February 28, 2020
"We saw, every day, the effects of giving somebody freedom"
Remember a few years ago when the owner of a credit card payment processing company based in Seattle raised the minimum wage of his employees to $70,000/yr while taking a huge pay-cut himself and capitalists the world over, afraid of their beloved & apparently suuuuper delicate system collapsing from such madness, flipped out? The BBC recently checked in with Gravity Payments and its owner Dan Price to see how things were going. Pretty damn well, as it turns out. (via, h/t Chrysostom)
"We don’t make her up so some guy at a bar can look at her like this"
MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews is a creep. This is not a new revelation, but in the wake of outrageous and nonsensical attacks on Bernie Sanders and a sexist exchange with Elizabeth Warren in which Matthews defended Michael Bloomberg against his own sexual harassment allegations, freelance journalist Laura Bassett, citing Matthews' treatment of Warren, has decided to speak out against Matthews in a GQ story detailing multiple instances of harassment that she had previously revealed without naming the perpetrator.
My gender identity is male and my gender expression is female.
CJ Duron (instagram) (previously) writes an essay on the difference between being gender creative and being transgender: When people call me a girl or misgender me I don’t really care. To me, gender is over. Gender is so last year. But when someone tells you their preferred pronouns, you should use those pronouns. [more inside]
More cute animals than you can shake a log at.
A webcam setup at a log on a creek in rural PA picks up years worth of fuzzy creatures wandering across the log. The long anticipated sequel, The Log 2: Another Year has even more including a very inquisitive bobcat.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer
Do Authors Write Where They Know? "That got me wondering: How far from a place they’ve called “home” do writers tend to set their works? The famous saying, of disputed origins, goes “Write what you know.” But do authors usually “write where they know,” like Zadie Smith?
To answer this question, we took a look at [a list of] the best 100 books written since 1900. We then calculated every possible distance between book setting and author residence to find the smallest value for each book. This told us if at least part of their book was based on a place familiar to the author."
Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities
Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon. It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense size and mysterious origins. Now, some scientists are arguing the settlements represent a distinct form of ancient urban life that has gone largely unrecognized.
Ice Ice Baby
In the depths of winter, Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire turns in to a frozen paradise, attracting ice fishers, snowmobilers, and... pilots. [more inside]
sᴉxɐ-⅄ / sᴉxɐ-X
When up means down: why do so many video game players invert their controls? [The Guardian] “Imagine you are playing a video game where you’re looking out over an explorable world. You have a controller in your hand and you want your character to look or move upwards: in what direction do you push the joystick? If the answer is “up”, you’re in the majority – most players push up on a stick, or slide a mouse upwards, to instigate upward motion in a game. Most, but not all. A significant minority of players start every new game they play by going into the options and selecting “Invert Y axis”, which means when they push up on the stick, their onscreen avatar looks or moves downwards. To both sets of players, their own choice is logical and natural, and discussions about the subject can get quite fraught – as I found when I tweeted about it a few weeks ago. But why the perceptual difference? Is there anything definite that neuroscientists or psychologists can tell us about this schism?”
You can't be Ceres-ous
To the Tseshaht, these islands are not a wilderness but a homeland
Across the Americas, scientists robbed graves, pillaged cultural items, and at times trafficked in baseless theories about the inferiority of Indigenous people. [...] This history made archaeologists unlikely allies in the fight to reclaim First Nations lands in British Columbia. But the Tseshaht Archaeology Project had a track record: Its leaders, Denis St. Claire and Alan McMillan, both white, had been working in the region for decades, talking to elders and asking for the approval of Nuu-Chah-Nulth leaders. Their work came at a time of tidal change in the field, when a growing number of researchers began working collaboratively with First Nations, rather than exploiting their history and territory. St. Claire was even adopted into the Tseshaht, and given the rare opportunity to speak on behalf of the tribe. “They’ve always been so respectful,” Watts says of the men. They wanted to do archaeology in service of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth. A First Nation, a Fight for Ancestral Lands, And an Unlikely Alliance -- The Tseshaht people are working with archaeologists to write a new chapter in a fraught history. (Atlas Obscura) [more inside]
You’re only as healthy as the least-insured person in society
“ For all but the independently wealthy in America, the best-case scenario for getting sick is being a person with good health insurance, paid time off, and a reasonable boss who won’t penalize you for taking a few sick days or working from home. For millions of the country’s workers, such a scenario is a nearly inconceivable luxury.” The Problem With Telling Sick Workers to Stay Home. The novel Coronavirus isn’t very deadly, that’s why it’s dangerous (The Atlantic) With 2 out of the 5 most common jobs in America bring food service or prep related, industry workers have taken to Twitter to describe how dangerous the current workplace and healthcare ituation is for staff and customers. Meanwhile, Doctors Prescribe Medicare-for-All: Single Payer Reform Endorsed by America's Largest Medical Specialty Society - The Lancet: “... a universal system, such as that proposed in the Medicare for All Act, has the potential to transform the availability and efficiency of American health-care services.” - Multiple Studies Show Medicare For All Saves Money (The Week) Why We Should Be Madder About The Uninsured
Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet
Remember when Wikipedia was a joke?
In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. The Office's Michael Scott called it “the best thing ever,” because “anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject—so you know you are getting the best possible information.” Praising Wikipedia, by restating its mission, meant self-identifying as an idiot.
That was in 2007....
Pick Thine Own Story-Exploit
Netflix is asking a court to cancel the Choose Your Own Adventure trademark owned by publishing company Chooseco, in response to Chooseco's lawsuit against Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. "In contemporary parlance, any situation that requires making a series of unguided choices, or that provides an opportunity to go back and re-make a series of choices that turned out badly, is referred to as a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure," argued Netflix.
Freeman Dyson 1923 - 2020
"Freeman Dyson Dies at 96; Wrestled With Questions of Physics and Morality" (SLNYT) Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth’s environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96. [more inside]
"He's not good or fast, so hopefully we're going to win this game."
Fast-and-loose culture of esports is upending once staid world of chess (NBC): Botez, 24, is good and fast. She holds the title of Woman FIDE Master, was the first female president of the Stanford University Chess Club and remains one of the best players in Canada. And under normal circumstances, she probably wouldn't be losing to her anonymous online opponent. ¶ But on the monitor to her right, Botez was also talking to more than 1,000 viewers who were watching the game as she offered a mix of live commentary, trash talk and thanks to the viewers who had given her contributions. ¶ Players like Botez now serve as some of the most visible ambassadors of chess -- and, it can be argued, the game's first entertainers. If chess hustling turned pro, it would look something like what Botez does.
One thing about him is that he be lactose intolerant, and so there be
Learning the Ropes, by Simon Rich, at the New Yorker. A salty tale of Black Bones the pirate and his ice-hearted roving partner Rotten Pete. “The only man I trust is me First Mate, Rotten Pete the Scoundrel, and I only trust him as far as I can keep me eye peeled on his hook hand. Rotten Pete is so rotten, he’d sell his mother for a piece-of-eight. I’ve seen him stab his peg leg through his brother’s screaming face, just to have himself a laugh. He’s got a black beard right up to his eyes and he loves to keep it slick with dead men’s blood.”
Coffee Break Sessions
Why not enjoy your coffee with some vinyl in the morning? Brazilian grooves • Japanese city pop and jazz-funk • Jazz from the USSR [more inside]
Google Interviewing Process for Software Developer Role in 2020
If you’re looking for a success story, this is the wrong post for you.
A software engineer describes his recent experience of interviewing at Google. [more inside]
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