onfocus

More links from the link mill. We're past the solstice which means the days get lighter from here—literally at least if not metaphorically. If you only have time for one link, read the New Statesman article about mass false memories and the communites that have sprung up around them: The movie that doesn't exist and the Redditors who think it does.

Corruption

• Center for Public Integrity: Donald Trump's sons behind nonprofit selling access to president-elect
• Politico: Gingrich: Congress should change ethics laws for Trump
• Teen Vogue: Donald Trump's National Security Advisor Met with 'Alt-Right' Freedom Party Leader
• USA Today: Lawyer: 'Appalled' by FBI warrant that shook Clinton

Action

• Resigning from Oracle
• EFF: Your threat model just changed.
• Schneier on Security: My Priorities for the Next Four Years

Online Community

• Fast Company: Internet Comments Are Awful. Could They Be Awesome?
• The Conversation: How news sites' online comments helped build our hateful electorate
• Jeff Jarvis: Facebook Steps Up

Neat Tech

• Google Web Designer
• GoAccess - Visual Web Log Analyzer
• Oxford Dictionaries API

Misc.

• Audio Engineering Society: The Effects of MP3 Compression on Perceived Emotional Characteristics in Musical Instruments
• Bloomberg: The Pessimist's Guide to 2017 (it me!)
• Against The Wicked City: On romantic fantasy and OSR D&D (D&D play style alternative via mefi)
• The Conversation: A sacred light in the darkness: Winter solstice illuminations at Spanish missions (architecture aligned with nature via @somebitsLinks)
• New Statesman: The movie that doesn't exist and the Redditors who think it does (see also: berenstein retcon. fascinating that more than one or two of these mass false memories exist.)

Corruption

• Buzzfeed: Trump Must Give Up Hotel Before Inauguration
• New York Times: The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
• Politico: Source: Twitter cut out of Trump tech meeting over failed emoji deal (facepalm emoji)
• Let Me Point out to you How Ridiculous the Trump Tech Meeting Was (nepotism)

Action

• neveragain.tech (tech employees refuse to build religious database)
• Atlantic: The Cure for Post-Election Malaise Is Civic Participation
• Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda (learning from tea party tactics)
• Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic (questions programmers should ask themselves)

Tech Criticism

• We say we don't hate our audiences. Our mobile strategies suggest otherwise. (100x this!)
• ZDNet: Evernote's new not-so-privacy policy will let employees read your notes (I did this uninstall)
• Wired: 150 Filmmakers Ask Nikon and Canon to Sell Encrypted Cameras

Media

• Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News
• Freedom to Tinker: Disrupting The Business Model of the Fake News Industry
• Kevin Barrett @ Postlight: Building Kind Social Networks
• Secure the News (grading the security of news sites)
• Wired: Meet the Ad Companies Ditching Breitbart and Fake News (see also: @slpng_giants)

Extra

• Flickr: Christmas Ephemera Group (tis the season)
• D&D Equipment Cards (neat DIY game accessory)
• The Awl: Maybe Stop Using Your Cuisinart (laceration hazard!)
• Gatebox - Virtual Home Robot (isolation hazard!)

Anxiety-Producing

• Teen Vogue: Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America
• Politico: Electors demand intelligence briefing before Electoral College vote
• Pew Research Center: Low Approval of Trump’s Transition but Outlook for His Presidency Improves
• Washington Post: A big change to U.S. broadcasting is coming
• @ericgarland: It's time for some game theory.
• The Independent: China flies nuclear bomber over South China Sea as a 'message' to Donald Trump
• Forward: Why Time's Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art
• Recode: Tim Cook, Larry Page, Sheryl Sandberg — and maybe even Jeff Bezos — are going to Trump's tech summit next week

Not as Anxiety-Producing

• Programmer Competency Matrix (via HN discussion of What Makes A Senior Software Developer?)
• Talks that changed the way I think about programming
• Closure Compiler in JavaScript (easier minification automation)
• Five Leadership Hacks (I love "continually fix small broken things")
• Fixing Font Awesome's fonts (performance tweaks for hosted icon fonts)
• Pull to Refresh.js
• Developers' side projects (who owns what?)
• Fun hacks for faster content (iframe streaming)
• The Mysterious Talking Board (SFO exhibit about ouija boards)

First, a big congratulations to friend of the blog Anil Dash, new CEO at Fog Creek. And a 2nd big congratulations on their launch of Gomix—a hosted community app builder. I love the view source philosophy behind it. It'll be fun to see what people build with it.

And here are some recent links:

The State of Things

• New York Times: The Array of Conflicts of Interest Facing the Trump Presidency (closed loops)
• Washington Post: Trump's stock holdings may give him a personal stake in rules on banks and oil firms
• New Yorker: Now Is the Time to Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About
• Politico: Trump inherits Obama boom
• New York Review of Books: Trump: The Choice We Face

Media

• MIT Technology Review: Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It's Too Much Like TV (by mefi's own hoder)
• Facebook's Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible With News ("The last thing Facebook wants is to contradict you in any way.")
• The Guardian: Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

Designing Things

• Mike Monteiro: How To Fight Fascism
• Nielsen Norman Group: The Distribution of Users' Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
• GDS design notes: We've updated the radios and checkboxes on GOV.UK

Hail Mary

• Lawrence Lessig: The Equal Protection argument against "winner take all" in the Electoral College
• Electors Trust
• New York Times: Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump

Online Community

• Fusion: What GitHub did to kill its trolls
• Buzzfeed: Silicon Valley's Most Popular Forum Bans Stories About Politics
• Keeping Instagram Safe: More Tools and Control (added anonymous reporting for self-injury posts)

Security

• FBI to gain expanded hacking powers as Senate effort to block fails (thanks for fighting this, Ron Wyden)
• Buzzfeed: After Trump's Win, Secure Messaging App Signal's Downloads Increase 400%

Supplemental

• EFF: Power Up Your Donation
• It doesn't look like anything to me (via @codinghorror)
• So bad it's good: Toto - Africa (many more at mefi)
• Christmas Gifs ( NSFW )

I want to share a book I read recently that I absolutely loved: The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth.



My introduction to this book was this tweet:

Things native English speakers know, but don't know we know: pic.twitter.com/Ex0Ui9oBSL

— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonBBC) September 3, 2016

I felt like I was getting a glimpse at the source code that runs English. Not at the syntax and grammar level (though there is a bit of that), but the presentation layer. I got the preview from Amazon and stumbled on this passage:

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.

That passage felt like demystifying a mystical process and from there I was hooked. I ordered the book and read it cover to cover.

Forsyth devotes one chapter to each figure of rhetoric identified by the Ancient Greeks. He describes them as, "...techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording." Some figures are familiar friends like alliteration. Some figures like hendiadys evade ease and detection. Some figures work across sentences like these three that start with the same words: anaphora. Of course you don't need to know the figures of rhetoric to use or appreciate them, but knowing how they work can help you employ them strategically.

The most fun aspect for me was the way Forsyth uses each figure to describe that figure throughout each chapter. Identifying each use became something of a puzzle to solve while learning about how puzzles work. Forsyth also frequently gives a prime example of each figure that everyone knows. Then he draws on everything from Shakespeare to poetry to music lyrics to illustrate each one. He demonstrates that rhetorical figures aren't a dusty relic, they're a part of the natural way we use language that we can tune into and appreciate.

It was a joy to read and joy is in need. And like all correct-thinking people, Mark Forsyth has a blog. It's The Inky Fool.