NEW RESOURCES

Afloat: Online Exhibition Reveals Unique Currach Building Video & Archive. “The finished 19 and a half feet, three-man currach complete with mast and sail, over two hundred photographs and video footage documenting the build, along with details logged in the NMI team’s notes and correspondence, have left us with a significant and complete record of the vanishing skill of traditional Irish currach building. The unique footage, following Michael Conneely carefully and craftfully through the step-by-step building process, is now available to view on the National Museum of Ireland’s website for the first time in an online exhibition called Making a currach – Michael Conneely.”

Gramophone: Birgit Nilsson Stiftelse launches new website devoted to the singer. “The Birgit Nilsson Stiftelse is today marking what would have been the singer’s 103rd birthday by launching a new website devoted to exploring her life and legacy. Rich in biographical accounts and atmospheric photographs, the website also serves as a resource for the museum devoted to the singer, for the Birgit Nilsson Prize, and for the Birgit Nilsson Stipendium – the scholarship established to support superb young artists of today.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Daily Times: First episode of podcast miniseries exploring Black Appalachian music now available. “The first episode of ‘Sepia Tones: Exploring Black Appalachian Music’ is now available on Great Smoky Mountains Association’s podcast ‘Smoky Mountain Air.’ Hosts William Turner and Ted Olson engage guests Loyal Jones, Sparky Rucker, and James Leva in a lively discussion about the roots of Appalachian music and their own roles in preserving these musical influences. This episode is the first of a six-part podcast miniseries to be released throughout 2021. Topics will include the complex history of Black music in East Tennessee, Black sacred music, Black women musicians, and the diverse landscape of music communities in Southern Appalachia.”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Inspiration: How to Use Notion with Gmail and Google Sheets using Apps Script. I hear from friends that they’re using Notion but I haven’t tried it yet. You? “Notion, my absolute favorite tool for storing all sorts of things from web pages to code snippets to recipes, just got better. They’ve released a public API and thus it will be a lot easier for developers to read and write to their Notion workspace from external apps.”

Popular Science: 9 cool ways your family can help scientists collect data. “Anyone with an interest in a project or topic, no matter their age or education level, can be a citizen scientist. It can be as simple as uploading a photo of a bird to an app, or as complex as building your own weather station and submitting detailed daily readings to an online database. It can be rewarding too, as this work has real impact and the number of studies using data from citizen science projects is on the rise.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Threatpost: How to Get into the Bug-Bounty Biz: The Good, Bad and Ugly . “In the past handful of weeks, Apple announced a patch for its MacOS bypass bug and rushed four out-of-band fixes for zero-days under active attack; Chrome’s zero-day was posted on Twitter in mid-April; and of course the Microsoft Exchange zero-day attack is still fresh. Threatpost invited zero-day experts to dig beyond the headlines, including Katie Trimble-Noble, the former DHS official who runs Intel’s bug-bounty program; Greg Ose, who runs GitHub’s bug-bounty program, and James McQuiggan, a security awareness advocate for KnowBe4.”

CNN: The bizarre story of the inventor of ransomware. “Eddy Willems was working for an insurance company in Belgium back in December 1989 when he popped the floppy disc into his computer. The disc was one of 20,000 sent in the mail to attendees of the World Health Organization’s AIDS conference in Stockholm, and Willems’ boss had asked him to check what was on it. Willems was expecting to see medical research when the disc’s contents loaded. Instead he became a victim of the first act of ransomware — more than 30 years before the ransomware attack on the US Colonial Pipeline ignited a gas shortage in parts of the US last week.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Discover Magazine: How To Spot Pseudoscience Online And IRL. “Imagine a universe rife with cosmic catastrophes: Jupiter ejecting a comet into space that would later become the planet Venus. The comet whizzing past Earth and changing its rotation. The resulting chaos on Earth causing natural disasters of biblical proportions — literally — like the parting of the Red Sea. In the mid-1900s, Immanuel Velikovsky, a psychiatrist and author, claimed that he could prove these radical ideas. Velikovsky laid out his case in Worlds in Collision, a 1950 bestseller. But the book wasn’t billed as creative fiction or a fanciful hypothesis based on anecdotal accounts of the past; rather, Velikovsky presented these interplanetary theories, and others, as factual.” A lot of articles with this kind of headline are ten paragraphs of bromide. This is a deep dive with a lot of history. Recommended.

SatNews: Geoscience Australia’s New Tool Reveals 30+ Years Of Australia’s Coastline Changes
. “The evolution of Australia’s coastlines can now be seen in amazing scale and detail, with a new tool developed by maps annual changes to Australia’s coastlines to highlight long-term trends in coastal erosion and growth.”

Phys .org: Older adults use social media to compensate for fewer in-person interactions, study says. “A lack of in-person interactions is a primary driver for older people to use social media, which differs from how younger people use it to establish and maintain relationships, according to a first of its kind study of older users by a researcher at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of the University of Alabama System.” Good evening, Internet…

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