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Friday, April 02, 2021

Good Friday

I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.
— Joyce Cary, who died in 1957 when  someone we know was conceived


Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.
— Flannery O’Connor, born in 1925


DID YOU KNOW MOSES WAS LEFT OUT OF THE PASSOVER SEDER? Jeff Dunetz at The Lid has come up with the perfect way to make it up to Moses – 14 famous movie scenes featuring the Prophet. Why 14? Because in the Old Testament, seven is the number for perfection and Jeff wanted Moses to have double satisfaction!



Gizmodo: “If Facebook had moved sooner to restrict hoax, toxic, misleading, or other content attempting to interfere with the 2020 elections, it could have limited its reach by around 10 billion views, according to a report by the advocacy group Avaaz. Researchers for Avaaz identified the 100 highest-performing pages on Facebook that had shared content classified as misinformation by the company’s own third-party fact-checkers, including at least twice within 90 days, per Time. Those pages received significantly more engagement than others throughout the summer of 2020, amid both the run-up to the election, the novel coronavirus pandemic, and nationwide protests against police racism and brutality triggered by the Minneapolis police killing of Black resident George Floyd. Avaaz found that “had Facebook tackled misinformation more aggressively and when the pandemic first hit in March 2020 (rather than waiting until October), the platform could have stopped 10.1 billion estimated views of content on the top-performing pages that repeatedly shared misinformation ahead of Election Day.” This allowed some of the disreputable pages to catch up in terms of social media interactions to major networks with far more followers like CNN in July and August, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests, according to the report…”


“While Fox’s audience spans ideologies on the right, its new challengers attract mainly conservatives. Last year witnessed the rise of Newsmax and One America News (OAN), two alternative media outlets seen as potential competitors to Fox News. But a new Pew Research Center survey finds that the long-standing cable superpower still has a much wider reach among both Republicans and Americans overall as a source of political news. In addition, while about three-in-ten Democrats and those who lean Democratic get political news from Fox, virtually none of them do from Newsmax and OAN, according the survey of 12,045 adults conducted March 8-14 on the Center’s American Trends Panel. While Fox does well among its conservative Republican core audience, it is also used by substantial portions of Democrats and ideologically moderate and liberal Republicans, according to the survey. And it attracts roughly equal portions of White, Black and Hispanic Americans. For their part, the much smaller Newsmax and OAN audiences are made up largely of older and White Americans and conservative Republicans. Among Republicans, Fox News is a much more common source than Newsmax or OAN, and is more ideologically mixed…”


Google Search Help – “You can learn more about an image or the objects around you with a reverse image search. For example, you can take a photo of a plant and use it to search for info or other similar images. What you find when you search Your results can include:

  • Search results for objects in the image
  • Similar images
  • Websites with the image or a similar image
Computer AndroidiPhone & iPad Compatible browsers –

You can do a reverse image search on most browsers, like:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Safari

  1. Are you your connectome? — If so, we might see an in-principle way of giving you immortality. Unfortunately, the most promising technique for this is… fatal?
  2. Academic bullying disguised as fighting for academic freedom — “Over the past decade, something very odd has happened to the idea of academic freedom: It has become conflated with free speech,” writes Jennifer Ruth (Portland State)
  3. At the intersection of philosophical theories of well-being and empirical studies of well-being — an interdisciplinary team fights equivocations and explores implications
  4. Strategies for better aesthetic disagreement — from Brandon Polite (Knox) and Matt Strohl (Montana)
  5. “A complex and accurate analog computing device — from a civilization that flourished 2,200 years ago” — the Antikythera mechanism is further evidence that “the past is more complicated, more multi-faceted, and more surprising than we currently know”
  6. “Demarcation is simply inevitable. Scientists have finite time and therefore must select which topics are worth working on and which are not” — the challenges of distinguishing science from non-science, in Boston Review
  7. “I believe that actions are wrong when they cause harm that violates a right [or]… when they cause gratuitous offence” — “Often cultural appropriation does neither.” James Young (Victoria) interviewed about art, music, copyright, culture, and more