On Thursday, the New York Times published a major investigation about the Hollywood mogul, who had assembled a team of top legal and PR professionals.
Category: Read
👓 Frantic switchboard calls, geometry of fire, led police to killer on Mandalay Bay’s 32nd floor | Washington Post
The gunshots came from the Las Vegas tower’s golden facade. But where was the shooter? And was there only one?
👓 Origin by Dan Brown review – fun in its own galumphing way | The Guardian
In his fifth blockbuster outing, professor of symbology Robert Langdon takes on the battle between science and religion
And by the way, who doesn’t like the word galumphing?
👓 Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. Were Close to Being Charged With Felony Fraud | ProPublica
New York prosecutors were preparing a case. Then the D.A. overruled his staff after a visit from a top donor: Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz.
👓 Billionaire relents, kicks open his gate to popular Martins Beach | SF Gate
A billionaire landowner who had blocked access to a beach near Half Moon Bay opened the gate leading to the sandy shore Wednesday, two days after legal papers were filed demanding he comply with a court order. The decision by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla to finally allow the public to use the only road leading to picturesque Martins Beach was touted as a victory for surfers and sunbathers, but lawyers say it probably isn't the end of a decade-long battle over the sandy cove.
They didn’t do a very good job describing the subtleties of the situation and the law here though.
👓 Anti-abortion Rep. Tim Murphy plans to retire amid sex scandal | USA Today
The announcement comes a day after the pro-life lawmaker allegedly asked his mistress to get an abortion.
If only the people who protest so vociferously and who spend money to fight abortion would instead spend their time and money to support the adoption and care of all these unwanted children, the problem would be so drastically different. You have to care about the lives after they are born or you’re just being hypocritical, otherwise, just what are you really saving? Do they want to save and add to the suffering in the world? Should they be called pro-suffering activists instead of anti-abortion?
👓 Vladimir Voevodsky, Fields Medalist, Dies at 51 | IAS
The Institute for Advanced Study is deeply saddened by the passing of Vladimir Voevodsky, Professor in the School of Mathematics. Voevodsky, a truly extraordinary and original mathematician, made many contributions to the field of mathematics, earning him numerous honors and awards, including the Fields Medal. Celebrated for tackling the most difficult problems in abstract algebraic geometry, Voevodsky focused on the homotopy theory of schemes, algebraic K-theory, and interrelations between algebraic geometry, and algebraic topology. He made one of the most outstanding advances in algebraic geometry in the past few decades by developing new cohomology theories for algebraic varieties. Among the consequences of his work are the solutions of the Milnor and Bloch-Kato Conjectures. More recently he became interested in type-theoretic formalizations of mathematics and automated proof verification. He was working on new foundations of mathematics based on homotopy-theoretic semantics of Martin-Löf type theories. His new "Univalence Axiom" has had a dramatic impact in both mathematics and computer science.
Sad to hear of Dr. Voevodsky’s passing just as I was starting into my studies of algebraic geometry…
👓 A Micro.blog #FollowFriday, Part I Among the Stones
For those of us wanting to leave Twitter and other silos behind and focus more on microblogging on our own domains, discovering new people to follow can be a little tricky. Manton Reece has a Discover tab on Micro.blog to find people, but the service is still in its infancy. Colin Devroe suggested a #FollowFriday movement. I’ll start off with two bloggers I’m enjoying. Feel free to use webmentions for your own lists! Please correct me if anyone else has started this, I haven’t had great connectivity for the last few weeks.
It also reminds me that I ought to get to work on keeping a following list of my own or add a follow post type to my site eventually. Perhaps something to think about over WordCamp LA and IndieWebCamp NYC this weekend?
👓 Ikea has bought TaskRabbit | Recode
Swedish home goods giant Ikea Group has bought TaskRabbit, according to sources close to the situation. The price of the deal could not be determined, but the contract labor marketplace company has raised about $50 million since it was founded nine years ago. Sources added that TaskRabbit will become an independent subsidiary within Ikea and that CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot and its staff would remain.
👓 How to Set a Default Fallback Image for WordPress Post Thumbnails | WP Beginner
Do you want to set a default fallback image for WordPress post thumbnails? Featured images also known as post thumbnails are very useful in engaging users and making your articles more noticeable on social media. In this article, we will show you how to set a default fallback image for WordPress post thumbnails.
👓 Three Decades Later, We’re Getting a Coming To America Sequel | Vulture
Jonathan Levine will direct and Kenya Barris will write a sequel to ‘Coming to America’, which is being developed with cooperation from Eddie Murphy.
👓 3 Ways To Read Sen. Bob Corker’s Retirement | FiveThirtyEight
It’s not unusual for a 65-year-old to announce his retirement, but a lot of people were caught by surprise when Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee did so on Tuesday. In a statement, the senator, who has found himself increasingly at odds with President Trump, said he he hadn’t planned to serve more than two terms in office. But is there more at work in the departure of this influential senator than simple adherence to a self-imposed term limit? What does it portend for the Republican Party establishment, Trump and the future of the party? There are a few ways to think about it.
👓 Ergodic | John D. Cook
Roughly speaking, an ergodic system is one that mixes well. You get the same result whether you average its values over time or over space. This morning I ran across the etymology of the word ergodic.
👓 Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal | Signal
At Signal, we’ve been thinking about the difficulty of private contact discovery for a long time. We’ve been working on strategies to improve our current design, and today we’ve published a new private contact discovery service. Using this service, Signal clients will be able to efficiently and scalably determine whether the contacts in their address book are Signal users without revealing the contacts in their address book to the Signal service.
h/t cryptographer Matthew Green
Private contact discovery for Signal. Make no mistake: what Moxie is doing here is going to revolutionize messaging. https://t.co/RjAMWIpXui
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 26, 2017
In short: your contact list will no longer be available to Signal servers. If you trust Intel SGX this wipes out a load of info leakage.
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 26, 2017
👓 Giving you more characters to express yourself | Twitter
We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).
I have taken to always posting on my own website(s) first–where the sky is the proverbial limit–and only then syndicating out to places like Twitter. While Twitter’s got a reasonable network and there are lots of interesting people who might not otherwise be online interacting, I really haven’t been using Twitter as much in the past two years as I had previously. This change isn’t going to affect me at all from a publishing perspective. There are much more valuable tools to be using now. (Though I do wish the rest of the web would catch up on some of the new technologies they’re really missing out on.)
I do appreciate that it will allow some others who don’t have their own websites some more flexibility. I’m hoping that the Twitter apps that handle notifications add the extra content as Twitter’s own mobile app notifications cut off even before the 140 character limit, which makes them painful to use from a UI perspective.
If nothing else, it’s nice to see them iterating a little, but they need to be doing it at a faster velocity.