Hello! Here’s this week’s Kat’s Kable - hope you enjoy it. This Wednesday, I am going to send out the first of a series of themed issues. Also, I realised something about last week’s: the ten pieces were from nine different sources, which is something I don’t think has happened earlier.
- The Man Who Broke Ticketmaster - Interesting story about Ken Lowson, who founded a firm called Wiseguy Tickets. His firm would buy nearly all the tickets for nearly every major concert in the USA, and then pass them on at inflated prices to brokers who would sell it at further inflated prices to fans. Lawson now has quit and disbanded Wiseguy; he now devotes his energies and expertise in making sure fans get tickets at the prices the tickets are being sold at. Talk about a reversal in strategy.
- A Battle Rages For The Future Of The Web - DRM is a very controversial topic in modern digital debates. Short for digital rights management, it is a way publishers of any content lock digital data to curb piracy. The entire WWW now may choose to embrace DRM; but should it? Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the WWW in the first place, is the chairman of the W3C consortium and must make a decision - soon.
- The New York Times Claws Its Way Into The Future - The NYT isn’t a newspaper anymore; it’s a media house/news outlet/whatever it needs to be. The third is most important - it’s being whatever it needs to be to survive right now. It’s interesting to note that it employs more coders than any other newspaper organisation. That’s where we’re headed, it seems like?
- Inside the High-Flying World of Estonian Extreme Swinging - This is exactly what you think it is - quirky and delightful. There’s a video too, which is positively brilliant.
- Remembering Nüshu, the 19th-Century Chinese Script Only Women Could Write - This is fascinating. A language that was restricted only to women, unlike the existence of many many languages that were and are restricted to men alone. The practice is dying now, but this piece has some nice pictures.
- The Little Yellow Box That’s Made Thousands of Operations Safer - This article talks about a small medical device called a pulse oximeter, a small non-invasive device that measures blood oxygen saturation. It beeps when all is well, and changes its pitch when something is wrong. It’s a simple device, but it has been saving millions (yes, millions) of lives. It frees up time and effort that would have been spent doing routine monitoring of patients 24 hours a day.
- Syrian History Is Unfolding on WhatsApp - I think I’d shared (many weeks earlier) a piece (found it!) about WhatsApp groups used by doctors to help out with medical cases in Syria. This is a touching essay about how WhatsApp is the major means of communication for refugees.
When your four-year-old daughter, who doesn’t know how to write yet, wants to text you, she sends you a string of emojis with an urgent wish: to hop on a boat for Greece with her mother, brother, and sister, and travel to Germany, where one day you will all be together again. WhatsApp bridges the shortest distance back home to Syria.
Also, Phones are now indispensable for refugees. - How Wikipedia Is Cultivating an Army of Fact Checkers to Battle Fake News - Yes, we need this.
- When Things Go Missing - A lovely and rather whimsical (and slightly long) piece about losing things and possessions.
Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep. - My Double Life as a KGB Agent - Riveting. From Guardian, the piece’s blurb - “Raised in East Germany, Jack Barsky abandoned his mother, brother, wife and son to spy for the KGB. In America, he started a second family. And then it all came crashing down…”