Roundup

Reading

Nothing finished this week, but I am midway through a couple of books - the biography Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow, and the memoir The Education of An Idealist by Samantha Power, who was the 2013-2017 UN ambassador for the US. Power won a Pulitzer for her '03 book on US foreign policy responses to genocide, and indeed, that and human rights was much of her focus in the Obama administration.

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Theatre

I watched A Christmas Carol while I was in DC. It was a good time, Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present were especially great, and apparently I still quite like the story.

Talking Meme

'tis the time.

Day 6: NOTPs/Least favourite ships
Day 7: Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid

RL

( vacation vacation vacation )

Random Links

The Vietnam Draft Lotteries Were A Scientific Experiments

The Vietnam draft lotteries took place at the cusp of the Information Age, and this timing could account for the wave of research focused on them, as contrasted with previous draft lotteries. The U.S. government had conducted similar drawings for mobilizations during World War I and World War II, but the infrastructure to track “subjects” consisted, at best, of paper forms slotted into cardboard folders. Merging those records, if preserved, with information about the outcomes of men eligible for the earlier draft lotteries would be prohibitively costly. Those lotteries, therefore, are hard to label “experiments”—their consequences can’t be studied. The Vietnam lotteries could, however, because electronic records and databases were appearing for the first time in the 1970s.

Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention

Books of the Year, as chosen by 42 Singaporean writers and artists

As Facebook caves to Singapore censorship, the writing is on the wall