The greatest fire in American history, in terms of loss of life, occurred in the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin in 1871. Most people haven’t heard of it, and even people who live in the region today aren’t aware of the disaster which happened in their own backyard.
150 years later, there is speculation that the cause of the fire might have come from a highly unusual source, and some data from other fires might help solve the mystery.
After the fall of the Nazi regime, the dirty secrets of WWII-era Germany slowly came to public light. Amid the horrors of the Holocaust and bizarre proof of some official's occult aspirations, researchers discovered a wealth of groundbreaking research on aircraft and rocketry. But how far did the Nazis get? Did they really invent aircraft that could explain the old stories about UFOs? Join Ben and Matt as they delve into the secrets of Nazi aircraft research in this classic episode.
Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, and Operators stops by to discuss some of the darker parts of Canadian history, including Mountie Gladio, Nazi connections in Ottawa, and Vancouver Island’s noted concentration of Satanists.
Support Dan’s content over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/operators
This week, we mull the Covid-era classroom (fears of contagion and falling behind), the meaning of Trump’s attack on TikTok, Nike-brand kneeling (and not kneeling) in the NBA bubble, and universalism and particularism in the Black Lives Matter uprising.
1:40 – Will Tammy find an Oriental market in Missoula? How does Andy plan to teach through his screen? What will be the impact of these lost semesters on poor and working-class students? Also, should we blame diversity administrators for the collapsing academy?
17:07 – Why is Trump raging against TikTok? Is it because of Sarah Cooper’s impersonations, the Tulsa BTS Army, or his larger vendetta against China? Are we being tricked into siding with a mega-corporation or military state? Further reading: on US fears of the app, Western and Eastern Internets, Microsoft and tech nationalism against China, and whether TikTok is basically just as bad as Facebook. Bonus: Jay reveals his strategy for making Twitter “unusable” through his war with music writers.
35:45 – We discuss Tammy’s recent article probing the tensions within the “POC” label. Are Asians excluded from new euphemisms for ethnic minorities (“Black and brown,” “BIPOC”)? Can we include non-Black perspectives without going “all lives matter”? Could a new political bloc emerge amongst immigrants, especially Latinx and Asian Americans (see recent exchange between Pankaj Mishra and Viet Thanh Nguyen)? Does foundation funding keep domestic and global politics separate? Are we helping the right wing capture the immigrant vote? Bonus: an update on the Portland Wall of Moms.
1:01:10 – Jay advances a Manufacturing Consent thesis: the media’s coverage of BLM has kept public discussion within the boundaries of safe and acceptable topics. This leads to a bro-out over the NBA’s cringey coverage, in which the richest companies in the world have turned “social justice” into a profitable brand. (Also, Jay and Andy are hypocritically watching lots of games.) More generally, should we be optimistic or skeptical about the evolution of progressive politics this summer?
1:17:50 – Our listener question of the week! We’ve heard from some of you that our podcast is one of your first experiences with politically-oriented Asian Americans, in part because you were too busy studying orgo in college (like this comrade). Is there a split between “STEM Asian Americans” and “humanities Asian Americans”?
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Isaias rumbles ashore in North Carolina, and threatens much of the East Coast with powerful winds and heavy rains. President Trump defends his coronavirus response. Newly-leaked videos show the George Floyd encounter -- from an officer's perspective. Correspondent Steve Kathan has the CBS World News Roundup for Tuesday, August 4, 2020.
Working with open source software changes the development process, according to this researcher who interviewed hundreds of technologists across projects.
There are people who understand bitcoin yet aren’t obsessively bullish on it. (I know, it’s weird. Like, how?)
Eghbal, a Protocol Labs alum who is familiar with bitcoin, is among them. She described bitcoin as a rare example of a project growing throughout a decade and continuing. Many people measure growth in terms of unique contributors, users or profits. For Eghbal, she said looking at different types of “activity” might offer a better spectrum.
“Measuring activity is maybe a better way to think about project health...some projects also don’t need to be as actively developed as others,” Eghbal said. “I was also looking at things like maintainers’ responsiveness.”
In short, are problems promptly fixed before they affect users? The quality of contributions should be evaluated in addition to the sheer number of contributors. Do the people who use the software get unique value from it when they need it?
Another useful metric, she said, can be “work done,” including “how many pull requests are being merged or how many issues are being closed.”
And, luckily, Eghbal isn’t the only researcher who understands bitcoin without being “active” in the “Bitcoin community.” (To be fair, I use these silly words more than anyone.) Privacy tech legend Claudia Diaz, Nym’s chief technologist, said she believes there could be value in cryptocurrency projects, although that’s not her focus nor passion.
“Cryptocurrency offers an option for the people who use the systems to fund them,” Diaz said. “I’m interested in making systems that make sense and self-sustain because everyone has the right incentives.”
Incentives
There are many different types of value people derive from open source software projects.
Sometimes they use the software, sometimes they use public work to develop their own personal brand. Eghbal said some of the most widely sought after engineers are “building an active fanbase for whatever they are creating.”
She added there are “different types of open source projects” with passionate fandoms, like Rust, plus open source developers have “a lot in common” with other types of online content creators. These public displays can lead to dramatic Twitter feuds and heated rivalries, just like other personality-driven roles like TikTok stars and podcasters.
“I’ve been told so many things are definitely, absolutely true, yet are all conflicting with each other,” Eghbal said of her research. “If I’ve learned anything it’s that developers have opinions.”
This is why Diaz’s token-funded startup, Nym, is developing a privacy layer comparable to Tor, the latter of which she said is heavily reliant on governmentfunding. In contrast, her startup Nym raised $2.5 million in a private token sale in 2019.
“Tor offers different trade-offs,” Diaz said. “We built Nym and the applications on top can be messaging applications or cryptocurrency applications...using the infrastructure to protect their metadata in the sense the network can’t figure out what services you are accessing or what they might be doing with those services.”
Motivations
Diaz considers herself somewhat of an outsider to the open source developer community, like Eghbal. Their motivations are primarily research-oriented, because research is their job.
Nym co-founders like Harry Halpin have more experience in (ideological) open source software development. Even coming from different perspectives, Halpin, Diaz and Eghbal all agreed that collaboration and interdependence are the crux of the open source development process.
“Now instead of relying on a couple of other developers’ code you may now be relying on hundreds of thousands of people’s projects and you don’t even know who these people are,” Eghbal said.
As such, Halpin said Nym works closely with teams contributing to other open source projects, like Rust, Cosmos and Zcash. In addition, his team often works with independent (quasi-celebrity) developers like Amir Taaki. Sometimes people contribute as a hobbyist or a user with specific needs, other times they are paid. There are many reasons why people work on cryptocurrency projects.
“I think it would be great to have an infrastructure that could support privacy in a variety of applications,” Diaz said. “Cryptocurrency offers an option for the people who use the systems to fund them...Privacy technologies have been very difficult to market.”
On the other hand, Eghbal described bitcoin as moving more slowly than some other cryptocurrency projects.
“Trying to prioritize stability is a very different development style rather than allowing people to have lots and lots of features,” Eghbal said, describing Bitcoin as relatively “stable.”
And even if the price of the asset never goes “to the moon,” perhaps continuing to provide reliable software tools can be a metric of success in itself.
Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, claimed to have translated ancient scriptures. He dictated an American Bible from metal plates reportedly buried by ancient Jews in a nearby hill, and produced an Egyptian "Book of Abraham" derived from funerary papyri he extracted from a collection of mummies he bought from a traveling showman. In addition, he rewrote sections of the King James Version as a "New Translation" of the Bible. Smith and his followers used the term translation to describe the genesis of these English scriptures, which remain canonical for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Whether one believes him or not, the discussion has focused on whether Smith's English texts represent literal translations of extant source documents. On closer inspection, though, Smith's translations are far more metaphysical than linguistic.
In Joseph Smith's Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism (Oxford UP, 2020), Samuel Morris Brown argues that these translations express the mystical power of language and scripture to interconnect people across barriers of space and time, especially in the developing Mormon temple liturgy. He shows that Smith was devoted to an ancient metaphysics--especially the principle of correspondence, the concept of "as above, so below"--that provided an infrastructure for bridging the human and the divine as well as for his textual interpretive projects. Joseph Smith's projects of metaphysical translation place Mormonism at the productive edge of the transitions associated with shifts toward "secular modernity." This transition into modern worldviews intensified, complexly, in nineteenth-century America. The evolving legacies of Reformation and Enlightenment were the sea in which early Mormons swam, says Brown. Smith's translations and the theology that supported them illuminate the power and vulnerability of the Mormon critique of American culture in transition. This complex critique continues to resonate and illuminate to the present day.
Daniel P. Stone holds a PhD in American religious history from Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and is the author of William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet (Signature Books, 2018). He has taught history courses at the University of Detroit Mercy and Florida Atlantic University, and currently, he works as a research archivist for a private library/archive in Detroit, Michigan.
Since the Arab spring the country has vastly expanded its military and diplomatic efforts—filling an evident power vacuum and harking back to the days of the Ottoman Empire. Tanzania’s economy was recently upgraded to “middle-income” status, but our analysis suggests something is fishy in its data. And why an Athens hotel will have two floors lopped off its top. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer
Mark Hendriks has been a product designer for 11 years. His family and he love to travel, see the world and visit national parks. He currently live in Spain with his wife and son, off the grid. And by off the grid, I mean a house on 20 acres, with its own solar power system, and own rain water collection system. But don't worry... he made sure he checked the LGE network speed before buying the property. Five years ago, he started a side project, building a weather app that combined up to date weather with his wife's beautiful landscape illustrations. Shortly after - Apple started promoting their apps, and their business started to take off. Today, they have ventured into nature based mindfulness apps, through their company known as Wild Ventures.
Over the weekend, TikTok learned it might be banned in the US. Actually maybe acquired by Microsoft (or maybe not). We break down the TikTok saga. Levi’s CEO revealed its wild new 5-month gameplan in a world where denim is out. And America’s biggest meat producer, Tyson, just made the boldest CEO hire we’ve ever seen: A Google tech guy.
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