Les Liens du Lundi

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Laurel Walmsley (NPR), Utah Woman charged with lewdness after being topless in her own home. There's... a lot going on here.
  
• 7News, Hero doctor sucks passenger's urine for 37 minutes in incredible mid-flight rescue. That. That certainly is a thing that happened.
  
• Peter Hannam (SMH), Climate Change Fund bankrools Warragamba dam wall raising, 'an outlay critics say is unrelated to the fund's original purpose.' Also not good for the black-throated finch.
  

Good News:

• David Copithorne (HearingTracker), Clear window surgical masks are a lifesaver for patients with hearing loss
  

Longer political and/or climate science

• Russell Marks (Saturday Paper), George Pell's appeal to the High Court:
  

  But this is not how the criminal law is supposed to work. The High Court has said as much for 25 years. It has consistently overturned state appeal courts that have confirmed original guilty verdicts at trial, in cases where the state appeal courts have engaged in reasoning inconsistent with the High Court’s approach since a case it decided in 1994, M v The Queen. What’s surprising is how often state appeal courts depart from this approach.

  
  Marks goes on to explain that the HC has set out the 'M Test' that should be applied in state appeals; few state appeals (Pell included) have done so. The case law precedent thus would look to be on Pell's side; if the HC upholds the Victorian verdict it effectively overturns M, which would make it easier to prosecute historical cases, but may have other consequences.
  

Longer historical, cultural, scientific, misc

• Francine Russon (Spectrum News, 2018), The costs of camoflauging autism.
  
• Angel Wilson (The Geekiary, Sept 2019), The psychology of fandom hyperfixation.
  
• Mia Sato (The Verge), Dial up!: How Hmong Americans turned a conference call into a radio of their own. This is fascinating, do recommend.
  

  When Lori Kido Lopez, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Asian American media, first moved to Wisconsin, she began researching Hmong media consumption and production. She first observed that though towns with larger Hmong populations might have a community newspaper or the rare community radio segment, it was difficult for Hmong people to find robust and consistent media about their community. She was missing what she would later find to be the most popular form of mass media for the Hmong.
  “[The Hmong I talked to were] just like, ‘Oh, you know, it’s Hmong radio or the cellphone show.’ Wherever the name they have for it,” Lopez says. “And you’re like, ‘No, there is no name for it. That’s how rare it is.’”