Monday Cup Of Links #41 - Free Speech And Colonialism, Fireproof Redwoods, Agile BS, All The Milky Way Planet Systems
Smoked in from the wildfires.
Happy Monday!
The past week’s been busy-busy with not-writer stuff, and is slated to continue for another week, at least.
I’ve been writing the parts of the novel India House, where our protagonists try to get a history book published, and find that all over India and Europe, the British empire is scaring the crap out of publishers who they approach to publish their book. When they manage to break out of this totally-not-an-attack-on-freedom-of-speech, by finding a publisher in the Netherlands who is far enough removed from the situation to dare to publish them, the British Empire hits back. They proscribe the book. They haven’t read it all of it or anything, but they just know it’s dangerous, so they ban its printing and sale in India. In Europe, where there’s stronger protections on freedom of speech, they just bully publishers into not publishing the book.
I’ve always found this whole “if a private entity censors you, it isn’t an attack on freedom of speech” argument to be specious. When private entities have a monopoly on dissemination of ideas, as they do right now, them censoring you is as good as losing your voice. These entities are monopolies that have been created with government grants and tax breaks, not to mention laws that they helped write to kill competition. And I’m not even getting into how corporations based in countries like the US, China and powerful EU countries enjoy a near-monopoly in several sectors in other countries which don’t have as robust environments for entrepreneurship, and whose capital raising is no match for a state-supported private corporation.
See how even 113 years ago, freedom of expression, even in the first world, was a sham if you were using it to share a counter-narrative. Private entities aren’t free. They are subject to several pressures, some of which can come from the government in subtle ways. Their choice to censure your speech isn’t always a free choice. See how when that didn’t work, they went straight to suppressing freedom of speech. Not much has changed since then.
Anyway, onto our links!
Northern California is being ravaged by wildfire. While trying to read more about the nature of forests that evolved with fire, I came across this interesting piece about how redwoods are practically fire resistant owing to a bunch of different adaptations. Read all the links in the sidebar there, redwoods are such an interesting species!
A lot can be written about the Ghadar movement, which was a movement to free India from the British, headquartered right here in the Bay Area. I found this Independence Day article a nice, short, succinct summary of Ghadar’s origins and impact.
They found 200,000 year old grass beds in a cave in South Africa. The layers of grass were interspersed with ash. Turns out, the early people there burned their beds regularly to rid them of bugs and other pests, before replenishing them with new layers of grass. And the ash also worked to keep pests away. A prehistoric spring cleaning, if you will.
The Department of Defense was dealing with so much incompetent/fake Agile that they wrote this excellent guide on how to detect Agile BS. Circulate this in your workplace, along with that CIA guide on how to slow down and disrupt work in an organization.
GIF of the week: Actually a video this time, but it’s only a minute long. Animated representation of all the multi-planet systems discovered in the Milky Way. Our solar system is present too! And the background music adds to the beauty of the animation.