Month: August 2022

Listened Flood, by Stella Donnelly from Stella Donnelly

11 track album

I really like how Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen captures Stella Donnelly’s album:

Flood is an album that requires patient and careful listening, peeling back the layers in each song to find the pulsing heart beneath. There’s nothing as immediate as the songs on Donnelly’s debut, but that’s not a bad thing – these 11 tracks ebb and flow like water, washing into and over one another to create a sense of something pure and boundless.

This feels like a different sort of COVID album, written while traversing around Australia.

Stella co-produced Flood alongside Jake Webb and Anna Laverty (whose award-winning CV features Camp Cope and Courtney Barnett), and opened up her co-writing credits with her touring band.

The more spontaneous process resulted in Stella trying on a lot of different personas. She ended up penning 43 tracks as she moved around the country mid-COVID, passing from Fremantle to Margaret River to Melbourne and beyond.

Place between Courtney Barnett and Megan Washington

Replied to Marking time, badly by Jeremy CherfasJeremy Cherfas (jeremycherfas.net)

Music in podcasts is one of those divisive topics on which few people agree. My own view is that most American shows have far too much music for my taste, and that my own episodes have too little. I’m not talking about continuous soundbeds, as done so well by Benjamen Walker. I’d never even try that…

Not sure how interested you are Jeremy, but I have really enjoyed playing around with Moog’s Model D app with Garageband and my midi keyboard thingie.
Replied to Pluralistic: 17 Aug 2022: Chokepoint Capitalism Kickstarter is live by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

What is “chokepoint capitalism?” It’s when a multinational monopolist (or cartel) locks up audiences inside a system that they control, and uses that control to gouge artists, creating toll booths between creators and their audiences.

I have supported Cory Doctorow’s latest kickstarter. Interesting to see the use of Libro.fm in regards to the audiobook. Seems a similar approach to musicians using Bandcamp to provide access to crowdfunded music.
Bookmarked

Ben Collins provides a formula for generating a list of IDs or numbers dependent on how many items are in the list using the Sequence formula:

=ArrayFormula(SEQUENCE(MAX(ROW(B2:B)*(B2:B<>""))-1))

Listened Muse | Will of the People from Muse | Will of the People

Enter the Muse Will of the People Experience

The Will of the People is a return to the tried and trusted sounds. As they have explained in interviews:

It’s a montage of the best of Muse. It’s a new take on all of those types of genres that we’ve touched on in the past.

However, this reference to the past comes across as somewhat problematic at times. As Paolo Ragusa touches on:

The fact that our global political crisis has given Muse’s audience more context for a dystopian record means that the band needs to be very careful about how it addresses these woes, the way it poses solutions, the specific problems that Bellamy is choosing to investigate. And unfortunately, Will of the People is — perhaps on purpose — not very careful about such things.

Whereas Arcade Fire’s return to the past seems somewhat comforting, I am not exactly sure how I feel about Will of the People.

Place between Queen and Rage Against the Machine.

Replied to A Guide To Named Functions In Google Sheets (New For 2022!) – by Ben Ben (benlcollins.com)

Named functions in Google Sheets let you create and name custom functions built with regular formulas, and reuse them in other Sheets.

Ben, am I right to say that Named Functions allows the functionality that is available via Google Scripts, it just means that you do not have to go through the effort of creating the script? I am assuming that if I made a copy of a Sheet with a Named Function that this comes with the copy? I also assume that unlike with Google Scripts, there is no need to provide permission for Named Functions? I am left wondering about combining the use of macros and Named Functions.
Bookmarked What Adults Don’t Get About Teens and Digital Life (WIRED)

Well-meaning messages meant to keep teens safe can backfire. The key is to focus on judgment and agency, not rigid rules for screen time.

In an excerpt from Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing), Emily Weinstein and Carrie James talk about teaching teens to build personal agency, anticipating and discussing different dilemmas before they arise, and encouraging collective agency where groups respond to challenges together.

Although I agree with all this, I still think the challenge is how to actually encorporate some of these practices into the day-to-day classroom. I once wondered of a school social space, but fear that such a space probably carries with it too much risk.

Bookmarked Curious About 3D Printing? Here Are Some Tips Before You Dive In by Kenneth R. Rosen (WIRED)

Take those first prints for what they are: learning experiences. With practice will eventually come mastery, at which point the upgrades and bells and whistles will make more sense and bring you greater satisfaction and reward. Learn the fundamentals—what speeds your printer and filament extruder enjoy, what types of plastics work best at your elevation and ambient temperature, and where you can improve on your creation and modeling inside the CAD software—before jumping ahead.

Above all, remember, it is a hobby at this level. Enjoy the journey and its many rewards.

Kenneth R. Rosen provides some tips to consider before starting your own foray into 3D printing. He structures this around a series of statements:

– Know Why You’re Buying
– Choosing a Type of Printer
– Beware the Upgrade Spiral
– Don’t Set and Forget

Replied to Country football loses an icon as Quambatook Football and Netball Club folds by Jeremy Story Carter (ABC News)

After more than a century, a proud country football and netball club is folding. Its demise tells a bigger story about rural Australia.

I remember going for a job a few years ago at Manangatang, further north of Quambatook. The principal spoke about the changes to the land. I wonder what the long term impact will be for these areas.
Liked How mammals won the dinosaurs’ world (bbc.com)

“We’re here mainly by chance,” says Bertrand. “The asteroid could have missed Earth, it could have fallen in another area of the planet in the ocean and it would have made a difference in terms of which species were selected. The whole thing when I think about it – it’s crazy.”

Brusatte agrees. “It could have just whizzed right past, it could have just ruffled the upper layers of the atmosphere, it could have disintegrated as it got closer to Earth. It could have done anything, but just by dumb luck it made a beeline for the Earth.”

For the mammals alive today, perhaps it’s a good thing it did.

Listened Methyl Ethel Live At The Wireless from abc.net.au

triple j headed along to UNSW’s Roundhouse to hear a hypnotic live show from Jake Webb and his white jumpsuit wearing band.

Recorded for Live At The Wireless in April, the show is a trip through their fourth album Are You Haunted? and their complex pop oeuvre.

Venue: UNSW Roundhouse, Sydney
Recorded:
First broadcast: Monday 30th May 2022

This live recording of Methyl Ethel is another reminder of what I missed out on earlier this year.

📰 Read Write Respond #078

Welcome back to another month. I feel like it has had a bit of everything, catching up with family visiting from interstate, eldest daughter managing to go on her first school camp in three years, as well as being being thrust into health and safety protocols.

On the Work front, I feel like I have spent much of my time trying to get to the bottom of a range of new defects that have come with a recent upgrade. I am always intrigued how aspects of the application that have not been fixed or improved are impacted.

Personally, I binged quite a bit this month, including The 100, Stranger Things, Birdman, Moon Knight and The Gray Man. I also listened to Tom Tilley’s memoir Speaking in Tongues. In regards to music, I enjoyed listening to Sam Prekop and John McEntire’s modular album Sons Of.

Here then are some of the posts that have had me thinking:

Self-Assessing Creative Problem Solving

Wouter Groeneveld discusses his development of the Creative Programming Problem Solving Test (CPPST), a self-assessment test for programmers that measures more than just divergent thinking.

If You’re Not Paying for the Product, You Are… Possibly Just Consuming Goodwill for Free

Troy Hunt posits that sometimes we are simply consuming goodwill.

Weary, old, a little broken, but not letting go of the dream: edtech in the 21st Century

Jon Dron shares his thoughts on how to help the edtech community find its soul again.

Four Tet on His 155-Hour Spotify Playlist, the Coolest Thing on Streaming

Kieran Hebden discusses his epic Spotify playlist, an artefact for listeners to explore.

Rewilding Cities

Clive Thompson thinks about the idea of monocropping and the impact of rewilding beyond just nature.

Read Write Respond #078

So that was July for me, how about you? As always, hope you are safe and well.

Image by Bryan Mathers

Background image via “Lego Stranger Things (fx)” by decypher the code is licensed under CC BY-SA

Bookmarked Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals (The Guardian)

Amid taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Kalanick ordered French executives to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a counter-protest with mass civil disobedience.

Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”

The Guardian take a dive into the decisions that led to where Uber is today. This is unpacked further in three podcasts, including an interview with Mark MacGann about the decision to blow the whistle.
Bookmarked Rewilding Cities – Clive Thompson – Medium (Medium)

We’ve monocropped streets — so they’re used almost exclusively for cars. Time to rewild

Inspired by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet’s discussion of banning cars in cities, Clive Thompson thinks about the idea of monocropping and the impact of rewilding beyond just nature.

In the same way that monocropping corn creates weaker, less resilient land, monocropping our streets with cars creates cities that aren’t as vibrant as they ought to be. We often don’t notice it, because we’ve trained ourselves to think of streets as “almost exclusively for cars”. But if you think of all the things you could do with streets, you realize how weird it is that we have, for decades now, used them mostly only for vehicles.

This reminds me of a piece that I wrote a few years ago about ‘rewilding education‘. Also, the suggestion of replacing roads had me thinking about the scene in Babakiueria where they propose replacing the freeway, a ‘baron wasteland’, with bushland. Of course, this is really a comical reference to the tendency to build on top of existing sacred sites.

Bookmarked Weary, old, a little broken, but not letting go of the dream: edtech in the 21st Century by Jon Dron (jondron.ca)

Edtech is learning from that model, replicating it, amplifying it. ‘Content’ made of bite-size video lectures and pop quizzes, reinforced by adaptive models, vie for pole position in charts of online learning products. These are not the products of a diseased imagination. They are the products of one that has atrophied.

This is not what we intended. This is not what we imagined. This is not what we wanted. Sucked into a bigger machine, scaled up, our inventions turned against us. Willingly, half-wittedly, we became what we are not. We became parts in someone else’s machine.

Jon Dron reflects upon the current edtech conversations. He shares his thoughts on how to help the edtech community find its soul again:

We must make playgrounds, not production lines. We must embrace the logic of the poem, not the logic of the program. We must see one another in all our multifaceted strangeness, not just in our self-curated surfaces. We must celebrate and nurture the diversity, the eccentricities, the desires, the fears, the things that make us who we are, that make us more than we were, together and as individuals. The things we do not and, often, cannot measure.

Dron’s list of dot-points are a useful provocation. I feel it also fits within the wider discussion of the small web.

Liked Enclouding education (code acts in education)

The cloud is a largely invisible, background presence in education, despite playing an increasingly significant role in many technical and institutional processes and practices. As recent relevant scholarship on the cloud has indicated, cloud computing arrangements are significantly affecting and reshaping a range of industries and sectors. The cloud represents an expansion of corporate big tech power into sectors like education, introducing new economic models, platform ecosystem arrangements, and AIOps capacities of automated governance.