November 4, 2022
Akemi Ishii – Lambada （ランバダ）
[Quick link to the music video] Years before the Macarena enraptured the planet for a short while, we witnessed another dance phenomenon that had swept Earth (including Japan) – Lambada. There was no way to escape it from 1989 to 1990. [more inside]
"Our radical ideas are now the conventional wisdom"
USENIX is ending the Large Installation System Administration Conference after 35 years. "LISA made LISA obsolete (That's a compliment!)" by Thomas A. Limoncelli takes us back to 1987, when "System administration is important" and "Open systems like TCP/IP and POSIX (Unix) are the future" were radical ideas, and shares LISA history (including: "LISA was LGBT-friendly when other conferences most certainly were not."). [more inside]
Lock Up Your Daughters ... Darcy's in Town!
From '50s pulp fiction P&P to bodice-ripper Northanger Abbey, it's the worst Jane Austen covers ever. (SL Twitter thread, with some additional egregious examples in the comments.)
His Back Pages
Fractal calculations, Kanagawa vibes
Koch snowflake a little too symmetrical for you? Consider the Kochawave Curve [pdf] (arxiv.org page), a variant that leans hard to the side and has a number of interesting properties and tilings of its own.
From Salem to Stonewall
What is a Groomer? is a documentary by little hoot and Caelan Conrad on moral panics, LGBTQ+ stigma, and stochastic terrorism.
Stand on that X there
Using freehand machine embroidery, Peter Frederiksen recreates scenes - and sometimes even short animated clips - from classic cartoons, and sometimes makes more abstract sketches. His web site is a bit neglected and the freshest images are on his instagram page. [more inside]
You've Been Played
Every week brings word of another company bringing gamification to the workplace, whether it’s Amazon workers in India competing to deliver packages in order to score “runs” in a thirty-day, cricket-themed Delivery Premier League for rewards like smartphones and motorbikes, or United Airlines’ short-lived experiment to help staff “build excitement and a sense of accomplishment” by swapping their bonus with a lottery — available only for those with perfect attendance records, of course. In You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All, MetaFilter's own Adrian Hon examines how "points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life as tools for profit and coercion." [more inside]
How much coverage are you worth?
To highlight the scale of the [missing white woman syndrome] problem, [Columbia Journalism Review] has developed a tool to test your own newsworthiness. By entering basic demographic data (none of which is saved by CJR) at areyoupressworthy.com, you can calculate your own worth, according to the American press.
« Previous day | Next day »