Featured Links - February 27, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Along the lakeshore

• We’re All Living Under Gravity’s Rainbow. "Looming apocalypse. Paranoid conspiracies. Rocket-obsessed oligarchs. As Thomas Pynchon’s novel turns 50, its world feels unnervingly present." It would be interesting to compare Gravity's Rainbow to John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar. 
• Hurricanes are changing with the climate. Our words about them may need to change, too. "Outdated names and definitions may be hindering public understanding of warnings about dangerous storms."
• MadCap Software Acquires IXIASOFT to Add Enterprise-Class DITA CCMS to Product Offerings, Expand Support for Customers’ Content Strategies. Interesting news in the technical communication field. 
• Sometimes Open Systems Beat Those Who Try To Lock Them Up: Spotify’s Podcast Colonization Flops.
• The Bill C-18 Reality: Everyone Loses When the Government Mandates Payments for Links. "The report that Google is conducting a national test that removes links to Canadian news sites for a small percentage of users sparked a predictable reaction as politicians who were warned that Bill C-18 could lead to this, now want to know how it could happen. None of this week’s developments should come as a surprise. Bill C-18 presents Google and Facebook with a choice: pay hundreds of millions of dollars primarily to Canadian broadcasters for links to news articles or stop linking." 
• The Corruption at Fox News Is Worse Than You Assumed. "An explosive legal filing reveals evidence showing the network is crooked from top to bottom." This is not really news, I suppose, and neither is Fox. 
• Ode to Samuel Delany. "Composed half-a-century ago, The Ballad of Beta-2 was a science-fiction vision of the future that speaks directly to our present."
• MIT team makes a case for direct carbon capture from seawater, not air. "The oceans soak up enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, and MIT researchers say they've developed a way of releasing and capturing it that uses far less energy than direct air capture – with some other environmental benefits to boot."