NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Wipe Metadata from Any File. Like, with a cloth?
Springer-Nature, the Anglo-German publisher of the world’s leading scientific journal Nature, announced in 2017 that in some of its publications it was censoring articles that used words like “Taiwan”, “Tibet” and “cultural revolution”, when printing in China.
In April 2020 Nature ran an editorial apologising for its “error” in “associating the virus with Wuhan” in its news coverage.
…The magazines that publish scientific papers have become increasingly dependent on the fees that Chinese scientists pay to publish in them, plus advertisements from Chinese firms and subscriptions from Chinese institutions. In recent years observers have noticed that the news coverage of China in these magazines has begun to look a little less objective than it once did.
Here is the full Matt Ridley piece.
China is still wrestling with how to rule over a diverse, ethnically mixed population that does not necessarily accept the dominance of the Han or the CCP narrative. The challenge for the CCP is that ethnic minorities constitute only about 10 percent of the total population but inhabit 60 percent of the land mass, much of which is in sensitive border areas (the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The national language is a recent construct and has priority in schools over the local languages. About 30 percent of the population speaks a language at home other than the national language.
That is from the new and “must read” From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of Chinese Communism, by Tony Saich. Keep in mind that the CCP is the most dangerous institution in the world today
Do mongooses sit behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance?
…despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans.” And how about this clincher: “…and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance.”
Solve for the fungi equilibrium?
Please let’s not regulate private space tourism
Good piece on why the Benin bronzes should be returned (NYT).
Dragon’s Blood Trees
This is a dragon’s blood tree from the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen in the Arabian Sea. You can see the mathematics of nature at work here — self-similarity at different scales, growing to fill the available space, efficient branching behavior…I bet there’s some cool Fibonacci shit going on here too. The photo was taken by Daniel Kordan — you can see more of this series at Colossal, on Instagram, or at Fstoppers. (via colossal)
Is this new drinking straw an instant cure for hiccups?
Mark Lutter page of major instances of social change led by movements
Which countries have appeared the most in NYT headlines over the decades?
Crypto joint accounts to cement relationships?