Elsewhere for December 20, 2019

You should read this for 12/20/2019:

Art and Film

Hello, my name is Kristin and I have never seen a single Star War.
After learning some incredible facts about moisture farming from
@jowrotethis
I’ve decided to watch every movie over the span of one week beginning with the original trilogy.

Patrick Stewart on Revisiting Two Lifelong Roles, in A Christmas Carol and Star Trek: Picard

Books, Writing, and Language

A ‘Mic Drop’ on a Theory of Language Evolution “Linguists now think our ancestors might have been chattering away for ages longer than they previously believed.”

The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas review – how Austen’s reputation has been warped “Cheap books create canonical authors. Jane Austen, it turns out, was popular for longer with more readers than previously thought”

Food and Drink

Dutch Stroop Wafels You’ll need a Pizelle iron.

History and Archaeology

In Tulsa, an investigation finds possible evidence of mass graves from 1921 race massacre

After nearly a century, Tulsa may be closer to finally answering whether bodies of black people killed in the 1921 race massacre were dumped into mass graves after one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history.

Science and Nature

H/T Yasmin: Granny killer whales pass along wisdom—and extra fish—to their grandchildren

Fish recorded singing dawn chorus on reefs just like birds

Sound plays an important role in various fish behaviours such as reproduction, feeding and territorial disputes. Nocturnal predatory fish use calls to stay together to hunt, while fish that are active during the day use sound to defend their territory. “You get the dusk and dawn choruses like you would with the birds in the forest,” says Steve Simpson, a marine biologist at the University of Exeter, UK.

Society

Queer Like Pete “Buttigieg is getting slammed for being a type of gay man America doesn’t understand.”

H/T Benedict Evans: Vox We asked 2020 Democratic candidates 7 key questions on technology

H/T Joshua Nudell @jpnudell: There is a petition to stop a statue of Ceres from returning to the top of the Missouri statehouse on the grounds that it is a false idol. Seriously. See: Petition created to halt ‘Ceres’ from returning back to Capitol building

Technology

Microsoft to finally shut down to do list app Wunderlist on May 6, 2020 Wunderlist was a great app, one that did one thing but did it really, really well. I used it for all kinds of lists, including shared lists for To Dos and shopping. Wunderlist has a blog post about the shutdown.

H/T Riggins: hoakley on Time Machine: How it works, or fails to This is a series of in-depth well-written articles about macOS Time Machine, how it works, and how to cope with (and solve) problems.

H/T anildash From 2012: The Web We Lost
See also: “Link In Bio” is a slow knife

Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy

It originated from a location data company, one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped onto mobile phone apps. You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies — and yet to anyone who has access to this data, your life is an open book. They can see the places you go every moment of the day, whom you meet with or spend the night with, where you pray, whether you visit a methadone clinic, a psychiatrist’s office or a massage parlor.

Freaked Out? 3 Steps to Protect Your Phone

The Biggest Social Media Operation You’ve Never Heard of Is Run Out of Cyprus by Russians

It is run by Russian nationals and based in and managed from Cyprus, with U.S. operations housed in a shared work space in New York. It funds itself with ad revenues from YouTube and Google worth tens of millions of dollars. And in 2018, it purchased a small suite of Facebook advertisements targeting U.S. citizens on political issues—and it made those purchases in rubles.

💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰

Trump’s team photoshops his face over Greta Thunberg’s on Time Person of the Year cover

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

LEGO is Now Offering to Pay For You to Ship Your Unused Bricks to Children in Need

The world’s first 3D-printed neighborhood now has its first houses “A giant 3D printer is currently squeezing out new homes in rural Mexico. Each one takes 24 hours and lets local families upgrade from a shack to a two-bedroom house. Could this be part of the global housing solution?”