Featured Links - August 28, 2023

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

Tree at the beach

Can Dogs Use Language? 'The “button dogs” of TikTok seem to be learning human words. What’s really going on?' Anyone who has a dog knows that they understand some words. The question is how much and can they create phrases or sentences.

Tech Billionaires Behind Secretive Plan for New California Metropolis. "A firm cloaked in mystery has bought up $800 million worth of land. Now the investors are unmasked."

Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality. "For years the writer laughed off being mistaken for fellow author Naomi Wolf. Then her ‘double’ drifted into a world of conspiracy theories and became a favoured guest of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. With the US standing on a political precipice, suddenly the stakes were a lot higher."

Reclaiming Control: The Internet Archive Empowers People. Gatekeepers Keep Suing. "To be clear: what the Internet Archive is doing is traditional library lending in a digital form, and frankly not radical – I can just get access to the materials I want much more quickly through the Archive, but I must also return them much more quickly. There is no situation in which acquiring a recipe from an obsolete edition of Brody’s first cookbook with no ebook equivalent would hurt her royalties. Libraries have traditionally bought one copy of a book and then lent it, much like they do with CDL, which maintains an “owned to loaned” ratio through sequestering materials."

Block the Bots that Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website. Tips on how to block bots from AI platforms by Neal Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld magazine.

The new “science of reading” movement, explained. "A huge shift in how kids are taught to read is underway. But the reading wars probably aren’t gone for good."

‘Dangerously Rebellious’ Texas Nuns Ban Bishop From Monastery for ‘Spiritual Safety’. "The Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth called for prayers to stop the “open disobedience.” Good for the nuns.