Little Robot! I WANT THREE!

It's not often that I'll choose a giveaway contest to be my primary post of the day, but I adore Ben Hatke's work, I've loved every single Little Robot comic he's posted, and, even though I haven't read the book yet, I recommend getting it for someone special in your life. Maybe someone who loves robots, or someone who loves graphic novels. I'm getting a copy for myself, of course, and I think it's an especially wonderful gift for any little girls you might know who are interested in tech!

Jolly Raffle Giveaway Contest: Little Robot!

Links!

• Libraries, Books, Writers, & Suchlike
• 311 Reasons to Celebrate Banned Books Week "According to the American Library Association, which provides the only national statistics, there were 311 reported attempts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves in 2014–2015.[...] But statistics do not give a full picture of what is going on. The reality is that censorship is still a problem in this country, and most of the victims are kids. Sometimes books are literally taken out of their hands."
• 6 Things You Learn Preserving America's Past Archivists have a hard job, y'all! 
• Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world 
• Filmmakers fighting “Happy Birthday” copyright find their “smoking gun” Copyright is such a mess. If I'm ever elected President (hah!), intellectual property law reform is going to be high on my agenda. 
• Long-lost Dr. Seuss book hits stores today -- and it's already a bestseller Related: What animal lovers will hate about the new Dr. Seuss book Perhaps - but the worry that reading this book will lead to kids asking parents to adopt exotic (or not) pets from the local pet store (rather than the local animal shelter) is sort of misplaced. I think responsible parents will know better than to troop the kids down to the pet store to get a monkey, and will opt to discuss the duties of pet ownership and check with the local animal shelter, instead. But maybe I'm putting too much trust in parents.
• Beatrix Potter, Mycologist: The Beloved Children’s Book Author’s Little-Known Scientific Studies and Illustrations of Mushrooms 
• Academic nonfiction for the masses? NEH awards $1.7 million in Public Scholar grants . 
• July 28, 1814: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin elope to France 
• Donald Trump's lawyer threatens reporter over ex-wife's allegations: 'You cannot rape your spouse' Um. There's so much wrong with this story, but let's point out the two biggest issues: 1) spousal rape is a thing; rape is sex without consent, and has nothing to do with marital status and 2) there's such a thing as freedom of the press; you can't just sue someone because you don't like the information they've put out there. Having read the original article (Ex-Wife: Donald Trump Made Me Feel ‘Violated’ During Sex), I don't feel that the reported did anything more than present the information very clearly and objectively. I also think the incident related is definitely marital rape, but I'm not Ivana, so I can't do anything more about it than shake my head. I understand Donald Trump is "distancing" himself from his campaign spokesman and lawyer, so maybe he has more respect for freedom of the press than Cohen. 
• CISA/CISPA
• Here’s How CISA Helps the NSA Scrape the Internet Backbone to Read Your Emails at Will 
• Congress Is About to Get a Shit Ton of Faxes This Week Mine's in there - is yours? Related: OPERATION: Fax Big Brother 
• URGENT: Help Rebury "Zombie" Cybersecurity Bill "It’s back to the 'barricades' for librarians and our many civil liberties coalition allies." Yep. 
• TPP
• The Trans-Pacific Partnership is Bad News 
• Comcast Killed The Ed Show For Talking About TPP They're arguing that it's because of low ratings, but The Ed Show was outperforming several other news shows that are staying on. Nope, the only thing that separates this show from the one's they're keeping is that Ed talked about the dangers of TPP and the others fell into corporate line. Yet another attack on freedom of the press - and our right to information. 
• Net, Tech, Health, & Science
• A Wind Machine You Can Call Home I would live there. 
• The women who programmed ENIAC 
• If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention 
• 15% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they? "The latest Pew Research analysis also shows that internet non-adoption is correlated to a number of demographic variables, including age, educational attainment, household income, race and ethnicity, and community type." 
• Editor’s Note: ‘Dr. Abscess’ and Why Surgeon Scorecard Matters 
• Beluga Season Has Begun! You can watch the migration live! 
• Authority Issues
• In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me. "I had conducted the same kind of raid on suspected bombmakers and high-value insurgents. But the Fairfax County officers in my apartment were aiming their weapons at a target whose rap sheet consisted only of parking tickets and an overdue library book." The author goes on to explain how such tactics backfired on the military and caused them to change methods - and why domestic law enforcement needs to do the same thing. 
• Death of Choctaw Activist Rexdale Henry in Neshoba Jail Prompts Private Autopsy 
• ‘The video is not good': Cincinnati braces for footage release in campus cop killing of Sam Dubose 
• Black Students In The U.S. Get Criminalized While White Students Get Treatment 
• Other (Serious Stuff)
• July 28, 1868: 14th Amendment adopted 
• You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4 "It was humiliating. Actually, it was worse than humiliating—it was a harbinger. Maz understood, as he lay dead in that refinery, that Hollywood didn't want him to be an actor. Hollywood wanted him to be a caricature. 'I started acting in junior high,' he says. "I was in Guys and Dolls. I was Stanley Kowalski. In my head, before coming to Hollywood, I thought, "I can play anything."' But instead he'd become the latest iteration in Hollywood's long history of racist casting, reducing his religion and culture to a bunch of villainous, cartoonish psychopaths. He knew he had to get out."
• These Programs Are Helping Prisoners Live Again On The Outside "If we want to reduce the prison population, ex-offenders need more compassion and understanding from the criminal justice system."
• One City Tried Something Radical to Stop Gun Violence. This Report Suggests It's Working. Fascinating! 
• Sanders Rips Apart GE for Shipping Jobs to China After Begging for Bailout From Our Government "It’s clear that Sanders believes companies who receive bailout funds from the US government should in turn re-invest that money in America." Well, makes perfect sense to me, too. 
• Cecil the lion's killer revealed as American dentist "Conservation groups in Zimbabwe reacted angrily to the news that the 13-year-old animal had been killed: partly because the lion was known to visitors and seemingly enjoyed human contact, and partly because of the way in which he was killed. He was lured out of the national park and shot." 
• Other (Randomness)
• What's In A Namaste? Depends If You Live In India Or The U.S. "I started paying attention to what Americans mean by namaste. I got the feeling that they didn't think of it just as a greeting, but it had a spiritual connotation — a Hindu mantra, a divine chant, a yoga salutation. Using namaste in India never made me feel spiritual in any way. Even in the yoga classes I took in India, the teachers never uttered a namaste.[...] I live in America now, and when I hear someone say namaste to me in an organic grocery store, or at a yoga retreat, I find it funny and cute. It never fails to put a smile on my face. I always get the feeling that they mean something very different than I do."