Les Liens du... Jeudi!
Oct. 31st, 2019 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricCurrent and stale affairs, hot and cold takes: -
Good News:
Longer political and/or climate science pieces
Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other
Rose Stokes (Refinery 29), I got pregnant after taking the morning after pill. (TL;DR, as well as weight related inefficiencies, neither morning after pill works if you've already ovulated. The only reliable option if you've already ovulated but cannot yet confirm pregnancy is a copper IUD.)
Tracey Sernack-Chee Quee (The Conversation AU), Step Into Paradise review: from koala jumpers to the Sydney Olympics, Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson defined Australian fashion.
Rebecca Morrison (AHRC blog. 2018), Eighteenth-century fast fasion: how the quick tricks of the mantua maker made sustainable gowns.
Sue Davenport and Peter Johnson, obituary for Yuwali (SMH), Western desert woman told of first contact with europeans: Yuwali's family were 'cleared out' from the area near Woomera prior to the Blue Streak rocket tests in 1964. They had never encountered white people before that point.
Callie Little (Conversation AU), Don't blame the teacher: student results are mostly out of their hands. Used twin studies methods to determine that other factors (family, school environment, class, etc) had bigger effect on student performance than individual teachers. Notes that while everyone remembers a particularly good teacher they had, it's unlikely such a teacher was transformatively good for *everyone*.
John Wertheim (CBS), Rare Christopher Columbus letters stolen from libraries around the world, and replaced with fakes. The letters are early printed copies of the letter, which was translated into Latin for circulation. The fakes all have identical smudge marks.
- Sam Jordison (TLS), What happened?. Still on the Booker Prize debacle.
That Wednesday, Afua Hirsch wrote in the Guardian that she was “proud” of the way that the judges had reached their decision. She also gave an astonishing insight into how they did it. “How do you judge the titanic career, the contribution to culture of Margaret Atwood, against the sheer beauty of Elif Shafak’s Istanbul?” she wrote. As Ron Charles from the Washington Post responded: you don’t. “You had one job”, he tweeted, “and that’s not it.” The rules state that the prize is about individual books, not a career. “How do you pit the phenomenon of Salman Rushdie against the quality and consistency of Bernardine Evaristo, who was in my view hitherto hugely underrated?” Hirsch went on. What did Evaristo’s “consistency” and the feeling that she had been underrated have to do with her current novel?
It’s one thing to feel bad about losing. It’s another to feel you were never in the game. I’ve seen Elly cry four times in twenty years. One of them was when she read that article. This prize had taken over our lives. We had put everything into it. And now, it seemed that we had not had a hope from the start. - M. Lynx Qualey (Book Riot), Literary prizes should not have co-winners. 'Wood said, of the 2019 judges: “They have actively broken the rules. It’s not that we accommodated the jury, it’s that the jury actively chose to reject the rules. They effectively staged a sit-in in the judging room.”'
- The Sydney Anglican diocese has been wearing its ass as a hat again. I didn't save the link to the reports of the archbishop asking queer allies to 'leave the church', but here's some similar stinking nonsense: 'Our legal advice is actually to quote the bible': Anglicans introduce new trans policy to avoid discrimination claims.
- David Batty (Guardian UK), University racism study criticised for including anti-white harrassment. I'm concerned by the EHRC commentator groups anti-semitism, anti-Traveller/anti-Roma prejudice, and anti-English sentiment together. One of those things is not like the others??
- Peter Nickeas (Chicago Tribune), 9 year old boy appears on murder charges for house fire. Aside from the wtf of charging a nine year old, I'm confused about why this is a *murder* charge. Does Illinois not have manslaughter offences???
- Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian (Foreign Policy), Abominable highlights hollywood's China problem: neighbouring countries are boycotting the film over a map shown that affirms China's disputed claim to the South China Sea.
Good News:
- Josh Halliday (Guardian UK), Manchester museum to return artefacts to indigenous Australians.
Longer political and/or climate science pieces
- Sarah Emmerson (Vice Motherboard), How Facebook bought a police force.
- Julia Quilter and Russel Hogg (Conversation AU), Over the top policing of bike helmet laws targets vulnerable riders.
Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other
- Annabel Crabb (ABC), What Makes an Australian? It's not what you think:
The Australian story is a loud and unruly one, full of individuals who looked at the world around them, and decided to break the rules.
Which it's why it's so surprising that when asked to nominate the key element of what it means to be Australian, the most widely agreed-upon response was this: "Respecting our institutions and laws".
Forget larrikins. To be Australian — according to the recipe written by more than 50,000 respondents to the Australia Talks National Survey — the big thing is to follow the rules of the place.
I mean, as a queer person, or just as someone who's been awake in the 21st century, this does not surprise me at all. - Two things I didn't fully understand, on x-chromosome inactivation:
- Ballaton, Cotton, and Brown, 'Derivation of consensus inactivation status for X-linked genes from genome-wide studies', Biology of Sex Differences 6:35 (2015) doi:10.1186/s13293-015-0053-7.
- Abstract of Lyon, MF, 'X-Chromosome Inactivation and Human Genetic Disease', Acta Pediactra. Suppl. 2002.
- Ballaton, Cotton, and Brown, 'Derivation of consensus inactivation status for X-linked genes from genome-wide studies', Biology of Sex Differences 6:35 (2015) doi:10.1186/s13293-015-0053-7.