Blogaround

1. Mandisa, Grammy-winning singer and 'American Idol' alum, has died at 47 (April 19) Oh my goodness, very shocked to hear this. Here's my favorite song from her:

2. Surprising No One, All 3,878 of Elon Musk’s Cybertrucks Are Being Recalled (April 20) "The brake pedal was still functioning and would override the accelerator if it became stuck. However, lifting one’s foot briefly off the pedal would result in the car instantly rising to dangerous speeds. That was particularly dangerous because the Cybertruck can go from 0 mph to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds." Holy crap.

3. The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat (April 16, via) "Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks."

4. Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, 82, Dies (April 19) 

5. This SMBC comic [via]. "Come to think of it, why are we even having this specific conversation when we're never going to have this exact conversation again later!?"

6. The Cass Review: Hey, What Does UK NHS Trans Report Mean? (April 18) "The Cass Review is a wonky, sciencey, jargony document that gives every appearance of being a Tory project intended to justify cracking down on medical care for trans people in the name of non-trans people who feel icky when forced to think repeatedly for weeks on end about surgeons coming for their genitals — but it nonetheless contains a few good things."

7. NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth (April 22, via) "The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth."

8. The ‘Progressive Evangelical’ Two-Step (April 23) "So Slaves, Women & Homosexuals starts with slavery because that establishes the possibility that clobber-texts may not be quite so indisputably authoritative after all. And then, as perfectnumber notes, it ends with an abstract discussion of the 'issue of homosexuality' as a way saying yesbutofcourse some such clobber-texts are still authoritative so, fear not, we’re not just saying that anything goes." The Slacktivist responds to my post on the book "Slaves, Women & Homosexuals" and connects it to the history of the organization Christians for Biblical Equality.

9. FTC bans contracts that keep workers from jumping to rival employers (April 23, via) "The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday banned noncompete agreements for most U.S. workers, a move that will affect an estimated 30 million employees bound by contracts that restrict workers from switching employers within their industry." Wow this sounds like a big deal! When I first read this, I thought, but isn't there an important business reason for non-compete agreements? Surely you can't just ban them- yeah they're a problem for workers, but solving it should be more complicated than that... right? But the article says, "Noncompete agreements have been prohibited in three states — California, North Dakota and Oklahoma — for more than a century. In recent years, 11 states and D.C. have passed laws that prohibit the agreements for hourly wage workers or those who fall below a salary threshold."