Elsewhere for November 9, 2019

You should read this for 11/09/2019:

Art , Music and Film

H/T Dawno: Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson + Astronaut Cady Coleman flute duet in space

Books, Writing, Language and Libraries

Troubling Copyright Bill Goes to the US Senate

With the top penalty set at $30,000 ($15,000 for unregistered works), it’s easy to imagine copyright trolls lining up to file cases. That amount needs to come down—no small-time creator is being damaged to that extent, and any content company who was being so hurt would file a lawsuit anyway.

Rural Library Adds Charging Station And Horse-Shelter/
Florida county denies its libraries funding for New York Times digital subscriptions, calling it “fake news”

Commissioner Jeff Kinnard: “I don’t feel like the county is obligated to subscribe to every major newspaper or every point of view. At some point, you draw the line.” (The Chronicle reported that Citrus County’s library system had no subscriptions to any newspaper.)

The library would have paid about o.4 cents per library card for a digital subscription to the New York Times.

Education

Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore

“Teachers are killing themselves,” Barry says in the new book, “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America” (Ecco), out Tuesday. “I shouldn’t be having to drive Uber at eight o’clock at night on a weekday. I just shut down from the mental toll: grading papers between rides, thinking of what I could be doing instead of driving — like creating a curriculum.”

Food and Drink

Easy Tuscan Bean Soup Canned (or dried and soaked) cannellini beans, carrots, celery, garlic, and baby spinach or kale.
H/T Lisa Carnell: Celtic apple crumble with Irish whiskey cream sauce recipe “Tart apples, Irish whiskey, and Kerrygold butter this is a perfectly decadent, Irish treat Irish food expert and cookbook authors vouch for.”
Via the WSJ: The Food That Helps Battle Depression

So what should we eat? The research points to a Mediterranean-style diet made up primarily of fruits and vegetables, extra-virgin olive oil, yogurt and cheese, legumes, nuts, seafood, whole grains and small portions of red meat. The complexity of this diet will provide the nutrition our brain needs, regulate our inflammatory response and support the good bacteria in our gut,

Chicken Tikka Masala

This dish is made with chicken that gets marinated in a spicy curry sauce with plain yogurt and cooked with tomatoes, spices, and more plain yogurt. You can use breasts or thighs, and it’s great served with rice.

History and Archaeology

Hoard of golden treasure stumbled upon by metal detectorist revealed to be most important Anglo-Saxon find in history

Instead, the study demonstrates that the material is almost exclusively military in nature. Even one of the small number of ecclesiastical objects in the hoard appears to have been of a potentially military character.
The hoard was made up of golden fittings from up to 150 swords, gold and garnet elements of a very high status seax (fighting knife), a spectacular gilded silver helmet, an impressive 30cm-long golden cross, a beautiful gold and garnet pectoral cross, a probable bishop’s headdress – and parts of what is likely to have been a portable battlefield shrine or reliquary.

See also the accompanying image and text database about the 700-odd items in the Staffordshire Hoard.

Science and Nature

John Hames Audubon’s Birds of America

John James Audubon’s Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds (Havell edition), all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration. Nearly 200 years later, the Audubon prints are coming to life once again, thanks to our vibrant digital library. Roam around below and enjoy one of the most treasured pieces of Audubon’s grand and wild legacy. Each print is also available as a free high-resolution download.

I’ve posted some very amateur recordings of a red fox barking

Society

The Many Voices of Journalism

Technology

Bill Gates’s Fortune Isn’t Going Anywhere

vAs I write this, Bill Gates is worth about $106.8 billion (just so you can compare that figure with your own bank balance more easily, it’s $106,800,000,000). Recall Gates’s retort: “When you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math over what I have left over.” This is a duplicitous way to talk about Warren’s proposal, because taxing $100 billion out of $106.8 billion would amount to a 94 percent tax; Warren has proposed an annual 3 percent wealth tax on assets over $1 billion. A 3 percent tax on $100 billion in wealth is $3 billion.

Women’s Work

H/T Yasmin: Birth canals are different all over the world, countering a long-held evolutionary theory
Via
@Tash_Stanton Friends at conferences – please do not assume that the people that you talk to do not know anything. I just got told that I should read what Stanton et al found about pain.
I. Am. Stanton.
Via @ ShannonDowney: A story… (in proper thread form)

I go estate sale shopping regularly and whenever I find an unfinished embroidery project I buy it and finish it bc there’s no way that soul is resting with an unfinished project left behind. One day I found this stunner for $5.

The Washington Post’s union finds that women and people of color in the newsroom make less than white men
Japan ‘glasses ban’ for women at work sparks backlash
In big step forward, tampons in Germany won’t be taxed as luxury items

A vote on Thursday in German parliament changes the tax rate for menstrual hygiene products like tampons or pads from their current designation as “luxury items” to that of “daily necessities.”
As of January 1,2020, this means a tax cut from 19 percent to 7 percent, and a big win for those who advocated for the change.

💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰

It Was a Corrupt Quid Pro Quo

Newly released testimony in the House impeachment inquiry shows in new detail how the Trump administration’s demands for a quid pro quo from the Ukrainian government operated. . . . And other testimony and communications show that the statement had to specifically mention President Donald Trump’s personal political obsessions.

Here’s Sondland’s testimony and here’s Volker’s testimony.

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

Tim Cook: The Power of Diversity

I was getting notes from kids who were struggling with their sexual orientation. They were depressed. Some said [they] had suicidal thoughts. Some had been banished by their own parents and family. It weighed on me in terms of what I could do. Obviously I couldn’t talk to each one individually that reached out, but you always know if you have people reaching out to you that there’s many more that don’t, that are just out there wondering whether they have a future or not, wondering whether life gets better … From there I really decided. There’s been a lot of people that came before me that made it possible for me to sit here today, and I needed to do something to help those people that were in a younger generation. It probably took a year between getting the words exactly like I wanted and picking the right time for the company, because I didn’t want it to be a distraction and so forth. I have not regretted it for one minute. Not at all.

Rap star Nelly has been quietly sending 2 kids to college every year for a decade
Jay Inslee Isn’t Going Away “The Washington governor may be out of the 2020 race, but his ideas are shaping the future of climate policy”

His six-part climate plan is by far the most ambitious and thoughtful road map to solving the crisis that has ever been put forward by a presidential candidate. It not only forced other Democrats to up their climate game, but large parts of it were immediately borrowed by other candidates, including Elizabeth Warren. So even if Inslee’s presidential campaign was a failure, his larger campaign to push U.S. climate politics to a new level of sophistication and ambition was a raging success, providing the policy DNA for the next generation of climate leaders.