Labor Day Weekend Tabs

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NYT, “Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away From Top U.S. Universities” — tl;dr: When academic freedom and research funding go away, so do the best professors.

The Economist, “Australia builds a Pacific alliance system to keep China out” — tl;dr: Increased Chinese belligerence is driving smaller regional countries to seek assurance elsewhere. Rather than turning to an unstable USA, they’re aligning with Canberra.

NYT, “Maria Bartiromo’s Downfall at an Increasingly Cautious Fox News” —- tl;dr: Cost your employer a measly $787 million for repeatedly lying on the air and you might lose your job. Is there no loyalty?!

NYT, “Clancy Faces Years of Confinement, No Matter What Comes Next” — tl;dr: Even if she’s never convicted of murdering her three children, she may never be released from a mental institution.

AP, “Here’s how the summer box office blew up and Hollywood got its mojo back” — tl;dr: Hollywood has just wrapped up its best summer in a decade and its biggest vibe shift since the pandemic (so long as you ignore ticket price inflation and the fact far fewer people are actually going to the theater now).

AP, “UN General Assembly endorses a new world map that shows more accurately Africa’s size” — tl;dr: Apparently someone is watching 25-year-old episodes of The West Wing.

One response to “Labor Day Weekend Tabs”

  1. Re map projections… Many years ago now I built a piece of software so that I could generate my own cartograms. When it turned out I needed to generate my own maps for subsets of the US states, I learned: (a) about PROJ, an open source package that will convert from almost any known map projection to any other known projection; (b) different projections are good for different things and the Mercator projection is still good for what it’s always been good for (global area comparisons are NOT one of those things); and (c) the common regional equal area projections (Lambert and Albers) date back to circa 1800 and involve complicated trig formulas. I’ve always had visions of large rooms full of minions doing the tedious trig calculations for the Lambert and Albers maps.

    The first modern look-up tables for trig functions is credited to the same al-Kwarizmi who brought Indian place-based decimal arithmetic to the West. The title of one of his works is where the term algebra comes from. Don’t tell Trump.