Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. Data builds an android derived from his own positronic neural pathways, and intends to raise it as his child — a prospect that invokes Picard’s iconic facepalm. Picard (to admiral conjured up by writers who needed an antagonist): “There are times, sir, when men of good conscience cannot blindly…
A Richmond police official and a fire official agree that Sunday, multiple individuals interfered with a fire truck’s response to a fire. But beyond that, each source tells a rather different story.
I just watched a pretty good Star Trek episode exploring the premise that well-intentioned people can remember and sincerely believe widely different interpretations of the same events, without being intentionally deceptive.
When equally credible sources make conflicting claims, there’s probably a story there somewhere. If a source makes unverifiable claims, or won’t respond to legitimate follow-up questions, or vilifies or aggrandizes a third party, that’s a good reason to be skeptical.
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. A space anomaly activates an alternate timeline in which the Enterprise-D is a bustling battleship, Picard is a hard-edged militant facing defeat after decades of war against the Klingon Empire, and somehow only Guinan realizes something’s wrong. This version of Picard struggles with ethical complexities that “our” Picard could…
A Facebook meme that claims “3 of these 4 honorable men were killed by ‘protesters’” is false. I don’t mean that I can prove that not a single one of the guilty parties ever participated in a protest. However, Police never connected Beaty’s death with the protests (and the FBI declined to do so when…
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Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. An agitated Riker, beamed off of a research station just before it explodes, finds himself charged with murder. Testimony from Riker, the victim’s widow, and (indirectly) the victim tell conflicting stories. A solid storytelling concept, which somewhat freshens a mishmash of already-familiar TNG tropes: a brilliant male scientist, his…
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The ongoing protests following the killing of George Floyd were caught up in violence again on Saturday, as police all over the country tear-gassed protesters, drove vehicles through crowds, opened fire with nonlethal rounds on journalists or people on their own property, and in at least one instance, pushed over an elderly man who was walking away with a cane. Here are some of the ways law enforcement officers escalated the national unrest.
Throughout the protests over the death of George Floyd, journalists have been injured and arrested covering the unrest. That trend continued Saturday and there were examples across the country but journalists on the ground in Minneapolis expressed dismay at how law enforcement officials seemed to be targeting members of the media. In the Friday night…
A rubber bullet shot by the Hong Kong police on Sunday caused a journalist to lose sight in an eye. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) again urges the authorities to guarantee reporters’ safety. A reporter working for Indonesian-language media outlet Suara Hong Kong News, Veby Mega Indah, has permanently lost eyesight in the right eye on…
Microsoft is laying off dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations. The layoffs are part of a bigger push by Microsoft to rely on artificial intelligence to pick news and content that’s presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft’s Edge browser, and in the company’s various Microsoft News apps. Many of the affected workers are part of Microsoft’s SANE (search, ads, News, Edge) division, and are contracted as human editors to help pick stories. Robots will now pick news stories for MSN and Microsoft News.
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A Facebook meme with 52k reactions and 37k shares includes pictures of volunteers cleaning the streets in Minneapolis, the day after mass protests of the death of George Floyd. The pictures make a powerful point about the values of the community. However, the text includes an unnecessary slam against journalism, because it introduces the images…
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Sobering report from the New York Times, providing evidence that COVID-19 deaths have been over-reported. Mortality data in the middle of a pandemic is not perfect. In most places, the disparities between the official death counts and the total rise in deaths reflect limited testing for the virus rather than intentional undercounting. Officially, about 355,000 people had…
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