You should read this for 8/18/2018:
Art and Film
H/T to @Lymond: Disney Takes Stand Against “Overzealous Copyright Holders” As the Hollywood Reporter notes: “forget any sense of irony.”
Oddly, and suprironicaly, as BoingBoing notes, the “fair use” defense Disney is using has a lot to be said in its favor.
Books, Writing, and Language
H/T to @cstross: Life in London, plus, a Macaw
Hundreds Of Newspapers Denounce Trump’s Attacks On Media In Coordinated Editorials
Ready For A Linguistic Controversy? Say ‘Mhmm’
History and Archaeology
A candidate for U.S. Senate Chris McDaniel Spouting ahistorical nonsens about Robert E. Lee and slavery Gets schooled by a Civil War historian who cites primary sources
Science and Nature
The mysterious Pilostyles is a plant within a plant H/T Bronwen
Via The New York Times Magazine and Nathaniel Rich with Photographs and Videos by George SteinmetzAfter 17 Days And 1,000 Miles, A Mother Orca’s ‘Tour Of Grief’ Is Over
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
his narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it. Jake Silverstein
Society
Patriotic Millionaires: Millionaires who think everyone should pay a fair share of taxes—and that the really wealthy are getting away with not paying. Watch this video,
Technology
Vis WIRED (h/t/ SJS): Even Anonymous Coders Leave Fingerprints
RESEARCHERS WHO STUDY stylometry—the statistical analysis of linguistic style—have long known that writing is a unique, individualistic process. The vocabulary you select, your syntax, and your grammatical decisions leave behind a signature. Automated tools can now accurately identify the author of a forum post for example, as long as they have adequate training data to work with. But newer research shows that stylometry can also apply to artificial language samples, like code. Software developers, it turns out, leave behind a fingerprint as well.
An 11-year-old changed election results on a replica Florida state website in under 10 minutes
Women’s Work
Via Esquite: You Want Nancy Pelosi Out? Find Somebody Better
Pelosi’s not inconsiderable accomplishments. For example, not a single Democratic member of the House voted for any of the schemes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, nor for the ludicrous tax package that the president* signed into law. Red state, blue state—in the House, it didn’t matter, because Nancy Pelosi held her caucus together. That takes a kind of otherworldly political skill, considering that Chuck Schumer is forever calculating which of his senators he can afford to lose while waiting patiently for Susan Collins to sell someone out again.
I think Nancy Pelosi has been magnificent, and I don’t want anyone else. Let’s take back the House and let’s do it with Nancy Pelosi at the helm.
