You should read this for 6/6/2021:
Art, Music, and Film
H/T Kira Cee: 
That Fat, Jolly Fella Isn’t Buddha
Biden Begins
‘I’m a car guy’: Biden zips around in electric Ford truck to boost clean-energy agenda
The day revealed Biden not so much in rare form but in his truest form. His entire life has been crafted, in many ways, around cars. The affection for automobiles is as much a part of Biden as his Irishness and his love of ice cream, and it’s one that has deepened over the years.
The event on Tuesday also married that longtime love — his affinity for cars — with the clean-energy policy that he’s attempting to push the country toward, one that would have electric charging stations spread more readily around the country.
Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language
A Guide To Gender Identity Terms
Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance. Alex Schmider, associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD, compares using someone’s correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – “a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.”
Coronavirus | COVID-19
The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill
On the video call, tensions rose. At one point, Lidia Morawska, a revered atmospheric physicist who had arranged the meeting, tried to explain how far infectious particles of different sizes could potentially travel. One of the WHO experts abruptly cut her off, telling her she was wrong, Marr recalls. His rudeness shocked her. “You just don’t argue with Lidia about physics,” she says. . . . There was just one literally tiny problem: “The physics of it is all wrong,” Marr says. That much seemed obvious to her from everything she knew about how things move through air. Reality is far messier, with particles much larger than 5 microns staying afloat and behaving like aerosols, depending on heat, humidity, and airspeed. “I’d see the wrong number over and over again, and I just found that disturbing,” she says. The error meant that the medical community had a distorted picture of how people might get sick.
Three GOP lawmakers fined $500 for defying House mask rules amid Republican backlash: ‘Worth it.’
Education
The Ethics of the “N-Word” in the Classroom
Food and Drink
The 20 best easy cake recipes A wide variety of simple cake recipes, many of them unusual and interesting.
History and Archaeology
Mudlarking: Searching for Lost Treasure – and History – on the Banks of the Thames
Since the beginning of time, the River Thames in London has been a great repository, collecting everything that has been deposited into its waters. Once discovered, these objects reveal stories of the capital’s fascinating history and its inhabitants.
Cerne Giant in Dorset dates from Anglo-Saxon times, analysis suggests “Sand samples examined by National Trust experts indicate hillside chalk figure was created in the 10th century.” See also Bawdy monks and the Cerne Abbas giant Also see Scientists unravel a mystery about a naked giant carved into an English hill
The giant was hewed into the hill in the late Saxon period, between the years A.D. 700 and A.D. 1110 — with the highest probability of A.D. 908, the scientists say.
“Every archaeologist I know, including me, had it wrong,” said Michael Allen, an independent geoarchaeologist and leading expert on ancient mollusks, who participated in the dig. The professionals thought the giant would be far older or younger than he is.
Stolen Roman frescoes returned to Pompeii after investigation
Extremely rare prehistoric animal carvings found for first time in Scotland See also Prehistoric carvings of red deer found in Scottish neolithic tomb
Somersham headless bodies were victims of Roman executions
Politics and Society
The Brewing Political Battle Over Critical Race Theory
“I’m not really sure that the conservatives right now know what it is or know its history,” said Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars.
He said critical race theory posits that racism is endemic to American society through history and that, consequently, Americans have to think about institutions like the justice system or schools through the perspective of race and racism.
Science and Nature
Whale hugs, ‘active sea serpents,’ and the wild world of whale sex
The Surprise Hiding in the DNA of Pet Fish
Referral link: Curiosity Stream delivers shows across the full spectrum of the non-fiction genre to demystify science, nature, history, technology, society, lifestyle and more. $19.99/year for thousands of films (or $2.99/month).
Technology
How to Keep Facebook from Snooping on Your Photos’ Locations
Facebook extracts your photos’ location data in a particularly sneaky way, stripping it out between when you upload the photo and when it’s published on Facebook. That might lead you to believe your privacy is being protected. If you download a photo from Facebook, you won’t find any interesting EXIF information, but Facebook silently adds it all to its own data trove.
SetApp: A Suite of macOS Apps for a Single Price Affiliate link for a great collection of ver 200 apps for macOS and iOS for a flat subscription fee.
Women’s Work
Pride month: The LGBT history you probably didn’t learn in school
Pay It Forward and Make It Better
I Thought I Was Done With Iraq. Then a Fellow Marine’s Purple Heart Turned Up at Auction.
Stuff I Wrote
New Belgium Brewery
June from Walters W.425
New Belgium Abbey Ale
Something Wonderful
‘A special day’: how a Glasgow community halted immigration raid
A report written by the former head of intelligence at the New York Police Department, Mitch Silber, and titled Domestic Violent Extremism and the Intelligence Challenge makes clear that officials at the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other agencies had collected plenty of intelligence leading up to the insurrection at the Capitol. What they failed to do was analyze it.
“Intelligence collection did not fail,” Silber writes in an analysis for the Atlantic Council obtained by NPR before publication. “In fact, it was robust. Rather, the failure was in the analysis of the intelligence and the failure of senior government officials to issue warnings based on that intelligence.”
NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured amazing images of clouds on Mars
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