5,540 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2021
    1. What Christine Ortiz is doing is legit tho (its the example she mentions next to Crow). I'm on the Admissions Committee for the uni she's building (currently only offers a summer fellowship program): https://www.station1.org/ -- might be worth looking into if you're exploring equitable innovations in higher ed

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>ysf</span> in 📚-reading (<time class='dt-published'>11/01/2021 20:55:11</time>)</cite></small>

    1. I know I know with the Paris is it is a stone. And people used to write on stone in Egypt. And that’s where they would create their hieroglyphic alphabet.

    2. The job of the scribe is write down anything and everything that The Priest clergyman and king I had to say. They were basically secretaries.

    1. Twitter, the president of one major cultural institution told me, “is the new public sphere.” Yet Twitter is unforgiving, it is relentless, it doesn’t check facts or provide context.
    2. Once it was not just okay but admirable that Chua and Rubenfeld had law-school students over to their house for gatherings. That moment has passed. So, too, has the time when a student could discuss her personal problems with her professor, or when an employee could gossip with his employer. Conversations between people who have different statuses—employer-employee, professor-student—can now focus only on professional matters, or strictly neutral topics. Anything sexual, even in an academic context—for example, a conversation about the laws of rape—is now risky.

      Is it simply the stratification of power and roles that is causing these problems? Is it that some of this has changed and that communication between people of different power levels is the difficulty in these cases?

      I have noticed a movement in pedagogy spaces that puts the teacher as a participant rather than as a leader thus erasing the power structures that previously existed. This exists within Cathy Davidson's The New Education where teachers indicate that they're learning as much as their students.

    3. Just as odd old women were once subject to accusations of witchery, so too are certain types of people now more likely to fall victim to modern mob justice.

      Modern mob justice is not too dissimilar to the historical experience of the Salem witch trials.


      How might one rewrite Arthur Miller's The Crucible within the framework of modern cancel culture? What does that look like? We need more art to reflect these changes in society to tell our story and get people thinking.

    4. After Alexi McCammond was named editor in chief of Teen Vogue, people discovered and recirculated on Instagram old anti-Asian and homophobic tweets she had written a decade earlier, while still a teenager.

      Should people be judged by statements made in their youth or decades prior? Shouldn't they be given some credit for changing over time and becoming better?

      How can we as a society provide credit to people's changed contexts over time?

      This can be related to Heraclitus' river.

    5. You would think it would be a good thing for the young readers of Teen Vogue to learn forgiveness and mercy, but for the New Puritans, there is no statute of limitations.
    6. Once it becomes clear that attention and praise can be garnered from organizing an attack on someone’s reputation, plenty of people discover that they have an interest in doing so.

      This is a whole new sort of "attention economy".

      This genre of problem is also one of the most common defenses given by the accused as sort of "boogeyman" meant to silence accusers. How could we better balance the ills against each of the sides in these cases to mitigate the broader harms in both directions?

    7. Nobody is perfect; nobody is pure; and once people set out to interpret ambiguous incidents in a particular way, it’s not hard to find new evidence.

      Wouldn't it be better for us to focus our efforts and energies on people who are doing bigger mass scale harms on society?

      Surely the ability to protect some of these small harms undergird ability to build up protection for much larger harms.

      Why are we prosecuting these smaller harms rather than the larger (especially financial and) institutional harms?

      It is easier to focus on the small and specific rather than broad and unspecific. (Is there a name for this as a cognitive bias? There should be, if not. Perhaps related to the base rate fallacy or base rate neglect (a form of extension neglect), which is "the tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important." (via Wikipedia)

      Could the Jesuits' descent into the particular as a method help out here?

    8. This is typical: More often than not, apologies will be parsed, examined for “sincerity”—and then rejected.

      Why are these parsed apologies being rejected and by whom? Are they being rejected by the wronged parties or by the broader society-at-large who regularly don't have or care about the full context of the situations? How much of these are propagated by social media and the ability of search engines to continually uncover them?

      How might these situations have given rise to the idea of honor suicides in cultures like Japan with rituals like seppuku? How are these sorts of cultural practices passed into common practice? How can they be reversed?

    9. One of the people I spoke with was asked to apologize for an offense that broke no existing rules. “I said, ‘What am I apologizing for?’ And they said, ‘Well, their feelings were hurt.’ So I crafted my apology around that: ‘If I did say something that upset you, I didn’t anticipate that would happen.’ ” The apology was initially accepted, but his problems didn’t end.

      Even in cases where one apologizes for offences which don't break existing rules and the apology is accepted by the transgressed, the social ostracism doesn't end. This is a part of the indeterminate length of the social sentences that transgressors suffer.


      What exactly are these unwritten rules? In some cases they may be examples of institutional power wielding influence in cases where people aren't giving the full benefit of humanity and consideration to others. Some may call some of these instances microaggressions or social constructs similar to them.

    10. Nicholas Christakis, the Yale professor of medicine and sociology who was at the center of a campus and social-media storm in 2015, is also an expert on the functioning of human social groups. He reminded me that ostracism “was considered an enormous sanction in ancient times—to be cast out of your group was deadly.” It is unsurprising, he said, that people in these situations would consider suicide.
    11. But isolation plus public shaming plus loss of income are severe sanctions for adults, with long-term personal and psychological repercussions—especially because the “sentences” in these cases are of indeterminate length.

      Putting people beyond the pale creates isolation, public shaming, loss of income, loss of profession, and sometimes loss of personal identity and psychological worth. The most insidious problem of all is the indeterminate length of the "sentence".

      For wealthy people like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and Kevin Spacey, they're heavily insulated by the fact that at least they've got amassed wealth which mitigates some of these issues. In these cases the decades of extracting wealth through privilege gives them an unfair advantage.

      There are now apparently enough cases of this happening, it would be interesting to watch the long term psychological effects of this group to see if these situations statistically effects their longevity or if there are multi-generational knock on effects as have been seen in Holocaust survivors or those freed from slavery.

    12. Another person suspended from his job put it this way: “Someone who knows me, but maybe doesn’t know my soul or character, may be saying to themselves that prudence would dictate they keep their distance, lest they become collateral damage.”

      Putting people beyond the pale creates a social contagion of sorts. It would be interesting to look at these cases from the perspective of public health and view these as disease. What information falls out of doing this? How does this model change?

      From Applebaum's perspective that these cases may help sow the seeds of authoritarianism, could they be viewed as something like an initial case of untreated syphilis and authoritarianism becomes a version of festered stage three syphilis.

      What other things may stem from these effects as second and third order problems from a complexity theory perspective?

    13. All of them, sinners or saints, have been handed drastic, life-altering, indefinite punishments, often without the ability to make a case in their own favor. This—the convicting and sentencing without due process, or mercy—should profoundly bother Americans.

      There is a growing number of cases in which people are having their lives being completely upended because they are being deprived of due process.

      In some cases, it may actually be beneficial as people may have been abusing their positions of privilege and the traditional system wouldn't have prosecuted or penalized them at all. In these cases the dismantling of institutional power is good. However, how many of them aren't related to this? How many are being decimated without serving this function?

    14. The purpose here is not to reinvestigate or relitigate any of their cases. Some of those I interviewed have behaved in ways that I, or readers of this article, may well consider ill-judged or immoral, even if they were not illegal. I am not here questioning all of the new social codes that have led to their dismissal or their effective isolation. Many of these social changes are clearly positive.

      This sounds a lot like the article How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life though in that case it was a single instance and these examples here may go beyond social media.

      Though I'm curious if all of them will entail social media as a (major?) factor in how they played out.

    15. Nuance and ambiguity are essential to good fiction. They are also essential to the rule of law: We have courts, juries, judges, and witnesses precisely so that the state can learn whether a crime has been committed before it administers punishment. We have a presumption of innocence for the accused. We have a right to self-defense. We have a statute of limitations.

      Great quote by itself.


      How useful is the statute of limitations in cases like slavery in America? It goes against a broader law of humanity, but by pretending there was a statue of limitations for going against it, we have only helped to institutionalize racism in American society. The massive lack of a level playing field makes it all the harder for the marginalized to have the same freedoms as everyone else.

      Perhaps this is why the idea of reparations is so powerful for so many. It removes the statue of limitations and may make it possible to allow us to actually level the playing field.

      Related:

      Luke 12:48 states, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." Is this simply a statement for justifying greater taxes for the massively wealth?

    16. But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake.

      Cancel culture and modern mob justice are possible as the result of volumes of more detail and data as well as large doses of context collapse.

      In some cases, it's probably justified to help level the playing field for those in power who are practicing hypocrisy, but in others, it's simply a lack of context by broader society who have kneejerk reactions which have the ability to be "remembered" by broader society with search engines.

      How might Google allow the right to forget to serve as a means of restorative justice?

    17. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.
    18. After that, she must wear a scarlet A—for adulterer—pinned to her dress for the rest of her life. On the outskirts of Boston, she lives in exile. No one will socialize with her—not even those who have quietly committed similar sins, among them the father of her child, the saintly village preacher.

      Given the prevalence of people towards making mistakes and practicing extreme hypocrisy, we really ought to move toward restorative justice. Especially in the smaller non-capital cases.

    1. , or ‘that is tragic’, nor are we certain, since short stories, we have been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all.

      Looks at Russian example of MODERNIST short story and likes that its

    1. Context: Sonia was watching Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Season 3: "Episode 1" and had previously been watching a documentary One of Us about people who had left oppressive seeming Hassidic Jewish communities.

      I can't help but that that every culture could be considered a "cult" in which some percentage of people are trapped with comparison to all other cultures on Earth. Based on one's upbringing and personal compass, perhaps living and submitting to one's culture can become oppressive and may seem particularly unfair given power structures and the insidiousness of hypocrisy.

      Given this, could there logically be a utopian society in which everyone lives freely?

      Even within the United States there are smaller sub-cultures withiin which people feel trapped and which have the features of cults, but which are so large as to not be considered such. Even the space in which I freely live might be considered a cult by others who don't agree with it. It's only the vast size of the power of the group which prevents the majority who comfortably live within it from viewing it as a bad thing.

      A Democrat may view the Republican Party as a cult and vice versa, something which becomes more apparent when one polarizes these communities toward the edges rather than allowing them to drift into each other in a consensus.

      An African American may think they're stuck in a broader American cult which marginalizes them.

      A Hassidic Jew may feel they're stuck in a cult (of religious restrictions) with respect to the perceived freedoms of broader American Culture. Some may feel more comfortable within these strictures than others.


      A gender non-comforming person living in the deep South of the United States surrounded by the Southern Baptist Convention may feel they're stuck in a cult based on social norms of one culture versus what they experience personally.


      What are the roots of something being a cult? Could it be hypocrisy? A person or a broader group feeling as if they know "best" and creating a rule structure by which others are forced to follow, but from which they themselves are exempt? This also seems to be the way in which authoritarian rules arise when privileging one group above another based solely on (perceived) power.


      Another potential thing at play here may be the lack of diversity within a community. The level of cult within a society may be related to the shape of the bell curve of that society with respect to how large the center is with respect to the tails. Those who are most likely to feel they're within a "cult" (using the broader definition) are those three or more standard deviations from the center. In non-diverse communities only those within a standard deviation of the norm are likely to feel comfortable and accepted and those two deviations away will feel very uncomfortable while those who are farther away will be shunned and pushed beyond the pale.


      How can we help create more diverse and broadly accepting communities? We're all just people, aren't we? How can we design communities and governments to be accepting of even the most marginalized? In a heavily connected world, even the oddball teenager in a small community can now manage to find their own sub-community using the internet. (Even child pornographers manage to find their community online.)

      The opposite of this is at what point do we circumscribe the norms of the community? Take the idea of "Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose." Perhaps we only shun those extreme instances like murder and pornography, and other actions which take extreme advantage of others' freedoms? [This needs to be heavily expanded and contemplated...] What about the over-financialization of the economy which takes advantage of the unprivileged who don't know that system and are uncapable of the mathematics and computation to succeed. Similarly hucksters and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of their targets' weaknesses and lack of knowledge and sophistication. Or the unregulated vitamin industry taking rents from millions for their superstitions? How do we regulate these to allow "cultural freedom" or "religious freedom" without them taking mass-scale advantage of their targets? (Or are some of these acculturated examples simply inequalities institutionally built into societies and cultures as a means of extracting power and rents from the larger system by those in power?)


      Compare with Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.


    1. Chancel’s recent paper adds new insights by allocating national consumption emissions associated with capital investments to individuals within each country based on their share of asset ownership, derived from the latest wealth inequality datasets. He finds that emissions from investments make up an increasing share – up to 70% in 2019 – of the footprints of the world’s 1% highest emitters.32

      Hence, High Net Worth Individual Divestment (HNWID) is definitely an important future strategy.

    1. I created a social justice metaphor library to help explain concepts like why you can't just create a "level playing field" without acknowledging the economic impacts of history (see, even saying it like that is complicated).

      I love that Dave has started a list of these useful social justice metaphors.

      I got side tracked by the idea this morning and submitted a handful I could think of off the top of my head.

      • Baseball fence
      • Parable of the Polygons
      • Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

      I'm curious if there are any useful ones in the neurodiversity space? I feel like I need more of these myself.

    1. If and when you need some kind of behaviour that waits for things, wait_until is a giant big sledgehammer. There are more fine grained, sophisticated tools built into Capybara, and I want you to learn about them, because those are some of the best features of the library. And when the built in tools aren’t enough, there are more sophisticated tools available than that clunky hammer. So hopefully the removal of wait_until encourages you to write better tests.
    2. I am firmly convinced that asserting on the state of the interface is in every way superior to asserting on the state of your model objects in a full-stack test.
    1. That's not how flatpack works; the executable is hidden in a container and you need to set up the whole environment to be able to call it. Delivering a well-isolated, not-to-be-run-from-outside environment is the whole point.
    1. Basically you take an idea, convert that idea into a character then whenever you want to think about that idea you imagine yourself as that character and then explain that idea to yourself through that character. For example: We first take an idea (lets use automation) Then we turn it into a character (lets see automation as a mass of cogwheels and pistons moving around randomly) Then you imagine yourself as that character and see the world through that characters eyes (in this case we would be disgusted by humanity because of how slow and inefficient it is) Now when we are asked a question about automation or when we want to think about automation we can imagine ourselves becoming that character and we can speak through them to answer that question

      Related to the idea of putting oneself into another ideas' shoes discussed a bit in Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind.

    1. However, unless my feeble brain is feeble, this looks like a valid use case and I might not be alone.
    2. Of course, we can always add more special cases to the type system to detect the specific case of iterating over a known-bounded object literal, but this just leads to the "Why does this code not behave like this other nearly-identical code?" problem when we fail to properly exhaust all the special cases.
  2. Oct 2021
    1. We do, even asking in our conclusion, “How might the social life of annotation serve the public good?” Any social benefit mediated by annotation must address power.

      The parallel structure here reminds me of the book The Social Life of Information which is surely related to this idea in a subtle way. I wonder if they cited it in their bibliography? I wonder if it influenced this sentence?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Information

    1. Churches we’re spreading the word in many different ways. The manuscript was most used in a Bible that was Latin.And there was also confession that people had to do said sine against the church. Come to think of it the clergy of men was probably taking notes and creating his own manuscript.

    2. Block printing was created and used by people of China. They used it for buddhist scripture

    1. Pace Dilthey, Plessner's "Levels" is not about interpreting historical contingencies, nor about the more familiar evolutionary sedimentation of frozen accidents, but rather is about looking to establish transcendental conditions (or categories) of biotic possibility that he refers to as "modals of the organic." As with Hegel he challenges us with a proposed logic of life always mobilized by dialectical tensions, albeit not on the basis of any form of idealism and bereft of a Hollywood ending. For Plessner, that which is both the sine qua non of the living state and that generative 'principle' from which organic modals can be derived is the on-going performance of a self-positioning boundary, and it is highly unlikely that anybody has ever thought as deeply about the implications of what this means.

      "Modals of the organic" are the levels at which emergent qualities at the higher level cannot be explained from the lower level, and give rise to the highest constitutive level, human consciousness.

    1. Inflections go the other way around.In classic mode, given a missing constant Rails underscores its name and performs a file lookup. On the other hand, zeitwerk mode checks first the file system, and camelizes file names to know the constant those files are expected to define.While in common names these operations match, if acronyms or custom inflection rules are configured, they may not. For example, by default "HTMLParser".underscore is "html_parser", and "html_parser".camelize is "HtmlParser".
    1. There’s a telling episode about a quarter of the way into Now You See It, Cathy N. Davidson’s impassioned manifesto on the way digital tools should transform how we learn and work.

      These were written at a time when the tech industry generally had a rose colored view of their effects on the world. By 2021, we've now got a much more sober and nuanced view. Even Cathy Davidson says as much in her recent book The New Education.

      For more on this topic with respect to education, see specifically Audrey Watters.

  3. theliturgists.com theliturgists.com
    1. THE SUNDAY THING

      The Sunday Thing

      The love of money is the root of all evil

      This week, Michael Gungor asked us to discuss money in our breakout groups.

      Money is power

      We outsource our power and authority to those who claim to have greater access to capital, because we underestimate and undervalue our own social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism). https://hypothes.is/a/667dOC0bEeyV6Itx3ySxmw

      Indigenous cultures in Canada were disempowered by outlawing the cultural practice of generosity (potlatch) and replacing the practice with centralized power over the medium of exchange: money. Money is a mechanism of disempowerment.

      Money is a shared story we tell ourselves about what has value. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/795246685

      We translated “ekklesia” as church. It is the deliberative body of the experiment in democracy in Athens, Greece. The people who are figuring out how to live together in the commons. The work of the people. The Liturgists.


      The Story of Money

      In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.

      On the Media: Full Faith & Credit


      Squid Game

      People were also discussing Squid Game.

      Squid Game was on my mind today before the call. “The reality of the history of Canada’s mining industry makes #SquidGame look like child’s play.” https://twitter.com/bauhouse/status/1449726452098682881?s=20

      The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.

      Commons: Mining

  4. imaginaxiom.com imaginaxiom.com
    1. However, we know that money is a fiction, a story that we tell ourselves. Money is a story about what and who has value. This scale of human value that we call money is fake. But if enough people believe it, that idea of money becomes our reality.

      On the Media

      The Story of Money

      Full Faith & Credit

      In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.

    1. In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.

      The Story of Money

      Ten autumns ago came two watershed moments in the history of money. In September 2008, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers triggered a financial meltdown from which the world has yet to fully recover. The following month, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto introduced BitCoin, the first cryptocurrency. Before our eyes, the very architecture of money was evolving — potentially changing the world in the process. In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.

    1. “Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”

      Canada is fake

      “Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”

      https://twitter.com/bauhouse/status/1449737672407150595

      “Eventually they spread their land grab all the way to the Pacific Ocean and the northern coastlines in pursuit of gold, silver, iron, copper, nickel, and diamond reserves.… ‘Canada’ came about in the late 1800s for nakedly economic reasons…”

  5. bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. Recent research suggests that globally, the wealthiest 10% have been responsible foras much as half of the cumulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% for more than twicethe emissions of the poorest 50% (2).

      this suggests that perhaps the failure of the COP meetings may be partially due to focusing at the wrong level and demographics. the top 1 and 10 % live in every country. A focus on the wealthy class is not a focus area of COP negotiations perse. Interventions targeting this demographic may be better suited at the scale of individuals or civil society.

      Many studies show there are no extra gains in happiness beyond a certain point of material wealth, and point to the harmful impacts of wealth accumulation, known as affluenza, and show many health effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/, https://theswaddle.com/how-money-affects-rich-people/, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dark-reasons-so-many-rich-people-are-miserable-human-beings-2018-02-22, https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-wealthy-people-may-be-less-successful-love-ncna837306, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/affluence,

      A Human Inner Transformation approach based on an open source praxis called Deep Humanity is one example of helping to transform affluenza and leveraging it accelerate transition.

    1. The breakdown of water involves a rearrangement of the atoms in water molecules into different molecules,

      Why would hydrogen and oxygen need to be separated for?

    1. Victor Papanek’s Design Problem, 1975.

      The Design Problem

      Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

      Figure 1: The Design Problem

      (Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

      The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

      • Figure 1: The Design Problem
      • Figure 2: A Country
      • Figure 3: The World
    1. journalism historian David Mindich

      The View from Somewhere

      Hallin’s spheres

      At 11 minutes into this podcast episode, David Mindich provides an overview of Hallin’s spheres.

      Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.

      Wikipedia: Hallin's spheres

      I learned about this podcast from Sandy and Nora in their episode, Canada’s democratic deficit.

    1. The podcast focuses on the troubled history of “objectivity” and how it has been used to gatekeep and exclude people of color, queer and trans people, and people organizing for their labor rights and communities.

      I learned about this podcast through Sandy and Nora.

    1. During the transatlantic slave trade, Europeans essentially enlisted the “help” of Africans to assist enslavement of their own peoples. They did this by giving small rewards of weapons, luxury goods, and winning wars against neighboring tribes. During initial explorations, “free” slaves guided the colonizers through the land and water. For any of this to occur, it was a plotted strategy using persuasion and even coercion. With the births of “mulattos” (children of Europeans and Africans), were bought back to Africa and infiltrated to continue the enslavement of African people. This was the beginning of the mental programming and trauma that has been engrained in the beings of POC and passed down for generations.

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    Annotators

    1. In ecology, edge effects are changes in population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats.[1] Areas with small habitat fragments exhibit especially pronounced edge effects that may extend throughout the range. As the edge effects increase, the boundary habitat allows for greater biodiversity.

      Edge Effects

      It was in the Design Science Studio that I learned about edge effects.

      Yesterday, I was thinking about how my life embodies the concept of edge effects. That same day, a book was delivered to our door, Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.

      Today, I was reading these words:

      Design for the Real World

      Design for Survival and Survival through Design: A Summation

      Integrated, comprehensive, anticipatory design is the act of planning and shaping carried on across the various disciplines, an act continuously carried on at interfaces between them.

      Victor Papanek goes on to say:

      It is at the border of different techniques or disciplines that most new discoveries are made and most action is inaugurated. It is when two differing areas of knowledge are brought into contact with one another that… a new science may come into being.

      (Page 323)


      Exiles and Emigrés

      The Bauhaus spread its ideas because it existed at the boundaries, the avant-garde, the edges of what was thought to be possible, especially as a socialist utopian idea found its way to a capitalist industrial-military complex, where the concept of modernism was co-opted and colonized by globalizing economic forces beyond the control of the individual. Design was the virus that propagated around the world through the vehicle of corporate globalization.

      That same design ethic is infecting corporations with a conscience, with empathy, with a process that begins with listening to people. Design is the virus that can spread the values of unconditional love throughout the body of neoliberal capitalism.

    1. Design for the Real World

      You have to make up your mind either to make sense or to make money, if you want to be a designer.

      — R. Buckminster Fuller

      (Page 86)

    2. Design for the Real World

      by Victor Papanek

      Papanek on the Bauhaus

      Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

      No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

      The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

      (Pages 30-31)

    1. Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved this text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion here.)

    1. The Daily is part of my ritual of learning through long-form journalism in an audio format what is top of mind for many Americans. I was raised on American exceptionalism that was piped into Canada through several media channels: TV, radio, music, books, movies, etc.

      Jacques Ellul called this Propaganda and The Technological Society.

    1. DIRECTORY (in progress): This post is my directory. This post will be tagged with all tags I ever use (in chronological order). It allows people to see all my tags, not just the top 50. Additionally, this allows me to keep track. I plan on sorting tags in categories in reply to this comment.

      External links:

      Tags categories will be posted in comments of this post.

  6. Sep 2021
    1. The Young Society's focus is showcasing young artists who have a passion for creativity.

      As Brad Jarvis pointed out to me, this sounds a lot like WeMakeStuff, which is the project that connected Brad and me. I had the privilege of working on WeMakeStuff Volume 02.

      Now that we are working together on the builders collective with the Design Science Studio, it is very interesting that Rachel Kehler and The Young Society are focusing on the theme of resilience, as design for resilience has been the focus of the builders collective.

      Design for Resilience was the project I submitted in my application to the Design Science Studio on June 12, 2020.

    1. Do not use articles in front of product names. For example, do not write "the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was..."
    1. Active Indexers, Curators and Delegators can earn income from the network proportional to the amount of work they perform and their GRT stake.
    2. Curators are subgraph developers, data consumers or community members who signal to Indexers which APIs should be indexed by The Graph Network. Curators deposit GRT into a bonding curve to signal on a specific subgraph and earn a portion of query fees for the subgraphs they signal on; incentivizing the highest quality data sources. Curators will curate on subgraphs and deposit GRT via the Graph Explorer dApp. Because this occurs on a bonding curve, that means that the earlier you signal on a subgraph, the greater share of the query fees you earn on that subgraph for a given amount of GRT deposited. This also means that when you go to withdraw, you could end up with more or less GRT than you started with.

      cryptoeconomics still amazes me, how everything can be an opportunity for 'investment'

    1. Competent scientists do not believe their own models or theories, but rather treat them as convenient fictions. ...The issue to a scientist is not whether a model is true, but rather whether there is another whose predictive power is enough better to justify movement from today's fiction to a new one. Steve Vardeman, 1987. Comment. Journal of the American Statistical Association 82 : 130-131. [kw]

      easier said than done

    1. there has been a spectacular rise in luxury consumption, with the consumption patterns of the global elite acting as a marker for those further down the income scale. Robert Frank (2000) describes the process as 'luxury fever', as consumption expectations are ratcheted up all the way down the income scale. The global elite are pushing up people's expectations and assumptions. In the US, for example, the average size of house has doubled, in square feet terms, in the past thirty years. In part it is a function of the positional nature of consumption. We consume in order to position ourselves relative to other people. Not only do the global elite raise the upper limit, everyone is thus forced to spend more just to keep up, but they also become the perceived benchmark, Juliet Schor's work, for example, shows that people are no longer keeping up with the people next door, but the people they see on television and magazines (Schor, 1998). In order to keep up with these raised consumption standards people are working harder and longer as well as taking out more debt. The increase in luxury consumption has raised consumption expectations further down the income scale, which in order to be funded has involved increased workloads and increased indebtedness. It is not so much keeping up with the Jones but 'keeping up with the Gates'.

      The elites point the way for those in even the lowest income brackets to follow. This crosses cultures as well. Capitalism trumps colonialism as former colonized peoples reserve the right to taste the fruits of capitalism. Hence, hard work, ingenuity and leveraging opportunity to accumulate all the signs and symbols of wealth, joining the colonialist biased elites is seen as having arrived at success, even though it means contributing to the destruction of the planetary commons. The aspirations to wealth must be uniformly deprioritized in order to align our culture in the right direction that will rescue our species from the impact of following this misdirection for the past century.

    2. the global elite (i.e. both global managers and the global super-rich) must be regarded as transnational for three main reasons, as Sklair (1997) outlines.

      Mapping out where they are is a useful exercise in order to identify the wealthy communities they may live in. Of course, citizens who live long enough in an city, town or community get to know where the affluent parts of town are.

      Of course many of the super elite live in exclusive homes far away from population centers. Wealth buys geographic exclusivity snd seclusion from prying eyes.

    1. The phonograph is like a book on tape it could read to people who really needed the help and support. Like the blind people with Learning disabilities the elderly and people who just wanted entertainment.

    2. People believed that they could translate it with a magnifying glass. Not possible because The machine is reading it for you.

    3. It was an early recording device people used it like a tape recorder. People could also come back and listen to them it was like magic

    1. I had seen other residents at the Y.M.C.A. do

      Blending in to belong to the new place, Copying actions, behaviour

    2. The Student Guide to North America,"

      Going to America, the narrator immediately starts to inform himself on the new country and culture. His descriptions change as well. He notices cultural differences etc. of the US.

    1. 'King (or Captain) Ludd,'' and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick - every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

      The stuff he's getting at in Against the Day.

    1. clocks from the fourteenth century onwards, how far this was itself a symptom of a new Puritan discipline and bourgeois exac

      I do not wish to argue how far the change was due to the spread of clocks from the fourteenth century onwards, how far this was itself a symptom of a new Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude.

      For some history of the importance of time with relation to naval navigation and trade, see: Sobel, Dava (1995). Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker and Company.

    1. TypeScript is an extension of JavaScript. You can think of it as JavaScript with a few extra features. These features are largely focused on defining the type and shape of JavaScript objects. It requires that you be declarative about the code you're writing and have an understanding of the values your functions, variables, and objects are expecting.While it requires more code, TypeScript is a fantastic means of catching common JavaScript bugs while in development. And for just that reason, it's worth the extra characters.
    1. The current supported languages out-of-the-box are Sass, Stylus, Less, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Pug, PostCSS, Babel.
    1. Webpack's resolve.mainFields option determines which fields in package.json are used to resolve identifiers. If you're using Svelte components installed from npm, you should specify this option so that your app can use the original component source code, rather than consuming the already-compiled version (which is less efficient).
    1. Update API usage of the view helpers by changing javascript_packs_with_chunks_tag and stylesheet_packs_with_chunks_tag to javascript_pack_tag and stylesheet_pack_tag. Ensure that your layouts and views will only have at most one call to javascript_pack_tag or stylesheet_pack_tag. You can now pass multiple bundles to these view helper methods.

      Good move. Rather than having 2 different methods, and requiring people to "go out of their way" to "opt in" to using chunks by using the longer-named javascript_packs_with_chunks_tag, they changed it to just use chunks by default, out of the box.

      Now they don't need 2 similar but separate methods that do nearly the same, which makes things simpler and easier to understand (no longer have to stop and ask oneself, which one should I use? what's the difference?).

      You can't get it "wrong" now because there's only one option.

      And by switching that method to use the shorter name, it makes it clearer that that is the usual/common/recommended way to go.

    2. Webpacker used to configure Webpack indirectly, which lead to a complicated secondary configuration process. This was done in order to provide default configurations for the most popular frameworks, but ended up creating more complexity than it cured. So now Webpacker delegates all configuration directly to Webpack's default configuration setup.

      more trouble than it's worth

      • creating more complexity than it cured
    1. What's the reasoning behind this change?
    2. I feel like app/packs (or something like it) is a good name because it communicates to developers that it's not just JavaScript that can be bundled, it's also CSS, images, SVGs — you name it. I realize what can be bundled is wholly dependent on the bundler you use, but even esbuild supports bundling CSS. So couldn't this possibly be confusing?
    1. the same time such closeness may create certain kinds of blindness in the researcher. One protection we developed against this was in the ongoing process of analysis in the research group. Our analytic discussions, of necessity,

      overcoming the blindness that sensitivity can bring about.

    2. he fact that we, the in- terviewers, were women who have been married, divorced, and had children (one of us had a baby after the study began) increased the validity of our data.

      positioning the researcher within the data and its interpretation - important to account for and explain similarities between researcher and interviewee - as it enhancing the interpretation of the data through sensitivity to phenomena.

    3. At the same time that we were trying to find some fruitful categories in which to group our inter- viewees, we were analysing issues or themes in the in- terviews.

      iterative methodological process.

    1. https://youtu.be/qYsMtroVLeA?t=287

      The big thing that I want to talk about here is out groups. This is a phenomenon that we that we see, which is that it's very very easy for people to decide that someone else is not like them they're different and they should be shunned and talked about.

      This is the minimal group paradigm. Thanks to Rashmi for giving that term. [It] says the smallest possible difference will be magnified into in group and an outgroup. Kevin Marks, Web 2.0 Expo NY 09: "...New Words You Need to Know to Understand the Web"

      Perhaps we can decrease the levels of fear and racism in our society by tummelling? By bringing in outsiders, treating them with dignity and respect within your own group of friends, you can help to normalize their presence by decreasing the irrational fears that others have built up and carry with them about these supposed outsiders.

    2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYsMtroVLeA

      Buzzwords for understanding the new internet

      Importance of words (neologisms) for helping us to communicate.

      retweets as a means of bringing new faces into your stream to expand your in-group.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Kevin Marks </span> in Epeus' epigone: Publics, Flow, Phatic, Tummeling and Out-groups - New Words You Need to Know to Understand the Web (<time class='dt-published'>09/06/2021 15:15:38</time>)</cite></small>

    1. liberty of conscience

      "Liberty of conscience" is a phrase Roger Williams uses in a religious context to denote the freedom for one to follow his or her religious or ethical beliefs. It is an idea that refers to conscious-based thought and individualism. Each person has the right to their own conscience. It is rooted in the idea that all people are created equal and that no culture is better than the other.

      This idea is strongly tied to: freedom from coercion of conscience (own thoughts and ideas), equality of rights, respect and toleration. It is a fundamental element of what has come to be the "American idea of religious liberty". Williams spoke of liberty of conscience in reference to a religious sense. This concept of individualism and free belief was later extrapolated in a general sense. He believed that government involvement ended when it came to divine beliefs.

      Citation: Eberle, Edward J. "Roger Williams on Liberty of Conscience." Roger Williams University Law Review: vol 10:, iss: 2, article 2, pp. 288-311. http://docs.rwu.edu/rwu_LR/vol10/iss2/2. Accessed 8 Sept. 2021.

    1. Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).

    2. Soon enough the Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbittry, and H. L. Mencken’s benighted boobocracy. They were everything that was wrong, unchic and middlebrow about middle America.”

      what a lovely sentence

    3. When asked for his views on which classic works to include among the Great Books, the science historian George Sarton pronounced the exercise futile: “Newton’s achievement and personality are immortal; his book is dead except from the archaeological point of view.”

      How does one keep the spirit of these older books alive? Is it only by subsuming into and expanding upon a larger body of common knowledge?

      What do they still have to teach us?

    4. In “A Great Idea at the Time,” Alex Beam presents Hutchins and Adler as a double act

      Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?

      What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.

      Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.

    1. Thebody:

      Make sure to add facts and personal stories if you can that support the main idea of what you are writing about.

    2. Themainideaorthesis

      In this section make sure to include a summary of what you'll be writing about. an introduction to the paper. restate your main idea in your conclusion as well.

    3. titles always give you a clue to the authors’topic.

      if you read the title you will know more or less what the rest of the page story, essay or book will be about. make sure your title is what your paper will be about

  7. learn-eu-central-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com learn-eu-central-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com
    1. the primary causes of extreme poverty are immaterial, theylie in certain deficiencies in education, organization, and discipline”(p. 159). Poorcountries, in his view, did not need more technology or physical infrastructure ormore foreign aid to eliminate poverty.
    1. According to Netflix, the Netflix app asks this question to prevent users from wasting bandwidth by keeping a show playing that they’re not watching. This is especially true if you’re watching Netflix on your phone through mobile data. Every megabyte is valuable, considering that network providers impose strict data limits and may charge exorbitant rates for data used on top of your phone plan. Advertisement tmntag.cmd.push(function(){tmntag.adTag('purch_Y_C_0_1', false);}); Of course, this saves Netflix bandwidth, too—if you fall asleep or just leave the room while watching Netflix, it will automatically stop playing rather than streaming until you stop it. Netflix also says this helps ensure you don’t lose your position in a series when you resume it. If you fall asleep in the middle of your binging session, you might wake up to find that several hours of episodes have played since you stopped watching. It will be difficult for you to remember when you left off.
  8. Aug 2021
    1. building software visualization tools as web ap-plications can help in making them available to a larger audi-ence
    1. I know, I know—needing to use JavaScript when writing CSS does feel like defeat, but unless there’s a vwWithoutTheScrollbarPlease unit in CSS, you’re going to need use JavaScript.
    2. Maybe someday, we’ll get a viewport unit that doesn’t factor in the scrollbars, but until then, we can only work around the current one.
    1. Now consider we want to handle numbers in our known value set: const KNOWN_VALUES = Object.freeze(['a', 'b', 'c', 1, 2, 3]) function isKnownValue(input?: string | number) { return typeof(input) === 'string' && KNOWN_VALUES.includes(input) } Uh oh! This TypeScript compiles without errors, but it's not correct. Where as our original "naive" approach would have worked just fine. Why is that? Where is the breakdown here? It's because TypeScript's type system got in the way of the developer's initial intent. It caused us to change our code from what we intended to what it allowed. It was never the developer's intention to check that input was a string and a known value; the developer simply wanted to check whether input was a known value - but wasn't permitted to do so.
    2. Changing every built-in function to accept anys would also "break" no one, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Part of TypeScript's value proposition is to catch errors; failing to catch an error is a reduction in that value and is something we have to weigh carefully against "Well maybe I meant that" cases.
    1. The Simplified Spelling Board of the early 1900s in the United States made gauge one of its targets in the early 1920s, urging the replacing of au with a to yield gage. From Simplified Spelling Board, Handbook of Simplified Spelling (1920): Principles Adopted Its [the Board's] recommendations, accordingly, have been based on the following principles : 1) When current usage offers a choice of spellings, to adopt the shortest and simplest. EXAMPLES : blest, not blessed ; catalog, not catalogue; center, not centre; check, not cheque or checque; gage, not gauge; gram, not gramme; honor, not honour; license, not licence; maneuver, not manoeuvre; mold, not mould; plow, not plough; quartet, not quartette; rime, not rhyme; tho, not though; traveler, not traveller.
    1. RemoteStorage requires the server to support a subset of OAuth, and that's the only kind of authentication supported. It also requires WebFinger support
    1. There's a lot of cruft here. Consider that while a project might have a prominently named file like "README" that is meant to be the first thing a wanderer encounters, the true first encounter is the file listing in the project source tree:

      • build/
      • config/
      • src/
      • .babelrc
      • .dockerignore
      • .editorconfig
      • .gitignore
      • .stylelintrc
      • .travis.yml
      • Dockerfile
      • Gruntfile.js
      • LICENSE
      • Procfile
      • README.md
      • aldine.sublime-project
      • aldine.sublime-workspace
      • circle.yml
      • package.json
      • tsconfig.json
      • tslint.json
      • yarn.lock

      Imagine a commit (or a pull request) with the summary "Remove cruft". Why might it be rejected? Let's get more specific.

      There's a Dockerfile here. There's also a package.json. We can ask of each of these, "Why is this here?" The answer is, "Because someone found them useful." Consider, then, that here's a strong case for a contrib/ directory† for this project and where these things should be kept, ill-conceived tooling conventions notwithstanding.

      † This link points to a particular blog post that explains the purpose of a contrib/ directory, but this is not an endorsement of Mr DeVault's other positions or demeanor. Ignore any stridence, arrogance, or other obnoxiousness that you might encounter in your pursuit to pull at any threads from that corner of the Web.

    1. an American company that offers executive educational programs, a business incubator and innovation consultancy service.[1][2] It is not an accredited university and does not provide traditional university qualifications.

      Worth keeping in mind

    1. MOFL IS DECREDENTIALING DOCTORS WHO THINK BAKER ACTING OVER AND OVER AGAIN IS NOT TORTURE PERIOD. It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search ⚓ It looks like there aren't many great matches for your searchTip: Try using words that might appear on the page you’re looking for. For example, "cake recipes" instead of "how to make a cake."Need help? Check out other tips for searching on Google.Web results5 days ago — It is well past the time for our lawmakers to once again address the ... Baker Acting of seniors and in many instances the person did not ...Missing:MOFL ‎DECREDENTIALING ‎THINKMar 15, 2004 — Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North ... education does not go beyond high school and who works full time ...Missing:MOFL ‎DECREDENTIALING ‎BAKERNov 2, 1989 — firms once again that, regardless of ... Revenue projections say the state will have just over $3 billion to Spend next year.16 pagesit is recognized that the world financial system is, at any given time, ... vaded both countries, but particularly Argentina, over the past five years.oian or indifference toward a tbe two-thirds needed to over- wn^M P 051 ... briJy strong- but over- whelming” the President made no move it'the' time to ...Aug 14, 1987 — Holloway and his wife Delta, who took over Ever- green Mnnor's ... wo will not wait a i itojsi yea,, to go back again, Ixwause of t — — —the ...Could China actually take over America and turn it to Communism in the ... keeping selected patriots at bay with DEW torture until such time the FBI ...Missing:MOFL ‎DECREDENTIALING ‎BAKER 2read.net

      MOFL IS DECREDENTIALING DOCTORS WHO THINK BAKER ACTING OVER AND OVER AGAIN IS NOT TORTURE PERIOD. It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search

      ⚓ It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search

      Tip: Try using words that might appear on the page you’re looking for. For example, "cake recipes" instead of "how to make a cake."

      Need help? Check out other tips for searching on Google.

      Web results 5 days ago — It is well past the time for our lawmakers to once again address the ... Baker Acting of seniors and in many instances the person did not ...

      Missing:

      MOFL ‎

      DECREDENTIALING ‎

      THINK Mar 15, 2004 — Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North ... education does not go beyond high school and who works full time ...

      Missing:

      MOFL ‎

      DECREDENTIALING ‎

      BAKER Nov 2, 1989 — firms once again that, regardless of ... Revenue projections say the state will have just over $3 billion to Spend next year.

      16 pages

      it is recognized that the world financial system is, at any given time, ... vaded both countries, but particularly Argentina, over the past five years.

      oian or indifference toward a tbe two-thirds needed to over- wn^M P 051 ... briJy strong- but over- whelming” the President made no move it'the' time to ...

      Aug 14, 1987 — Holloway and his wife Delta, who took over Ever- green Mnnor's ... wo will not wait a i itojsi yea,, to go back again, Ixwause of t — — —the ...

      Could China actually take over America and turn it to Communism in the ... keeping selected patriots at bay with DEW torture until such time the FBI ...

      Missing:

      MOFL ‎

      DECREDENTIALING ‎

      BAKER 2read.net

    1. when you're reading some fresh code in your browser, do you really want to stop to configure that test harness

      Running the tests should be as easy as opening something in the browser.

    1. I used to think copying was unseemly before one of my writing professors in college filled me in on the big, unkept secret. He handed us a small trove of writing samples from folks like Joan Didion, John McPhee, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ernest Hemingway. Essentially a Who's Who of New Yorker essayists. We had to copy out their work, then write our own pieces using the copied sentences as 'templates.'

      This general thought goes back to antiquity (and possibly earlier). In writing about classic rhetoric Seneca the Younger wrote in Epistulae morales

      "We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, 'pack close the flowering honey | And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "

      (Sound a bit like he's one of the original digital gardeners, but in an analog world?)

      He's essentially saying, read the best, take their thoughts and ideas, consume them, make them your own."

      Generations later in ~430 CE, Macrobius in his Saturnalia repeated the same idea and even analogy (he assuredly read Seneca, though he obviously didn't acknowledge him):

      "You should not count it a fault if I shall set out the borrowings from a miscellaneous reading in the authors' own words... sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of the old writers... We ought in some sort to imitate bees; and just as they, in their wandering to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the honeycombs, and transform the various juices to a single flavor by some mixing with them a property of their own being, so I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading... For not only does arrangement help the memory, but the actual process of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts to make a single flavor; with the result that, even if the sources are evident, what we get in the end is still something clearly different from those known sources."

    1. The incident described in this post provides a good case study for why the GitHub pull request process is not a good substitute for wikis.

    1. I should perhaps also note that I try, whenever possible, not to collect raw quotes or information simply copied from the Internet or from books, but to write excerpts or summaries in my own words on the basis of my reading. Luhmann called this "reformulating writing" and argued that such an approach is most important for one's own intellectual life. But this idea is not a new discovery Luhmann made. In fact, the idea that excerpts should be used to keep on's research goes back to at least the Renaissance when people first began to make extensive excerpts on paper.

      This is also related to the ideas of invention as well as the analogy of the bee in relation to commonplaces. Link this to the bee analogy of Seneca the Younger and Macrobius in Saturnalia.

    1. Middleware would reduce both platforms' own power and their function as levers for unaccountable state power, as governments increasingly pressure platforms to "voluntarily" suppress disfavored speech.2

      Tangentially related idea which this sparked:

      Within my beyond the pale thesis, banishing people in smaller social groups is easier, but doesn't necessarily scale well.

      In larger towns, cities, and even states, it may work in some of the smallest and most egregious cases like major crime or murder when carried out by the state, but what about the smaller social infractions?

      Cancel culture is attempting to apply this larger social pressure to bigger public figures in ways that it traditionally has been more difficult to do. It's even more difficult in a highly networked world where globalism has taken hold.

      How do we cater to the centric masses while potentially allowing some flexibility to the cultures considered at the edges? Ethics aren't universal, so there will be friction at a huge number of overlaps.

      Examples:

      • Paula Dean (racism), loses shows, deals, etc. but still has reach in certain sections of the country and online
  9. Jul 2021
    1. "For example, human annotators rarely reached agreement when they were asked to label tweets that contained words from a lexicon of hate speech. Only 5% of the tweets were acknowledged by a majority as hate speech, while only 1.3% received unanimous verdicts."

      This seems shocking to me.

    1. Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality, freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which one dominant group subjugates another. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.

      Critical theory versus Englightenment

  10. www.nwp.org www.nwp.org
    1. Writing is the currency of the new workplace and global economy

      No, the finance metaphor is so fraught with capital and considerations of the bottom line that I really buck against this. Writing at its best has never been about using it as a currency. It is not BitCoin.

    1. I arrived in England in the early 80s when there were still only three TV channels. I was used to watching Emmerdale Farm and Yes Minister. Then The Young Ones came on and just blew me away. I loved the irreverence. I loved that they share this house, but are all so different. I loved how they smack each other around. It would just flip from one thing to another. It was totally out of the box.I’d watch it with my family or school friends and record it on our VCRs so that we could memorise the lines. Even today, 30 or 40 years later, I’ll see Vyv [Adrian Edmondson] or Neil [Nigel Planer] in something and think: “It’s Vyv!” or: “It’s Neil!” I can still quote the lines.AdvertisementPeople in America know The Young Ones. It had a life here, too. We also got The Comic Strip Presents … with that guy [Alexei Sayle] who did that song about that car [Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?]. I particularly remember the episode Didn’t You Kill My Brother? where he plays the gangster twins.

      I loved 'The Young Ones'.

    1. As for why - a GET can be cached and in a browser, refreshed. Over and over and over. This means that if you make the same GET again, you will insert into your database again. Consider what this may mean if the GET becomes a link and it gets crawled by a search engine. You will have your database full of duplicate data.
    1. Sending body/payload in a GET request may cause some existing implementations to reject the request — while not prohibited by the specification, the semantics are undefined. It is better to just avoid sending payloads in GET requests.
    1. Incapable of preventing viral infection, binding antibodies can instead trigger paradoxical immune enhancement. What that means is that it looks good until you get the disease, and then it makes the disease far worse than it would have been otherwise. As detailed in my interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in one coronavirus vaccine trial using ferrets, all the vaccinated animals died when exposed to the actual virus.

      They say "follow the science". Well, what about this science? What they really mean to say is "Follow OUR science".

    1. ‘Don’t get fooled by those mangled teeth she sports on camera!’ says the ABC News host introducing the woman who plays Pennsatucky. ‘Taryn Manning is one beautiful and talented actress.’ This suggestion that bad teeth and talent, in particular, are mutually exclusive betrays our broad, unexamined bigotry toward those long known, tellingly, as ‘white trash.’ It’s become less acceptable in recent decades to make racist or sexist statements, but blatant classism generally goes unchecked. See the hugely successful blog People of Walmart that, through submitted photographs, viciously ridicules people who look like contemporary US poverty: the elastic waistbands and jutting stomachs of diabetic obesity, the wheelchairs and oxygen tanks of gout and emphysema. Upper-class supremacy is nothing new. A hundred years ago, the US Eugenics Records Office not only targeted racial minorities but ‘sought to demonstrate scientifically that large numbers of rural poor whites were genetic defectives,’ as the sociologist Matt Wray explains in his book Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006). The historian and civil rights activist W E B du Bois, an African American, wrote in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940) that, growing up in Massachusetts in the 1870s, ‘the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me. It was a matter of income and ancestry more than colour.’ Martin Luther King, Jr made similar observations and was organising a poor-people’s march on Washington at the time of his murder in 1968.

      examples of upper-class supremacy

      This seems an interesting sociological issue. What is the root cause? Is it the economic sense of "keeping up with the Jonses"? Is it a zero-sum game? really?

    1. Ebooks don’t have those limitations, both because of how readily new editions can be created and how simple it is to push “updates” to existing editions after the fact. Consider the experience of Philip Howard, who sat down to read a printed edition of War and Peace in 2010. Halfway through reading the brick-size tome, he purchased a 99-cent electronic edition for his Nook e-reader:As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern …” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text. For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern …”A search of this Nook version of the book confirmed it: Every instance of the word kindle had been replaced by nook, in perhaps an attempt to alter a previously made Kindle version of the book for Nook use. Here are some screenshots I took at the time:It is only a matter of time before the retroactive malleability of these forms of publishing becomes a new area of pressure and regulation for content censorship. If a book contains a passage that someone believes to be defamatory, the aggrieved person can sue over it—and receive monetary damages if they’re right. Rarely is the book’s existence itself called into question, if only because of the difficulty of putting the cat back into the bag after publishing.

      This story of find and replace has chilling future potential. What if a dictatorial government doesn't like your content. It can be all to easy to remove the digital versions and replace them whole hog for "approved" ones.

      Where does democracy live in such a world? Consider similar instances when the Trump administration forced the disappearance of government websites and data.

    2. Libraries in these scenarios are no longer custodians for the ages of anything, whether tangible or intangible, but rather poolers of funding to pay for fleeting access to knowledge elsewhere.

      A major archiving issue in the digital era is that libraries are no longer the long term storage repositories they have otherwise been for the past two thousand years.

      What effects will this have on the future? Particularly once the financial interests of the owning companies no longer exists?

    3. As Jorge Luis Borges pointed out, a library without an index becomes paradoxically less informative as it grows.

      Explore why this is so from an information theoretic perspective. Is it true?

    1. Not all the ancients are ancestors.

      I'll definitely grant this and admit that there may be independent invention or re-discovery of ideas.

      However, I'll also mention that it's far, far less likely that any of these people truly invented very much novel along the way, particularly since Western culture has been swimming in the proverbial waters of writing, rhetoric, and the commonplace book tradition for so long that we too often forget that we're actually swimming in water.

      It's incredibly easy to reinvent the wheel when everything around you is made of circles, hubs, and axles.

    1. better to have had five stupid ideas than no ideas at all. And if somebody wrongly points out that your idea is stupid, it is even more important not to take offence: just explain gently why their dismissal of your idea is itself stupid

      highlight

  11. Jun 2021
    1. They are artifacts of a very particular circumstance, and it’s unlikely that in an alternate timeline they would have been designed the same way.

      I've mentioned before that the era we're currently living in is incredibly different from the era of just 10–15 years ago. I've called the era of yesterdecade (where the author of this piece appeared on Colbert a ~week or so after Firefox 3 was released and implored the audience to go download it and start using it) the "Shirky era", since Shirky's Here Comes Everybody really captures the spirit of the times.

      The current era of Twitter-and-GitHub has a distinct feel. At least, I can certainly feel it, as someone who's opted to remain an outsider to the T and G spheres. There's some evidence that those who haven't aren't really able to see the distinction, being too close to the problem. Young people, of course, who don't really have any memories of the era to draw upon, probably aren't able to perceive the distinction as a rule.

      I've also been listening to a lot of "old" podcasts—those of the Shirky era. If ever there were a question of whether the perceived distinction is real or imagined these podcasts—particularly shows Jon Udell was involved with, which I have been enjoying immensely—eliminate any doubts about its existence. There's an identifiable feel when I go back and listen to these shows or watch technical talks from the same time period. We're definitely experiencing a lowpoint in technical visions. As I alluded to earlier, I think this has to do with a technofetishistic focus on certain development practices and software stacks that are popular right now—"the way" that you do things. Wikis have largely fallen by the wayside, bugtrackers are disused, and people are pursuing busywork on GitHub and self-promoting on social media to the detriment of the things envisioned in the Shirky era.

    1. CASE OFABDULAZIZ, CABALES AND BALKANDALI v. THE UNITED KINGDOM

      CASE OF ABDULAZIZ, CABALES AND BALKANDALI v. THE UNITED KINGDOM

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. Giving peers permission to engage in dialogue about race and holding a lofty expectation that they will stay engaged in these conversations throughout the semester or year is the first of the four agreements for courageous conversation. While initially, some participants may be eager to enter into these conversations, our experience indicates that the more personal and thus risky these topics get, the more difficult it is for participants to stay committed and engaged." Singleton and Hays

    2. "Courageous conversation is a strategy for breaking down racial tensions and raising racism as a topic of discussion that allows those who possess knowledge on particular topics to have the opportunity to share it, and those who do not have the knowledge to learn and grow from the experience." Singleton and Hays

    3. "Although in the United States it is common to use the term multiculturalism to refer to both liberal forms of multiculturalism and to describe critical multicultural pedagogies, in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and other areas,anti-racism refers to those enactments of multiculturalism grounded in critical theory and pedagogy. The term anti-racism makes a greater distinction, in my opinion, between the liberal and critical paradigms of multiculturalism, and is one of the reasons I find the anti-racism literature useful for analyzing multiculturalism in music education."

    4. "Many North American music education programs exclude in vast numbers students who do not embody Euroamerican ideals. One way to begin making music education programs more socially just is to make them more inclusive. For that to happen, we need to develop programs that actively take the standpoint of the least advantaged, and work toward a common good that seeks to undermine hierarchies of advantage and disadvantage. And that, inturn, requires the ability to discuss race directly and meaningfully. Such discussions afford valuable opportunities to confront and evaluate the practical consequences of our actions as music educators. It is only through such conversations, Connell argues, that we come to understand “the real relationships and processes that generate advantage and disadvantage”(p. 125). Unfortunately, these are also conversations many white educators find uncomfortable and prefer to avoid."

    5. "I am also concerned that despite the best of intentions many of us have not considered adequately what social justice means and entails. I worry that social justice may become simply a “topic du jour” in music education, a phrase easily cited and repeated without careful examination of the assumptions and actions it implicates. That can lead to serious misunderstandings."

    1. reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create

      reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create possibilities when they're read in you know its full context um but some of what is happening or some of what the role of the the classroom or the the person is to do is to try to say this is the range of the acceptable response and i feel like as a teacher our role is to kind of say you get to choose how you want to show up but base it in something that's real that's authentic that's not just about you this but it's about the collective so how do we cultivate that connection to collectivity how do we cultivate that ethical uh commitment and conviction to one another but at the end of the day how do we allow young people and everyone really the agency um to decide how they want to like show up—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

      This is a powerful teaching philosophy. Return to reflect on this.

    1. Different ways to prepend a line: (echo 'line to prepend';cat file)|sponge file sed -i '1iline to prepend' file # GNU sed -i '' $'1i\\\nline to prepend\n' file # BSD printf %s\\n 0a 'line to prepend' . w|ed -s file perl -pi -e 'print"line to prepend\n"if$.==1' file
    1. I feel like I may have just stumbled on a back alley book club on design.

      It's digital books+Hypothes.is+Fight Club...

      The rules of Back Alley Book Club:

      1. We don't talk about Back Alley Book Club.
      2. We don't talk about Back Alley Book Club.

      ...

      1. If this is your first night at Back Alley Book Club, you have to annotate.

    1. The first argument to shared_context (the shared group name) is superfluous. It feels a bit like "what's this argument for again?" (Note that you could still use it with include_context to include the group manually, but it's a bit odd to mix-and-match the approaches).