Dipping back into unread email, 2024

11i24

The future is dangerous: Anglo-Nipponica Victor Mair at Language Log

12iv24

EDUCAUSE launches generative AI readiness assessment tool for higher education with AWS

14iv24

lulz

lulz Wikipedia

lulz Urban Dictionary

Lulz is awesome. Lulz is way better than lol. Lulz is a synonym for Schadenfreude and means "lol derived from other's suffering".

lulz at cyberwire.com

The laughs, the yucks, the amusement. The leetspeak expression is often given as an explanation of cyber actions, especially low-grade attacks like defacements and petty doxing, that lack any comprehensible external motive, whether that be revenge, hacktivism, criminal gain, or state action.

Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz

How Lulz Took Down Wall Street Douglas Rushkoff at Medium

...Norbert Wiener tried to warn us way back in the 1950s that digital technologies would be cybernetic in nature. They do not function in the straight linear fashion of the Industrial Age with its assembly lines, unidirectional drive toward progress, and growth-based capitalism. No, the world of cybernetics is a world of feedback loops — like the cycles of a computer. Call and response. Everything comes back, like karma. And though for a while it looked like digital technology was just going to accelerate that relentless drive toward infinite wealth for the few, feedback has finally kicked in, and the digital revolution so many of us have been waiting for may, at last, be here.

of the Maasai

...First came the British colonial authorities, who established the 5,700-square-mile Serengeti National Park, pushing the Maasai to an adjacent zone called the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, with its famous crater, where they were promised they could live. Then came UNESCO. It declared both Serengeti and Ngorongoro to be World Heritage Sites, which came with new restrictions. Western tourists began arriving, seeking an experience of Africa that a thousand movies promised—one of pristine beauty and big game, not people grazing cattle. Tanzanian authorities began leasing blocks of land to foreign hunting and safari companies, many of which promoted themselves as conservationists—a word the Maasai have come to associate with their own doom. Spread among the villages that dot the northern tourist zone, the Maasai have meanwhile been growing in number—their population has doubled in recent decades, to about 200,000. Inevitably, the clash of interests has led to bitter and occasionally violent conflict.
The Atlantic

***** 15iv24

The internal monologue, or "inner speech — a voice that one hears within their mind, either reflexively shooting out fragments of thoughts or deliberately controlled in moments of one's conscious life — is a rich presence in my life. Indeed, my internal monologue is a relentless presence in my life, loud, vibrant, and often disrespectful of my desire to fall asleep at night. What my inner monologue lacks in etiquette, however, it makes up for in mental productivity.

16iv24

Candide Wikipedia

Actually, Corporate Investment in AI Saw a Significant Drop in 2023 Lucas Ropek at gizmodo

Cracking the Bro Code Coleen Carrigan at MIT Press

"To be, or not to be, that is the question" the whole text from Hamlet

...Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

17iv24

Othering

Othering Wikipedia

Why Othering should be considered in research on health inequalities: Theoretical perspectives and research needs PMC

Us vs. Them: The process of othering CMHR

We need to get back to traditional American values Tom the Dancing Bug

Gibson (Loar) K-5 mandocello 1924 $100,000.00 at Mighty Fine Guitars

Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are Wikipedia

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear Wikipedia

Backup camera Wikipedia

19iv24

Winning Close-Up Photos Show Life in Sync With Water gizmodo

The Parts We Live With: D.H. Lawrence and the Yearning for Living Unison Marginalian

21iv24

The Problem Isn't Men, It's Bros Deconstructing prejudice Douglas Giles at Medium

Solopsism Wikipedia

Smelting and Steel in Photographs Craig Mod

Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair

23iv24

The incredible new tech that can recycle all plastics, forever New Scientist

Out of the Gray A 2X McPhee Crossing Alan Levine

25iv24

On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars Maggie Appleton

Death is a Feature Doc Searls

The Tyranny of Phylogeny: An Exhortation Elio at Small Things Considered

26iv24

*****

...activist Naomi Klein. She wrote in a recent 'Street Seder Address' published in The Guardian, that Zionism "is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery — the story of Passover itself — and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide ... a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe — and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate."

Netanyahu's virulent Likud form of Zionism, which he has now allied with the openly racist and even genocidal Religious Zionism and Jewish Power blocs, has created an image of the movement that is anathema to many progressive and leftist activists, and it fuels anti-Semitism as less informed people on the right and left conflate this ruthless ultra-nationalism with Judaism. Just as marriages can run their course, leading to a necessary divorce, the time has come for Jews to divorce Zionism. Bibi has become a literal Pharaoh to Palestinians. Klein adds, "From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats — much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet."

What Buddha Said Immediately After His Awakening Will Blow Your Mind Rami Dhanoa at The Taoist Online via Medium

Lalitavistara: The Play in Full

Minor White, Authenticity, and Reverie Kukkurovaca at hairybeast.net

The Nerd Urban Dictionary Chris Anderson at Medium

Wikipedia @ 20 Stories of an Incomplete Revolution at MIT Press

27iv24

Political Anthropology Edwin A Winckler JSTOR

Theorizing socialism: a prologue to the "transition" KATHERINE VERDERY American Ethnologist

Time, Space, and Structure in the Consolidation of the T'ang Dynasty (a.d. 617–700) Robert M Somers

Early Autumn Wikipedia

Louis Bromfield Wikipedia

The Second Act of Louis Bromfield The National Endowment for the Humanities

Malabar Farm: Historical Timeline

Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution The Planter of Modern Life

28iv24

Genetic engineering Wikipedia

Methods and Mechanisms for Genetic Manipulation of Plants, Animals, and Microorganisms - Safety of Genetically Engineered FoodsNCBI Bookshelf

Science and History of GMOs and Other Food Modification Processes FDA

What are genome editing and CRISPR-Cas9? MedlinePlus Genetics

Degrowth: Avoiding Eco-Collapse Stan Cox at Informed Comment

Echoes of Injustice: The Marshall Trilogy and the Native American Sovereignty When justice rests in your pocket Kemal M. Lepschoque, LL.M.

29iv24

Zarmanochegas Wikipedia

The Self-immolation of Kalanos and other Luminous Encounters Among Greeks and Indian Buddhists in the Hellenistic World Georgios T . Halkias - Academia.edu (pdf)

The Curious Case of Psychology in the Postmodern Era Carl Georg Solberg at Medium

DNA Discoveries in the Basque Country Zivah Avraham at Medium

Discovery of 20,000 Photographs Reveal World's First Police Crime Lab PetaPixel

New moon atlas the most detailed ever boing boing

Shaping the Future of Learning: The Role of AI in Education 4.0 via Stephen Downes

30iv24

Fifteen Essential Cookbooks New Yorker

1v24

"Intifada" in Arabic just means Uprising or Mass Protest; it is used for the Jewish Warsaw Uprising Juan Cole

3v24

Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End Alejandro Orradre at Medium

5v24

War in Gaza, Shibboleths on Campus The New Yorker

The Dawn of the Home Page John Seabrook at New Yorker 1995

E-mail was last year's way of communicating. This year is about making a Web site, an on-line space where millions can visit you.

6v24

Ley Lines, April 2024 bandcamp

Cloud Cuckoo Land Naomi Mitchison at Hathi Trust

7v24

The disenshittified internet starts with loyal "user agents" Cory Doctorow

MIT License text becomes viral “sad girl” piano ballad generated by AI Ars Technica

Trippy NASA Visualization Takes You Inside a Black Hole gizmodo

Burning to Write. And Vice Versa. Doc Searls

Feral Atlas

Feral Atlas invites you to explore the ecological worlds created when nonhuman entities become tangled up with human infrastructure projects. Seventy-nine field reports from scientists, humanists, and artists show you how to recognize "feral" ecologies, that is, ecologies that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but which have developed and spread beyond human control. These infrastructural effects, Feral Atlas argues, are the Anthropocene.

Playful, political, and insistently attuned to more-than-human histories, Feral Atlas does more than catalog sites of imperial and industrial ruin. Stretching conventional notions of maps and mapping, it draws on the relational potential of the digital to offer new ways of analyzing—and apprehending—the Anthropocene; while acknowledging danger, it demonstrates how in situ observation and transdisciplinary collaboration can cultivate vital forms of recognition and response to the urgent environmental challenges of our times.

Good and Bad Ideas xkcd

8v24

Three Paradigm Shifts About Rocks: Ridicules Which Turned Into Cherished Scientific Truths Avi Loeb at Medium on Alfred Wegener

A new look at sperm whale communication Victor Mair at Language Log

Our Weird Expectations of Technologies Giles Crouch

With so much hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Generative AI (GAI) and more robots opening more doors into society, literally and figuratively and other world-shifting technologies, perhaps it's time to explore our expectations around digital technologies impacting our world today. And why our expectations are rarely met, which is probably a good thing.

...Expectations of technologies run across all aspects of culture; politically, economically, societally, aesthetics, customs, norms and traditions. They vary by types of cultures, geographies and environments. This is largely why predictions of what a technology will do to and in our world are so often incorrect. Or funny.

Like we expected that the introduction of autocorrect on smartphones would help us all communicate and understand each other better. That too, went a wee bit sideways, sometimes in funny ways, sometimes not. Today we even have "techno-comedy" on social media from YouTube to TikTok and Reels. Humour plays an important role in both setting expectations and helping us, at a societal level, take stock of when it fails to meet our expectations.

9v24

Neuralink Says Its First Brain Implant in a Human Encountered a Data Loss Problem gizmodo

At Dien Bien Phu Chris Mullin at LRB

...The French strategy seems to have been to block the route into neighbouring Laos, where an uprising against colonial rule was also underway, and to tempt the Viet Minh into a set-piece battle which the French, with their tanks, artillery and aircraft, were confident of winning. The construction of an airstrip meant they were not dependent on roads and well supplied with heavy weapons. They were taken completely by surprise when, on 13 March 1954, the Viet Minh artillery, much of it recycled US weaponry captured by the Chinese in Korea, opened up on them from the surrounding hills. Before long the air strip was out of action and the French troops were trapped.

...The battle at Dien Bien Phu lasted 55 days. On 8 May 1954 the French government announced that France would withdraw from Vietnam. The casualties on both sides were horrendous. About eight thousand Viet Minh were killed and twelve thousand wounded. French casualties, many of whom were recruited from their North African colonies, numbered 2200 dead and 5600 wounded. Many more died on the long march into captivity.

Campus Uproar Radio Open Source

Campus Uproar

We are dropping in conversationally on faculty players we know on either side of the country: Sophia Azeb at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Zachary Samalin at New York University in Manhattan. Santa Cruz is encamped in tents and abuzz with notably civil and inclusive debates about rights, wrongs, and history—all the arguments about Palestine that Congress doesn't have. You could wonder: what if the 19-year-olds who have preempted the conversation from the campuses are, in fact, the leaders we have been looking for?

10v24

The Secret Life of Bridges arcgis

Personal vs. Personalized AI Doc Searls

11v24

Documenting Human Menace in High-Altitude Southern California Environmental awareness motivated Robert Adams' landscapes Matthew Bamberg at Medium

Your Brain on Art Ted Gioia

Indigo and Cabbage part1 and Indigo and Cabbage part 2 Victor Mair at Language Log

12v24

Taiwanese in France Victor Mair at Language Log

Roland W. Reed — Every Picture Tells A Story Sara Relli at Medium

Biological Consciousness Wolfgang Stegemann at Medium

Chasing xkcd

13v24

Cryptonomicon Wikipedia

Narrativium Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki

Narrativium ribbonfarm

14v24

Tech-Enabled Telepathy Moves Closer to Reality With Latest Breakthrough gizmodo

14v24

Galaxy Song Wikipedia

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid
Obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had
Quite enough

Just remember that you're standing
On a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second
So it's reckoned
The sun that is the source of all our power

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at four hundred thousand miles an hour
In the galaxy we call the Milky Way

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side
It bulges in the middle, six thousand light years thick
But out by us, it's just a thousand light years wide

We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
We go 'round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, of the speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
'Cause it's bugger all down here on Earth

15v24

John Gardner on the Key to Self-Renewal Across Life and the Art of Making Rather Than Finding Meaning Marginalian

18v24

Harmless Fun Charlie Stross

...I probably don't need to describe how social media have allowed stories that appeal to our "common sense" beliefs but are actually misinformed to spread virally, never mind the ease of confusing satire and reality online, or the use of media channels by hostile state actors to spread propaganda designed to incite chaotic or self-destructive behaviour in rival powers' populations. Do I?

Adobe's CEO is Just Not on the Same Wavelength as Artists PetaPixel

Fatimah Hossaini Afghan artist

Peevable words and phrases: journey Victor Mair at Language Log

...we're facing a veritable onslaught from "journey":

When Did Everything Become a 'Journey'?

Changing our hair, getting divorced, taking spa vacations —they're not just things we do; theyre "journeys." The quest for better health is the greatest journey of all.
Lisa Miller, NYT (5/13/24)

19v24

On Giving Up: Adam Phillips on Knowing What You Want, the Art of Self-Revision, and the Courage to Change Your Mind Marginalian

20v24

Orchids feed their young through underground fungal connections New Scientist

Weekly Top Picks at Algorithmic Bridge

Distressing Dialogues, by Edna St. Vincent Millay UPenn Library

21v24

Nova Scotia's Billion-Dollar Lobster Wars The New Yorker

New Windows AI feature records everything you've done on your PC Ars Technica

22v24

Making Sense of the Missing Clair Wills at NYRB, interview with Fintan O'Toole

Japanese knotweed National Invasive Species Information Center

Japanese Knotweed — Profile and Resources Invasive Species Centre

Invasive Plants, Japanese Knotweed Maine Natural Areas Program

23v24

What Happens in the Brain to Cause Depression? Quanta Magazine

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp Cory Doctorow

John Oliver Explains Why Ethanol Fuel Is a Lie gizmodo

24v24

Surviving as an Extremophile in the Acidic Life of Academia Avi Loeb at Medium

Since I came to Harvard thirty one years ago, the relative number of administrators to faculty has increased considerably. There used to be a direct line between a faculty member and the top Harvard leadership, but today there are many gatekeepers along the way, including new layers of mini-deans and intermediate administrators for specific mini-tasks. Faculty have more forms to fill, more rules to follow, more restrictions to keep in mind, and more committees to attend.

How to Wirelessly Send Docs and E-Books to Your Kindle lifehacker

25v24

Wrenching Around Google URLs, Get Your Old Skool Search Back (for now) Alan Levine

Over 20 Technology and Critical Infrastructure Executives, Civil Rights Leaders, Academics, and Policymakers Join New DHS Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board to Advance A''s Responsible Development and Deployment Homeland Security (classic Fox and Chicken House)

Take Control of Your Life: The Concept of Agency and Its Four Helpers Pattison Professional Counseling and Mediation Center

Agency is the sense of control that you feel in your life, your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior, and have faith in your ability to handle a wide range of tasks and situations. Your sense of agency helps you to be psychologically stable, yet flexible in the face of conflict or change.

Agency

Agency is your very own power, your ability, to affect the future.

Agency (sociology) Wikipedia

Agency (psychology) Wikipedia

Agency (philosophy) Wikipedia

Agency Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

What Is the Sense of Agency and Why Does it Matter?PMC

Utopian Realism a speech by Bruce Sterling at Medium

Faux ScarJo and the Descent of the A.I. Vultures New Yorker

Lycia Wikipedia

Lycian language Wikipedia

26v24

This is how your perception shapes reality Chris Ferrie at Medium

Indiana Jones, Foie Gras, and Confronting Forced Patriotism Greyson Ferguson at Medium

Kierkegaard and the Burning World Steven Gambardella at Medium

Second Brain/Attention/Find Your Books Kevin Kelly

Is "Knol" a radical move for Google —challenging big media? at Googlization of Everything

27v24

The Anthropocene Review (some open access)

Ordinary Notes Christina Sharpe via Conscientious Photography

28v24

Where is the Most Complex Highway Interchange in the United States? Jim Fonseca at The One Minute Geographer

29v24

Charles Darwin's - It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank - quotation

Origin of Species Variorum darwin-online. org

Social Anthropology archives UPenn

30v24

Do Not Attempt to Adjust Your Book J.W. McCormack at The Baffler

Ottla Kafka

Avoiding people because of what you suspect they might think Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber

1vi24

The Inescapabnle Thingness Roz Chast at New Yorker

Small, cheap, and weird: A history of the microcar Ars Technica

Cities Wolf in the Living Room

2vi24

Popova this morning:

That we can wonder is what saves us. The price evolution had us pay for our exquisite consciousness is an awareness of our mortality — an awareness unbearable without the capacity for wonder at the miracle of existing at all, improbable as we each are against the staggering odds of never having been born, alive on an improbable world unlike any other known. Wonder is the religion nature invented long before we told our first myths of prophets and messiahs, the great benediction of our fate as borrowed stardust on short-term loan from an entropic universe.

New study unravels Darwin's 'abominable mystery' surrounding origin of flowering plants ScienceDaily

Bob Dylan — Shelter from the Storm Lyrics

Buried In the Mix: "Shelter from the Storm" Adam Nathan

You will never listen to this song the same way again. Here are 17 things you never heard in Bob Dylan's Shelter from the Storm.

The Sámi Language August Astrom at Medium

The Reason You See the Virgin Mary in Your Grilled Cheese Riley York at Medium

Clickbait at knowyourmeme.com

Clickbait Wikipedia

3vi24

Persicaria cespitosa (knotweed) Wikipedia

14 Free Online Tools You Should Know About gizmodo

4vi24

The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality Marginalian

5vi24

Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 4 Victor Mair at Language Log

The Internet's Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes Elon Musk's Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.

6vi24

Why are plants green? John Innes Centre

Why Are Plants Green? To Reduce the Noise in Photosynthesis Quanta Magazine

Photosynthesis, Chloroplast Learn Science at Scitable

Anglo-Thanatocene, or D-Day as liberal militarism Adam Tooze

...D-day exemplifies what French historians Bonneuil and Fressoz aptly call the Thanatocene — the distinctively modern mobilization of energy and resources towards the project of destruction, killing and death.

...at the same time, the quintessential example of what Bonneuil and Fressoz call the Anglocene — i.e. the epochal role played by the British Empire and then American hegemony in shaping a global system of power based first on coal and then on hydrocarbons.

Autocatalysis—The fundamental principle of life Wolfgang Stegemann at Medium

Photographers Outraged by Adobe's New Privacy and Content Terms PetaPixel

9vi24

Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health? Quanta Magazine

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity Marginalian

Australia's Story: On the Ground 2.5 Billion years ago Simon Cameron at Medium

Pilbara stromatolites showing Earth's earliest life forms nominated for national heritage listing ABC News

Stromatolites and other early life at wa.gov

Beyond the Self: A Fruitful Dialogue Between a Buddhist and a Neuroscientist Harry Readhead at Medium

H5N1: International failures and uncomfortable truths at crofsblogs

10 Controversial Things I Believe About AI That I Shouldn't Say Out Loud Alberto Romero at Medium

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11vi24

Generative AI as Learning Tool Mike Loukides at O'Reilly.com

From Chartbook:

The amount of fish farmed globally has surpassed the wild catch for the first time as production soars to meet rising demand. In 2022, some 94.4mn tonnes of fish were farmed in pens and ponds, compared with 91mn tonnes caught in open water, according to a new report from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. The boom in aquaculture — concentrated in Asia, which the FAO says accounts for 90 per cent of global production — was allowing the world to consume ever more fish, said Manuel Barange, director of the UN agency's fisheries and aquaculture division. Average consumption per person per year has more than doubled since the 1960s, from around 9kg to 20.7kg, with more than 3bn people now relying on fish or seafood as their main source of protein, according to the FAO. "[Aquaculture] is the fastest-growing food production system in the world," said Barange. This was good news in terms of food availability, he said, "because the increasing consumption of aquatic foods does not come on the back of greater exploitation of oceans, lakes and rivers". However, environmental and animal welfare NGOs have criticised the FAO's position. In an open letter addressed to Barange and published on Friday, signatories from some 160 organisations urged the UN body to exclude farmed salmon, sea bass, sea bream and other carnivorous fin fish from its definitions of sustainable aquaculture. They say the industrial farming of these species is "destroying local environments, depleting wild fish stocks and harming local economies". ... Some 40 years ago, as much as 40 per cent of wild-caught fish was used for animal feed but this was now down to less than 20 per cent, he said. In the past, around 3kg to 4kg of fish meal was required to produce 1kg of a farmed fish such as salmon, he added. But different feed formulations meant this was now down to 1kg of fish meal to produce 1.2kg. On average across all fed aquaculture species, 1kg of fishmeal produced 4kg of fish, and for prawns, shrimps and salmon around 90 per cent of feed was vegetable-based, Barange said. This evolution had allowed aquaculture "to grow without using more fish from the ocean".

12vi24

tangled bank variorum at Darwin Online

13vi24

Acts of Language NYRB

15vi24

What is the Plant's Eye View?

The Botany of Desire Wikipedia

16vi24

The New Science of Plant Intelligence and the Mystery of What Makes a Mind Marginalian

Every Loss Reveals What We Are Made of: Blue Bananas, Why Leaves Change Color, and the Ongoing Mystery of Chlorophyll Marginalian

The Holocene: An Environmental History, 3rd Edition = Student Companion Site

The Rus' in Their Own Words August Astrom at Medium

Befriending a Blackbird Marginalian

17vi24

Past Global Changes

...supports research which aims to understand the Earth's past environment in order to obtain better predictions of future climate and environment, and inform strategies for sustainability.

18vi24

Vegetation History and Archaeobotany

mg. Victor Mair at Language Log

Aerial Glacier Photographs A collection of 100,000 striking high-resolution aerial photos of glaciers, photographed over 40 years with a 63-pound WW II surveillance camera

Generative AI for farming Mike Loukides at Oreilly.com

Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun Meghan Willcoxon at Quanta

19vi24

How the Earth Breathes Cole Frederick at Medium

20vi24

Why herbs evolved to smell and taste so delicious New Scientist

Global Breaking Alerts Map at loxodromelabs.com

The Zionism Riddle at Radio Open Source

Guitars, Wash Boards, and Tea Chests: How Skiffle Became the 1950s Punk the Hobbledehoy

21vi24

Jeans designed to look like your fly is down boingboing

Are plants conscious? Radical new experiments suggest they could be New Scientist

O flesh, how art thou fishified Rob Horning at Substack

If No One Told You It Was Impossible You'd Be Capable of Anything Alberto Romero at The Algorithmic Bridge

Ethnobotanical Methods PowerPoint Presentation

This Photographer Documented Native American Tribes Before They Vanished PetaPixel

22vi24

Jutlandic August Astrom at Medium

The Best British folk songs, as chosen by British folk singers

23vi24

Sudan Starves NYRB

https://boingboing.net/2024/06/23/ever-wondered-how-a-sinkhole-works-this-video-explains-it.html boing boing

24vi24

Photos of a rusting Alaskan river win New Scientist Editors Award New Scientist

Mapmatics review: Engaging new book explores how vital mathematics is to map-making New Scientist

The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling Lisa Song at Informed Consent

Writers Named Neil: A Guide Aaron Zinger

Driven By The Past A Road Trip Through the American West

World word: soap Victor Mair at Language Log

25vi24

Economist on sriracha

Sweet and spicy with a sour tinge, sriracha sauce was an instant hit when David Tran, a Vietnamese refugee, brought it to America in the 1980s under the brand Huy Fong Foods. Asian eateries were the first to snap up Mr Tran's hot sauce, but before long the green-nozzled bottle, with its distinctive rooster logo, had become a staple in restaurants and pantries alike. Within just a few years Mr Tran went from hawking his wares out of a Chevy van in Los Angeles to walking the floor of a 20,000-square-metre factory. By 2020 his business was worth $1bn. Since then, however, it has suffered a meltdown. First came grumblings by fans that the condiment had lost its vibrant crimson colour and peppery punch. Next came the shortages. Enthusiasts soon panicked and began to hoard the stuff. At one point last year resale prices for Huy Fong's sauce on eBay, an e-commerce site, reached as high as $150 per bottle. To cap it off, last month the company announced it was halting production until at least September. For decades Huy Fong set its sriracha apart with fresh jalapeños reddened on the vine, a difficult commodity to grow at scale. Competitors turned to dried chillies. Mr Tran turned to Craig Underwood, a Californian with a penchant for peppers. For 28 years Underwood Ranches, his company, met all Huy Fong's jalapeño needs, at one point producing close to 45,000 tonnes a year. To fill Huy Fong's bottles, Underwood Ranches expanded its acreage ten-fold. The two men became chums. In 2017, however, the relationship soured following a disagreement between Mr Tran and Mr Underwood over financial terms. Although Mr Tran scrambled to find new growers, turning south to Mexico, none has been able to reliably meet his exacting requirements. "It wasn't easy to put together that supply chain," Mr Underwood explains. Huy Fong's woes began in earnest once its reserves began to run out in 2020...

26vi24

The Wojak Meme Generator, gee whiz Bruce Sterling

Ever heard of James Thurber? He's been dead since 1961 Bruce Sterling

Well, maybe James Thurber (1894-1961) and his graphically simple, meme-like cartoons are overdue Bruce Sterling

the government isn't real Bruce Sterling

27vi24

Babylon Berlin season 4 and How to Watch MHz Choice on Amazon Prime

Where Immigrants are Settling Maps Mania

Daniel Coe's Astonishing River Cartography Orion Magazine

29vi24

Alfred Crosby

Ecological Imperialism Wikipedia

Alfred W Crosby Wikipedia

Following the Trail of a Giant: Alfred W. Crosby

Environmental Historian: An Interview with Alfred W. Crosby JSTOR

Crosby on The Great Flu

30vi24

Hedningarnas moraoud: innovation, fantasi och nygamla musikinstrument pdf

"The Hadal Zone," by Annie Proulx The New Yorker

Mutualisms evolve in correlation across the plant tree of life Sinnott‐Armstrong - New Phytologist - Wiley Online Library

Genetic analyses of embryo homology and ontogeny in the model grass Zea mays subsp. mays Wu - New Phytologist - Wiley Online Library

Zhuang

Zhuang people Wikipedia

Zhuang Minority

Sinification of the Zhuang People Pingwen Huang pdf

A hidden minlority revealed Victor Mair at Language Log

The Future, Present, and Past of News Doc Searls

1vii24

Behind the Scenes with Thelonious Monk in "Rewind & Play" New Yorker

I have nothing to say on AI and I am saying it Brian at abject.ca

...As part of a university's learning technology team, I don't have the option of opting out of the AI hubbub. I try to keep up with the reading, pro and con.

(Quotes Tom Woodward:
LLMs and AI are big enough that I can't be pro or con. I like certain potentials. I could have some real fun with aspects of these massively different technologies. I could also worry about so many things. I think Gardners old bag of gold analogy applies in lots of ways. Unfortunately, what we have learned is that if there is a bag of gold, capitalism will sell you plenty of high-priced, addictive, radioactive-lead-asbestos, gold-like items created by destroying the most beautiful areas in the world using slave labor. Soon no one will remember what real gold even looks like or that we didn't have to do it this way or that most of the problems were created by pure greed. The companies will then charge us for rehab.

9vii24

Zoe Aqua: The Romanian Synagogue Concert Tour Dumneazu

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Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today.

Calculating Empires centers on four themes: communication, computation, classification and control. Across the centuries, the work illustrates the shifts in communication devices, infrastructures, and computational architectures, and how they are entwined with the histories of social control and classification. The vertical axis represents time, beginning with the 16th century at the base. The horizontal axis features a collection of systems: from algorithms to architecture, bodies to borders. Navigation is flexible: you can follow a theme, a time period, or set of ideas.

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Preliminary Notes on the Delvish Dialect Bruce Sterling at Medium

(of LLMs)
The upshot of this effort is a new dialect. It's a distinct subcultural jargon or cant, the world's first patois of nonhuman origin. This distinctive human-LLM pidgin is a high-tech, high-volume, extensively distributed, conversational, widely spoken-and-read textual output that closely resembles natural human language. Although it appears as words, it never arises from "words" — instead, it arises from the statistical relationships between "tokens" as processed by pre-trained transformers employing a neural probabilistic language model.

And we'll be reading a whole lot of it. The effort to spread this new, nonhuman dialect is a colossal technical endeavor that ranks with the likes of nuclear power and genetically modified food. So it's not a matter of your individual choice, that you might choose to read it or not to read it; instead, much like background radioactivity and processed flour from GMO maize, it's already everywhere

...I'm inventing a handy neologism (as is my wont), and I'm calling all of these Large Language Model dialects "Delvish." The peculiar word "delve" is very commonly used by Large Language Models. People have noticed this odd verbal quirk, "Delve," so if you also notice some modern writer "delving," there's quite a good chance he's not human.

...Unwanted, spammy Delvish content has already acquired many pejorative neologisms, such as "fluff," "machine slop," "botshit" and "ChatGPTese."

.

100 Best Books of the 21st Century The New York Times

Extinction or adaptation? Three decades of change in shifting cultivation in Sarawak, Malaysia T. S. Hansen, O. Mertz at Environmental & Soil Science Journal (2006)

Shifting cultivation is commonly believed to be disappearing in Southeast Asia, but appears relatively persistent in some areas with alternative economic opportunities. This paper analyses how three decades of development have influenced both the decline and persistence of shifting cultivation in Sarawak, Malaysia. Changes in land use and demography are analysed in two Iban shifting cultivation communities, which differ in access to markets, off-farm work, and in their proximity to large-scale land development. Although the Sarawak State Government's policies to limit shifting cultivation have not proven effective, introduction of compulsory school attendance, investment in infrastructure and associated access to markets and employment opportunities have gradually changed local livelihoods, now composed of subsistence and commercial farming, land development and connections to local and international labour markets. Shifting cultivation of hill rice has persisted in both communities despite other economic opportunities and has been maintained for a range of reasons. However, increasing permanent migration of younger people and pressure on land from land development may gradually end shifting cultivation, particularly in more developed areas.

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Psilocybin generates psychedelic experience by disrupting brain network ScienceDaily

Bandelier National Monument Andy Ilachinski

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The 10 Best James Webb Space Telescope Photos (So Far)PetaPixel

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Planetary boundaries Stockholm Resilience Centre

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries Science Advances

My Favorite Maine Places Two of them are secrets. The third is the Schoodic Peninsula. Thomas E. Ricksat Medium

Immigrastion and the American Nations Colin Woodard

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Wikipedia

29viii24

Lyme disease test gives hope for a speedier diagnosis New Scientist

Eastern equine encephalitis: Mosquito-borne illnesses are spiking across the world New Scientist

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Understanding Albrecht Dürer's Masterpieces: The Knight, Death and the Devil, St. Jerome in His Study, and Melencolia I Vault Editions

Web of Nature Andy Ilachinski

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Swamp Thing (comic book) Wikipedia

Universal's new Ministry of Magic theme park (video) Boing Boing

3viii24

"Couch-fucker" at stronglang

The Types of the Folk-Tale (Aarne) at Hathi Trust

New research sheds light on relationships between plants and insects in forest ecosystems Science News

The Miraculous Origin of Brain Intelligence in Land Animals (Like Us) When aquatic animals first transitioned to land, a virus-like element probably hijacked their neurons. Shin Jie Yong at Medium

John Thompson's China (1873-74) at MIT Visualizing Cultures

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The Canadian Eastern Woodlands — A "Divided Cultural Enclave" Sara Relli at Medium

Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language Victor Mair at Language Log

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Mad Magazine at the Norman Rockwell Museum boing boing

Places Journal UC Berkeley and Archive and explore Places

Demographics of North African human populations unravelled using genomic data and artificial intelligence ScienceDaily

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Keto diet helps with weight loss but also raises cholesterol levels New Scientist

Emotional overlap Venn diagrams at Flowing Data

Intelligence from the Future of the Past Santa Fe Institute

Setting the terms, redux Doc Searls

A Winter Tour of the Hidden Corners of a Little Town in Upstate NY James Howard Kunstler (2013)

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What is a schema? How we use shortcuts to organize and interpret information Kendra Cherry

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The Presidential Medal of Cartography Maps Mania

Your Voice Is a Garden: Margaret Watts Hughes's Wondrous Victorian Visualizations of Sound Marginalian

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Zotero 7: Zotero, redesigned

10viii24

How European Hostilities Impacted First Nations in the Atlantic Provinces Sara Relli at Medium

The story of Pentangle's "Basket Of Light" Hobbledehoy

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mapsontheweb: Are you certain that God exists? other sides of a nobody

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Prefixes and suffixes for common Japanese dishes Victor Mair at Language Log

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"They're such NPCs" — Why Elon Musk thinks you're not real Boing Boing

Halide's 'Anti-Intelligent' Update Makes iPhone Photos Truly Natural PetaPixel

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The 6 Hidden Patterns: Introduction Hanzi Freinacht at Medium

Giant fossil seeds from Borneo record ancient plant migration ScienceDaily

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Why is mpox a global emergency again so soon after the last one? New Scientist

The surprising way sunflowers work together to get enough light New Scientist

A Better Way to Do News Doc Searls

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Iain McGilchrist Wikipedia

scone/scone Marc Liberman at Language Log

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10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing Or How Silicon Valley Started Breaking Bad Ted Gioia

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Neoliberalism and its enemies IV The success of full employment and the failure to adjust Matthew Yglesias

22viii24

What is quietism? GotQuestions.org

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Tamarind Wikipedia

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Bhakti Wikipedia

Jñāna Wikipedia

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A Field Guide to Bros New Yorker

The Plight of the Political Satirist The New Yorker

The Money Mountains of Los Angeles Maps Mania

Freemium worship Mark Liberman at Language Log

The Best Apps to Improve Spotify's Awful User Interface lifehacker

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Fungus transforms food waste into haute cuisine New Scientist

Map of job gains and losses flowing data

"Wipe it off the Face of the Earth!" Israel's War on the United Nations and International Law Ramzy Baroud at Informed Consent

Forms Without Substance Andy Ilachinski

On Heath and the demise of western Marxism Eric Schliesser at Crooked Timber

Advancing contemplative knowledge and practice Journal of Contemplative Studies

Where Ethics Meet Earth The Aldo Leopold Foundation

Aldo Leopold Wikipedia

Zeitgeist Wikipedia

Overton Window Wikipedia

The Case of the Missing Chacmools Geoffrey Gray onCarlos Castaneda

This App Quickly Shrinks Any Image Without Reducing Quality lifehacker

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The Full Catalogue of the Earth.s Impact structures Wayback Machine 899 records

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You and the Universe: N.J. Berrill's Poetic 1958 Masterpiece of Cosmic Perspective Marginalian

Metamorphosis Wikipedia

Meta (prefix) Wikipedia

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

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Climate Change has deep historical Roots Amitav Ghosh explores how Capitalism and Colonialism fit in at Informed Comment (Nutmeg's Curse)

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Can we solve quantum theory's biggest problem by redefining reality? New Scientist

Oncom Wikipedia

Images Can Shape Us Roberto at Small Things Considered

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Niagara Concealed Andy Ilachinski

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Berber, emic vs. etic Victor Mair at Language Log

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Seeds: Time Capsules of Life Papadakis

I [Still] Blog Therefore I [Still] Am Alan Levine

Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript

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Nuclear clock: How the most precise timepiece ever could change our view of the cosmos New Scientist

AI Blues Mike Loukides at O'Reilly

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Where the Crops Grow FlowingData

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Leaves of Forgotten Paths Andy Ilachinski

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Between the Covers Naomi Klein Interview Tin House

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Kicking Bishop Brennan Up The Arse

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The Philosophy of Time Douglas Giles at Medium

Cells Across the Tree of Life Exchange 'Text Messages Using RNA Quanta Magazine

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Maps Mania

What Am I Reading These Days? The New Yorker

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Why the words we use in physics obscure the true nature of reality New Scientist

Physicist David Wolpert on how to study concepts beyond imagination New Scientist

Font making for oracle bone inscription studies Victor Mair at Language Log

From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem Read by David Byrne Marginalian

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Earth got even hotter than we thought during past 500 million years New Scientist

Light has been seen leaving an atom cloud before it entered New Scientist

Quantum time travel: The experiment to 'send a particle into the past' New Scientist

A Declaration on Future Generations could bring the changes we need New Scientist

A Look Behind the Screens: Examoning the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services pdf via Bruce Sterling

Phantastic Job! ("Phanerozoic Time-evolving Averaged Surface Temperature Illustrative Curve") Gavin at Real Climate

For-Profit US Healthcare System—Once Again—Ranks Dead Last Among Its Peers Informed Comment

Deptford Trilogy Chris Lovegrove

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The Enchanted Loom On the mind's ability to reinterpret the past and the tenth anniversary of Lapham's Quarterly. By Lewis H. Lapham

20 Slang Terms From World War I

Scientists say we have enough evidence to agree global action on microplastics ScienceDaily

❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧

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On Intelligence Doc Searls

Grocery Owner Territories flowing data

Tara Dower Sets New Overall Supported Fastest Known Time on the Appalachian Trail

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Study finds drinking plenty of coffee is good for you Boing Boing

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The brain has its own microbiome. Here's what it means for your health New Scientist

Satellite Spots 'Star Trek' Starfleet Logo Among Dirty Sea Ice PetaPixel

L'intelligence artificielle dans l'éducation : contexte, règles et limites Stephen Downes

booklover: "If you've still got a nation of people sitting in front of screens, pretending, ...

If you've still got a nation of people sitting in front of screens, pretending, interacting with images rather than each other, feeling lonely and so needing more and more images, you're going to have the same basic problem. And the better the images get, the more tempting it's going to be to interact with images rather than other people. And I think the emptier it's going to get.
David Foster Wallace, interview on The Connection (1996)

Modern man does not understand how much his 'rationalism' ...has put him at the mercy of the psychic 'underworld'... Carl Jung

He has freed himself from 'superstition' (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.

Google Earth Adds Historical Imagery to Track Location Changes Over Time PetaPixel

Belle Sisoski Official Website

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The Subculture of Cryptocurrency Giles Crouch at Medium

WH Auden: SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

...
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Return to work and dying on the job Cory Doctorow

Joe Boyd Wikipedia

Boyd was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Princeton, New Jersey. He attended Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut. He first became involved in music promoting blues artists while a student at Harvard University. After graduating, Boyd worked as a production and tour manager for music impresario George Wein, which took Boyd to Europe to organise concerts with Muddy Waters, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Boyd was responsible for the sound at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Bob Dylan played a controversial set backed by electric musicians...

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How We Become Ourselves: Erik Erikson's 8 Stages of Human Development Marginalian

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Bacteria can work as a team to spot prime numbers and vowels New Scientist

The Beatles Most Hated Album Saved Their Career Daniel Van Auken at Medium

How the Lakota Became the 'American Refugees' Sara Relli ast Medium

7 Words With Truly Surprising Opposites Jack Shepherd at Medium

In 1939, a Photojournalist Documented a Road Trip to Break Her Drug Addiction C.S. Voll ast Medium

Lost Civilizations from Our Cosmic Past Avi Loeb at Medium

Francesca Todde's Iuzza at Conscientious Photography

The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology Max G Levy at Quanta

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

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Lengthened consonants mark the beginning of words ScienceDaily

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30 Things I've Learned About AI In 8 years of studying and writing about it Alberto Romero at Algorithmic Bridge

Byte-Sized Beliefs: Memes as Social Mirror Giles Crouch at Medium

Memes may seem simple, they are anything but. They play a key role in our digital societies and cultures...

The Finest Mystery Jonathan Geltner at slantbooks.org

...I have never been interested in mysteries set elsewhere than in England. The best of all such mysteries, in my opinion, and perhaps the one that best justifies my feeling for the genre, is the one that I have just re-read, Sayers's finest work, The Nine Tailors

Little Green Ringing Book

A trusty pocket guide for beginner bellringers, as you discover a fascinating art and a lifelong hobby. It explains the terms you'll encounter and answers your questions as it introduces you to bells and change ringing, and helps you ring rounds and call changes.

If you want to progress to ringing methods — the 'tunes' of change ringing — the book is a collection of exercises, tips and explanations, from handling a bell to Plain Bob and Grandsire.

It's useful for experienced ringers too — it features Kaleidoscope ringing, methods on three and four, and simple slow course, little, and place methods, so you'll never be caught out or short of ideas again.

Scientists Witness the Birth of Water Molecules at the Smallest Scale Yet gizmodo

Spy Plane Uncovers Radioactive Gamma Rays in Tropical Thunderstorms gizmodo

Bakhtin's Theory of the Literary Chronotope (available for download)

Our cosmic neighborhood may be 10x larger ScienceDaily

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How Rice Tempted Chickens to Live With Humans Prateek Dasgupta at Medium

B Teams in the A League Michael Alford at Medium

...The camera business has changed. Cameras used to be a mechanical product. The "sensor" was film, and you got film at the corner store. Cameras were just a light-tight box to put it in. What distinguished cameras from each other was the quality of their lenses, the ergonomics of their bodies, and the performance and reliability of their mechanisms.

Now each camera has its own super-high-tech sensor instead of film, often manufactured by Sony, but customized by each company. Cameras are now computers, so companies must have the chops to make those. Computerized cameras are slaves to software, so companies must code with the best and keep on iterating over the life of the product.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice... Catrina Prager at Medium

It's one of those old movies that you must see. At least once. Just so you don't come off as ignorant when the crowds you like to mix with quote it. I grew up on 'old' comedy, on vaudeville and abstraction. On nonsense and circus. The very first time, I watched Beetlejuice out of a sense of obligation...

Who Are the Japanese? New DNA Study Shocks Scientists SciTech Daily

A Fascinating Short History of the Kodak Snapshot PetaPixel

Prime's enshittified advertising Cory Doctorow

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Ants can be used to make yogurt — and now we know how it works New Scientist

Oyster reefs once thrived along Europe's coasts — now they're gone

Elephant Butte NM

Fascinating photo of a train crossing Elephant Butte Dam in 1915 boing boing

Elephant Butte Lake State Park

Elephant Butte, New Mexico Wikipedia

The Nicknames of America Maps Mania

Some U.S. cities have very quirky nicknames. Apparently, the citizens of Auburn, Alabama like to call their town the 'Armpit of the Confederacy'. While their nearby neighbors in Gordo, Alabama call their home the 'Armpit of Civilization'.

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Rise in drug overdose deaths, led by fentanyl FlowingData

Kolbert on Greenland ice sheet, New Yorker

The Greenland ice sheet has the shape of a dome, with Summit resting at the very top. The ice dome is so immense that it's hard to picture, even if you've flown across it. It extends over more than six hundred and fifty thousand square miles—an area roughly the size of Alaska—and in the middle it is two miles tall. It is massive enough to depress the Earth's crust and to exert a significant gravitational pull on the oceans. If all of Greenland's ice were cut into one-inch cubes and these were piled one on top of another, the stack would reach Alpha Centauri. If it melted—a rather more plausible scenario—global sea levels would rise by twenty feet...

The great wheelworks of the climate, the oceans transport fantastic amounts of energy—a quadrillion watts' worth—from the sun-drenched tropics toward the sun-starved poles. One particularly important loop in this system is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or amoc (pronounced "ay-mock"). The loop might be said to begin in the North Atlantic, where the surface waters are especially cold and salty. The combination of low temperature and high salinity makes the water unusually dense, so it sinks. Warmer water from the south rushes in behind it; as this water cools, it sinks, drawing still more water north, and so on. Oceanographers measure currents in units called sverdrups. One sverdrup equals a million cubic metres per second. When the amocis operating at full strength, the water circulates to the tune of twenty sverdrups, a hundred times the flow of the Amazon River...

Were the amoc to collapse, heat would build in the Southern Hemisphere. Global rainfall patterns would shift, storms in the Atlantic would become more destructive, and warm water would pile up on the shores of the eastern U.S., leading to rapid sea-level rise. Places like Britain and Scandinavia would, perversely, grow much colder; according to one recent study, temperatures in London would drop by almost twenty degrees, which would give it a climate like present-day Siberia's. Farming in much of northern Europe would become impossible...

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Conceptual models of space colonization Charlie Stross

I'm thinking morose thoughts about the practical prospects for space colonization (ahem: stripped of the colonialist rhetoric, manifest destiny bullshit, "the Earth's too fragile and vulnerable to keep all our eggs in one basket", and the other post-hoc attempts at justification) and trying to sort them out in case I ever feel inclined to go back to writing the sort of medium term SF epic that Kim Stanley Robinson nailed in his Mars trilogy in the 1980s.

And what I'm nibbling on is, to paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, the big question of what if all our models or paradigms for how to structure a colony effort are wrong?

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Ban Thankim Vietnamese guitar

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Teaching: goals and methods from my Tenure File

Vinyl, or long playing anniversary 1998

hair wars

older John

"Knell in the coffin"">Mark Liberman at Language Log

Imperial examination Wikipedia

Bridget St John: The enduring quality of an iconic folk singer Hobbmledehoy

Kafka's Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Talented from Manifesting Their Talent Marginalian

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Coming to Seattle: fact-checking workshop with legendary researcher Lisa Gold Boing Boing

What I've Done Lisa Gold

My clients have included authors of fiction and nonfiction (Neal Stephenson, Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Justine Larbalestier, Matt Ruff, Linda Stone, Richard Bitner), publishers (HarperCollins, Hill House), magazines (Pacific Standard, The Magazine), businesses (Bauman Rare Books), and nonprofit organizations and foundations (The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

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Paradoxes and Contradictions Andy Ilachinski

My Search for Hidden Meanings in Beatles Songs Before the Internet, we often had no idea what hit songs were about Ted Gioia

There's a Ghost in the Garden: A Subtle and Soulful Illustrated Fable about Memory and Mystery Marginalian

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The best new science fiction books of 2024, from Adam Roberts to Rachel Kushner New Scientist

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Radar Trends to Watch: December 2024 O'Reilly

Map of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" boing boing

'Margarita Burn': When Juicing Limes in the Sun Goes Horribly Wrong gizmodo

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Tofu: The Trickster of Japanese Cuisine Kitano Komachi at Medium

What Can the Dust Bowl Tell Us About Climate Migration? George Dillard at Medium

Words in Motion: Discovering the Humanity in Joyce's Masterpiece Walter Bowne at Medium

The 100 Best Recordings of 2024 (Part 2 of 2) Ted Gioia

AI Companies Have Lost the Mandate of Heaven Alberto Romero

Calvin Trillin's US Journal Paige Williams at New Yorker

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Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar's "The Big Fix" Cory Doctorow

The Canadian national identity involves a lot of sneering at the US, but when it comes to oligarchy, Canada makes America look positively amateurish.

Canada's monopolists may be big fish in a small pond, but holy moly are they big, compared to the size of that pond. In their new book, The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians, Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar lay bare the price-gouging, policy-corrupting ripoff machines that run the Great White North

North America's Shrinking Railways Maps Mania

Not Your Standard Book Chat Radio Open Source

Orhan Pamuk wanted to talk about his hard-cover collection of notebook drawings and diary entries in recent years; I wanted to hear the global writer's take on the distemper, East and West, in the 2020s. He said he doesn't talk contemporary affairs, but then he insisted on doing just that: he said that President Erdogan's authoritarian politics is ruining Turkey, and Donald Trump could be just as dangerous in America. The news about Orhan Pamuk himself, coming out of his notebooks, is that he has been a passionately visual artist all along, keeping an alternative record of his own life in high-color drawings and aphoristic jottings, words and pictures like nothing our listeners have seen.

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H5N1 bird flu is closer to gaining pandemic potential than we thought New Scientist

How a Book From 1981 Anticipated This Political Moment NYT, on Samuel Huntington's American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony

Two Masters of the Darkroom Michael Alford at Medium (W. Eugene Smith and Jerry Uelsmann)

Hokusai's Daughter—Apprentice to Master Kim Vertue at Medium

The biological information field Wolfgang Stegemann at Medium

Battery rationality Cory Doctorow

After 9/11, we were told that "no cost was too high" when it came to fighting terrorism, and indeed, the US did blow trillions on forever wars and regime change projects and black sites and kidnappings and dronings and gulags that were supposed to end terrorism.

Back in the imperial core, we all got to play the home edition of the "no price is too high" War on Terror game. New, extremely invasive airport security measures were instituted. A "no-fly" list as thick as a phone book, assembled in secret, without any due process or right of appeal, was produced and distributed to airlines, and suddenly, random babies and sitting US Senators couldn't get on airplanes anymore, because they were simultaneously too dangerous to fly and also not guilty enough to charge with any crime...

The Biggest Week In AI Ever (Again!) AI Mindset

Heron divination Marginalian

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Hijra (South Asia) Wikipedia

Story of the Hijra: India's Third Gender arcgis storymap

THE HISTORY OF THE HIJRA: THE THIRD GENDER IN THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT Shirin Razdan at Journal of Urology

The Third Gender and Hijras Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School

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Jitter vs Latency: Unraveling the Nuances in Network Performance

Latency (audio) Wikipedia

Science Communication Using Analogy Metamia

METAMIA is a free database of analogy and metaphor. Anyone can contribute or search. The subject matter can be anything. Science is popular, but poetry is encouraged. The goal is to integrate our fluid muses with the stark literalism of a relational database. Metamia is like a girdle for your muses, a cognitive girdle.

A MAGNA CARTA FOR THE KNOWLEDGE AGE Esther Dyson, George Gilder, Jay Keyworth and Alvin Toffler, in New Perspectives Quarterly Fall 1994, Vol. 11, No. 4

The Return of War to the Home Front: Don't Look for Restraint from Donald Trump's Military Andrea Mazzarino at Informed Consent

The Watersons "Frost And Fire" Hobbledehoy

Memento Mori tutorial Vault Editions

Hobson's Choice Wikipedia

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Blyth is Back Radio Open Source

Are Social Media Platforms the Next Dying Malls? Ted Gioia

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A Christmas Gift to My Families Doc Searls

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An Earth Powered by the Sun Maps Mania

Social Media Bruce Sterling

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Bad writing becomes an art form in annual contest for world's worst prose Boing Boing