Soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo snubbed Coca-Cola. Then their market value sank $4 billion. CBS
Why 1971 was an extraordinary year in film BBC
The Green Revolution at Matraville and other places Is Being Built on a Very Dirty Industry Bloomberg
As Jordan Schachtel wrote late last month in a Substack article titled, “What to make of the COVID-19 lab leak theory,” “The virus was not the cause for global catastrophe. It was the response to the virusthat crippled the global economy and our society. The disease was not nearly as damaging as the ‘cure’ for the disease.”
Tax inVoice - Cyber security for business and intermediaries part 1 (ato.gov.au)
For the New Yorker, Hannah Fry wrote a brief history of information visualization, a quiet innovation that has changed the world:
Van Langren could have put these values in a table, as would have been typical for the time, but, as Friendly and Wainer observe, “only a graph speaks directly to the eyes.” Once the numbers were visualized, the enormous differences among them — and the stakes dependent on those differences — became impossible to ignore. Van Langren wrote, “If the Longitude between Toledo and Rome is not known with certainty, consider, Your Highness, what it will be for the Western and Oriental Indies, that in comparison the former distance is almost nothing.”
Van Langren’s image marked an extraordinary conceptual leap. He was a skilled cartographer from a long line of cartographers, so he would have been familiar with depicting distances on a page. But, as Tufte puts it, in his classic study “Visual Explanations” (1997), “Maps resemble miniature pictorial representations of the physical world.” Here was something entirely new: encoding the estimate of a distance by its position along a line. Scientists were well versed in handling a range of values for a single property, but until then science had only ever been concerned with how to get rid of error — how to take a collection of wrong answers and reduce its dimension to give a single, best answer. Van Langren was the first person to realize that a story lay in that dimension, one that could be physically seen on a page by abstracting it along a thin inked line.
Van Langren’s graph, which Fry says “might be the first statistical graph in history”, is pictured at the top of this post.
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University: “This field guide looks at social media that works on different “logics” than do Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. It features communities that have tried consciously to use different models than surveillance capitalism and includes the work of collaborators in other countries and subcultures. No field guide would be complete without images. Much as a field guide to birds helps us look more closely at the birds we encounter on a walk through our neighborhoods, Fiammetta Ghedini’s remarkable illustrations in this field guide help us look at social media differently. The Institute published the illustrated guide in connection with “Reimagine the Internet,” a virtual conference about what the internet could and should become over the next decade…”
Publishers Weekly: “After votes on successive days this week in the Assembly and the Senate, the bill crossed the finish line just before the June 10 close of the legislative session and is now headed to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s desk. If signed, the law would be the second such piece of digital library legislation to pass, following Maryland’s. Like the Maryland legislation, which passed into law on June 1, the New York bills (S2890B in the Senate and A5837B in the Assembly) require “publishers who offer to license e-books to the public” to also offer those e-books to libraries on “reasonable” terms. The bill’s summary states that the law is designed to ensure that “widely accepted and effective industry practices remain in place while prohibiting harmful practices that discriminate against libraries and harm library patrons.” And, also like the Maryland legislation, New York’s bill passed unanimously in the Assembly.Publishers Weekly: “New York is now the second state to pass a bill that would ensure public libraries the right to license and lend e-books that are available to consumers in the state…”
