h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

#fileformat Friday! Forking QuickTime. #digipres
https://preservation.tylerthorsted.com/2023/10/06/quicktime-moov/

Katalin Karikó won a Nobel Prize for her work on the COVID mRNA vaccines. Yet just 10 years earlier, UPenn kicked her out of academia.

"They told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality. When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.'"

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfizer-biontech

Python 3.12 released https://lwn.net/Articles/946189/ #LWN

What would it sound like if the musicians parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic sang *his* parodies instead? I jumped off the deep end into the world of A.I. voice cloning to find out, and the results are even worse than you imagine. https://waxy.org/2023/10/weird-ai-yankovic-voice-cloning/

Brewster goes to Washington (congressional hearing on the Copyright Office Modernization Committee)

"The key thing I would suggest is the role the Library of Congress plays of preservation and access.

I mean, fundamentally, it's the Library for Congress, and they're building this collection of mandatory deposits as well as copyright registrations and everything that goes into their collections to try to preserve and create a better democracy."

https://blog.archive.org/2023/09/28/brewster-goes-to-washington-sep-26-2023/

1/2

I can't work out if these new rechargeable batteries are great or really stupid

This might have slipped under the radar these past few days, but a 9.8 RCE in Exim (on many, many mail servers) that does not require authentication is bad bad bad.

https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-23-1469/

Behind the fraud drama rocking academia

If the crowdfunding effort is anything to go by, there is huge sympathy for the data detectives Leif Nelson, Joe Simmons and Uri Simonsohn. The three men — professors of marketing, applied statistics and behavioural science, respectively — have carved out a reputation as defenders of sound scientific research methods. Now they face a lawsuit in the U

https://timharford.com/2023/09/behind-the-fraud-drama-rocking-academia/

#UndercoverEconomist

Met some storm troopers in front of a hair salon in Wales

Slowly but surely, years of Tory cuts are hitting more and more local authorities. This time, mine 😞

https://www.romfordrecorder.co.uk/news/23819331.havering-six-months-away-bankruptcy-notice/

So how does CO₂ really work to heat our atmosphere? Surprisingly this is far more complicated than you'd think. Behold, a Spherical Cow model of global warming with graphs, code & data: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/co2-global-warming-sensitivity/

🆕 blog! “A love letter to electric power tools”

When I was seven or eight, I asked Santa to bring me a set of screwdrivers for Christmas. I wanted to take apart my toys to see how they worked1. I also thought they might be useful on our upcoming holiday; if the aeroplane needed repairing mid-flight I'd be able to help2! Santa heard my […]

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/09/a-love-letter-to-electric-power-tools/
⸻
#tools

If I was a Tory Chancellor, I wouldn’t abolish inheritance tax. I’d fix the ridiculous marginal rates that can exceed 70%

https://www.taxpolicy.org.uk/2023/09/24/70percent/

Someone did an actual study on why text editing on phones sucks so bad and built a prototype that solves a bunch of its problems and I want it real bad ;_; https://jenson.org/text/

UK GDPR recognises the USA as adequate for some (many?) transfers of personal data:

https://decoded.legal/blog/2023/09/uk-gdpr-recognises-the-usa-as-adequate-for-some-many-transfers-of-personal-data

#UKGDPR #GDPR #DataProtection #Adequacy #USA #decodedlegal #lawfedi