It is a long video, but Folding Ideas‘s Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs is a great video on NFTs and why it is a horrible concept.
Hat tip: I found the video through a tweet by Lindsay Broadwell
I have listened to the Science Vs podcast for a while, but had somehow missed the fact that they had become exclusive to Spotify. This is not a good situation to be in for a podcast promoting the understanding of science, and the host/producer Wendy Zukerman and the editor Blythe Terrell have taken the consequences and are now limiting their output to shows that debunk stuff released on the Spotify platform
Zukerman, the host and executive producer for “Science Vs,” and Terrell, an editor for the science podcast, plan to limit their production on new episodes because they do not believe Spotify’s rules regarding misinformation go far enough.
“Until Spotify implements stronger methods to prevent the spread of misinformation on the platform, we will no longer be making new Science Vs episodes, except those intended to counteract misinformation being spread on Spotify,” they wrote in a letter to Ek, posted on Twitter on Monday.
“Science Vs,” which is exclusive to Spotify, looks at the science behind topics including pandemics.
They have already started doing this, with their latest episode Joe Rogan: The Malone Interview, which you can listen to here.
I applaud the principled stance that they have taken. You can find their twitter feed here.
Engadget have a few more details in Spotify’s ‘Science VS’ podcast will only fact-check misinformation being spread on Spotify
A schoolboard in Tennessee has decided to ban the usage Art Spiegelman’s award winning graphic novel Maus while teaching about the Holocaust. Maus is of course, a graphic novel based on the true experiences of Art Spiegelman’s family as told by his father.
The McMinn County School Board voted 10-0 to ban the book in a Jan. 10 meeting, citing concerns over “rough” language and a nude drawing of a woman, according to meeting minutes posted to the district website. The book was part of its eighth-grade English language arts curriculum.
Maus was serialized in 1986 – 1991, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (the special award in letter), and is so far the only graphic novel to have won any Pulitzer prize. When arguing whether graphic novels can be literature, Maus is held up as the number one exhibit in favor.
When I was a Danish school kid, back in the Eighties, we would be told stories about the holocaust and the German occupation by people who experienced it. This was incredible impactful. As the people who experienced the Holocaust are dying out, works like Maus becomes more and more important. They tell the stories that otherwise would be lost, allowing us to remember the atrocities, and pushes us to ensure that they never happen again. The US Holocaust Museum states it well:
As news spread about the school board’s decision, the U.S. Holocaust Museum said, “Maus has played a vital role in educating students about the Holocaust through sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors.”
“On the eve of International #HolocaustRemembranceDay, it is more important than ever for students to learn this history,” the museum said Wednesday on Twitter without mentioning the district. “Teaching about the Holocaust using books like Maus can inspire students to think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.”
Of course, the ban on Maus is just part of a larger culture war, as Art Spiegelman himself points out:
While it’s not the first time “Maus” has been the subject of controversy, Spiegelman said he is alarmed by school boards nationwide banning books amid tense debates over the teaching of race, slavery and oppression.
“This is not about left versus right,” Spiegelman told The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. “This is about a culture war that’s gotten totally out of control.”
When start to ban books, especially books like Maus, the rest of us should take note, and speak out. This is the first step towards a very dark path.
A new blogging network opened up this month – OnlySky.media, which bills itself as the “first explicitly secular multimedia platform” (quote from Adam Lee’s blogpost about the new platform). I think the choice of the word “multimedia” is intentional, since both Freethought Blogs and the Orbit are secular blogging networks, and the same could probably be said of ScienceBlogs. So far, I haven’t seen any other media context, so I find it a bit premature to make that claim (also, Freethough Blogs make the occational pod-/vlogcast, so in a sense, this network can be called multimedia as well).
OnlySky is an exodus of atheist blogs from Patheos, due to new restrictions made to secular bloggers at Patheos. It is a long time since I have visited any blog at Patheos, due to the incredible invasive ads and the horrible layout, so I applaud the move, which will allow me to read some of the many great bloggers there. It might also mean that links to blogposts on social media, will make it clearer which blog it links to, making it easier to avoid giving click to bloggers that you don’t want to support.
Anyway, aside from the quibble about the claim about being the first network, I am entirely happy to see a new atheist network. My only worry is the attempt of defining the network as a movement
SUPPORT THE Movement
Help support independent secular storytelling and journalism.OnlySky covers the human experience from an explicitly secular point of view. Support from our readers safeguards our essential editorial independence, emboldening us to find and publish stories that others won’t. We seek to secure an influential place for secular values in our culture, and change the cultural narrative regarding the nonreligious.
From the Support OnlySky page.
Having had too many bad experiences with atheist movements, which often provide cover for the worst kind of racism and misogynism, I have absolutely no intention of supporting anything claiming to be a movement. Also, isn’t it a bit arrogant to try to cast your own commercial venture into a movement? Hopefully, they will realize that they are heading down the wrong path with this language.
One area of worry, is the fact that OnlySky media has a science section, but as far as I can see, the ranks of contributors don’t really contain any scientists – hopefully this will change over time.
The Neil Young ultimatum to Spotify about the Joe Rogan podcast, and the afterwards removal of Young’s music from the platform has gotten me to do something which I had considered several times before – cancelling my Spotify Premium account.
I am not a fan of neither Neil Young as a person nor of his music, but he is right that Spotify helps spread dangerous misinformation, and we need to show them that it is unacceptable.
I have been using Spotify, either the free version or the Premium version, since I was on a project in Sweden in 2008 or so. Back then, Spotify was only available in Sweden, and they checked your location when you signed in, so I could only use it when at work. Later the service became available in the rest of the world.
In the past, I have considered cancelling Spotify due to their fairly low pay to the artists (of the big streaming services, YouTube is the only one that’s worse), but one of the reasons I’ve stuck around has been the lack of alternative, and the lack of a definitive push. Well, promoting Joe Rogan is definitely a definitive push, so I guess I will be looking for a new streaming platform to hear music on. I have heard good stuff about Tidal so I will be checking that streaming platform out.
If you want a good explanation why Joe Rogan is so problematic, I highly recommend listening to the Joe Rogan episode of the Decoding the Gurus podcast.
A little late, but still worth sharing in these festive times
Someone posted a link to this story on Facebook
How a $300K Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT accidentally sold for $3K
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 NFTs, each depicting an ape with different traits and visual attributes. It may sound arcane, but it’s one of the most prestigious NFT collections in the world. Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry and Post Malone are among its star-studded members. Right now the price of entry — that is, the cheapest you can buy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for — is 52 ether, or $210,000.
NFTs is a ridiculous scam, where you pay a fortune to own a computer graphic, which other people can freely copy and have themselves. Many NFTs are connected to existing art work, digital or digitalized, and are often created by people who have no rights to the original artwork, earning money on other peoples’ intellectual property. This is not the case with the Bored Ape Yacht Club images, who were created specifically for usages in NFTs. It is not clear to me, whether the right to the intellectual property is transferred at the same time. It appears from other articles that this might be the case, but often this is not the case, and the NFT is just a proof that you own “the original” digital version of the digital artwork – something which is nonsense, because that is not how digital images works on computers and on networks.
Which is why it’s so painful to see that someone accidentally sold their Bored Ape NFT on Saturday for $3,066.
No, it is not painful. It shows how ridiculous this is.
What really happened was that someone got $3K for something, instead of the $300K that they wanted, because they made a mistake. This is something which is reversable in most transactions, but not with NFTs.
The rest of the article goes into several examples of stupid mistakes in cryptocurrency, which depends on the same technology as NFTs (blockchains), clearly showing a major issue with decentralized assets, where it is not possible to reverse mistakes.
One interesting thing about the Bored Ape Yacht Club, unlike a lot of NFTs, is that because you actually get the rights of the digital artwork, you are actually buying a real product. Not “the original” artwork, but rather the rights surrounding the artwork. This makes them less silly than NFTs of art where the rights to the image doesn’t transfer as well. It also means that it is nothing new – the trade of intellectual rights to an artwork has been around for a long time. So, if someone tries to use this as an good example of NFTs, remember to point out that people don’t just by the NFT when buying an image in this collection, so it can’t be used as an general example.
I am always awestruck about the feats of engineering and science that goes into space exploration, and I love when there is yet another milestone to celebrate.
Here it is: humanity’s final look at @NASAWebb as it heads into deep space to answer our biggest questions. Alone in the vastness of space, Webb will soon begin an approximately two-week process to deploy its antennas, mirrors, and sunshield. #UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/DErMXJhNQd
— NASA (@NASA) December 25, 2021
You can follow the news on the Webb Telescope Twitter feed or the blog dedicated to the Webb Telescope over at NASA.
I have been out traveling for the last couple of months, so I didn’t cover this, while it was happening, but a major event happened in Danish politics.
Former Danish minister of immigration, Inger Støjberg, was impeached for illegal orders and found guilty, and now faces 60 days in jail (or more likely, in house arrest with an ankle bracelet).
Former Immigration Minister in Denmark Sentenced to Prison for Separating Couples (NY Times)
Inger Stojberg was sentenced to two months’ incarceration after being found by a court to have illegally ordered the separations of married migrant couples in which at least one person was underage.
Inger Støjberg has tried to make this case into being about protecting child brides, but this is not what the case is about at all. Rather, it was about a minister knowingly giving instructions that breaks both Danish laws and international conventions. The facts are simple, during a period in 2016, Støjberg gave instructions that Syrian refuge couples should be separated automatically if at least one of the people was under 18 years old. While it is legal for the Danish authorities to separate couples if they feel that there are good reasons for this, they are not allowed to do so without an individual evaluation of the circumstances.
Back when this happened, it was legal for Danes to get married when under 18, if they got a dispensation. This option has since been removed (in part to help give Støjberg cover when she claimed that this was to protect the young women).
As a consequence of the judgement, the Danish parliament has to evaluate whether Støjberg is worthy to be a member of the Danish Parliament (Folketinget). The debate about this is happening as I am writing this post, but it is clear that there is a majority for expelling her from the parliament. This is not permanent, as she can be re-elected after she has served her time.
Content warning: rape, murder, sexual assaults, police brutality
A couple of days ago, an police officer from London’s Metropolitan Police was convicted for rape and murder, and sentenced to a whole-life prison term, which means that there is no chance of a parole.
It is always shocking when a police officer breaches the trust in such a way, but now the Mirror shows that he was far from the only one.
Fury as 26 Met police colleagues of Wayne Couzens committed sex crimes since 2016
A damning probe into the Met Police today reveals 26 colleagues of murderer Wayne Couzens have committed sex crimes since 2016.
Offences included rape and possessing indecent images of children. Two officers were jailed in April, a month after Couzens raped and killed Sarah Everard.
The alarming figures uncovered by the Sunday Mirror come as pressure mounts on Met Commissioner Cressida Dick to stand down – and for the force to be given a radical overhaul to end a sexist culture.
Labour’s Harriet Harman said: “Women’s confidence in the police has been shattered.”
A staggering 27 Met Police officers were convicted of sex crimes in the past five years, a Sunday Mirror probe has found.
As happens in all institutions where sexism has been allowed to stay unchallenged, it has grown into much worse things. The leadership of London’s Metropolitan Police has accepted a culture, where the police officers have felt safe being sexist or worse
Former Det Supt Paige Kimberley tells how – days after Sarah was murdered – she warned Dame Cressida about a WhatsApp group where male officers were sharing pornographic images and offensive remarks
A panel found their behaviour to be “distasteful” but did NOT amount to misconduct. It is now known the group is similar to the one Couzens and colleagues used in the run-up to 33-year-old Sarah’s death.
The leadership has failed, and there needs to be a reckoning – and there needs to be a purge of the officers in the force, removing everyone who has either participated in these things, or turned a blind eye to it.