Lightening the Mood (Mood Tint!)

Yesterday was a very political post, so I'm going to do something light and entirely not political today (until the links, of course). I'm taking an online free course on color, and it's a lot of fun. This week, we're looking at color extraction and palette creation from mood images. It's a cool thing interior decorators do, and I'm never going to be an interior decorator, but it's fun to play with! I thought I'd use my flower picture from yesterday's post and see what I could do with it.

 I like it! I could see doing a living room in these colors, although I'm not generally a fan of fuchsia. Also, I can see me spending a lot of time playing with color extraction. Fun times!

And speaking of fun times, here's a cool video with nifty color facts (and a shameless plug for what sounds like my kind of book):

Links!

• Library Land
• This year's Nebula Award nominees are incredibly diverse — read some online  There is an insane amount of goodness on these lists...
• An Attempt To Save South Carolina's Historical Documents Is Destroying Them  "For 20 years, beginning in the 1950s, the state laminated documents like this to try to protect them from aging. This discoloration is not supposed to be happening; it's caused by a chemical reaction. The natural acids from the paper mix with the degrading laminate to create a noxious vinegar. Each passing year will further degrade the document until it's gone."
• “I have nothing to hide. Why should I care about my privacy?”  "There are two sets of reasons to care about your privacy even if you’ve got nothing to hide: ideological reasons and practical reasons."
• Health, Science, & Technology
• Nearby Star Hosts 7 Earth-Size Planets "[F]rom the surface of one of the middle worlds TRAPPIST-1 would be a salmon-colored orb appearing 10 times larger than the sun in Earth’s sky but no brighter than our star appears at dusk. You would feel rather than see most of its light, which peaks in warm, invisible rays of infrared. Every now and then a neighboring planet would drift by overhead, the nearest ones appearing twice the size of Earth’s full moon in the sky." Sounds beautiful...Also, am I the only one who thinks all the planets need to have saints' names? If you liked my twist on this news story, you should read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow series - because Catholics and SciFi go well together, actually.
• Life Expectancy Study Suggests U.S. Will Lag behind  "[A]mong high-income countries, the United States is likely to have the lowest life expectancy in 2030, with men and women expecting to live 79.5 and 83.3 years respectively....This was partly due to a lack of universal healthcare in the United States, and also due to factors such as relatively high child and maternal mortality rates, and high rates of homicides and obesity, the study said."
• Randomnesses
• Social Justice Must Be Complicated, Because Oppression Is Never Simple "Just because the end result of oppression may get us in the same room, it does not mean that we got there via the same path. And if the causes of our oppression are the not the same, why would we imagine that the solutions would be?"
• International
• Famine declared in part of South Sudan by government and UN Related: Famine looms in four countries as aid system struggles to cope, experts warn "While the generosity of donors has risen sixfold over the past 20 years, unprecedented levels of humanitarian suffering have overtaken financial support. Donor funding reached a record high last year but only half of the requirements were met, according to the UN’s humanitarian chief, Stephen O’Brien."
• U.S. News
• NEA President Sends Letter To Education Secretary Betsy DeVos 
• Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Likely to Bring a Flood of Lawsuits 
• Need to know about immigration? You can start at theSkimm's No Excuses site, because that's a good place to start. 
• Islamic Terrorists and American Mass Shooters Have Something in Common "In an earlier post, I discussed some social science research that supported the view that actions such as the Travel Ban that focus on Muslims is counter-productive because it adds to the very sense of alienation that leads to radicalization in the first place.  It turns out that this same dynamic of alienation is also behind  American mass shooters who have no connection to Islam."
• Permission Slip  "When we see racist or anti-semitic graffiti (or see Jewish property vandalized) the people making excuses for it may be right in a technical sense – a lot of it is probably the product of stupid kids, because vandalism tends to come from teenage boys. But the content of the vandalism is not a coincidence. It's a result of watching other people engage in a kind of social transgression (which teenage boys love, because it gets a rise out of people and brings them attention) without consequences."
• Chief digital officer steps down from White House job over background check  "White House Chief Digital Officer Gerrit Lansing was among the six staffers who were dismissed from the White House last week after being unable to pass an FBI background check, according to sources....President Donald Trump's director of scheduling, Caroline Wiles, was also among the six staffers who did not pass the intensive FBI screening....Two sources close to Wiles said she will get another job in the Treasury Department."
• The Pruitt Emails: E.P.A. Chief Was Arm in Arm With Industry  "In his new job, Mr. Pruitt will regulate many of the companies with which he coordinated as attorney general of Oklahoma. From that perch, Mr. Pruitt took part in 14 lawsuits against major E.P.A. environmental rules, at times in coordination with energy companies such as Oklahoma Gas & Electric, whose executives held a fund-raising event for Mr. Pruitt, while he joined with the company to challenge a rule that would require it to upgrade or replace certain coal-burning power plants." Gross.