On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I finally learned about data accuracy grading in SIMBAD a couple of nights ago. They have a five-level scale currently, going from A (best) to E (worst), and that letter is usually at the back end of the "Spectral type:" line item in any given star's profile data. For example, "F5V C". "F5 E" for another.

Of course, I'm making do with the data I have and the published and aired location data from the episodes and movies of the various branch series of Star Trek here...

As opposed to the governmental variety, which most of us here know to be wary of.

This report from The Intercept about the choices made by hospitals - and other organizations - in response to news services' needs for information reminds us that "industrial censorship" is not an oxymoronic concept. It's real and it has consequences that may not have been expected either.

From David Brin:

https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2018/06/its-not-futile-we-are-making-progress.html

From Alberta, a ruling on gay-straight alliances that should bring some cheer:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/gsa-injunction-overturned-1.4724713

For the space data nerds among my friendlisters, here's something new among the stuff that's been whipped up in the wake of GAIA DR 2:

http://gaia-kepler.fun/

The ultimate answer to “government is useless”

I may quibble on specific details, as an informed Canadian might, but I have no quarrel with it as a whole. I present the link for discussion in what I hope will be an informed way.

From The Winter Solder? Where Fury and Romanova dumped SHIELD's stuff onto the Internet?

Did they have the time to work out what parameters they needed to "decide" what files to release and which to sit on? Because this little question-asking session over at MarvelMeta from five months earlier raised the thought in my mind. Also, having watched Citizenfour, it occurred to me that for all the craziness Edward Snowden brought down on himself, he still managed to make the time to find people like Greenwald and Poitras to help him start figuring out what had to go public ASAP and what had to be sat on indefinitely for the good of international security.

Given the situation with Project: Insight - a matter of hours before the three Helicarriers launched their mass-murder programming - Fury, Romanova, Hill, Rogers, Wilson and whoever else was helping behind the scenes may not have had that luxury of time and contemplation. So, the situation may well be as described by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw: "Thanks to Natasha's Snowden-esque leak, anyone with internet access can now read everything from SHIELD's black ops missions to the Helicarrier specs to Hawkeye's psych evaluations. Civilians now know precisely how much SHIELD has been hiding from them all these years..."

Thoughts?

(Yeah, this is the kind of thing that my brain turns back towards while I'm trying to clear out my sinuses over the weekend.)

There's a linkage theme connecting these sites: graphic design, particularly for infographics and user interfaces.

http://infosthetics.com/

These four links contain a lot of stuff that I wish had been included in The Art of the Avengers. Not sure how it didn't happen, but the fact that it's available to look at via these URLs is a good thing.

http://cargocollective.com/jayse/Avengers
http://jayse.tv/v2/?portfolio=avengers-maria-hills-tri-up-displays
http://jayse.tv/v2/?portfolio=avengers-helicarrier-glass-screens
http://jayse.tv/v2/?portfolio=hud

This particular news item has me worried:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/05/02/ottawa-libraries-archives-closing-budget-cuts.html

It strikes me as an act of self-blinding, self-deafening and self-amputation. Both short-term and long-term. It also undermines the principles of transparency and open governance, designed to ensure oligarchy and information control.

I do not like it. At all.