Toots 🦣 from 10/30 to 11/03

As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I don’t notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by message length.

Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:07 – Mon 30 October 2023

Two frames of a film, featuring a man sitting in front of a window, facing left of camera
Image credit: Almost certainly public domain

A 104-Year-Old Lost Silent Movie Has Been Found in a Basement from 404 Media

Upon examination, it was confirmed that reels 1-4 of the missing silent 35 mm print entitled: Sealed Hearts, was in the cans. The original US distribution print had lasted 50 mins and been in 5 reels.

Hashtags: #LostMedia

In all fairness, this does happen, from time to time. However, due to the nature of early film and a lack of understanding of media’s value until recently, we can expect it to happen far less frequently every year. In this case, the print even turned up thousands of miles away from where anybody would have considered seriously looking for it.

12:01 – Mon 30 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

If you intend to do a good act, do it quickly, and then you will excite gratitude; a favor if it is slow in being conferred causes ingratitude.

Ausonius

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:03 – Tue 31 October 2023

Image Not Shown: A collage of clip art of various white-collar workers performing tasks around the United States Capitol

In defense of bureaucratic competence from Pluralistic

Regulation is, first and foremost, a truth-seeking exercise. There will never be one obvious answer to any sufficiently technical question.

Hashtags: #Regulation #Bureaucracy

Regulation also works shockingly well, far better than any market-based solution to a problem that I’ve ever seen. Rather than waiting for corporate executives to weigh the long-term profits of environmental conservation (for one example) against the immediate-term cost-savings from dumping waste in a local river, banning the latter practice benefits everyone except the people dedicated to destruction.

12:07 – Tue 31 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Man is an actor who plays various parts: First comes a boy, then out a lover starts; His garb is changed for, lo! A beggar’s rags; Then he’s a merchant with full money-bags; Anon, an aged sire, wrinkled and lean; At last Death drops the curtain on the scene.

Bhartṛhari

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:04 – Wed 01 November 2023

Image Not Shown: A girl dressed as a ‘Catrina’ takes part in the Catrinas Parade in Mexico City to celebrate Day of the Dead

How ‘La Catrina’ became the iconic symbol of Day of the Dead from The Conversation

While some people might presume it’s always been this way, La Catrina is actually a transcultural icon whose prestige and popularity are equal parts invention and accident.

Hashtags: #Art #DayOfTheDead #DiegoRivera

I assume that, by now, all readers know that I vastly prefer the Day of the Dead over Halloween. I know that creative workers in particular (hi, all) find the latter an opportunity to cut loose, but anti-establishment satire and (at least notional) ofrendas to give a thought to those no longer with us appeals directly to me, making the history all the more interesting.

12:03 – Wed 01 November 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

It is so unfair that the big executives can make that much money when there are people that can’t afford to buy groceries. It is fundamentally unfair. It isn’t right. They don’t have a conscience. And they need to pay up.

Deb Haaland

Hashtags: #Quotes #NativeAmericanHeritage

9:02 – Thu 02 November 2023

Image Not Shown: Children laughing and eating around a cafeteria table

School Lunches Should Be Free from OtherWords

Public school meal debt has ballooned to $262 million per year, with an estimated 30.4 million students unable to pay for their meals.

Hashtags: #Education #Poverty #Food

Honestly, everything about charging for school lunches feels bizarre. Unless things have changed dramatically since I last had a school lunch, we already serve meals that only barely meet nutritional guidelines and cost as little as possible. When you add the costs of collecting, securing, and accounting for payments, it’d probably come out cheaper to give the food away, and you’d have better students for it.

12:04 – Thu 02 November 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Democracy is the destiny of humanity; freedom its indestructible arm.

Benito Juárez

Hashtags: #Quotes #NativeAmericanHeritage

9:01 – Fri 03 November 2023

This global view of the surface of Venus is centered at 0 degrees east longitude. NASA Magellan synthetic aperture radar mosaics from the first cycle of Magellan mapping were mapped onto a computer-simulated globe to create this image
Image credit: Public domain by NASA policy

If Venus had plate tectonics, could it have had life? from Futurity

To account for the abundance of nitrogen and carbon dioxide present in Venus’ atmosphere, the researchers conclude that Venus must have had plate tectonics sometime after the planet formed, about 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago.

Hashtags: #Venus #Space #PlateTectonics

Again, I wouldn’t call this a critical article, but Venus always seemed more interesting to me than Mars, despite the popular culture fascination with the latter.

12:06 – Fri 03 November 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Nearness to nature…keeps the spirit sensitive to impressions not commonly felt and in touch with the unseen powers.

Charles Eastman

Hashtags: #Quotes #NativeAmericanHeritage

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.

Content Warning: US Party Politics

Image Not Shown: Great turnout for Rep. Dean Phillips' big announcement ...

The laughable notion that Dean Phillips (who?) could unseat Biden, according to The Atlantic from Daily Kos

There’s no effort in this piece to consider any counterarguments. It doesn’t even seriously consider why other Democrats might not have challenged Biden.

At this point, I only barely remember the days when I kept The Atlantic in my RSS feed reader and considered subscribing to it. You can even find many instances in my Twitter archive of my posting links over there. But they jumped on the “ideological diversity” bandwagon that people invariably mean as code for laundering right-wing extremist views, and it buried their useful content.

Content Warning: murders, Killers of the Flower Moon spoilers

An Osage man on the Arkansas River sometime between 1910 and 1918 – about a decade before the Osage Reign of Terror
Image credit: Almost certainly in the public domain

For the Osage Nation, the betrayal of the murders depicted in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ still lingers from The Conversation

After a long investigation, the bureau uncovered a massive conspiracy masterminded by white men like William King Hale, Ernest Burkhart and other non-Osage members in the community of Fairfax, Oklahoma, particularly those in positions of authority.

I can see why the incident would still haunt the community…

An animated image showing text in various languages identified
Image credit: CC-BY-SA 4.0 by the Wikimedia Foundation

Open language identification API for 200+ languages from Wikimedia Diff

While there are numerous LID tools in existence, none can boast detecting all 300+ languages that Wikipedia is available in.

I love projects like this…

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Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.