deusvulture

• TwitPic, an image hosting service that was a popular way to embed images in tweets back in 2012, appears to have changed hands, and is reassigning old urls to newer uploads. Hilarity ensues (partly-blurred NSFW at the link). Even the First Lady isn't safe. Here is a twitter thread that digs yet deeper into the issue.


• New Year's Day 2019 was the first real Public Domain Day in two decades, after the passing of the Curse of Sunny Bono. If you've been dithering about whether to shell out two dollars for The Great Gatsby, or your local library doesn't stock Golden Age of Hollywood classics like "The Ten Commandments", your ship has come in.


• Adam Cadre, whose reviews are often only tangentially about the thing reviewed, gives us a review of Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood that is also a little essay on ways of reading literature.


• Dreamwidth user brin-bellway on Universal Basic Internet.


• Remember that thing where American diplomats in Cuba were coming home with bizarre symptoms that led to speculation about Cuban sonic weaponry? Turns out it was crickets all along. Edit: Correction, one particular purported recording of the "sonic weapon" was crickets. Egg on my face for not reading the whole article!


• How did the prices of tin and lead change between 1983 and 1985? How about Australian vs. South African coal over the 1960s? Hides, olive oil and leather since the end of the Cold War? A super-fun applet for generating price charts.


• British horsetrack bets are denominated in Guineas, and shops in Haiti near-universally list their prices in Haitian Dollars. The problem? No Guineas have been minted in the last two hundred years, and there's never been such thing as a Haitian Dollar. J. P. Koning on abstract units of account.


• An Apology.

Time for another links roundup! I find these posts to be a useful exercise, so regardless of who's reading them they're likely to continue.

• Eric S. Raymond on American regional accents - If you read old books that transcribe accents or listen to recordings of Civil War veterans, it becomes clear that at one point there was very little difference between northern and southern pronounciation. What changed? ESR suggests it might have had to do with country music in the mid-20th century. Putting aside that ESR seems to think (for some reason) that he's the first to notice some of these things, I would love to read a more thorough treatment of the subject.


• Why Defend Freedom of Icky Speech? Neil Gaiman weighs in. This article was written in 2008, and I'm sure you couldn't get a public figure to admit to thinking these things today, but I have to agree 100%. Key quote:

  So when Mike Diana was prosecuted -- and, in 1996, found guilty -- of obscenity for the comics in his Zine "Boiled Angel", and sentenced to a host of things, including (if memory serves) a three year suspended prison sentence, a three thousand dollar fine, not being allowed to be in the same room as anyone under eighteen, over a thousand hours of community service, and was forbidden to draw anything else that anyone might consider obscene, with the local police ordered to make 24 hour unannounced spot checks to make sure Mike wasn't secretly committing Art in the small hours of the morning... that was the point I decided that I knew what was Obscene, and it was prosecuting artists for having ideas and making lines on paper, and that I was henceforth going to do everything I could to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

  (h/t glacialtimeframe on tumblr, via jumpingjacktrash.)



• That viral image that suggests photojournalists are grossly exaggerating the violence in Paris is itself fake news, at least in particulars. Not the world's most interesting story, but I've seen a lot of otherwise reasonable people credulously sharing the original image. Constant vigilance!


• Gwern reviews "Japan As Number One", by Ezra F. Vogel, a highly influential book from the 1990s about the threat of Japanese global dominance. Not exactly the top worry on Western minds these days, of course, but Vogel warned that Americans would have to adopt Japan's brilliant educational system and communitarian spirit to keep up. Gwern sees parallels to China hysteria:

  [W]hat happened in Japan is what happened elsewhere repeatedly: nothing but industrialization of a country with relatively high pre-existing human capital catching up to the production frontier. [...] A poor non-industrialized country grows rapidly for a long period, insiders & outsiders ascribe the growth to various idiosyncratic features of that country with the self-congratulatory connivance of political leaders, then growth slows down and stops and attention moves on. That’s all. It’s happened many times before, and I am sure it will happen again. (Perhaps we will read in another two decades of how India’s ethnic diversity is responsible for its blistering growth, or perhaps instead we’ll be hearing about how the legacy of cross-border smuggling networks laid the groundwork for North Korean stock market outperformance…)



• Michel Houellebecq: "Donald Trump Is a Good President" - primarily because he's willing to leave other countries the hell alone. This is a pretty blunt, funny article that's short enough that you might as well just read it. I am now somewhat more interested to read "Soumission", which is the one thing by Houellebecq that anyone ever talks about.


• From the hot-takes-on-cold-subjects department: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” played a pivotal role in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, according to Quartz magazine. It would seem that on his visit to America in 1950, the influential Islamist Sayyid Qutb was turned against the ideals of Western culture forever by the degeneracy he saw - degeneracy he summed up with his disgust at the sight of students dancing at a college party to everyone's favorite controversial Christmas song.

  “To most people watching this dance, it would have been an innocent dance of happiness,” documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis observes in his film, The Power of Nightmares. “But Qutb saw something else. The dancers in front of him were tragic lost souls. They believed they were free, but in reality they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires.”

  [...] Qutb returned to Egypt a radically changed man. In what he saw as the spiritual wasteland of America, he re-created himself as a militant Muslim, and he came back to Egypt with the vision of an Islam that would throw off the vulgar influences of the West. Islamic society had to be purified, and the only mechanism powerful enough to cleanse it was the ancient and bloody instrument of jihad.

  Qutb eventually became a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, plotted to assassinate Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and was executed by hanging in 1966. But his teachings and writings became a primary inspiration for a generation of militant Islamists, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  For what it's worth, I sometimes get a similar feeling myself when I'm trapped at a Christmas party.

  (h/t on this one to femmenietzsche on tumblr)