October 21, 2019
Sound and Motion
Who needs adorable animal antics? You do! You can find little howlers at r/tinyawoos and lots of gamboling at r/Zoomies. [more inside]
Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, spreading life science with Barbies and in prisons
A slingshot and a fishing pole can get you 50-80 feet up, celebrating and exploring the last biotic frontier (NPR article and 8 minute video), just like Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, forest ecologist and a science communicator (The Evergreen State College), and her DIY (ESC) TreeTop Barbies (New York Times). When she's not in the treetops or promoting science and education to young people, she may be bringing life science to prisoners (5 minute TED Talk). [more inside]
The Force Will Be With You ... Always
The latest (and final?) trailer for "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"
“blur”
“blur” A man sees his father’s life through blurred photographs. YouTube.
“beat” refers to beatific
Allen Ginsberg on the day after Kerouac died, and on the day of his funeral. Bill Tremblay's poem on the funeral. Jack Kerouac, gone fifty years ago today.
How To Radicalize A Normie
Continuing his series on the Alt-Right Playbook (previously, previouslyer), Ian Danskin now focuses on the means by which the alt-right recruits new members, from bringing them into the fold to leading them down into the depths of the movement. (SLYT)
Why did the Boeing 737 Max crash?
David Perell writes:
"The actual story of the 737 Max crash begins with that McDonnell-Douglas purchase in 1997, 21 years before the first accident in late 2018. Unfortunately, media coverage of the crash mostly ignores Boeing’s corporate history. " [more inside]
Cake village
Lynn Nolan explains: “All of the buildings, bar the Miner’s Arms and Eyam Tea Rooms, are made from individual bricks which are no bigger than an inch long. There are lights inside the buildings, which allow you to see the glasses in the pub and the sweets in the shop through windows, which are made out of gelatine sheets.” Lynn spent three months recreating Eyam (pronounced “Eem”) using over 50 different cakes and eight litres of whisky, baked by residents of the Derbyshire village (tinkly music video). How to make a church. Previous constructions include Youlgrave, made out of Christmas cake, icing and marzipan, and Bethlehem, made out of 36 whisky-soaked cakes.
progress of the field of software engineering between 2004 and 2016
Nowadays, professionally, I am extremely conscious of this sort of style choice or convention, trying hard to ensure it's consistent across the team, organization, or better yet with the rest of the broader community. At the time, though, I was programming basically alone, and idiosyncrasies, like this mistaken naming convention, could persist for years. 3500 words from Li Haoyi, "a software engineer, an early contributor to Scala.js, and the author of many open-source Scala tools such as the Ammonite REPL and FastParse," describing a 300-line version of Asteroids he wrote when he was fourteen.
The legal afterlife of Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
"Bartleby is referred to again and again in court records, where he is not evoked as a signal of ambiguity but reduced instead to pure obstacle: a bad citizen whose intentions cannot be surmised. There is no room in law for something beyond logic, because rational explanation is the key to argument." In I Would Prefer Not To, Your Honor, Daniel Tovrov looks at references in the American judicial system to Herman Melville's infamously noncompliant Bartleby. Bartleby may primarily be referenced as a flattened symbol of insubordination, but he's also present as a symptom of a flattening system. [more inside]
for the utterly preventable harm he said he’d endured
For My Incarcerated Clients, There Is No Winning by Peter Borenstein [The Marshall Project] [more inside]
Portrait of an Inessential Government Worker
Michael Lewis profiles federal government worker Art Allen: “I’ve only thought about one problem in my life,” said Art, with an odd little laugh, which sounded half like a chuckle and half like an apology for speaking up. “Which is how to improve Coast Guard search and rescue.” [more inside]
a contest of storytelling
Around the world, there’s a battle of storytelling about migrants and Muslims. Populists are winning Because it’s a contest of storytelling, the sworn enemies of the populists are people like me: writers and journalists. Truth tellers, writes Suketu Mehta.
"Horrifying and arousing in equal measure."
Someone's been replacing the dustcover of former British PM David Cameron's memoirs with their own far superior version (SL Guardian).
Polls across Canada are open for the 43rd general election
As of 7am Pacific Time, polls are open across Canada for what looks to be one of the closest and least predictable elections in Canadian history, one which, unlike many previous elections, probably won't be decided until the last votes are cast on the west coast. This is as good a time as any to remember that day in 1849 when elite mobs burned down Parliament but were peaceably defeated by the first government in the British Empire to be responsible to a democratically elected Parliament. [more inside]
Hogwarts Is the Best-Known UK Academic Institution in America
For those of a more progressive worldview, however, a nation is also an ideal, the land being merely the body beyond which there is a “soul” of a nation. This is certainly true of Britishness, which has developed into something far more than a physical country, let alone an ethnic group. Britishness has become a sort of idea – and a very profitable one at that. from Harry Potter and the importance of soft power in by Ed West in UnHerd
I tell myself all the time, Let them be crabs, Mary. Let them be crabs.
ATTN:
The Politics of Succession - "Succession is all but overtly inspired by the Murdoch family, whose multi-continental media empire played a crucial role in making Donald Trump's presidency possible." [more inside]
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