Good Things Friday (269) and Link Love
April 19, 2024
1. A friend gifted us a large jar of homemade salsa and it’s really good. Sometimes I get tired of eggs for breakfast but never when we have the good salsa. I don’t know what it is but it’s not the same with storebought salsa (which, to be clear, I am generally totally fine with. There’s something about the fresh salsa searing my throat that’s just right).
2. A friend gave me solid advice that my therapist later agreed with. Gold star for friend!
I feel the need to test our water now (gift link): Maine Is a Warning for America’s PFAS Future
This is a year old but I hadn’t seen it before and it’s too perfect: Professor Not Prepared for Contents of Lost 1942 Reel Hoped To Be WWII Film
This sounds like a good thing. It has never made sense to me that we’ve allowed privatizing resources we all need to survive: US lawmakers Elizabeth Warren and Ro Khanna seek to ban trade in water rights
I adore Murderbot more than words can say, and relate to Murderbot so much too, so I guess that means I feel this way about Martha Wells according to her Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico. Some of my favorite bits: “One of the major publication reviews for Artificial Condition wondered why Murderbot was so wary of humans considering they were all so nice to it. That was also the novella where one of the characters was a ComfortUnit, which Murderbot called a sexbot, but I don’t know, maybe that was too subtle. So I’m not exaggerating about the way some readers ignore the fact that it was a story about enslaved people.” Murderbot knows not to trust people because they’ve met them and were enslaved by them. They’re spending a hell of a lot of time avoiding recapture!
“The third law also stipulates that robots are expected to die for us, despite their inherent desire to kill us.
That’s just really unfair.” For this alone, why would anyone like or trust humans??
“Murderbot struggles with a lot of things during the series: its personhood, its freedom to make decisions about its own body, its feelings about its own body. ” I struggle deeply with my feelings about my own body these days.
The cloud under the sea (I hate the scrolling set up for this article but the text is fascinating): “The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.””
I think the pandemic also taught us that one old dude who knows Fortran is all that’s holding our financial services up.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
I think of that XKCD all the time….