If people were rain, i was a drizzle and she was a thunderstorm. 

-Pudge, Looking For Alaska

Jon Larsen collects and photographs micrometeorites from all over the world, finding them even in urban areas mixed in among terrestrial dust and dirt.

Facial recognition, fake identities and digital surveillance tools: Inside the post office's covert internet operations program

Hacker group behind Colonial Pipeline attack claims it has three new victims.

Over the past 24 hours, the group posted the names of three new companies on its site on the dark web, called DarkSide Leaks. The information posted to the site includes summaries of what the hackers appear to have stolen but do not appear to contain raw data. DarkSide is a criminal gang, and its claims should be treated as potentially misleading.

"Spite is for people who want to shove you off the garden walk. A more humane politics would ask how to make the path wider"  ... more politics  

The Gospel According to Paul · Arts on Tour

Full of intelligence and wit, The Gospel According to Paul is a funny, insightful and occasionally poignant portrait of Paul Keating. The man that - as he tells it – single-handedly shaped contemporary Australia. ... Paul Keating is a man of eviscerating wit and rich rhetoric with an ego the size of Everest.

Baby whale shark pleads with fishermen to save its life Pattya Mail 

Cheryl Ann Krause (Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit) & Jane Chong (Assistant U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York), Lawyer Wellbeing as a Crisis of the Profession, 71 S. C. L. Rev. 203 (2019):

This Essay explores the implications of lawyer wellbeing for the health of the legal profession. To date, the movement to improve lawyer wellbeing has been largely propelled by the need to address the negative consequences of lawyers’ poor mental health for lawyers as individuals, as well as for their clients, their employers and society. Drawing on recent studies on lawyers’ unfulfilled psychological needs, however, we propose that the conditions that give rise to lawyers’ poor mental health also reflect divergence from our ideals of the lawyer as a professional and the law as a profession. Particular facets of lawyer suffering—debilitating self-doubt, lack of autonomy, and a diminished sense of connectedness to others—reveal wellness as an issue that sits at the intersection of other fault lines within the profession. 

The new digital extortion

Axios: “If you run a hospital, a bank, a utility or a city, chances are you’ll be hit with a ransomware attack. Given the choice between losing your precious data or paying up, chances are you’ll pay.

• Why it matters: Paying the hackers is the clear short-term answer for most organizations hit with these devastating attacks, but it’s a long-term societal disaster, encouraging hackers to continue their lucrative extortion schemes.
• Driving the news: Colonial Pipeline paid hackers almost $5 million in ransom to restore its systems and get gasoline flowing again after a ransomware attack held the country’s largest pipeline hostage, which resulted in widespread disruption of gasoline supply.
• The big picture: “This creates a collective action problem — the bad guys win so they’ll go out and hit someone else,” said Betsy Cooper, director of Aspen Tech Policy Hub at the Aspen Institute…”

 “Every registered thoroughbred in the world is descended from one of three stallions: the Byerly Turk, the Darley Arabian, and the Godolphin Arabian.” (New Yorker)

10 Tales of Manuscript Burning (And Some That Survived) Literary Hub

Mount Vesuvius victims died just moments away from rescue Ars Technica

At 95, Dick Van Dyke is still the consummate showman. And he’s desperate to get back onstage.WaPo

A New Look at a Wicked Emperor WSJ

Neutrons unlock the secrets of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes Ars Technica

Pentagon Surveilling Americans Without a Warrant, Senator Reveals

“The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard. Senator Wyden’s office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically about warrantless spying on American citizens. “I write to urge you to release to the public information about the Department of Defense’s (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans,” the letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, reads…”