- The Argument That Saved Paris by Ian Buruma | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books – This much is known: Nordling did meet von Choltitz several times, mainly to arrange the release of French political prisoners, and to negotiate a truce (threatened by the Communist resistance as much as by German zealots). We also know that von Choltitz, however aristocratic in his comportment, had been a very ruthless character, responsible for the destruction of the center of Rotterdam in May 1940. Worse that that, in 1942 his regiment flattened Sevastopol, and von Choltitz faithfully carried out orders to “liquidate” the Jewish population. He was a perfect illustration of the complicity on the eastern front of German army officers with the Nazi genocide, a shameful fact that has only recently been acknowledged in Germany.
- Intocht Sint Nicolaaas in Amsterdam in 1935 – YouTube –
- Killer whales living with bottlenose dolphins demonstrate cross-species vocal learning – Now, University of San Diego graduate student Whitney Musser and Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute senior research scientist Dr. Ann Bowles have found that killer whales (Orcinus orca) can engage in cross-species vocal learning: when socialized with bottlenose dolphins, they shifted the types of sounds they made to more closely match their social partners. The results, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, suggest that vocal imitation may facilitate social interactions in cetaceans. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-killer-whales-bottlenose-dolphins-cross-species.html#jCp
- Dust – Lightspeed Magazine – Very late at night, when the buzz of drill dozers has died out, I can hear her breathing. I know that sounds crazy. I don’t care.
- SSLv3 goes to the dogs; POODLE kills off protocol – Over the past week, rumours were circulating about a new vulnerability in SSLv3. No details were widely available until today and now we have POODLE, the 'Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption' attack. The attack, specifically against the SSLv3 protocol, allows an attacker to obtain the plaintext of certain parts of an SSL connection, such as the cookie. Similar to BEAST, but more practical to carry out, POODLE could well signal the end of SSLv3 support.
- Tricia Sullivan and Shadowboxer – Imgur –
Articles with the Tag World War II
Your Happening World (October 8th through October 13th)
- Guest Blog: Imagining Future Africa: Sci Fi, Innovation & Technology. | CONNECT/ZA –
- The Daily Targum :: Neither man nor woman: life as a non-binary student – On the bottom of my column, I use the pronoun “they.” This isn’t a typo, despite what many writers at The Guardian and Telegraph assumed as they reported on my Trigger Warning activism. Indeed, I do not identify as a man, the gender I was assigned at birth. I identify as a non-binary student.
- From the Heart of Europe – Refugees of Casablanca –
- The First Female Gamers – Could it really have been so unthinkable to Gygax that a woman would purchase Dungeons & Dragons? His game went on to wild, unprecedented popularity, and women constituted no small part of its long-term audience. To appreciate the situation in 1974, we must understand the market Dungeons & Dragons entered, and the curious consumer group it targeted: gamers.
- Retired NSA Technical Director Explains Snowden Docs – Well, they participate in the parallel reconstruction. So, in other words, when you can't use the data, you have to go out and do a parallel construction, means you use what you would normally consider to be investigative techniques, go find the data. You have a little hint, though. NSA is telling you where the data is, it makes you look really good. If you have it quickly. So then you can justify, taking it into court and use that in court. And so I call that perjury. In fact, I call this a 'Planned Program Perjury Policy' run by the Department of Justice of the United States. And, it's not just affecting our democracy, it's subverting our entire court system. It's not only subverting ours, it's subverting everybody's in the world that has a relationship with the FBI or the DEA. So this is infecting entire democracies, all of the world.
Your Happening World (July 10th through July 13th)
- welcome to overvalwagen.com –
- Review: ‘Unexpected Stories,’ By Octavia Butler : NPR – At some point during the excavation, two short stories emerged: "A Necessary Being" and "Childfinder." Both written in the '70s, one was apparently left unpublished by Butler herself, the other part of a famously unreleased anthology. Both are finally seeing the light of day in an e-book called Unexpected Stories.
- Orientation Police — The Nib — Medium – I’m gay. I date men. Some of those men have vaginas.
- Trigger Warning: Breakfast — The Nib — Medium – The next morning, I make him breakfast. If I didn't say no, it's just a romance
- The Line it is Drawn #183 – Western Re-Designs of Manga/Anime Characters | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book ResourcesComics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources –
Your Happening World (July 3rd through July 4th)
- Engines of the Red Army in WW2 –
- AfroFuturism with Kibwe Tavares & Keguro Macharia | Muse & Words –
- Bots – trekt ten strijde! –
- DutchNews.nl – Zwarte Piet is a negative stereotype: court orders parade rethink –
- Fotoserie: Zwarte Piet 1888-2014 | HP/De Tijd – Zwarte Piet, Netherlands, racism, blackface
Your Happening World (June 15th through June 16th)
Blog fodder for June 15th through June 16th:
- Activists warn of trans suicide risk in England as surgery delayed | Gay Star News – Activists have claimed the time for trans people to get male to female gender reassignment surgery has skyrocketed in England from seven months to three years.
- David Brothers: Quitting the Big Two – Changing those habits takes effort, which leads me directly to why it isn’t difficult to stay away from the Big Two these days: I succeeded at changing my thinking. Wednesdays aren’t new comics days any more. I don’t read comics news sites when I can help it. I discover new comics via word of mouth or Tumblr. I unplugged in a way that let me maintain my decision instead of waffling and crumbling.
- BBC News – Study: Deforestation leaves fish undersized and underfed – Deforestation is reducing the amount of leaf litter falling into rivers and lakes, resulting in less food being available to fish, a study suggests.
- Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present – This postcard haunts and is haunted. In 1989, its utopian promise haunted a reality that was unable to make good on it, and in turn the postcard was haunted by the increasingly dystopian qualities of reality. In 2009 this haunting-problem now haunts the present as an example of the Marxist hauntology Derrida wrote about. The problems of our imagined Utopias and Dystopias haven’t gone away – the postcard is a ghost of the GDR, exploding like a spectre the neat symbolic binaries we put our faith in by being both nice and nasty, wrong and right, innocent and guilty, present and absent. It’s also the ghost of childhood, of innocence personal or ideological, imploring us to know its killer, manifesting to us so as to haunt and correct injustice in the same way that ghosts traditionally do. It’s a poignant lie about reality and reality is a poignant inadequacy compared to it.
- German tank problem – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – In the statistical theory of estimation, the problem of estimating the maximum of a discrete uniform distribution from sampling without replacement is known in English as the German tank problem, due to its application in World War II to the estimation of the number of German tanks.