Category: news

Harvesting Government History

Here’s an interesting article about a group of librarians archiving pages from federal websites, prior to the start of the new administration:

The ritual has taken on greater urgency this year, Mr. Phillips said, out of concern that certain pages may be more vulnerable than usual because they contain scientific data for which Mr. Trump and some of his allies have expressed hostility or contempt.

Source: Harvesting Government History, One Web Page at a Time

I would have assumed that something like this would just be done as a matter of course by archive.org, but I guess it is a big enough job that it needs some human guidance and curation, beyond just pointing a web crawler at *.gov and calling it a day. The Times article doesn’t mention archive.org, but they are involved:

…the Internet Archive, along with partners from the Library of Congress, University of North Texas, George Washington University, Stanford University, California Digital Library, and other public and private libraries, are hard at work on the End of Term Web Archive, a wide-ranging effort to preserve the entirety of the federal government web presence, especially the .gov and .mil domains, along with federal websites on other domains and official government social media accounts.

As a cynic, I want to say that this is largely pointless, but I guess I do still have some hope for the future, since I’m actually kind of enthusiastic about this. It seems like the kind of thing my brother Patrick (who was a librarian) would have been interested in. (Though he, too, was a bit of a cynic at times.)

Healthcare in America right now

Here’s an interesting article on Obamacare, which unfortunately turns out to be largely a waste of time to read, due to a couple of key sentences near the end:

There’s one significant problem with all these ideas, of course: They’d need to pass the Republican Congress and be signed into law by Mr. Trump.

Source: Politics Aside, We Know How to Fix Obamacare

So, it’s a good thought exercise, but it isn’t going to happen.

And here’s another article that doesn’t leave me feeling good about the current state of the healthcare system in America:

To put it in very, very blunt terms: This is the health equivalent of a carjacking.

Source: Surprise! Insurance Paid the E.R. but Not the Doctor – The New York Times

I already knew about this one, of course. I’ve read about it before, and was actually a bit worried about it, when I went in for hernia surgery last year.

Reinventing Local News

Here’s an interesting effort to help “reinvent” local news. The gist of it seems to be that we should put aside a certain amount of money from FCC auctions of local TV licenses to help set up new “cutting edge” local news sources. I’m not too optimistic that this will happen, or that it would result in quality, long-term, local news for New Jersey if it does. But, hey, it’s worth a shot. The local news situation in NJ is pretty weak.

We’re focusing first on New Jersey. Sandwiched between the New York and Philadelphia media markets, New Jersey receives little to no coverage of its state and local governments. New Jersey owns four public TV licenses, which the FCC estimates could fetch as much as $2.3 billion at auction.

Source: Our Last, Best Chance to Reinvent Local News

Paying for Pluralsight, and other subscriptions

Pluralsight extended their Black Friday sale by a few days, so I gave in and paid for a year last night. Part of my reason for that is that I noticed that there’s a series on SharePoint 2013 programming with JavaScript by David Mann that looks like it might be useful. (Now I just have to convince myself to watch it.)

I was happy to see that they added the paid subscription to the end of my free period, rather than just start it immediately, so it will last until January 2018. I paid for the subscription with a virtual card number, so it won’t auto-renew, so that will give me a chance to think about whether or not I want to continue with it in 2018.

I’m in the middle of listening to a Mac Power Users episode on managing subscriptions, and there’s a few good ideas in there. For stuff that renews annually, my approach is generally to pay for them with a virtual card number or (where possible) a personal check, so they don’t auto-renew. Then, I have to make a conscious decision to evaluate and renew (or not) each year. I also try to keep track of them in Evernote, and set reminders so I know when they’re coming up for renewal.

I tend to review subscriptions at the end of each year, so I might as well do that now. Looking at a few of the big ones, I see that my Office 365 subscription is good until December 2018, so I don’t have to worry about that one for a long time. But my Evernote subscription is set to renew next month, at the $70 “premium” level. I’m still not happy about their increase from $50 to $70, but I do get quite a lot of use out of Evernote, so I’m pretty sure that I’m going to let that one renew. (Though maybe I should read up some more on their iOS app redesign, before I commit to that.)

And I just checked my NY Times subscription. I originally subscribed at a promotional rate of $10.50 every four weeks, for a year. That was in January, so that promotional rate will be over soon. I don’t mind paying that, but I expect that the renewal will be done at whatever the current “regular” rate is. The Times is kind of sketchy about pricing. My account page doesn’t say at what rate the subscription will renew, so I’m not sure if it’ll still be $10.50, or something else. Looking at their current rates (by going to their site in a private browsing window), I think it would be $15 every 4 weeks. And looking at the cost of subscribing through their iOS app, I think I could get a subscription for $130 per year, which comes out to $10 every 4 weeks. So, to get a good rate, I may need to cancel my existing subscription and resubscribe through iOS.

I could choose to look at supporting the Times as being a little like a charitable donation though. I think we’re going to need a robust, independent, (relatively) unbiased press over the next four years. And the Times seems to have gotten under the president-elect’s skin more than any other media outlet. So they’re worth supporting, for that reason, at very least.

Giving Tuesday (a bit late)

Since I posted about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I figure I should write a Giving Tuesday post too. I’ve been really indecisive about giving to charity, since the election results came in. I think there are a lot of charities that will need help over the next few years, and it’s hard to choose which ones to support.

A friend forwarded me an article from NPR about choosing charities to support this year. It’s somewhat helpful. And there’s Nick Kristof’s annual column about holiday season charitable giving at the NY Times site.

Bananapocalypse

Here’s a good article on the possibility of a coming bananapocalypse. It sounds kind of funny, but it’s a real problem.

The world’s most popular fruit, the Cavendish banana, is also one of the least genetically diverse. These seedless bananas destined for the $11 billion export market are, essentially, clones. That leaves the humble Cavendish vulnerable to diseases that can take advantage of its limited genetic diversity.

I eat a banana almost every day, so it would really bother me if they disappeared, but of course that’s a “first-world problem.” I’d just eat more of something else, and get on with my life. In some parts of the world, bananas are a staple and an important source of nutrition.

All of this seems to be leading up to a world much like the one presented in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Let’s hope we don’t actually let it go that far. (Which reminds me: I need to read more Paolo Bacigalupi.)

Waiting for the Miracle

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m really hoping next week is better than this week. I’m listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” right now. This live version is pretty good. I never got the chance to see him live, and now I really regret that. Hearing of his passing right after the election news was a bit of a one-two punch.

I’d been listening to The Essential Leonard Cohen a lot recently, so he’s been on my mind. I got on a Cohen kick a couple of months ago, after reading a book called A Cold and Broken Hallelujah, by Tyler Dilts. It’s not a book about Cohen, rather a police procedural that references Cohen (and Springsteen, and some other interesting music and books).

I didn’t really intend on writing another blog post touching on the election, but I’ve got a lot of stuff swirling around in my head, so maybe letting some of it out might help.

I was going to link to one or two articles on Quartz, but there are so many random post-election articles on there that picking out one or two seems pointless. Oh, heck, I can’t resist the temptation: here’s their two most popular articles right now (from the “popular” link at the top of the home page):

  1. A playlist of Leonard Cohen’s songs to help you make sense of the world
  2. Want to understand how Trump happened? Study quantum physics

The first one is just a list of YouTube videos (including some pretty good ones). I’m not even going to try reading that second one. From the headline, it seems like it would be fairly similar to a whole host of media stories about how we can “understand” the election through the lens of one particular viewpoint or another (math, physics, history, art, etc.). At this point, I think I’ve decided to opt out of reading any more of those.

Here’s another bit of media overload I hit this morning: Yesterday, I saw an article somewhere about a hiker running into Bill and Hillary Clinton while out for a walk. The hiker got a selfie with Hillary. Minor, innocuous, story, right? The kind of thing that wouldn’t even be a story, if we still got our news printed on dead trees and delivered daily. But on the web, it’s worth writing up and posting, because it’ll attract a few clicks, so why not? Well, this morning, in the infamous “trending topics” sidebar on Facebook, I see a link to an article with this title: “Was the Hillary hiking in the woods photo staged?” (I’m not linking to this article, for obvious reasons.) First: a generally good rule of thumb for any article whose headline is phrased as a question is that the answer to that question is always “no.” If it was “yes,” the headline would have been a statement instead of a question. (This is apparently Betteridge’s law of headlines.) Second: who cares? Hillary has already lost the election. Why would she be “staging” photos? Why would anyone care if she did? I think this article is basically the result of a process that got started at the beginning of this election cycle and is now stuck on auto-pilot, and nobody knows how to turn it off. The day after Hillary passes away, years from now (hopefully not any time soon), there will be an article titled “Did Hillary fake her own death?” (The answer will, of course, be NO.)

My main takeaway from the paragraph above is that I should really spend less time on Facebook. One of my Facebook friends recently linked to F. B. Purity, which is a Firefox add-in that cleans up Facebook a bit, allowing you to hide some of the more annoying bits, like that “trending topics” section. I went ahead and installed it this morning, so we’ll see if that helps. Of course, it’s only useful on Mac and Windows, and not on iOS. I’ve fallen into the habit of checking Facebook on my phone a lot at work, and I should really stop doing that. Sometimes, it’s a nice little break, if I hop on there and see something funny, or a nice photo of a friend’s kids. But generally it’s just a time sink, and I shouldn’t be bothering with it at work.

I think I might want to revisit the Bored and Brilliant series of episodes from the Note to Self podcast. When it first aired, I thought there were a few really interesting observations and ideas in there, along with a bunch of stuff that seemed either really obvious to me, or that didn’t really apply to me. Right now, though, rethinking how I use my phone and how I consume news and social media seems like a really good idea.

Working my way back around to something that actually relates a little more directly to the election results, rather than how the media is reacting to the results, and how I’m reacting to that, here’s a link to a blog post by Marco Arment on the election results.

Most people in the world are good, and want to be good to each other. Whether they vote that way or not, far more Americans believe in progressive, liberal, inclusive views than regressive, aggressive, conservative ones.

He relates this election to his feelings during the George W. Bush years. I’m apparently a good bit older than him, so I’ve been thinking back to the Reagan years, which correspond almost exactly to my teenage years. So thinking about the next four years as “probably not much worse than Reagan or Bush” is… a little comforting?

I remember a lot of Reagan-related black humor from my nerd friends in high school. I suspect there will be a lot of black humor over the next few years. I just recently finished reading a book of Hunter S. Thompson essays from the Reagan years. I think we really need a find a new Thompson for the Trump years. Maybe Matt Taibbi? Not quite, but he’s usually worth reading. Of course, he rejects the comforting idea of comparing Trump to Reagan or Bush:

Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead.

So now my panic pendulum is swinging back from “this is kinda bad” to “this is a disaster”. I don’t know. I should just stop reading all these think pieces, right?

I was kind of hoping I could go see Fantastic Beasts today, but it doesn’t open until next week. Here’s an idea: get on the train and go over to the Met Breuer, and see the new Kerry James Marshall exhibit. And, hey, the Paul Klee exhibit looks pretty good too!

Splendid Isolation

A very clever DJ on the radio this morning played Pete Yorn’s version of Splendid Isolation (originally a Warren Zevon song). It seems apropos, after this week’s election results.

David Remnick’s An American Tragedy, from The New Yorker, is a well-written (but fairly depressing) assessment of the situation. Tim Urban’s It’s Going to Be Okay is a bit more hopeful.

Joshua Benton, at Nieman Lab, has written a good overview of the media forces at play in this year’s election. I’ve been reassessing my own consumption of media, though I think I’m probably going to keep reading and watching the same things, for the foreseeable future: The NY Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and PBS NewsHour for “real” news, and The Daily Show, Colbert, and Samantha Bee for “funny” news. I’m thinking about cutting back a bit though, especially in the short term, just to keep from going crazy.

I’m thinking a little bit about religion too, but I’m not at all sure what to do on that front. I think that the Catholic Church is going in the right direction, so that’s a ray of hope.

And a little escapism isn’t a bad thing. (I’m re-watching some of the Harry Potter films this week, for instance. And reading some comics. And listening to some Doctor Who audio dramas.)

And some cosmic perspective might help too:

(I don’t usually try to embed multiple tweets in a blog post, so this may look weird. But hopefully it works ok.)

I’m also thinking about doing something that I haven’t done in a long time: create a mind map. I’ve had a lot of thoughts going through my head about positive things I can do over the next four years, both to stay sane and upbeat, and to help others. But I really need to organize those thoughts. This NY Times Op-Ed piece by the Dalai Lama has given me some additional stuff to think about, but I’m really not sure where to go with it.

Pope Francis Names Joseph Tobin to Lead Archdiocese of Newark

From the NY Times:

Francis’ pick is Joseph W. Tobin, currently the archbishop of Indianapolis. He made national headlines last year when he rebuffed Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, now the Republican vice-presidential nominee, by refusing to stop Catholic Charities from resettling a family of Syrian refugees.

And:

Archbishop Tobin [..] is replacing Archbishop John J. Myers, a conservative who is among a small minority of American prelates who announced long ago that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should not receive Holy Communion.

Also:

Myers’s tenure was hobbled in recent years after he failed to ensure that a priest convicted of child sexual abuse no longer had access to children.

Myers is the guy who spent half a million dollars of church money on upgrades to his retirement home.

I have a lot of snarky comments in my head about all this upheaval in the church, but I’m going to withhold them all and just say that I’m following Francis’ reforms with some interest and lots of hope.

Archbishop Peter L. Gerety Dies at 104

…he had erased a multimillion-dollar deficit in the archdiocese, in part by selling a lavish archbishop’s mansion in a gated community in West Orange and settling instead in a rectory in the North Ward of Newark, a city still scarred by the race riots of the 1960s.

Source: Peter L. Gerety, Oldest Archbishop Who Preached Social Justice, Dies at 104

I kind of remember Archbishop Gerety from back when I was a kid. He probably came to our parish once or twice. I didn’t know much about him then, but, reading his obituary, he sounds like the kind of archbishop the Church can be proud of. (Unlike this guy and his fancy retirement house.)