Liked Is Martha Stewart’s turn on the cover of Sports Illustrated really about the male gaze, or is she chasing something else? (abc.net.au)

When we get fit and put on good clothes, even sexy clothes, we’re hoping our girlfriends greet us with shrieks of delight at our well-toned arms and how well our jeans fit. Martha may have been on the cover of a men’s magazine, but almost all the discussion since her appearance has been by women.

Liked WordPress Playground by zieladamzieladam (developer.wordpress.org)

WordPress setup? Click, done. WordPress Playground makes WordPress instantly accessible for users, learners, extenders, and contributors. You can: Get started in 60 seconds Visit playground.wordpress.net to get your very own, private, in-browser WordPress running. That’s it! Now you can build a theme, build an entire site, test a plugin, and more! Here’s the gist of […]

Liked The Year in Quiet Quitting by Cal Newport (The New Yorker)

Quiet quitting is not a life philosophy or policy proposal that needs logical scrutiny. It’s also not a political weapon to be wielded to prove how much more woke or conservative you are than everyone else. It’s both more incoherent and essential than all of that. Figuring out how work fits into a life well lived is hard, but it’s an evolution that has to happen. Quiet quitting is the messy starting gun of a new generation embarking on this challenge. The specifics of what a young engineer says in his TikTok video might annoy or confuse many of us, but it shouldn’t. The content here isn’t that important. What matters is that Generation Z is waking up to the fact that the unnatural melding of self and work induced by an adolescence lived within online spaces isn’t sustainable. They’re finally—thankfully—ready to ask what should come next.

Liked Indiekit (getindiekit.com)

The IndieWeb is a community of personal websites, connected by simple standards. These follow the principles of publishing content at your own domain name and owning your data.

Indiekit uses these standards to help you publish content to your own website and then share it on popular social networks.

Paul Robert Lloyd’s Indiekit looks like another interesting blogging platform. It offers a different approach to the IndieWeb that does not depend on WordPress.
Liked A Zettelkasten, Commonplace Books, and Note Taking Collection by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

Below I’ve aggregated a list of some of the longer articles and material I’ve written about these topics. The completist can find and search my site for even more specific material with these tags:Ā zettelkasten,Ā commonplace books, andĀ note taking. I’ve also contributed a fair amount to the Wikipedia pages forĀ zettelkastenĀ andĀ commonplace books.

Liked How the Lessons of Game of Thrones Were Lost (theatlantic.com)

Our present era of franchise-driven TV requires the industrialization of spectacle, but all the money in the galaxy can’t ensure crackling dialogue and convincing acting. The funny thing is that without a bit of goofiness, these supposedly mature fantasies undermine the credibility they’re chasing. A world where everyone’s frowning just feels fake.

Liked Storytelling — End-Times Tales by Venkatesh RaoVenkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm.com)

But definitely, something is going on that has temporarily shut down our ability to access a sense of the timeless in order to construct stable notions of ourselves in relation to it. For the time being, we seem to be eternity blind, unable to see past the sound and fury of reboots and reruns of our collective memories.

Liked Wikipedia is swimming in money—why is it begging people to donate? by Andreas KolbeAndreas Kolbe (dailydot.com)

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the non-profit that owns Wikipedia and other volunteer-written websites, is about to reach its 10-year goal of creating a $100 million endowment five years earlier than it planned. Its total funds, which have risen by about $200 million over the past five years, now stand at around $300 million. Its revenue has risen every year. In just the first nine months of its current financial year, it has raked in $142 million in donations according to an internal document—and already obliterated its previous annual record.

Liked Considering the Post-COVID Classroom by wiobyrnewiobyrne (wiobyrne.com)

As we deal with the current situation, we not only need to consider F2F, online, and hyflex education, we need to think about what pedagogy could and/or should look like in a post-pandemic system.

As we deal with the current situation, we not only need to consider F2F, online, and hyflex education, we need to think about what pedagogy could and/or should look like in a post-pandemic system.
Liked Are You the Same Person You Used to Be? by Joshua Rothman (The New Yorker)

The passage of time almost demands that we tell some sort of story: there are certain ways in which we can’t help changing through life, and we must respond to them. Young bodies differ from old ones; possibilities multiply in our early decades, and later fade. When you were seventeen, you practiced the piano for an hour each day, and fell in love for the first time; now you pay down your credit cards and watch Amazon Prime. To say that you are the same person today that you were decades ago is absurd. A story that neatly divides your past into chapters may also be artificial. And yet there’s value in imposing order on chaos. It’s not just a matter of self-soothing: the future looms, and we must decide how to act based on the past. You can’t continue a story without first writing one.

Liked Chaos surfing: from surviving to thriving in chaotic times by Anne-Laure Le CunffAnne-Laure Le Cunff (nesslabs.com)

In their book Surfing the Edge of Chaos, Richard Pascale, Mark Milleman, and Linda Gioja explain that there are four cornerstone principles to chaos in nature that we can also observe in chaotic times in our lives and at work:

  • Equilibrium is a precursor to death. ā€œWhen a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive to changes occurring around it,ā€ they write. This state of equilibrium is highly dangerous, putting the system at risk of not adapting quickly enough.
  • Innovation usually takes place on the edge of chaos. It’s when they face a threat or are excited by a new opportunity that living systems tend to come up with new ways of living through experimentation and mutation.
  • Self-organization emerges naturally. As long as a system is sufficiently populated and properly interconnected, a new self-organization will emerge from chaos.
  • Living systems cannot be directed towards a linear path. In dynamical systems, an attractor is defined as a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve. The direction is discovered rather than dictated by the living living system.

These principles are crucial to keep in mind when surfing the edge of chaos.

Liked Why Do Batteries Lose Charge When You Aren’t Using Them? by Jason Fitzpatrick (How-To Geek)

But the electrical energy we stash away in batteries is not entirely unlike a bunch of school children all squashed into a classroom. The children fidget about, full of energy, really wishing they could be outside the confines of the classroom, racing about the playground. You could easily argue that it is not the natural state of children to stay calm and still in neatly organized rows.

The electrons packed away in your battery are like those fidgety kids, practically dying to be free and bouncing around again. The natural organization of the chemical compounds in the battery is not calm and neatly organized rows, so to speak—which is why batteries can be quite dangerous when things go wrong.

Liked Podcast AI (podcast.ai)

Welcome to podcast.ai, a podcast that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence. Every week, we explore a new topic in depth, and listeners can suggest topics or even guests and hosts for future episodes. Whether you’re a machine learning enthusiast, just want to hear your favorite topics covered in a new way or even just want to listen to voices from the past brought back to life, this is the podcast for you.

Liked How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Reverb MachineReverb Machine (reverbmachine.com)

In 1978, Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album by any means, it was the first album explicitly released as an ā€˜ambient music album’. The album was essentially a continuation of Eno’s experiments with the tape machine as a compositional tool, as well as his exploration of generative music. In this article I’ll discuss how the music was composed, break down and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2, and hopefully give you some ideas about how to adopt this approach yourself.

Liked ADHD guidelines have finally been released in Australia. Here’s why that matters by Gemma Breen (ABC News)

The 111 recommendations were wide-ranging: from the use of medications, family support and a need for further research. Here are just a few of interest:

  • Parents and carers of childrenĀ with ADHD should be offered training and supportĀ when a child is diagnosed
  • People diagnosed with ADHD should have access to the NDIS
  • There needs to be a greater focus on supporting students with ADHD in school and tertiary settings
  • There should be greater involvement of GPs in the identification, diagnosis and treatment of the disorder
  • Children should be given clear pathways for treatment and support into adolescenceĀ and, eventually, adulthood
  • ADHD medication should be monitored on an ongoing basis
  • There should also be a focus on non-medicalĀ interventions, such as lifestyle changes
  • More knowledge is needed toĀ better understand and detectĀ ADHD in girls and women.
Liked The Psychological Weirdness of ā€œPrompt Engineeringā€ (Medium)

Kind of poetic, isn’t it? The act of speaking to an art-AI feels like a communication word-game — like playing Charades or Taboo, where you have to trigger your collaborator to produce the right result by talking around a subject. Except in this case, the goal is to find the correct incantation that awakens the spirits residing within yonder eldritch cauldron of vectors, and summons them to do your bidding.

Liked On Michael Crichton’s Busy Ambition by Study HacksStudy Hacks (calnewport.com)

The dean replied paternalistically with a warning that writing a book might be more difficult than Crichton expected. It was at this point that the young medical student revealed that he had already published four books while at Harvard (under a pen name), and had multiple other writing projects in progress, including his first medical thriller,Ā A Case of Need, that would soon win him an Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year, and his first fully-developed techno-thriller,Ā The Andromeda Strain, which would become a breakout bestseller.

Liked Pluralistic: 07 Oct 2022 “Don’t spy on a privacy lab,” and other career advice for university provosts by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

the students arrange the sensors into a “public art piece” in the lobby – a table covered in sensors spelling out “NO!,” surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.

Meanwhile, students are still furious. It’s not just that the sensors are invasive, nor that they are scientifically incoherent, nor that they cost more than a year’s salary – they also emit lots of RF noise that interferes with the students’ own research.