Oracle: How sports teams are keeping fans engaged during the pandemic shutdown: Money quote: “Sports fans are committed and involved. They are the only customers I know who are willing to have their favorite team logo tattooed on their bodies.”
How to stop Google Calendar from automatically including Google Meet links in meeting invitations.
Zoom: Disable Google Hangout on Google Calendar
This has been a stone in my shoe for years; now that I’m sending out meeting invitations more frequently, it’s become a real problem.
The article refers to “Google Hangout,” which is what “Google Meet” was called recently.
Television promo photo 1970 in Hungary via
Welcome to the future, brought to you by America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies, advertising art from Newsweek, April 1959. via
Cory Doctorow: “Hue and cry, posses, sheriffs: What did we do before cops?” Professional policing is a relatively recent invention, and one whose time has gone.
Cory Doctorow: Americans don’t trust Big Tech to moderate their communities: Censorship by big business in partnership with government is not the answer to harassment, hate speech and fake news on the Internet.
Cory Doctorow: The Earbuddy is experimental technology that takes advantage of wireless earbuds' microphones being sensitive enough to tell the difference between touching different parts of your face. You could control your phone or communicate with each other just by touching your face (except of course you shouldn’t touch your face). Didn’t Carol Burnett pioneer this technology?
Cory Doctorow: “Robots aren’t stealing your job: Your boss is destroying it and blaming it on automation.” Automation enables gig-economy jobs, offshoring and flexible scheduling that drives down pay and turns people into robots.
Cory Doctorow: “SF anthology to benefit covid charities: Surviving Tomorrow is a new anthology whose entire profits go to pay for covid-19 tests for front-line workers. Contributors include Neil Gaiman, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Robert Silverberg, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Andrew Mayne, Scott Sigler, Orson Scott Card, Alan Dean Foster, A.C. Crispin” and Cory.
Cory Doctorow: Politics and sf: People look out for each other during a crisis, despite stories about people going crazy and turning on each other during disaster, or when civilization collapses.
As pulp writers, science fiction writers don’t want to confine themselves to man-against-man or man-against nature, we like the plot-forward twofer, where it’s man-against-nature-against-man, where the tsunami blows your house over and your neighbors come over to eat you. That kind of story of the foundational beastiality of humans does make for great storytelling, but it’s not true. That’s not actually what happens in crises.
In crises, the refrigerator hum of petty grievance stops and leaves behind the silence to make you realize that you have more in common with your neighbors. It’s when people are are their best.
You know that thing where I was doing daily digests of links and occasional image digests? I’m tired of that. Let the firehose resume?
I seem to enjoy fiddling with how I post to the blog and social media as much as I enjoy posting.
After many years working from home, suddenly I feel like I need to wear nice shirts for work most days. The reason is Zoom, of course.
Link list: Tuesday, June 16 2020
Cisco rolls out new solutions for remote work, learning, post-pandemic
For instance, one solution combines video collaboration hardware and software to offer virtual visitations for inmates in correctional facilities. Another solution uses Wi-Fi and analytics software to monitor social distancing in workplaces."
Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: The technology of Uyghur oppression: How China uses technology to oppress Uyghurs and Kazakhs: While the concentration camps imprisoning 1M+ people are most visible, the entire region “has been turned into an open air prison where technology tracks and controls predominantly Muslim Turkic people while allowing Han people to go about their business largely unhindered.”
The people who are “free” – that is, not interred in a concentration camp – were nevertheless forced to provide blood, DNA, fingerprint, iris and facial biometrics to the security apparatus. The penalty for noncompliance was imprisonment.
Authorities set up a dense network of biometric scanning points throughout the region, points that Han people were typically waved through, while Turkic people had to stop and be scanned – more than 10 times/day.
And while Xinjiang is its own unique horror, it has its roots in the US post-911 counterinsurgency theory (COIN), pioneered by US Army General Petraeus, and in the EU’s “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) programs.
China’s motto: “teach like a school, be managed like the military, and be defended like a prison.”
American companies supply tools to China, and those companies sell consumer products in the US, provide funding to universities such as MIT, and collaborate with scientists.
The US can end complicity with the program and put pressure on the Chinese state and companies to end human rights abuses in the region.
Cory: How covid spreads: Research shows covid is less likely to spread outdoors than indoors, long-duration contacts are more dangerous, and “good air circulation is a powerful preventative.” Also, mysteriously, most positive cases won’t spread the disease, while “a small minority [of ‘superspreaders’] will spread it widely; the mechanism for that is unclear.
Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin has a cynical take on yesterday’s surprise pro-LGBTQ decision by the US Supreme Court: The court follows election returns. If the court had overturned LGBTQ protections yesterday, it would have fired up Democrats to win more elections, pass even broader civil rights protections, and encouraged Democrats' belief that Gorsuch is an illegitimate right-wing hack. As it stands now, the court is free to make more decisions like Citizens United, which entrench Republican power.
Quiggins expects “hard neoliberals” on the right “to welcome the fact that this unwinnable fight is over,” but “culture warriors who back Trump will be furious.”
In other words, the court sees the country swinging to the left, and conservatives are shifting from seeking gains to protecting against losses.
Mo Rocca: Sammy Davis Jr. Death of the Entertainer: Sammy Davis Junior loved to perform so much that he once said he wanted to die on stage. He very nearly did, delivering a barnstorming performance just before his death from cancer in 1990.
From the age of three Sammy Davis, Jr. did it all better than anyone else – singing, dancing, acting, even gun spinning.
There Is No ‘Second Wave.’ The U.S. Is Still Stuck In The First One
Mo Rocca: Audrey Hepburn: Death of an Icon: Lithe and elegant, Audrey Hepburn survived girlhood malnutrition in Nazi-occupied Belgium. For the rest of her life, she wore her gratitude for surviving that experience.
Oracle BrandVoice: 4 Questions To Ask SAP During SAPPHIRE: IT teams need to focus on innovation, not deploying and managing on-premises systems. “Companies don’t want a driveway full of tools and car parts.”
Interesting finds in my home office
After my Mom passed away in 2000, and then my Dad in 2004, I inherited my Mom’s rolltop desk. It’s in my home office. If you’ve ever done a Zoom call with me, you can see it behind me. It’s not my primary desk; it’s just sitting there with piles of stuff on it.
Yesterday I was looking through the drawers of the desk for a Post-It note. The drawers are mostly empty; I don’t use them. The wide drawer in the top center had some USB thumb drives in the front tray, which I’d put in there myself a few years ago and then forgot about them. In the big wide space behind the tray, there were some bills that have been sitting there since before Dad died. Behind those, two envelopes: One was from 1989, containing two tickets to my middle brother’s college graduation ceremony. They still looked new, red and shiny.
The second envelope had a handwritten address on the front, written by a child in pencil. It looked like one of my brothers' handwriting. Interesting! The return address was Harley Avenue Elementary School. That’s the school my brothers and I attended. Even more interesting!
I opened the envelope and found a letter that my brother had written to his future self, part of a class project. My youngest brother was then 9 years old, and he wrote it to himself at 19. I would have been about 15 then. It was 1976.
I took a photo with my iPhone camera and sent it to my brothers for their enjoyment. In situations like this, I marvel at what my 1976, 15-year-old self would have thought about that technology. I was a die-hard science fiction fan then; I would have loved it
The message was unremarkable. I don’t think my brother’s head was in the assignment. He is wondering what the prices will be 10 years in the future, and whether inflation will still be a big deal. Inflation was a big deal in 1976.
My youngest brother and I both had the same teacher when he was in second grade and I was in third, Arlene Kaufman, who of course we called Miss Kaufman. I actually heard from her two years ago on Facebook. Yesterday, I looked her up again on Facebook to let her know about the new find, but she seems to have deleted her account. When I heard from her, she was living in Queens, NY, parts of which were hard hit by Covid. I hope she’s doing OK.
Here’s how I heard from Miss Kaufman (I’m just going to stick with that name) two years ago: A year or so before that, in my random Internet cruising, I came across the cover of an early edition of the science fiction novel Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein. Miss Kaufman had a small library in the corner of her classroom, which contained that edition of that book. It was one of the first two chapter books I read. The other was a biography of Helen Keller. And I loved Red Planet. It awakened a love of reading, science fiction, and Heinlein that sticks with me to this day.
A year after the first post, Miss Kaufman wrote to me on Messenger; she said a former student of hers had forwarded the post to her, and she said she remembered me too. I received the message from her while I was in a hotel room in Florida on a business trip.
I wonder what that must have been like for her. You remember a 9-year-old-boy and you turn around and he’s a 50-something man writing from a hotel room in Florida. I mentioned this insight to a friend recently, who said Miss Kaufman is probably used to it. I guess that happens to teachers frequently, if they are good teachers with long careers who touch many students' lives.
Now that I think of it, regarding the Helen Keller biography: I love history now too. So thanks again, Miss Kaufman!
I never did find the Post-Its. It turned out I did not need them. I used a memo pad instead — from my first job in tech journalism, at Open Systems Today, 30 years ago. They gave me far too many of those memo pads and I rarely have a need for them, so they sit around my office. I photographed that with the iPhone, too, and sent it to my editor on that job, who I recently reconnected with about freelance work.
My office is like an archeological site. I really need to declutter. 📓
Found images: Tuesday, June 16 2020
Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 1910s. She wore pants, smoked publicly — often on the roof of the White House — kept a pet snake and a dagger, partied all night and slept until noon.
“I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice Roosevelt. I cannot possibly do both.” — Theodore Roosevelt
