Interesting reads
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Horrible but interesting read about one of the worst tragedies within the 2011 earthquake. Drove through thidS town last week - they have signs all up the coast showing where the water stopped. It's so surprisingly high that even that changed my mind about tsunamis and tsunami warnings, which until now I'd almost always ignored.
The school beneath the wave: the unimaginable tragedy of Japan’s tsunami
The long read: In 2011 a tsunami engulfed Japan’s north-east coast. More than 18,000 people were killed. Six years later, in one community, survivors are still tormented by a catastrophic split-second decision
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@gt12 I remember watching it unfold in real time on tv. Just ridiculous power that swept up everything in its path. I read about places similar to that village where there are stone markers that indicated where the water got to during previous tsunamis. Terrible that these warnings are forgotten over time and similar mistakes are repeated
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87 years ago today Marx Brothers surreal classic Animal Crackers was released into cinemas
Pulling Focus: Animal Crackers (1930)
"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know." – Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding (Groucho Marx) Animal Cracke
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Their next movie was Monkey Business (still with fourth brother Zeppo).
At the beginning of the movie they are each in a barrel (stowaways on a ship) and are singing Sweet Adeline.
The great mystery is - is there four voices singing or three? If it's four - that means Harpo was singing, although not seen.
And if you're a Marx brothers fan, you just have to rewatch the mirror scene in Duck Soup.
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1992 Secondary schools team - those who didn't become ABs. From the sounds of it, we missed Todd Miller's best.
The greatest rugby team you never saw the nearly men – NZ Herald
A rugby team only diehard rugby fans ever saw play but had All Black legends Jonah Lomu and Jeff Wilson. 25 years on, its legacy is poignant and enduring – NZ Herald exclusive feature.
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Long read w/ several reviews from recent London Review of Books...
You are the product
Excerpt:
[...]
Facebook already had a huge amount of information about people and their social networks and their professed likes and dislikes. After waking up to the importance of monetisation, they added to their own data a huge new store of data about offline, real-world behaviour, acquired through partnerships with big companies such as Experian, which have been monitoring consumer purchases for decades via their relationships with direct marketing firms, credit card companies, and retailers. There doesn’t seem to be a one-word description of these firms: ‘consumer credit agencies’ or something similar about sums it up. Their reach is much broader than that makes it sound, though. Experian says its data is based on more than 850 million records and claims to have information on 49.7 million UK adults living in 25.2 million households in 1.73 million postcodes. These firms know all there is to know about your name and address, your income and level of education, your relationship status, plus everywhere you’ve ever paid for anything with a card. Facebook could now put your identity together with the unique device identifier on your phone.
That was crucial to Facebook’s new profitability. On mobiles, people tend to prefer the internet to apps, which corral the information they gather and don’t share it with other companies. A game app on your phone is unlikely to know anything about you except the level you’ve got to on that particular game. But because everyone in the world is on Facebook, the company knows everyone’s phone identifier. It was now able to set up an ad server delivering far better targeted mobile ads than anyone else could manage, and it did so in a more elegant and well-integrated form than anyone else had managed.
So Facebook knows your phone ID and can add it to your Facebook ID. It puts that together with the rest of your online activity: not just every site you’ve ever visited, but every click you’ve ever made – the Facebook button tracks every Facebook user, whether they click on it or not. Since the Facebook button is pretty much ubiquitous on the net, this means that Facebook sees you, everywhere. Now, thanks to its partnerships with the old-school credit firms, Facebook knew who everybody was, where they lived, and everything they’d ever bought with plastic in a real-world offline shop. All this information is used for a purpose which is, in the final analysis, profoundly bathetic. It is to sell you things via online ads.
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John Lanchester · You Are the Product: It Zucks!
I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me...
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@Salacious-Crumb said in Interesting reads:
Long read w/ several reviews from recent London Review of Books...
John Lanchester · You Are the Product: It Zucks!
I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me...
"...What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. ..."
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@Salacious-Crumb That's an excellent read. Thanks for sharing.
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@Salacious-Crumb Yep - that took up a decent chunk of the work day.
Cheers. -
What Does an Innocent Man Have to Do to Go Free? Plead Guilty.
A case in Baltimore — in which two men were convicted of the same murder and cleared by DNA 20 years later — shows how far prosecutors will go to preserve a conviction.
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@pakman said in Interesting reads:
Tough to read a video. And since I'm not bilingual and can't understand Espanol, doubly-tough.
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@Salacious-Crumb said in Interesting reads:
@pakman said in Interesting reads:
Tough to read a video. And since I'm not bilingual and can't understand Espanol, doubly-tough.
I'll give you the video point, but if you had the patience to watch for 15 seconds you'd find it is in Anglais!!!
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Newsweek cover story feature this weeK, filed under TECH & SCIENCE
MALE INFERTILITY CRISIS IN U.S. HAS EXPERTS BAFFLED
Who's Killing America's Sperm?
The sudden rise in male infertility is a scary national crisis, and we can't blame it on Trump—or can we?
It's not just the United States. It's the western world.
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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS:
"Everything you want to know about America can be learned in a McDonald’s.”
McDonald’s as America: A Conversation with Chris Arnade | Los Angeles Review of Books
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Photographer Chris Arnade discusses his use of McDonald’s as a point of entry into the communities he documents.
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@Salacious-Crumb said in Interesting reads:
Newsweek cover story feature this weeK, filed under TECH & SCIENCE
MALE INFERTILITY CRISIS IN U.S. HAS EXPERTS BAFFLED
Who's Killing America's Sperm?
The sudden rise in male infertility is a scary national crisis, and we can't blame it on Trump—or can we?
It's not just the United States. It's the western world.
Too much bike riding?
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Remembering William S Burroughs
http://www.gadflyonline.com/home/archive/August99/archive-burroughs.html
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As part of the bankruptcy filing, Rathburn provided a list of assets. The inventory included 14 chairs, 10 file cabinets, 91 heads, 18 spines, six hips and a copy of the Hippocratic Oath. He put the total market value of the body parts at $160,900.
In a warehouse of horrors, body broker allegedly stacked human heads
Arthur Rathburn allegedly cut up bodies with a chainsaw and rented infected parts. But for years, authorities let him do business despite his bizarre practices
Mealamu: "Los mejores jugadores que enfrenté fueron Ledesma y Creevy" - ESPN Video
