As discussed previously, this is my weekly Twitter roundup. Note that tweets of articles generally include header images from the articles, which are not included here unless they happen to be available under a free license. Most are not. But I now add most of my commentary here, where I’m not restricted by the message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

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

9:01 – Mon 18 May 2020

Understandable But Nonetheless Troubling: Facebook’s Ban On In-Person Events from the Electronic Frontier Foundation

…seems to incorporate gatherings that are discouraged though not legally prohibited.

A big part of why I posted the article was because of the reference to the Santa Clara Principles a bare-bones moderation-transparency policy that isn’t nearly as well known as it should be. I also very much appreciate the nuance of “this is probably necessary for legitimate reasons, but still something that needs to be watched.”

12:02 – Mon 18 May 2020

Our apparently casual question has led us to an interesting reflection that the history of the Far East is not without lessons of serious value to the student of comparative history.

Kan’ichi Asakawa

I wasn’t able to skim more than a couple of chapters, but Asakawa’s book looks very interesting for people who are interested in the topic.

9:04 – Tue 19 May 2020

Credit card companies are tracking shoppers like never before: Inside the next phase of surveillance capitalism from Fast Company

Over the past decade, consumer purchases have quietly become one of the most sought-after and lucrative data sets, used by Wall Street and Madison Avenue alike to infer shoppers’ tastes, budgets, and plans.

Obviously, as stores re-open and the virus spreads again, forcing another round of closures (even as most states still haven’t gotten to anything like a decline), this is going to be increasingly difficult to navigate.

12:01 – Tue 19 May 2020

Milky night;

Through the resting trees

A petal—

Falling.

Jun Fujita

9:02 – Wed 20 May 2020

Federal Whistleblower Says Boss Pushed Him to Purchase Drugs That Hadn’t Been Tested in Humans from The Intercept

…Bright faced pressure not just from lobbyists, but also from Kadlec and others on his staff…

12:04 – Wed 20 May 2020

Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies.

Eileen Chang (張煐)

9:05 – Thu 21 May 2020

‘A Nightmare Scenario’: Coronavirus Has Reached the World’s Biggest Refugee Settlement from VICE

…almost impossible to contain an outbreak in the sprawling mass of 34 camps, which are home to about 855,000 Rohingya Muslims, most of whom arrived after fleeing a wave of genocidal violence…

12:03 – Thu 21 May 2020

The hour is black, my road unbuilt;

My beggar’s song

I cannot sing; yet, thou knowest,

For thy love I long!

Dhan Gopal Mukerji

9:03 – Fri 22 May 2020

Traits we can’t see can help us find stuff in clutter from Futurity

Guo and the team found that participants implicitly used the hardness distinction to locate a target more quickly, even though none reported being aware that hardness was relevant.

12:05 – Fri 22 May 2020

Did not the sages of old teach that man is man only because of his possession of the ethical concept? Did they have any ethical sense at all?

Soh Jaipil

At this point, I need to point out that we have done an absolutely atrocious job of documenting Asian Americans in the United States, coming to light as I’ve tried to keep quotes in some relation to Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month. Soh is an excellent example. The man was a political activist, a doctor, a newspaper publisher, and the token Asian quoted in regional stories about Asian matters, but the above was the only statement I can find him recorded as saying.

It doesn’t bode well for the final week of the month, I’ll tell you that much.

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, here’s a sixth article that didn’t fit into the week, but too weird to not mention.

Someone at the CDC Leaked Another Pandemic Plan the White House Doesn’t Want You to See from VICE

The guide says, for example, that states and local governments should be coordinating travel patterns, saying they will “impact efforts to reduce community transmission.”

I believe this makes a total of three plans (that we know of) that the administration chose to ignore in favor of watching a hundred thousand Americans die.

Focusing the recovery on green infrastructure could create millions of jobs from Fast Company

Until COVID-19 hit, the energy efficiency sector was the largest job creator in energy, employing at least 2.4 million people as of 2019 (the coal industry, by contrast, employed around 70,000 people.)

I can’t find a link, but I’m also hearing that solar energy prices are (or were) about to jump below the cheapest coal/oil energy rates, even as the tax incentives expire.

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