Five Senators Join the Fight to Learn Just How Bad Ring Really Is: “…if police want to request footage from a person’s front door in reference to a car break-in on that street, there is no need for police to verify that footage would be helpful to solving that incident, or whether the footage would even be used for that particular incident and not for other purposes. If a person agrees to share their footage with police, police then have that footage forever and can share it with whoever they want without oversight or restrictions. This means footage from your door, requested by local police to catch an alleged thief in the neighborhood, could end up being used by another law enforcement agency for a completely attenuated purpose, such as identifying someone for deportation—without your knowledge or direct consent.”
Links
Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.
Apple sleuths hunt Northwest for varieties believed extinct: “E.J. Brandt and David Benscoter, who together form the nonprofit Lost Apple Project, log countless hours and hundreds of miles in trucks, on all-terrain vehicles and on foot to find orchards planted by settlers as they pushed west more than a century ago.”
Linkdump for January 27th through October 30th
Sometime between January 27th and October 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- Retroactive: Run Aperture, iPhoto, or iTunes on macOS Catalina.: Saving this for myself, in case I want or need iTunes when I get around to upgrading to Catalina.
- Inside the sexy Halloween costume industrial complex: Their costumes are often horrible, and oft-derided each year (including by me). But I thought this peek into the “sexy everything company” was an interesting one.
- The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight: "On the western flank of the Hoover Dam stands a little-understood monument, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation when construction of the dam began in 01931. The most noticeable parts of this corner of the dam, now known as Monument Plaza, are the massive winged bronze sculptures and central flagpole which are often photographed by visitors. The most amazing feature of this plaza, however, is under their feet as they take those pictures."
- Queen Elizabeth II makes New Zealand woman who fought to decriminalize prostitution a ‘dame’: “Catherine Healy, 62, a founder of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, was instrumental in helping her country become the first to decriminalize prostitution in 2003. After 30 years of activism, the queen recognized her Monday as a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit ‘for services to the rights of sex workers.’”
- Keira Knightley is obviously right: there’s a sexist double standard in how we treat period dramas: “The great irony is that in being dismissed as feminine fluff, the period drama has somewhat avoided the controlling male gaze. Women are allowed complexity and agency. They can be the heroes – not the wives and girlfriends of the heroes. Ignore the negativity, and the corset can actually be quite freeing.”
The Chemistry department invites applicants for an assistant professor whose research requires the outdated and esoteric equipment we have sitting around in our labs.
Torrey’s costumes are often some of my favorites at Norwescon, and it’s nice to see her featured in The Stranger!
In today’s offering of “weirdly cute”: a snail playing with a carrot. At least, that’s sure what it looks like is going on, at the risk of being too quick to anthropomorphize snail behavior.
I don’t think I’ve seen any of Billy Porter’s work, don’t really know who he is, but that is one hell of an outfit, and I really like what he has to say about it.
Bed used in hotel honeymoon suite for 15 years then discarded in a parking lot, rescued by an antiques dealer, and initially believed to be Victorian, turns out to be Henry VII’s marriage bed.
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport had 6.4 inches of snow Friday, according to the National Weather Service. It’s the second most snow recorded in the area in a day for the past 20 years, and nearly beat our yearly average (6.8 inches) in a single day.
I’ll admit that I’m not a big fan of four-wheeling as a recreational activity; it seems to me wasteful and often damaging to the environment. That said, I can allow a little leeway if you have the chance to do it on the moon (gorgeous stabilized 60FPS video).