Month: June 2021

Bookmarked Practice Typing, Read Lit | TypeLit.io (typelit.io)

Improve your typing while reading great books like Alice in Wonderland, 1984, The Art of War, The Call of Cthulhu, Pride and Prejudice, Dracula, and more!

typelit.io is a site provides a different approach to practicing typing. Rather than a series of exercises which focus on developing skills, it gets you to simply reproduce the text of a classic piece of literature. I found this kind of therapeutic, almost a way to de-stress. Not sure how helpful it is in actually learning how to touch type, but it at least offers something novel.

ᔥ “Dr. Alec Couros
@courosa
“ in Dr. Alec Couros on Twitter: “Cool idea for a typing practice site. https://t.co/oqvnyQnWhh” / Twitter ()

Bookmarked Opinion | Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling. by Zeynep Tufekci (nytimes.com)

Despite the current dissembling, we should assume that the Chinese government also doesn’t want to go through this again — especially given that SARS, too, started there.

This means putting the public interest before personal ambitions and acknowledging that despite the wonders of its power, biomedical research also holds dangers.

To do this, government officials and scientists need to look at the big picture: Seek comity and truth instead of just avoiding embarrassment. Develop a framework that goes beyond blaming China, since the issues raised are truly global. And realize that the next big thing can simply mean taking great care with a lot of small details.

Zeynep Tufekci brings together everything that we know about viruses both past and present, explaining that even if COVID19 did not leak from a lab, that we need to learn from the current situation to make changes to the way we work within such spaces.

One key lesson I came away after this many months of research has been that we were due for a coronavirus pandemic—one way or another. We may not know what that way has been, but we can still try to prevent all the potential ways we’ve learned about. And that is more important than anything else.

Bookmarked https://www.theguardian.com/info/ng-interactive/2021/jun/25/techscape-sign-up (theguardian.com)
Following Alex Hern’s new venture, a technology newsletter with the Guardian.

That’s a long preamble to the good news that The World Is Yours* is blowing up. Specifically: I’m going to be writing the Guardian’s flagship tech news letter, TechScape, every week starting in mid-July. You can, and should, sign up here.

It will be interesting to see the difference. I have enjoyed The World Is Yours, especially the personal touch, and wonder where this fits within ‘pro’ newsletter.

Watched Degrees of Uncertainty – A documentary about climate change and public trust in science by Neil Halloran from neilfilms.com

A data-driven documentary about Neil Halloran.

As Neil Halloran dives into the world of hard and soft science and askes the question, “when can we be sure enough?” He suggests that we need to be sceptical in order to develop a larger picture of truth. With this in mind, he traces the data and differences associated with global warming, before suggesting that we can be sure enough to say that drastic change is needed. In addition to the captivating narrative, Halloran also provides interactive moments for the skeptical viewer to take their own dive into the evidence and research.

In a separate piece of data journalism, the team at the ABC News Story Lab provide a take on acting now and how this buys us more time later.

So the transition is coming, but if Australia sits on its hands for five years it will waste the best chance it has to create the industries that could turn it into an energy superpower.

If you live in a part of Australia that’s reliant on fossil fuel jobs, it is easy to see the appeal of the message “we can’t turn things off tomorrow”. But if we keep following that thinking, tomorrow won’t be in 2050 — it will be just around the corner.

Watched
I had not heard of any of these albums.

2:38 Really From – Really From

3:41 Vijay Iyer, Linda May, Han Oh & Tyshawn Sorey – Uneasy

4:42 Sweet Trip – A Tiny House, In Secret Speeches, Polar Equals

6:17 For Those I Love – For Those I Love

7:17 NyX, Gazelle Twin – Deep England

8:24 Black Country, New Road – For The First Time

10:13 Hannah Peel – Fir Wave

11:29 Skee Mask – Pool

12:41 Armand Hammer & The Alchemist – Haram

14:32 Black Midi – Cavalcade

15:51 The Armed – Ultrapop

17:37 Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders – Promises

Clearly I have some listening to do.

Replied to https://pozible.com/profile/damian-cowell/activity/only-the-shit-you-love-july-27–97d62ad6-075c-46d5-b857-92b523b45e8e (pozible.com)

Thank-you from the part of me that isn’t a cynical, carping smartarse, for making this whole ridiculous thing possible, and then hanging in there while I took an eternity figuring out how to do it.

Who knows if it will be worth it. But if in the end I’m still your friend, well, what a wonderful thing to be.

I opened my emails and saw a whole list of EOY spam trying to get me to buy or donate before. However, nestled in there was an update from Damian Cowell on the release of his album:

I said I’d be back, but I didn’t think it’d take quite this long…

Four years, three months, two weeks and two days, all up.

But here I stand before you, to say “I’m ready”…

Only The Shit You Love – the 19 episode cartoon series, followed by the album and the graphic novel – will kick off on August 3.

Here was me wondering if the totalitarian state had gotten to him and he had instead fled with his funds to places with greater standards, but instead he was just being a perfectionist I guess. It would seem that I have my entertainment sorted for the second-half of the year:

How will it work? On August 3 we’ll start with episode 1, followed by episode 2 the same week, just to kick things off, and then it will be one episode per week after that. Plus there’ll be an accompanying weekly podcast – Only The Shit You Love the Podcast – where I start by talking about that week’s episode and wander off into all kinds of weird nostalgia (because nostalgia is the leitmotif of Only The Shit You Love) plus bits and pieces of The Shit I Love.

Listened
I wondered what a ‘heavy’ St Vincent album might sound like, maybe this is a taste?

Appearing on Radio.com’s New Arrivals show (via Uproxx), St. Vincent explained that she was “dead set” on creating a “heavy record” as the follow-up to 2017’s ‘Masseduction’. “Like just heavy the whole time – like, ‘Hey kids, you like Tool? Well, you’ll love the St. Vincent record’, you know?” she said.
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I also am intrigued if Jack Antonoff had an part to play in this recording or if St. Vincent simply self-produced it?

Liked Reversals in psychology (gleech.org)

A medical reversal is when an existing treatment is found to actually be useless or harmful. Psychology has in recent years been racking up reversals: in fact only 40-65% of its classic social results were replicated, in the weakest sense of finding ‘significant’ results in the same direction. (Even in those that replicated, the average effect found was half the originally reported effect.) Such errors are far less costly to society than medical errors, but it’s still pollution, so here’s the cleanup.

ᔥ “”Lots of screen-time is not strongly associated with low wellbeing; it explains about as much of teen sadness as eating potatoes, 0.35%.” “ in Richard Olsen on Twitter: “”Lots of screen-time is not strongly associated with low wellbeing; it explains about as much of teen sadness as eating potatoes, 0.35%.” https://t.co/X2NljTCBBm” / Twitter ()
Bookmarked Remote workers work longer, not more efficiently by The Economist (economist.com)

The return to the office is well under way, just as summer in the northern hemisphere begins. Pretty soon, people will be able to resume the habit of staring wistfully out of the window, hoping it will still be sunny at the weekend. As many workers embrace a hybrid pattern, perhaps commuting 2-3 days a week, the experiment in full-time home-working is ending. At the same time, assessments of its effectiveness are proliferating.

The Economist discusses the results associated with a new report “Work from home & productivity: evidence from personnel & analytics data on IT professionals”, by Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel and Christoph Siemroth. They found that although there were changes, some were detrimental, such as more meetings.

Despite working longer hours, the employees had less focus time than before the pandemic. Instead, all their extra time was taken up by meetings.

This continues the reflections on the changes to work based on coronavirus. In a separate piece, Derek Thompson discusses the winners and losers, such as the growth of suburban-town-centers and downturn in regards to city businesses.

Replied to On Digital Gardening, Blogs, and Knowledge (macdrifter.com)

I like the idea of grooming my reference material but I can barely find time to do laundry. I think one of my biggest problems is over-saving. Stars, favorites, reading lists,bookmarks, notes, playlists, and the whole mess of podcasts, is exhausting to keep track of, let alone keep alive and healthy. I recently looked back over my collection of Pinboard bookmarks when I moved to Raindrop.io. It was a nice walk down memory lane but most of it has very little value to problems I am now dealing with.

I enjoyed this reflection Gabe, in particular your comment about who you want to be.

I want to be the person that reads these long heady articles “later” but life has different plans for me. I don’t read anything later. I read now or I don’t read it.

I feel that it is continual question of balance. Although I agree with Amy Burvall:

In order to connect dots, one must first have the dots

The problem I have is how much time do you allocate to the collection of ideas and how much time do you allocate to putting them together in new and interesting ways.

Listened
I really enjoyed the discussion about how you structure the finances and decisions, this was something I too had always wondered. That makes a lot more sense to me now. In regards to something I was left wondering about is the ways in which regular guest, Bryan Mathers , has benefited from Creative Commons? Maybe something for a future episode?
Bookmarked Website Carbon Calculator | How is your website impacting the planet? (Website Carbon Calculator)

The internet consumes a lot of electricity. 416.2TWh per year to be precise. To give you some perspective, that’s more than the entire United Kingdom.

A site designed by Wholegrain Digital on how to measure the impact of a site on the planet. Tom Greenwood also provides some tips on making your site more energy efficient. This is something I have been wondering about recently, especially in following Doug Belshaw’s work on his site.

ᔥ “Jeff Kettle” in The internet consumes extraordinary amounts of energy. Here’s how we can make it more sustainable ()

Bookmarked Remembering Janet Malcolm, Who Wrote and Lived with Bravery and Kindness by Ian Frazier (The New Yorker)

A master of modern journalism, and one of its most penetrating critics, has died at eighty-six, Ian Frazier writes. She was, as in a favorite line from “Charlotte’s Web,” the rare combination of true friend and great writer.

With the passing of Janet Malcolm, there has been many things said about her life and legacy.

Helen Garner on Malcolm:

She maintains a perfectly judged distance between her eye and its target. She does not suck up to the people she interviews. She gives her subjects rope. She allows herself to be charmed, at least until the subject reveals vacuity or phoniness, and then she snaps shut in a burst of impatience, and veers away. Although at times she draws back in distaste, or contempt, or even pity, she is not someone who deplores the way of the world or sets out, in her writing, to change it. She merely pays it the respect of her matchless eye. In her work there is a complete absence of hot air. There are no boring bits. Reading her is an austerely enchanting kind of fun. Everything she finds interesting she makes even more interesting by the quality of what she brings to it.

David A. Graham on Malcolm:

There are two kinds of magicians: Those who purport to be doing something truly supernatural, drawing on the paranormal, and those who are honest with their audiences about fooling them.

Janet Malcolm, who died last week at 86, was of the second type. Her journalism was filled with instances in which she alerted readers that she would be playing with their minds; she then did so effortlessly. Knowing you were being messed with was no protection.

Bookmarked The ‘20-5-3’ Rule Prescribes How Much Time You Should Spend Outside by Michael Easter (Prevention)

Nature has these effects on the mind and body because it stimulates and soothes us in unusual and unique ways. For instance, in nature you are engulfed in fractals, suggested Hopman. Fractals are complex patterns that repeat over and over in different sizes and scales and make up the design of the universe. Think: trees (big branch to smaller branch to smaller branch and so on), river systems (big river to smaller river to stream and so on), mountain ranges, clouds, seashells. “Cities don’t have fractals,” said Hopman. “Imagine a typical building. It’s usually flat, with right angles. It’s painted some dull color.” Fractals are organized chaos, which our brains apparently dig. In fact, scientists at the University of Oregon discovered that Jackson Pollock’s booze-and-jazz-fueled paintings are made up of fractals. This may explain why they speak to humans at such a core level.

In an adaption from the book The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, Michael Easter discusses the ‘20-5-3’ Rule for engaging with nature:

  • 20 minutes outside three times a week
  • 5 hours a month spent in semi-wild nature
  • 3 days a year off the grid in nature

ᔥ “Daniel Pink
“ in (1) Daniel Pink on Twitter: “How much time should you spend outside? Try the 20-5-3 rule. 20 minutes a day/3 days per week in a neighborhood park. 5 hours a month in semi-wild nature, like a forested state park. 3 days a year off the grid — e.g. in a cabin. https://t.co/gKvwe0D02H” / Twitter ()

Liked Education Research and ‘Negative Capability.’ by an author (chronotope)

Instead of passively accepting the ‘stone tablets’ of research we should be engaged in a constant dialogue with research, questioning it, challenging dogmatism, teasing out relevance to our own context and our own individual problems in a sort of ‘detached attachment.’ We should be constantly reviewing our own preconceptions and refining our practice through this process of oscillation and reflection. We should reconcile ourselves with the irreconcilable nature of the classroom. What may work on Tuesday period 3, might be a disaster on Thursday period 2 with the same class and the same teacher for a variety of reasons, some that we may ‘know’ but many that are simply unknown.

Replied to

Bianca, with your love of Shakespeare and podcasts, thought I’d recommend the recent In Our Time episode of the Sonnets.

It was interesting to consider the form (never thought Sonnets as a shape poem) and the different interpretation.

Bookmarked The Middle Leader Manifesto: What 160 Leaders Say Matters | notosh by Ewan McIntosh (notosh)

Leading from the Middle is essential for any organisation, particularly in the complex world of education. This is a manifesto that describes the key promises we need to keep.

Ewan McIntosh identifies what it takes to grow a middle leader. This includes making your ideas small, referencing data, support the collective, encourage serendipity, get stuff done, revisiting the scrapheap and communicating in many ways. In some ways, this reminds me of a piece I wrote about being made an ICT Co-ordinator a few years ago.
Replied to The physics of social spaces are not like the physics of physical spaces by Jon Dron (jondron.ca)

It’s very challenging to design a digital space that is both richly supportive of human social needs and easy to use. The Landing is definitely not the solution, but the underlying idea – that people are richly faceted social beings who interact and present themselves differently to different people at different times – still makes sense to me. As the conversation between Jesse and Stephen shows, there is a need for support for that more than ever.

Jon, this is one of the things that I wonder about in regards to domain of one’s own, what happens when everything is available in the form of a social exhaust. I guess that is the intent behind the discussion around private posts.
Bookmarked Why Turkey's Coast Is Covered in Sea Snot by Sarah Zhang (theatlantic.com)

The mucus floating underwater was fascinating—even beautiful—but what scientists saw on the seafloor was disturbing. They already knew that unsightly layers of the mucus could float to the surface. Now they discovered that they could also sink, covering corals, sponges, brittle stars, mollusks, and any other unlucky creatures on the seafloor, cutting them off from oxygen. “They’re literally smothered,” says Alice Alldredge, an oceanographer at UC Santa Barbara. “Sure, it’s uncomfortable for us as human beings to have all this gunk at the surface. But the bottom-dwelling organisms are going to die.” An ecosystem takes years to fully recover from such a mass mortality.