You should read this for 9/28/2019:
Art and Film
Via Benjamin Mayo: Watch All The Apple TV Aerial Video Screensavers These new screen savers are stunning. Honestly, these are almost enough on their own for me to want an Apple TV as a streaming situation
Books, Writing, and Language
Wood-case pencils—there’s a lot more variety in terms of wooden pencils, and much higher quality than Ticonderoga, for surprisingly little money.
Education
Use Minecraft to Teach Your Kids Pretty Much Anything
The era of schoolchildren being forced to buy crappy $100 calculators is nearing its end
Texas Instruments’ TI-84 is an obsolete piece of crap: a 1980s design updated to 1990s technology made with 2000s penny parts and sold for more than $100 a pop to children all but forced to buy them. TI is a notorious lobbyist and has sought laws big and small to maintain this status quo, from mandatory Algebra courses with mandatory TI-84s to examination rules that allow its devices and no others. But the racket is falling apart under pressure from superior alternatives and growing resentment among teachers and students.
Food and Drink
How to Make Simple Syrup Simple syrup is used in a wide variety of cocktails, and it’s easy (and affordable) to make at home. Simple Syrup is also great to have on hand for iced coffee, or to infuse with flavors (lemon or mint or ginger) to use in food and drink.
The Negroni A classic cocktail featuring equal parts of gin, Campari, and Vermouth.
History and Archaeology
Map of Scots women accused of witchcraft published for first time
A map that tracks more than 3,000 Scots women who were accused of being witches in the 16th and 17th Century has been published for the first time.
The interactive document has been created by data experts at the University of Edinburgh.
Society
Missing mail: As postcards celebrate 150 years, they’re also disappearing
You can’t be ‘impartial’ about racism – an open letter to the BBC on the Naga Munchetty ruling
On 17 July 2019, Dan Walker, a host on BBC Breakfast, commented that a woman had shared a similar experience of being told to “go home” and that he found that remark “telling”. Walker added that the person in question had never been told that by the “man sitting in the Oval Office”.
Walker asked his co-host Naga Munchetty how she felt, inviting personal commentary. . . . When asked by Walker how she felt about Trump’s remarks, she replied “furious”. “Absolutely furious and I can imagine lots of people in this country will be feeling absolutely furious a man in that position thinks it’s OK to skirt the lines by using language like that.” On 25 September, the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) found Munchetty had breached the corporation’s guidelines in issuing this remark.
In response, a group of POC who work in UK broadcasting and media point out: “Racism is not a valid opinion on which an “impartial” stance can or should be maintained.”
Technology
Developer takes down Ruby library after he finds out ICE was using it
“I have a moral and ethical obligation to prevent my source from being used for evil,” Vargo wrote on the now-empty Chef Sugar GitHub repository.
Nilay Patel on Apple’s iPhone 11Apple Iphone 11 Pro And Pro Max Review: The Battery Life Is Real
But after using an iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max for the past week, I think they’re more than the sum of several lightly updated parts. These are some of the most well-balanced, most capable phones Apple — or anyone — has ever made. They have excellent battery life, processors that should keep them relevant for years to come, absolutely beautiful displays, and a new camera system that generally outperforms every other phone, which should get even better with a promised software update later this fall.
Oct17 Wooden Alarm Clock I just bought this under $20.o0 very basic wooden digital alarm clock. It’s attractive, has a small footprint, a battery backup, and the display can be turned off completely util you activate it by sound or touch.
Women’s Work
The Unkillable Myth of Period Syncing
For a phenomenon that’s highly unlikely to be real, period syncing has enjoyed an impressively long life in the popular imagination. Every now and again, news stories and listicles pop up to inform the public that no, actually, period synchronization as a result of prolonged proximity is not a thing, but the fictional story lines and offhand jokes persist nonetheless.
💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰
Via TPM: Rectification of Names
t is clear purely on the basis of what is now undisputed in the record that the President and Rudy Giuliani are guilty of a criminal abuse of power and that most or all of the President’s top national security advisors have been complicit in and quite likely participated in that criminal activity.
The Trump-Ukraine scandal is a taste of how dirty the US elections will get
To be clear, the only scandal involving Ukraine is that Trump openly admits that he repeatedly pressed a foreign leader for dirt on his political opponents ahead of a presidential election. For the second election in a row. Only this time, he could use the promise of military and foreign aid to grease his request.
Regarding the references to CrowdStrike and a server: Per “transcript,” Trump seems to think DNC-hired security firm is from Ukraine
Trump has previously referred to CrowdStrike as a Ukrainian company. The reference to the server appears to be related to a conspiracy theory that one of the DNC’s servers had been hidden from the FBI. But CrowdStrike’s co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a US citizen of Russian heritage, and the company is based in the United States and is publicly traded on the NASDAQ exchange.
Pay It Forward and Make It Better
LGBT Muslim festival: ‘We don’t just have one identity’
“Not only with the Muslim community, but also with other religious communities, we’re being told to choose between our religion and our queer identity,” she says.
Thomas Cook collapse: Woman raises funds for staff on flight
Video: Boo, you need to learn to jump.
New York Met museum returns stolen ancient Egyptian coffin
The 2,100-year-old coffin of a priest called Nedjemankh was featured in an exhibit housing artefacts from Egypt.
The stolen antique was sold to the museum by a global art trafficking network, which used fraudulent documents, officials said. The gilded coffin was looted and smuggled out of Egypt in 2011.
