How many people does it take to change the world? This BBC article summarizes research by Erica Chenowith, finding that non-violent protests engaging 3.5% of a population have never failed to bring about change. For the US, this would be 11,721,000 per this Wikipedia article. Let’s get started!
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I use Emacs on Windows, with generally ok performance. Today, it took several minutes for Emacs to start, and I could not use the mouse to position the cursor (had to use all keyboard commands). Lazyweb – anyone else seen this before?
I have been following the Gaza student protests across the US, starting at Columbia University (AP timeline, FOX5NY TV timeline). As a graduate of the University of Texas, I have been saddened to see its students being harrassed and intimidated by local and state police, with the blessing of UT president Jay Hartzell and Texas governor Greg Abbott. More often than not, law enforcement is being used to stifle legitimate nonviolent protests. More coverage: Texas Monthly magazine, Texas Tribune, Daily Texan.
In a step in a different direction from some of my previous posts, I offer Richard Eaglespoon with a lengthy piece on making New York style pizza (yum!) (via Scripting News). Eaglespoon also has a post on making hamburgers which also appears very tasty…
Gregory Alvarez: “Living Like It’s 99: No Social Media, No Smartphone” (via Tracy Durnell) – A personal story about stopping use of a smartphone and social media and still not using it 3 years later. Good example to use to examine our own habits….
Crooks and Liars.com: Four years ago yesterday, Donald Trump announced that “injecting bleach and shining light into the body would cure COVID-19” – it’s amazing we survived Trump, much less COVID-19!
Simon Willison: AI for Data Journalism – an annotated version of a recent talk where Simon gave twelve (!) demos of using AI tools to process data – jam packed!
I have been having problems today with copying files to a USB drive, getting this error: “You’ll need to provide administrator permission to copy this file”, I used to not have this problem. Looked at this posting on the problem, but doesn’t seem to work. Lazyweb, can you help me?
Elle Griffin writes about recent BigPub merger settlement (merger did not go through), and how few new copies of most books are sold, and lots of other interesting financial details. I mostly buy used books, so I can believe this story (via Simon Willison). Killer quote:
The DOJ found that, of 58,000 books published in a year, “90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.”
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
In early April, I posted about Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn, who wrote a column saying that he was going to continue to tell the truth about Donald Trump, even when it offends those who are paying for information. Dan Froomkin has an excellent interview on PressWatch with Chris Quinn, including more on how Quinn took a long time in writing the piece, and opinions on the national news media and how editors are afraid. It is a good read!