What I'm reading 10/19-10/26

2015-10-25

Oklahoma Earthquakes Are a National Security Threat - Matthew Philips

  1. "Since 2008, Oklahoma has gone from averaging fewer than two earthquakes per year that measure at least 3.0 in magnitude to surpassing California as the most seismically active state in the continental U.S. This year, Oklahoma is on pace to endure close to 1,000 earthquakes."

Let's Applaud Wesleyan's Student Censors For Honesty - Ken White

  1. "People who respond to student paper content they don't like by trashing the paper to suppress it are thug trash, and it's nice of them to sign a self-identifying petition."

  2. "I like the petition. I like it because the students aren't pretending to be anything but censorious: it's honest."

Gustavus student newspaper's 'Case Day' story gets papers trashed - Kate Maternowski

  1. Related to the above, this shit happened at Gustavus just as I was joining the Weekly.

The Assassination Complex - Jeremy Scahill

  1. "Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination."

  2. "During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets."

Whale Song Explained - David Rothenberg and Mike Deal

  1. "Extraordinarily, while the whales in each population have distinctly different dialects of song, all the whales within a population change their song together synchronously."

Homan Square revealed: how Chicago police 'disappeared' 7,000 people - Spencer Ackerman

  1. "According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years."

  2. "No contemporaneous public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist."

  3. "The warehouse is also unique in not generating public records of someone’s detention there, permitting police to effectively hide detainees from their attorneys."

America's biggest economic dilemma: private affluence amid public squalor - @KStreetHipster and Matthew Yglesias

  1. "'There's a whole society to improve. Crime and inequality and poverty and on and on, but (most of) our jobs aren't for improving society. Instead out jobs are (typically) for enriching someone. Not a societal good in and of itself, but a private good.'"

Getting a full PDF from a DRM-encumbered online textbook - Jonathon Vogel

  1. "Several coffee/tea/tinder breaks later, broken up by restarting the scraping process where it broke for some reason, and all the pages are living on my hard drive. Nice!"

The Hostile Email Landscape - Jody Ribton

  1. "In the end, I gave up and switched back to Google Apps. It felt like defeat. This isn't how the internet is supposed to work."