Posts Tagged ‘crossword puzzles’
Tuesday Morning Links!
* A Nearby Earth-Size Planet May Have Conditions for Life. Launch the S.S. Donald Trump for a Space Race Victory!
* When Unpaid Student Loan Bills Mean You Can No Longer Work.
* A spectre is haunting grad students.
* Why are we still doing alumni interviews? They’re so transparently bad that I’d forgotten they even existed, and I did some! Among other things they seem like such an obvious discrimination and harassment vector legal counsel would have shut them down years ago.
* For several years Durazo’s union has advocated for housekeepers to be given handheld, wireless panic buttons that can alert hotel security when a worker feels threatened ― a sign of how dire it views the problem of sexual predation in the hotel industry. After working to negotiate the use of panic buttons in their employer contracts, the union is now lobbying city councils to mandate them through legislation so that all workers have access to them, union and non-union alike.
* The university in ruins, English department edition.
* This Is Just How Badly Scott Walker Has Decimated Public Schools in Wisconsin.
* “Schools are segregated because white people want them that way.”
* “No one can prevent Trump from using nuclear weapons, experts say.”
* How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways.
* Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Tarantino’s upcoming movie, according to a source who read the script, focuses on a male TV actor who’s had one hit series and his looking for a way to get into the film business. His sidekick—who’s also his stunt double—is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by Charles Manson’s cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story.
* Writing Nameless Things: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin.
* We Have Come to a Bad Moment, and We Must Change: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. And some bonus KSR content: a podcast!
* The end of net neutrality, again, and this time for real.
* Little Man, Little Man is the only children’s book by acclaimed writer James Baldwin. Published in 1976 by Dial Press, the book quickly went out of print. Now, at a time when Baldwin is more popular than ever, and readers, librarians, and booksellers are clamoring for more diverse children’s books, Duke University Press is proud to bring the book back into print. It will be available in August 2018.
* Making the film versions of every kid in America’s childhood should be a license to print money. And yet.
* For the love of God, someone please complete this crossword puzzle!
* Make Nepotism Great Again: 20 Families Got Jobs in Trump Administration.
* Al Franken should have resigned last week like I said. He should resign today.
* How Congress hides its sexual harassment settlements.
* Normal country doing normal country things.
* Meet One of New York’s Best Professional Dungeon Masters.
* Black Mirror literally did this one.
* And just for fun: The coming coup.
1001 Sunday Links
* Penn Gillette on three-card monty and graduate school in the humanities.
* Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera.
* “Use Tatooine sparingly” and other rules from the Star Wars style guide. io9 has a few other highlights.
* A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.
* Inside Disney’s America, the doomed ’90s project that almost sunk the company.
* “The Contemporary” by the numbers.
* From a work in progress: Nomic and net.culture.
* Vice science faction: After the Big One.
* Alumnae vowed to save Sweet Briar from closing last year. And they did.
* Radical notion: College Presidents Should Come from Academia.
* Simon Newman, the college leader whose metaphor about drowning bunnies made him infamous in higher education, announced late Monday that he has resigned, effective immediately, as president of Mount St. Mary’s University. The Mount St. Mary’s Presidency Was a Corporate Test Case. It Failed Miserably..
* The only MFA program in the US that focuses on African American literature could close.
* UW slips out of top 10 in new public university ranking. Amid rough seas for UW System, wave of challenges hits UWM.
* UC Davis chancellor received $420,000 on book publisher’s board. The University of California paid hedge fund managers about $1 billion in fees over the last 12 years, according to a white paper study released by the university system’s largest employee union.
* A Field Test for Identifying Appropriate Sexual Partners in Academia. She Wanted to Do Her Research. He Wanted to Talk ‘Feelings.’
* “The GRE is like taking a cancer test that was invented in the 1940s.”
* Putting on a “Brave” Face: On Ableism and Appropriation in the Film Industry.
* Justice Dept. grants immunity to staffer who set up Clinton email server. What you need to know about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Did Clinton and Petraeus do the same thing? Clinton, on her private server, wrote 104 emails the government says are classified.
* The Libya Gamble: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Push for War & the Making of a Failed State.
* Clinton insiders are eager to begin recruiting Republicans turned off by the prospect of Donald Trump to their cause — and the threat of Sanders sticking it out until June makes the general election pivot more difficult. Inside the Clinton Team’s Plan to Defeat Donald Trump. Smart to announce it now!
* But, look, it’s not all Clinton negativity: Hillary Clinton promises to ‘get to the bottom of UFO mystery’ if elected, and ‘maybe send a task force’ to alleged alien prison Area 51.
* The Official Head Of The Democratic Party Joins GOP Effort To Protect Payday Lenders. Bernie Versus the Earthquake Industry.
* Republican Voters Kind Of Hate All Their Choices. 1927 flashback. Kasich May Have Cut Off Rubio’s Path To The Nomination. Trump gives supporters permission to be violent with protesters: If you hurt them I’ll defend you in court. Researchers have found strong evidence that racism helps the GOP win. ‘Not even my wife knows’: secret Donald Trump voters speak out. Is this a realignment? The rise of American authoritarianism. Awkward.
* The car century was a mistake. It’s time to move on.
* 2°C.
* Another piece on the end of Louisiana.
* I don’t know that the Melissa Click case is really the best example here, but there’s every reason to think body cameras will be used to serve police interests, not citizen interests.
* Lab tech allegedly faked result in drug case; 7,827 criminal cases now in question.
* Can a 3-year old represent herself in immigration court? This judge thinks so. Please watch my show Three Year Old Immigration Lawyer next fall on ABC.
* Did the Spanish Empire Change Earth’s Climate?
* The Flint Next Time: Fears About Water Supply Grip Village That Made Teflon Products. Flint is in the news, but lead poisoning is even worse in Cleveland.
* This Guy Spent Four Years Creating an Imaginary Reddit for 3016.
* Sci-Fi Hero Samuel Delany’s Outsider Art.
* Marquette in the news! Oh.
Sweetin’s autobiography begins with a very different two-word phrase. The first line ofUnSweetined, which Sweetin wrote (or rather told in bits to a ghostwriter) in 2009, is “fuck it.” She is referring to her attitude right before smoking meth and doing a plateful of cocaine, the night before she was scheduled to give a speech at Marquette University about her commitment to sobriety (she did give that speech in 2007, and she was high the entire time she was on stage).
* Over at Slate friend of the show Eric “The Red” Hittinger explains clearly and succinctly why rooftop solar power probably won’t ever challenge big utility companies.
* When People With Schizophrenia Hear Voices, They’re Really Hearing Their Own Subvocal Speech.
* This video shows what ancient Rome actually looked like.
* Steph Curry Is On Pace To Hit 102 Home Runs.
* Mysterious Chimpanzee Behaviour May Be Evidence Of “Sacred” Rituals.
* Here’s a silly thing I watched: “Great Minds with Dan Harmon,” 1, 2.
* Sports corner: Ivy League Considers Banning Tackling During Practice.
* A Believer interview with the great Andy Daly.
* A Plagiarism Scandal Is Unfolding In The Crossword World. Professional Bridge Has a Cheating Problem.
* The Enigmatic Art of America’s Secret Societies.
* Super-Intelligent Humans Are Coming.
* The astonishment that such things are “still” possible.
* The Retirement Crisis Is Getting Truly Scary.
* The Fact That None Of The 2016 Presidential Candidates Have A Space Policy Is Tragic.
* From the start, in 1967, “Trader Joe” Coulombe devised his “low-priced gourmet-cum-health-food store” with an “unemployed PhD student” in mind as the ideal customer.
* Reading from a statement while speaking with analysts, Chief Executive Officer Joel Manby said SeaWorld’s board of directors has “directed management to end the practice in which certain employees posed as animal-welfare activists. This activity was undertaken in connection with efforts to maintain the safety and security of employees, customers and animals in the face of credible threats.”
* What Mars Would Look Like Mapped by Medieval Cartographers.
* New York City Is in the Throes of a Häagen-Dazs Heist Epidemic.
* Thus, I conclude that in fact, Gygax’s strength scoring system is actually…pretty good! But only good for fighters, in a system like AD&D where we can reasonably assume that all fighter PCs have been training for 10+ years and are genetically super-gifted. However, if you’re Raistlin Majere from the Dragonlance Chronicles and are in all probability an underweight untrained or novice lifter of average height, then you are probably looking at a STR score of around 6-7. If you are a woman of my current weight and untrained, you are looking at a STR score of around 3-4. If you’re my current weight and train consistently for a couple of years, you can expect to have a score of around 8-9. Men and/or individuals with higher testosterone levels will have somewhat higher scores, but it is definitely out of the question that a 10-11 can represent an average strength in our society, though it may be in a farmer-dominant society where everyone lifts a lot of hay bales.
* Every Bryan Fuller Star Trek episode, ranked.
* Secrets of my success: Narcissistic Students Get Better Grades from Narcissistic Professors.
* The dialectic never stops turning: Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling the thirst for change. Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change.
* We are the second best girls.
* 20 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up Your Decisions.
Wednesday! Night! Links!
* I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims. Your response as a society to Osama bin Laden and his followers threatens to undermine your moral standards and your humanity.
* Ambivalent campus benchmarks watch: Today is “Tuition Runs Out Day” at Marquette.
* The MOOC Revolution: A Sketchy Deal for Higher Education.
The promoters of MOOCs claim to see universities as dinosaurs, but their business model is parasitic upon the very institutions they claim to be rendering obsolete. Udacity designs its own curricula rather than aggregating pre-existing university courses like Coursera and EdX, but without the Stanford credentials and backgrounds of its founders it is highly unlikely it would have gone anywhere. The affiliation provides startup companies with a highly desirable brand: the “top tier” of higher education, according to the U.S. News and World Report (which always rates the wealthiest and most selective schools as the best). A similar motive drives the colleges themselves: much like encouraging over-application to enhance their selectivity and thereby their U.S. News ranking, or establishing campuses in Abu Dhabi, China, and Singapore, the promotion of MOOCs is a way for highly competitive university administrators to enhance global brand visibility and give themselves an aura of cutting-edge innovation. The media’s celebratory response confirms the initial success of the strategy.
* From Cal’s student regent: “Online education: proceed with caution.”
* CUNY Loses Landmark Discrimination Lawsuit.
* It’s a curiosity of literary history that Corelli’s fantasy virgin, unwrinkled and slim waisted, would give rise to one of its most grotesque, tragically despoiled characters. But without Corelli’s Thelma, there would be no Gollum.
* Secrets of a Feminist Icon: The Anti-Union History of Rosie the Riveter.
* The Malware-Industrial Complex.
No law directly regulates the sale of zero-days in the United States or elsewhere, so some traders pursue it quite openly. A Bangkok-based security researcher who goes by the name The Grugq tweets about acting as a middleman and has spoken to the press about negotiating deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with government buyers from the United States and western Europe. In an argument on Twitter last month, he denied that his business is equivalent to arms dealing, as critics within and outside the computer security community have charged. “An exploit is a component of a toolchain,” he tweeted. “The team that produces & maintains the toolchain is the weapon.”
* Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult.
* Climate Hawk Obama: ‘If Congress Won’t Act Soon To Protect Future Generations, I Will.’
* Unpaid Internships Are a Rich-Girl Problem—and Also a Real Problem.
* The famous 1996 Election Day crossword puzzle.
* The blue eyes / brown eyes experiment, 1968.
* The rich are different from you and me: they’ve captured 121% of income gains during the recovery. You read that right, more than 100%.
* “You could safely say that Iceland holds the world record in household debt relief,” said Lars Christensen, chief emerging markets economist at Danske Bank A/S in Copenhagen. “Iceland followed the textbook example of what is required in a crisis. Any economist would agree with that.”
* Zounds! Credit agencies ripping everybody off. I’m shocked, shocked…
* In the largest false memory study to date, 5,269 participants were asked about their memories for three true and one of five fabricated political events. Each fabricated event was accompanied by a photographic image purportedly depicting that event. Approximately half the participants falsely remembered that the false event happened, with 27% remembering that they saw the events happen on the news.
* Defense Nerds Strike Back: A Symposium on the Battle of Hoth. gerrycanavan.wordpress.com will be tracking this important story as far as it goes.
* Proved: Wertham fudged his data for Seduction of the Innocent.
* An ‘Autopsy’ Of Detroit Finds Resilience In A Struggling City.
* Car gets stuck at 125 mph for over an hour.
Lecerf, frantic, called the police from his car — and they sent an escort that The Guardian describes as “a platoon of police cars” to help him navigate a highway full of fellow cars and get them to swerve out of the way of the speeding car. (Lecerf stayed, appropriately, in the fast lane.) What resulted was a small miracle of technological coordination: Responding to emergency services’ advance warnings, three different toll booths raised their barriers as Lecerf approached. A police convoy ensured that roads were kept clear for the speeding car. Fellow drivers, obligingly, got out of the way. Emergency services patched Lecerf through to a Renault engineer who tried — though failed — to help Lecerf get the speeding car to slow down.
* And the reason for the season: Wes Anderson valentines.
Gerry Canavan 
