[NEWS] Seven Christmas links: Bowie and Bing, horror, ghosts, holidays, xenophobia, Elf on the Shelf

• Dangerous Minds shares the story of the remarkable duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie.
• Dangerous Minds looks at the 1980 horror film To All A Goodnight.
• Strange Company shares a strange story, of a ghostly choir reportedly heard in 1944, here.
• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog writes about why she and her husband each take Christmas seriously.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the xenophobia behind the idea of a War on Christmas, going back to the anti-Semitism of Henry Ford.
• JSTOR Daily carries suggestions that the idea of the Grinch, from Dr. Seuss, has anti-Semitic origins.
• VICE makes the case for the creepiness of the Elf on the Shelf in the context of a surveillance society, here.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait shares a stunning photo taken by a friend of the Pleiades star cluster.
• The Buzz, at the Toronto Public Library, shares a collection of books suitable for World Vegan Month, here.
• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber considers, with an eye towards China and the Uighurs, how panopticon attempts can stray badly on account of–among other things–false assumptions.
• Gizmodo considers how antimatter could end up providing interesting information about the unseen universe.
• Joe. My. God. reports from New York City, where new HIV cases are dropping sharply on account of PrEP.
• JSTOR Daily shares a vintage early review of Darwin’s Origin of Species.
• Language Hat examines the origins of the semicolon, in Venice in 1494.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money shares a critical report of the new Jill Lepore book These Truths.
• The LRB Blog reports from the Museum of Corruption in Kyiv, devoted to the corruption of the ancient regime in Ukraine.
• Marginal Revolution shares a new history of the Lakota.
• The NYR Daily looks at the photography of Duane Michals.
• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at population trends in Russia, still below 1991 totals in current frontiers.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why some of the lightest elements, like lithium, are so rare.
• Window on Eurasia shares the opinion of a Russian historian that Eastern Europe is back as a geopolitical zone.
• Arnold Zwicky considers Jacques Transue in the light of other pop culture figures and trends.

[NEWS] Sox tech links: Venezuela power, Argentina agriculture, AI writing, Google, Buttegieg, HIV

• Wired reports on the daunting scale of the Venezuela power failure, and the sheer difficulty of restoring the network.
• The Inter Press Service looks at the possibility for Argentina to enjoy improved agricultural circumstances come climate change.
• CBC reports on how artificial intelligences can be used to create frightfully plausible fake news.
• Axios notes the sheer density of information that Google has on its users.
• CityLab reports on the policies hopeful presidential candidate Pete Buttegieg would bring in relating to the automation of work.
• Wired takes a look at the second reported HIV cure and what it means.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer notes Apep, a brilliant trinary eight thousand light-years away with at least one Wolf-Rayet star that might explode in a gamma-ray burst.
• Centauri Dreams notes that AAVSO, the American Association of Variable Star Observers, has created a public exoplanet archive.
• The Crux considers/u> different strategies for intercepting asteroids bound to impact with Earth.
• D-Brief notes the discovery of a solar twin, a star that might have been born in the same nursery as our sun, HD 186302 184 light-years away.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that although NASA’s Gateway station to support lunar traffic is facing criticism, Russia and China are planning to build similar outposts.
• JSTOR Daily notes the research of Katie Sutton into the pioneering gender-rights movement of Weimar Germany.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money celebrates the successful clean-up of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, once famously depicted on fire.
• The Map Room Blog links to maps showing Apple Maps and Google Maps will be recording images next for their online databases.
• Jamieson Webster at the NYR Daily takes a critical, even defensible, look at the widespread use of psychopharmacological drugs in contemporary society.
• Roads and Kingdoms carries a transcript of an interview with chefs in Ireland, considering the culinary possibilities overlooked and otherwise of the island’s natural bounty.
• Rocky Planet considers the real, overlooked, possibility of earthquakes in the relatively geologically stable east of the United States.
• The Russian Demographics Blog notes how, in the transatlantic wine trade, American interest in European wines is surely not reciprocated.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes how Einsteinian relativity, specifically relating to gravitational lensing, was used to predict the reappearance of the distant Refsdal Supernova one year after its 2014 appearance.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• In a guest post at Antipope, researcher and novelist Heather Child writes about the extent to which Big Data has moved from science fiction to reality.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the very recent discovery of a massive crater buried under the ice of Greenland, one that may have impacted in the human era and altered world climate. Are there others like it?
• Crooked Timber responds to the Brexit proposal being presented to the British parliament. Is this it?
• D-Brief notes the discovery of the unusually large and dim, potentially unexplainable, dwarf galaxy Antlia 2 near the Milky Way Galaxy.
• Gizmodo notes that the size of mysterious ‘Oumuamua was overestimated.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the life and achievements of Polish-born scholar Jósef Czapski, a man who miraculously survived the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn.
• At the LRB Blog, Ken Kalfus writes about his father’s experience owning a drycleaner in a 1960s complex run by the Trump family.
• Marginal Revolution starts a discussion over a recent article in The Atlantic claiming that there has been a sharp drop-off in the sex enjoyed by younger people in the United States (and elsewhere?).
• At Roads and Kingdoms, T.M. Brown shares a story of the crazy last night of his bartending days in Manhattan’s Alphabet City.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel imagines what the universe would have been like during its youth, during peak star formation.
• Strange Maps’ Frank Jacobs takes a look at different partition plans for the United States, aiming to split the country into liberal and conservative successor states.
• Window on Eurasia notes that some Ingush, after noting the loss of some border territories to neighbouring Chechnya, fear they might get swallowed up by their larger, culturally related, neighbours.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell predicts that there will not be enough Tory MPs in the United Kingdom willing to topple Theresa May over the Brexit deal.

[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: listening phones, HIV denialism, Euncie Foote, nuclear war, asteroids

• This alarming VICE report notes the ways in which our phones–and other mobile devices, I’m sure–are in fact listening to us.
• This distressing story looks at how HIV denialism has become popular among many Russians, and the terrible toll this belief system inflicts on people victimized by it (children, particularly).
• Smithsonian Magazine notes how the 1856 discovery of the greenhouse effect created by carbon dioxide by pioneering scientist Eunice Foote was overlooked because she was a woman.
• The detonation of more than 100 substantial nuclear weapons, this report notes, would doom civilization through climate change and agricultural collapse. Motherboard has it.
• Asteroids in orbits linked to that of the Earth would be excellent first targets for asteroid mining, Universe Today reports.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares one picture of a vast galaxy cluster to underline how small our place in the universe is.
• The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture shares some photos of Syrian refugee families as they settle into the United States.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the Dragonfly proposal for a Titan lander.
• The Crux notes the exceptional vulnerability of the cultivated banana to an otherwise obscure fungus.
• Bruce Dorminey notes NASA’s preparation of the Clipper mission to investigate Europa.
• The Frailest Thing’s Michael Sacasas takes a look at the role of surveillance in the life of the modern student.
• Hornet Stories has a nice interview of Sina Grace, author of Marvel’s Iceman book.
• Joe. My. God. reshared this holiday season a lovely anecdote, “Dance of the Sugar Plum Lesbians.”
• JSTOR Daily took a look at why Americans like dieting so much.
• The LRB Blog considers the Thames Barrier, the meager protection of London against tides in a time of climate change.
• The Map Room Blog notes the digitization of radar maps of Antarctica going back to the 1960s.
• Marginal Revolution seems cautiously optimistic about the prospects of Morocco.
• Russell Darnley at maximos62 is skeptical about the prospects of the forests of Indonesia’s Riau province.
• Stephanie Land at the NYR Daily talks about how she managed to combine becoming a writer with being a single mother of two young children.
• Out There argues a lunar fuel depot could help support crewed interplanetary exploration.
• Science Sushi notes genetic evidence the lionfish invasion of the North Atlantic off Florida began not with a single escape but with many.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel makes the argument an unmanned probe to Alpha Centauri could have significant technological spinoffs.
• Supernova Condensate makes the point, apropos of nothing at all, that spaceship collisions can in fact unleash vast amounts of energy.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, while Kazakhs see practical advantages to cooperation with Russia, they also see some problems.

[URBAN NOTE] Four Toronto links, from Toronto Island students to Ontario Place park to the TTC

• Caroline Alphonso reports in The Globe and Mail about how Toronto Islands students have been displaced to school on the mainland, in Regent Park.
• Robert Benzie and Victoria Gibson describe in the Toronto Star a new waterfront park in a revitalized part of Ontario Place.
• Torontoist’s Keiran Delamont notes how Metrolinx’s sharing of data with the police fits into the broader concept of the modern surveillance state.
• Steve Munro tracks the evolution, or perhaps more properly devolution, of streetcar service from 1980 to 2016.

[LINK] “Surveillance shouldn’t be the new normal”

Mathew Ingram makes the case against the emergent panopticon state.

As the Globe and Mail has reported — based on classified documents obtained from an anonymous source — U.S. intelligence officials appear to be mapping the communications traffic of several large Canadian corporations, including Rogers Communications Inc., one of the country’s largest internet and telecom providers. Perhaps the most depressing aspects of this news is how completely unsurprising it is.

By now, we have all been subjected to a veritable tsunami of surveillance-related leaks, courtesy of documents obtained by former U.S. intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, a trove from which this latest piece of information is also drawn. These files suggest the National Security Agency uses every method at its disposal — both legal and otherwise — to track every speck of web and voice traffic, including tapping directly into the undersea cables that make up the backbone of the internet.

In that context, the idea that intelligence agencies are snooping on the networks of Canadian corporations like Rogers seems totally believable, despite the fact that a 66-year-old agreement between Canada and the U.S. supposedly prevents either country from spying on the residents of its partner. While the document in question doesn’t say that any snooping is occurring, it seems clear that the behaviour it describes is designed to create a map of those networks in order to facilitate future surveillance activity.

The U.S. has repeatedly argued that this kind of monitoring is necessary in order to detect the activities of potential threats to U.S. security. The problem with this approach, of course, is that no one knows where those threats will appear, or how they will manifest themselves — thanks to the diverse nature of modern international terrorism — and so the inevitable result is a kind of ubiquitous surveillance, in which every word and photo and voice-mail message is collected, just in case it might be important.

One of the risks inherent in the steady flow of leaks from Mr. Snowden and others is that the new reality they portray eventually becomes accepted, if not outright banal. Of course we are being surveilled all the time; of course our location is being tracked thanks to the GPS chips in our phones; of course the NSA is installing “back door” software on our internet devices before we even buy them. At this point, it’s hard to imagine a surveillance revelation that would actually surprise anyone, no matter how Orwellian it might be.

Much more is available if you follow the link. Go, read.

[PHOTO] “Prepare for the New Cameras-Everywhere World”

Inspired by the recent shocking New York Post front page photo showing a man minutes from death, Slate‘s Dan Gillmor writes about the future of photography in a world where the ability to take and share photographic images at high speed will be ubiquitous. There’s a risk, Gillmor argues, that between the demand of mass audiences for all sorts of powerful images, the collapse of photography as an economically viable industry via free amateur images, and the development of panopticon-aiding photo recognition technologies, things might become rather unpleasant.

(Here in Toronto we’ve had just a taste of this sort of thing at work in relationship to the TTC, as some TTC riders who are angry at the performance of some TTC employees have taken and shared images (and video) of these employee performances.)

For example, the choices made by editors will still matter. Mass media are not going to disappear entirely. Even if we witness the demise of bottom-feeders (like the New York Post, which in this case put the subway picture on Page One with a lurid headline), we’ll still have media organizations with reach and clout. Interestingly, there’s been no outcry about the New York Times’ decision to post a surveillance-camera shot of a man who’s about to murder another man. The key differences are a) a passer-by didn’t take the picture; b) the police are trying to find the murderer; and c) the Times didn’t troll for readers with a seamy headline.

Over time, the more important choices will be made by the audience. Even if “mainstream media” (whatever that means) choose to behave with common decency, there will be no shortage of other outlets for gruesome pictures and videos that aren’t legally obscene or (like child porn) just plain criminal. Not long after the 2001 terrorist attacks, major media outlets made the lockstep decision to stop airing videos of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center or people jumping from the burning towers. But these are easy enough to find online. With more and more videos, it will increasingly be up to you and me to make our own decisions.

Meanwhile, the role of the professional spot-news photographer won’t merely change. It’ll just about end. People in that business should be looking for new ways to make a living. As I wrote in my book Mediactive several years ago, a cameras-everywhere world makes it much more likely that an “amateur” will get the most newsworthy images. But because tabloid-style media will always have an audience, probably a big one, new kinds of content marketplaces are sure to emerge, giving non-pros a way to sell and license the most newsworthy material. Look for bidding wars will erupt for items that are sufficiently interesting or ugly or titillating.

The more important implications of the cameras-everywhere world are about the surveillance society we’re creating. This isn’t a new idea, of course, as any reader of George Orwell or David Brin knows. But the degree to which pessimists’ fears are coming true is remarkable—and terrifying to anyone who cares in the least about liberty.

Online surveillance has gotten most of the recent attention, but it is also very likely that a variety of Big and Little Brothers will record us everywhere we go—eventually, with sound, too. Facial recognition and other techniques will mean that our every move will be trackable. The purveyors and adopters of this stuff like to say we have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide. That’s police-state mentality, but it’s getting more common. Benjamin Franklin would be hooted down today for his famous and eternally right admonition, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”