new wardrobes every three months (fashion brands usually produce four “collections” a year)

he site today continues to be a place of pilgrimage throughout the months of June and July, but the three days and two nights of fasting and prayer are no longer framed as literal immersions in Purgatory, but rather as a time of ‘prayer and reflection’.

hese Neapolitan dioramas of Purgatory are partly geared towards prompting each passerby to pray for the souls represented but, in some parts of the city, this logic is reversed: the dead themselves are petitioned for intercession on behalf of the living in return for certain kinds of ‘refreshment’. This refreshment would consist in prayers, songs, flowers, chocolates, cigarettes, etc, and the requests would either involve healing, getting a job, finding a spouse, or getting pregnant. Devotees would adopt a particular soul through the simultaneous adoption of its material counterpart, a skull, which would be polished, cleaned and placed inside a small wooden box. And here again we see the emphasis on giving the immaterial and spiritual a material and physical location, on connecting them to the stuff of this world.

It is here in Naples that the practice of prayer for the souls in Purgatory reaches its greatest contemporary expression. Throughout the ancient centre of the city, small shrines consisting of three-dimensional dioramas of Purgatory can be found embedded in the walls of its narrow, twisting streets. Red and orange flames engulf an ensemble of tiny terracotta figurines – portraying a young woman with flowing hair, an old man, a priest – all raising their arms towards Heaven and the assistance of the Virgin Mary, the queen of Purgatory. People from the surrounding neighbourhoods stuff passport photos of deceased loved ones into the glass cases of these dioramas to gain them, too, some relief from the flames through proximity to Mary’s divine intercession, an intercession accompanied by the prayers of all those walking past.

Yet it is upon these prayers for the dead that the entire logic of Purgatory as a lived, social phenomenon hinges – the belief that death does not sever us irreparably from those we love. For Catholics, prayers for the dead allow one to both ease their suffering in Purgatory and to accelerate their passage through it. Thus love for the deceased is not founded solely upon memory, but rather upon a continuing social life of mutual care and assistance.

As if speaking directly to future historians still wedded to the colonial alcohol discourse, in 1908 , Booker T. Washington wrote: “I have read much in the Northern papers about the prohibition movement in the South being based wholly upon a determination or desire to keep liquor away from the negroes and at the same time provide a way for the white people to get it. … I have watched the prohibition movement carefully from its inception to the present time, and I have seen nothing in the agitation in favor of the movement, nothing in the law itself, and nothing in the execution of the law that warrants any such conclusion. The prohibition movement is based upon a deep-seated desire to get rid of whiskey in the interest of both races because of its hurtful economic and moral results. The prohibition sentiment is as strong in counties where there are practically no colored people as in the Black Belt counties.”

A better explanation for the “dry wave” that swept the South from 1907 to 1910 would be to point out that Southern “wet” forces were far weaker, more dispersed geographically, and far less organized than the well-entrenched brewing and distilling trusts of the North, and were therefore less able to defend against united community activism. Also, in the Democrats’ one-party South, liquor interests had less opportunity to flex their political muscle by throwing their financial weight behind rival political parties or candidates more willing to defend their interests.

In the 1880s, even as violence and lynchings ended Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era began, prohibitionist rallies made the point of announcing that all were welcome to attend, regardless of color. Black and white temperance speakers shared the same stage and applauded each other’s accomplishments despite organizational segregation, as Black voters were courted by white politicians.

From the podium of a national women’s rights convention in 1866—alongside icons Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—Harper called-out her white sisters who talked a big game about their own oppression and disenfranchisement but were complicit in the racial oppression of their African American counterparts. “Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on,” she proclaimed. “I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.” After Harper’s withering j’accuse, Susan B. Anthony moved to rename their National Woman Suffrage Association the American Equal Rights Association, which would demand universal suffrage regardless of race.

Add to this the political dynamics: the brewers, distillers and saloonkeepers who were making money hand over fist tended to be well-to-do whites. And while their clientele included mostly men of every color and creed, those communities that paid a disproportionate price for their men’s addiction—primarily women, African Americans, and Native Americans—had no vote, no legal standing, no political or economic power, and thus no recourse in opposing their systemic alcohol-subordination.

The idea for JAF Herb was to develop a typeface with the prop­er­ties of black­let­ter, without evoking any negat­ive connota­tions. The design retains the complex, humane char­ac­ter of fraktur without appear­ing conser­vat­ive, aggress­ive or intol­er­ant.

He offered Dillenius a job at his garden in Eltham, Kent; and, in 1721, Dillenius migrated to Britain to work on Sherard’s plant collection, the mosses of Britain, and a pinax (illustrated book) of Britain’s plants.

In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty writes: In visual experience, which pushes objectification further than does tactile experience, we can, at least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we constitute the world, because it presents us with a spectacle spread out before us at a distance, and gives us the illusion of being immediately present everywhere and being situated nowhere. Tactile experience, on the other hand, adheres to the surface of our body; we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quite becomes an object. Correspondingly, as the subject of touch, I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere; I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go to the world, and tactile experience occurs ‘ahead’ of me, and is not centred in me.

Liberating one group often means prohibiting another group from doing its opposite. In ‘expanding human freedom’ for Black people, the 13th Amendment quite explicitly took away white Americans’ perverse freedom to own slaves. The fundamental question about ‘freedom’ is always: who has the freedom to do what and to whom?

‘All great reforms go together,’ Douglass was fond of saying: abolitionism, women’s suffrage and temperance – as Prohibition rightly points out later on.

Did General George Washington ensure that his men had liquor at Valley Forge? Sure. But he also understood that the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania had – at the request of local Native American tribes – a strict prohibition against trafficking the ‘white man’s wicked water’ dating back to William Penn’s Great Law of 1682. That the early colonial Pennsylvania was arguably spared the bloody Indian Wars that plagued the other colonies is credited to the justice and fair play between colonisers and natives embodied in the Quaker prohibition.

Generations of social reformers and activists – both in the United States and around the world – focused not on the alcohol in the bottle, nor on ‘other people’s habits’, but on what they called ‘the liquor traffic’: unscrupulous sellers who got people hopelessly addicted to liquor for their own profit. The difference between opposing liquor and the liquor traffic is subtle, but hugely important. Liquor is just the stuff in the bottle, but trafficking is about profit and predation; like human trafficking, diamond trafficking or the traffic in narcotics and opioids.

Creation occurs across both public and private channels. When you share something funny with your group chat, you are a creator. A text message is a post.

Creators only produce small-scale pieces of content: everything they do is a minor, if not wholly ephemeral, work.

The post should not require interpretation or specialized background knowledge. It should be self-explanatory for its target filter bubble.

Devotees of the Traditional Latin Mass might enjoy a tidbit from a 2003 article by Tolkien’s grandson Simon. It seems that Tolkien, like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, wasn’t a big fan of the liturgical reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council:He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My Grandfather obviously didn’t agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but My Grandfather was oblivious.

Allowing the earliest stages of natal puberty to take place for gender-dysphoric children, prior to the decision of whether to administer puberty blockers, is considered diagnostically meaningful because some will experience their dysphoria remit during this time and some will not. However, what Laidlaw et al. are implying here is that waiting until adulthood is clinically meaningful for gender-dysphoric children, when there is no indication that this is the case – there is no discontinuity between gender dysphoria in adolescence and in adulthood.

I love the idea of socially annotating the web anyhow, but I also have this fear that the service dies and all the precious annotations would be gone.

For those of us who feel different, who don’t easily fit into structures of this society or this world, we have to make our own structures, definitions, and taxonomies to feel at home — that is, to build our own world. And while others might be confused why we spend so much energy inventing new names and containers seemingly constantly, it’s important to remember doing this helps us simply exist … so that we can connect in this one world we share.

Apple meanwhile, they dress it up very well. And it’s very pretty, but if you want to operate in the Apple ecosystem, they control how you breathe and everything has to be exactly like how they want you to do it. And they have this big fight for our privacy going on, which I appreciate of course. I love it. But the end result somehow is that they tripled their advertising revenue over the past quarter or something like that. Somehow everyone now has to use their advertising program. So this is again, someone trying to control the internet.

And this leads to the harsh choice that if you have a device on your network, a modern phone or a modern browser, or a modern Chromebook even, you have to give it unimpeded and uninspectable access to the internet, because the moment you try to figure out “what is my phone telling about me” to it’s creator, then the phone ceases to function. It will not allow you to do that.

The other notable thing about the UK is that they are mad for football over there, everyone is mad for English football. So there is a lot of “unpaid” streaming going on. And also many lawsuits, which means that UK ISPs now routinely get court orders that say, you must block the following illegal streaming sites. And it has now gone so far that internet providers actually preemptively hunt for these streamers. So before big matches, they look what sites suddenly get a lot more traffic. It’s probably no accident if just before the Arsenal match starts you suddenly you have 500 megabits of internet going somewhere. And then they block these sites. So it is quite preemptive.

A fun thing is that found out, I know a lot of people in Iran, I have some sorta family members there, and they told me, yeah, we all use a VPN. And I was very impressed. I thought these people are so privacy conscious. And they said, no, no, it’s the only way to get somewhat performant internet here. Because if you don’t use a VPN, you go through the interception infrastructure and it is like super overloaded. So we use a VPN to get fast internet and crucially, and I was very impressed by that, they said we also have no hopes that the VPN actually gives us privacy, because they were aware to many of the VPN providers out there are not actually that good in terms of providing privacy. But at least they are good at providing a faster internet in Iran.

They have a sort of highly curated Facebook and they even have video conferencing solutions that they built themselves, which were used more during the Corona outbreak even. And they have made their own specifically modified Android tablets and they have a Linux operating system. So these people really run their own internet and it’s probably not even correct to call it an internet. Of specific interest, their modified Android tablets are rumored to be a fully controlled and setup to keep track of everything you do. And that’s just terrible. And then I realized that’s actually what actual Android tablets also do, but they do it on behalf of advertisers. And in this case, they do it on behalf of the north Korean government. The probably only had to change a few domain names in the source code.

we need to remember that the so-called "subtractive principle" - writing 'IX' instead of 'VIIII', for instance - is actually a medieval invention

The move away from that curriculum is overdue. But I’ve come to think that we home in on the shortcomings of Calkins’s methods because dumping them is relatively straightforward. You can’t just fix absurd teacher-student ratios by force of will—you need money and buildings and teachers.

The education crusader Horace Mann, who sparred with the phonics-fixated schoolmasters of Boston, went so far as to claim that children were frightened by the alphabet, which he described as a horde of “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions.”

How much scent is too much is both personally and culturally dependent. Take oud, a super expensive incense that Middle Eastern people scent their clothes with. If you’ve ever strolled through an international airport, you know the scent bower can be large. Part of what one is choosing with perfume is to create a nimbus. The question is, how social or private should that nimbus be? 

Yeah. I wanted to inhabit my body more and stop doing this head-in-a-jar screen thing. It’s funny, when you write about the smell of freshly sharpened pencils, you can’t just go to Wikipedia and start your research there. You have to get actual pencils—a lot of them, it turns out—and sharpen them first. With smell, you bump into thingliness at every turn. 

One owner of eight rental properties in North Carolina posted a blog about her hatred of both landlord and tenant because, in her words, “I don’t believe that there is a hierarchy in the relationship between me, the homeowner, and our clients who choose to rent our homes,” she wrote. Except that the hierarchy is very real, and very clear. As Oksana Mironova, housing policy analyst at Community Service Society of New York, puts it, “A conversation about power is instead becoming a conversation about who is being mean to someone else.”

“When we work with undergraduates on digital humanities projects,” Quinn said, “it's often easier to take a humanities undergrad and teach them just enough coding to do what they need to do rather than taking some of the CS majors who can do the coding in their sleep but don't really think about the questions in the nuanced ways that we need them to.”

Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college.

According to Schmidt, the Great Recession sparked the beginning of a downward spiral in humanities such as history, art, philosophy, English and foreign languages.“In the period of the Great Recession, you had Barack Obama out there saying we need more STEM majors and fewer English majors,” Schmidt said. “That was a story you were hearing from a lot of people in influential positions … and I think that made a difference.”

Several Snohomish residents at Tuesday’s meeting wanted the City Council to pump the brakes. They asked why Snohomish needed to provide affordable housing. They said they worried that low-income housing “brings crime,” and they shared fears of inheriting Everett’s “cesspool.”

Unfortunately, once he’s shone a light on the injustice of the world, told you that you’re right for feeling like the world is fucked up, he essentially hangs up the phone. He says, in this book, his fundamental belief is that “we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos”, and he advocates for this by breaking the novel form, and assigning all information equal value, which is why he does things like name the race of every character, and the size of their breasts or genitals.

(She contrasted the fellowship she felt among lionfish hunters with the behavior of other conservationist types: “Turtle people treat each other like shit and backstab each other.”)

The 1990s also saw the introduction of “stepbacks,” a two-layered cover with the top page “stepped back” a quarter inch from the side to conceal a (typically much sexier) illustration beneath. By hiding suggestive clinches and implausibly fit cover models behind a more innocuous screen, stepbacks provided readers with a cover—literally—if they didn’t want to be seen reading a titillating story in public. The cover of the 2002 mass-market edition of Book 4, Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, shows a landscape background with a lipstick-kissed handkerchief being dropped from the oversize title—but pulling back that page reveals a painted clinch of the protagonists, whose clothes seem about to succumb to the forces of passion and/or gravity.

Plant 10 percent of thefield with pollinizer cultivars toachieve the best pollination andhighest yield (Figure 5). Red Pearland Sussi are two commonly usedpollinizer cultivars.

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylosuva-ursi) and lingonberries areeasily confused due to theirsimilar leaf structure and berrysize (Figure 4). Both plants arenative in the Pacific Northwest.Kinnikinnick has red berries, 5 to8 mm, while lingonberry fruitsare bright red and 7 to 11 mm.

The inability of people at a lower level in the social scale to make any meaningful provision for themselves from savings, as well as the fact that so much is taken out of their hands by the state, means that their income is, in effect, pocket money of the kind that a child receives from its parents. They spend up to the hilt and even beyond, and remain economic minors. Gone in my lifetime is the idea that debt is to be avoided, that it is discreditable to live entirely on credit, and shameful not to repay. If you have no assets worth speaking of, the bailiffs have nothing to seize, and creditors can whistle for their money. 

First, it puts the meaningful accumulation of assets for those who do not already possess them out of reach. (I speak, of course, in generalities; there are always exceptions). This in turn has the effect of transforming a society divided by permeable classes into a fixed caste society. There have always been advantages to being born in a well-off household, but asset inflation encourages them to become hard-wired, so to speak, into the social fabric.

With the concept of enough go those of modesty and humility. They are replaced by triumph and failure, the latter certain almost by definition to be the more frequent. The humble person becomes someone not laudable but careless of his future, possibly someone who will be a drain on others insofar as he has failed to make adequate provision for himself – even if, given his circumstances, it would have been impossible for him to have done so. For notwithstanding technical progress, automation, and robotics, we shall need people of humble and comparatively ill-paid employment for the foreseeable future.

for not to speculate, but rather to place one’s trust in the value of money at a given modest return, is to risk impoverishment.

the only way to insure against poverty in old age is either to be in possession of a government-guaranteed index-linked pension (which, however, is a social injustice in itself

For one thing, inflation destroys the very idea of enough, because no one can have any confidence that a monetary income that at present is adequate will not be whittled down to very little in a matter of a few years. Not everyone desires to be rich, but most people desire not to be poor, especially in old age.

The alloy was such that a type would cool and turn solid almost instantly, allowing for quick production of identical types.

A matrix isn't a full mould. It only gives the shape of the letter. If you look at actual types shown below, you can see they are like long square rods. Gutenberg would combine the matrix with a hand mould to create the whole mould for a type. Next he would pour a liquid metal alloy consisting of lead, tin, and antimony into the mould. The alloy cools quickly, and out comes a lead type similar to the ones seen below: Square metal rods with typefaces on them.

New Orleans, obviously, was a major city in the Confederacy, and when Louisiana seceded, New Orleans did too. But it was retaken fairly early on in the war. When the Union army occupied New Orleans, the expectation among town people was, “Just wait until August.” Because then, all these unacclimated Union soldiers are gonna die, and they’ll see that yellow fever is on the side of the South. When all these boys die it will vindicate us and our system.Benjamin Butler, who was the occupying general, was really worried about disease, and like everyone in America he had heard the tales of New Orleans. He was acutely aware that most of the men in his army had never been this far south before, that they were decidedly unacclimated and vulnerable to this disease. So he installed a strict quarantine. He didn’t let ships come in or out without a thorough inspection. He doubled the salary of the quarantine officer, he cleaned the streets, he fired people who seemed to be the lackeys of the bureaucrats in New Orleans. He did a whole program of sanitation.And it worked. There were only a few cases of yellow fever reported during the war years, even though hundreds of thousands of people came in and out of the city each year. It’s actually a miraculous demonstration of just how effective martial law can be in stopping diseases, I guess, and how effective quarantine could be when properly instituted and rigorously upheld.But right after the war, when the Union army receded, the same people who had been in control of New Orleans before the war took up their former positions and went back to their old ways. The said, whatever happened during the war, let’s forget about that. Benjamin Butler was very much hated as a tyrant in New Orleans by whites, who associated the quarantine with him but not improved health. And right away health problems came back. There was a serious epidemic again in 1867, and periodic epidemics throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, culminating in the epidemic of 1878, just after the end of Reconstruction. That was the worst in a generation; 5,000 or 10,000 people died in New Orleans alone, 25,000 people died across the Gulf South. It went all the way up to Memphis, which had never had yellow fever before.But once again, in the midst of this devastating epidemic, you had this prevailing attitude among the commercial-civic elite, who say “Quarantines just don’t work here.” They said this even though they had proof that it did work during the war. It was only when immigration dries up so precipitously after the war, and when cotton goes elsewhere, that New Orleans could sort of shake itself free from this attitude.

they counter the pushback by essentially denying disease, both as an epidemiological reality and as a social reality too. Increasingly by the 1850s, you see people saying, well, yellow fever is not that big of a problem. It’s not that serious of an illness, and anybody who’s temperate and well-mannered and courageous and manly will survive. It only kills the immoral, the drunk, the unfortunate. Your cousin in Philadelphia or your niece in Sligo who thinks of New Orleans as a “necropolis,” they don’t know what they’re talking about, these northern critiques of New Orleans’s health situation are a proxy for abolitionists attacking slavery.

I don’t want to conflate immunity with class position because they are distinct in the Bourdieuian sense. But immunocapitalism produces this sort of immune overclass that develops a set of policy positions which include an antipathy toward public health measures. Does a lackadaisical attitude toward yellow fever become a conservative litmus test for pro-slavery politics?In this period, New Orleans spends far, far less on public health than does any other comparable American city. I’m talking about 2 cents on public health per person per year, compared with 69 cents in Boston. It’s the deadliest city in America by far, it has triple the average national mortality rate. And everyone derides it as a Necropolis or The Seat of Pestilence or The Great Charnel House or The City of Death—MH: Jesus.

Immunocapitalism is a system of class rule in which elites in New Orleans used yellow fever and the destruction that it brought to essentially divide and subjugate the masses, both black and white.

People who were rich and white—many of whom owned slaves and country plantations—were able to leave. You would get onto a carriage with your family, or perhaps with enslaved people whom you owned, and you would go to your country plantation. Or you would go to the north and you would take in theater and do business in New York. Some went to London or Paris to do their summer tours there. But that’s only for the very richest people, and many had no choice but to remain in town during epidemics because they did not have the funds or freedom to leave. And if you stuck in town, life would be very miserable. You would spend three months in utter fear that you were going to die. You would steel yourself to keep working because you would be fired if you didn’t, if you gave up your post in your grocery or wholesaler or merchant house. If you did get sick, you would spend all the money you had in the world and then some on doctors and nurses to try to safely take you through the acclimating process. If you survived, you would be known as an acclimated citizen; if you died, you were a poor and unfortunate unacclimated stranger. And you had about a 50% chance of living or dying of this disease in the 19th century.

With the banning of the transatlantic trade, New Orleans becomes the biggest slave market in the United States and the center of the exclusive domestic slave trade.

Make content and publish it on your own site. And also create connections with other people that do the same. Share what you learn, share your successes and your failures. Share your passions, your hobbies. But do it on your own site, with your own voice, at your own pace.

Since vinegar can corrode certain materials,the best containers for this pickling techniqueare our jars with glass lids, thus Fido, Officina 1825and Lock Eat. They are also ideal because they comein large sizes, perfect for gherkins or other, largervegetables.

The fire of the melting leaves traces of itselfin the light of the cooled down material. Thus4,500 million years ago, only the silica dustwould have remained on the surface of theincandescent sphere called earth; therefore thepositive attitude, with its dynamic enthusiasm,clarifies and gives transparency to the truth.Saying BORMIOLI is like saying GLASS.Those eight letters are dressed in blue, blueKlein, a colour that is a source of pure conceptualinspiration; then, in a second moment, theyflare up red in the flames to create just like withprestidigitation skills iconic shapes, multipliedaccording to the language and logic of popart. In the background of a clear horizon freecrystalline beaches can be caught.

Beyond the autobiographical references, itis certain that the activity of a glassmaker,at the service of Ars, never finds a definitivefulfillment, because it takes place withoutend beyond the existence of the individual, inagreement with Life (the one with a capitalL). The permanent evolution of process andof product, which dates back to the time ofthe Phoenician, proves and confirms this.

I could not imagine at that time theonomatopoeia of fate: I could not recognizethe heat of the fire and the light of the glassthat had always resonated within my surname:BORMIOLI.

If enough people in a community are doping, he said, it spreads risk even to those who are clean, as the level of competition rises and more people are pushed to exhaustion and injury.

I think what gives me trouble here, actually, is that the account seems incomplete. It tells us about the demand side of cultural production over the last several decades: There is less demand for intellectually challenging culture (the argument goes) because it is less valuable to consumers as a means of rising in a social hierarchy. But what about the supply side? What about the companies and institutions that create culture? It would be unsophisticated to think that they’re merely responding to some natural market signal, wouldn’t it?The word “money” doesn’t appear in either Goldberg or Marx’s posts, which seems odd to me for posts putting forward an argument about class. As big a story as the expansion of the internet over the last few decades has been the rise of a finance-led asset economy, in which rising asset prices (in stocks as in homes) are prioritized over wages, productivity, semiconductor chips, halfway decent 90-minute movies, etc. What role does all the investment-seeking money play in supposed cultural boredom? Major labels and movie studios1 tend to belong these days to public, integrated multinational conglomerates, which prize consistent returns -- whether from multi-season television shows, or established and wholly owned I.P. -- over any particular kind of innovation, creativity, or daring.

But it does suggest that most of what we get these days, in terms of what’s most widely consumed and covered, is pap. Ross Douthat has described these trends as a symptom of cultural decadence.

And the film writer Farran Smith Nehme took a tour through the last 100 years of box-office hits and found that well-reviewed, popular movies aimed at adults have all but vanished from view:Of the 120 top-10 box office hits for 2008–2019, 42.5% were aimed at children/youths; 25% were superhero movies; 11.7% were Star Wars/science fiction; 13.3% were thrill rides; 2.5% were whatever the Hobbit was supposed to be; 1.7% were poorly reviewed movies for adults; and 3.3% were well-reviewed movies for adults. 

I don’t know, but the music writer Ted Gioia, in a newsletter from January, pointed out that “the new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.”

I’m of two minds about it: On the one hand, there’s a self-flattering conventional wisdom about the emptiness or unoriginality of contemporary culture crudescing among my peers that seems worth resisting, or at least attending to. Why would or should yuppie parents like us be aware of the “scintillating and new”? (Surely the most damning thing you can say about Dimes Square is that people like me are aware of it?) What are we doing ourselves to seek out challenging or even just adult culture, rather than just assume it should be served up to us or dominate whatever passes for “the conversation”? And boy doesn’t it seem like a convenient coincidence that culture was more dynamic at a time when we didn’t get tired at 8 p.m.?

With a full-time aphorism-maker such as Mencken it’s hard to see why one sentence rather than another should be regarded as a ‘quotation’. ‘Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses’ is not regarded as a ‘quotation’ familiar enough to get into the dictionaries, while ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard’ apparently is, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The problem with Wilde is not just that he and every character he created always sound like they’re quoting Oscar Wilde, but that after him quotations that didn’t sound at least a little bit like Oscar Wilde were unlikely to be quoted, because they didn’t sound like quotations.

Quotations are ‘familiar’ in that strange and slightly coercive sense of being ‘stuff that well-informed or with-it people, or members of my family, should know, but which you too could look as though you know if you read this book’.

But the modern book of quotations is also the bastard offspring of the early modern jest book, which ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really it’s more like a commonplace book) the quotation (though really it’s more like a paraphrase): ‘All our new corne comes out of old fields, and all our newe learning is gathered out of old bookes (Chaucer).’

Here’s the thing though: AWS Lambda integrations with AWS services are really really good! Especially Step Functions. If I invoke the ECS RunTask API from StepFunctions (Something I do quite a lot, I might add), its rarely as simple as passing JSON directly. Either using environment variable overrides or command overrides, or a command override plus some API gymnastics in my task to hydrate references. I also have to handle returning response or error data back to my state machine. This experience results in monotonous work that needs to be accurate. Not my cup of tea. (I imagine good tooling could help with this pain-point. I’m watching the functionless framework closely here.)But frameworks will not be able to solve performance issues. You see, lambdas start up within a couple of seconds, while it can take a minute or two for Step Functions to kick off a Fargate task. Observability is also easier with lambda functions. You can click straight through from step functions to lambda execution logs, while Fargate tasks which stop will only linger for an hour. If you want to click through you’d better do so quickly. I concede that you can hook up event bridge to log stopped task details. But then you need to build your own user experience on top of what AWS gives you. I don’t have time for that.An even larger benefit to this proposal there is a whole bunch of great tooling which is built to deploy lambda functions. Serverless Framework, SAM, Chalice, etc. I can’t use that with Fargate or Step Functions Activities. Why shouldn’t you be able to deploy long running tasks to AWS with these great frameworks?

Fellow IndieWeb netizen Maya

Another path of integration to think about is sharing annotated links from h. to my blog or the other way around. I blog links with a general annotation at times (example). These bloggable links I could grab from h. where I bookmark things in similar ways (example), usually to annotate further later on. I notice myself thinking I should do both, but unless I could do that simultaneously I won’t do such a thing twice.

As racially mixed kids (white father, mother of Asian descent), they wouldn’t even fit into any of the prescribed Antiracism, Inc. identity boxes.

This academic year, let’s imagine that my son’s seventh-grade math teacher will be following “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” a recently published antiracist toolkit for teachers, funded in part by the Gates Foundation. Embarking on her “antiracist journey,” my son’s teacher will have learned that standard mathematics instruction is plagued by “the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture” such as “perfectionism,” “worship of the written word” and “objectivity.” In math classrooms, the workbook explains, white supremacy culture manifests whenever “math is taught in a linear fashion,” “rigor is expressed only in difficulty” and grading practices “center what students don’t understand rather than what they do.” To “dismantle” white supremacy in collaboration with her students, my son’s teacher must “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views”; and “expose students to people who have used math as resistance.”

In a chapter called “Let’s Talk About Whiteness,” Singleton declares that “Whiteness represents a culture and consciousness that is shared by White people.” The variation within my own extended white family invalidates this absurd, quasi-mystical claim. With all due respect to my evangelical Christian, Trump-supporting relatives in rural Texas, we share neither a culture nor a consciousness.

This war of words between Catholics and Protestants on the subject of public schools exploded into real violence in Philadelphia in the spring of 1844. Allegations that Catholic residents wanted to remove the King James Bible from the city’s schools led to widespread rioting, with pitched battles between Protestants and Irish Catholics on the streets of Philadelphia featuring stones, torches, sabers and muskets. At least fifteen Philadelphia residents died in the fighting. Dozens of homes and two Catholic churches were razed to the ground. Two months later, at the Fourth of July parade, Protestants marched with banners proclaiming “Foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of a Republican Government” and “The Bible is the basis of Education.”

Mann’s lowest-common-denominator approach to religion in public schools may have been informed by his own religious upbringing and his shift away from the fire-and-brimstone Calvinism of his parents to a kinder, gentler Unitarianism. When Mann was fourteen, his older brother Stephen drowned after skipping a Sunday church service to swim in a local pond. The family minister devoted his eulogy to castigating Stephen for profaning the Sabbath, proclaiming that his future life would be one of eternal damnation.

A little over $2M, but that number keeps growing because I still have loads of usernames despite instagram patching the ratelimit bypass.

times of fecund cultural production

The internet, Marx writes in his book’s closing section, changes this dynamic. With so much content out there, the chance that others will recognize the meaning of any obscure cultural signal declines. Challenging art loses its prestige. Besides, in the age of the internet, taste tells you less about a person. You don’t need to make your way into any social world to develop a familiarity with Cage — or, for that matter, with underground hip-hop, weird performance art, or rare sneakers.

I can think of no recent novel or film that provoked passionate debate.

German brands, Japanese brands, and American brands likely all source their grape flavorings, for example, from the same vendors.

In some cases, yes, a candy is better because it is fundamentally different, on a chemical level, than what’s available in America. Europe’s strict regulations on chocolate quality mean that it offers something that’s not really comparable to a Hershey bar (and that Europeans are generally enthusiastic to tell you how much American chocolate sucks).

the primary feature is the texture. Chewing one feels like you’ve encountered a Starburst that fights back.

To take a shot at mainstream American success, Hi-Chew’s makers did the usual stuff that consumer-products businesses do: They hired retail consultants, switched distributors, that kind of thing. But they also set their sights on a very important group: Major League Baseball players, the only people who routinely spend time chewing snacks in extreme close-up on TV. Morinaga supplied Japanese players in the league with Hi-Chew, Kawabe told me, focusing first on teams in markets where major retailers were headquartered. The gambit worked; ESPN reported on just how obsessed the 2015 Yankees squad was with the little fruit candies. Walgreens and CVS picked up the brand after it became popular with the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox. Regular people tried the newly plentiful and suddenly trendy candy, and then insisted that their brother or spouse or co-workers try it. Hi-Chew’s U.S. sales grew from $8 million in 2012 to more than $100 million in 2021, according to Kawabe.

They chip away at traditions, forgetting that, for students, visiting fellows and new academics, these are the very things that cause rapture and delight.

While the London gentlemen’s clubs are well-dressed and traditional, they’re largely devoid of ceremony; instead, they’re well-appointed places to relax over meals or drinks and sniffingly observe shibboleths of the upper classes, from which syllable to stress in ‘patina’, to why one ought not to own fish knives. Meanwhile, foundationally working-class clubs, such as the Knights of Columbus or the Freemasons, deck themselves in formal ceremony and ritual. The already powerful can afford not to make too much fuss. For the up-and-coming, or the downtrodden, formality gives an unparalleled sense of membership to a grander body.

More importantly, the rules of formality are ultimately accessible to all. Anyone can learn the etiquette and wear the tie, and so become part of the ever larger, ever more diverse in-group that practices the formality of the event.

The Homestead Acts were unquestionably the most extensive, radical, redistributive governmental policy in US history. The number of adult descendants of the original Homestead Act recipients living in the year 2000 was estimated to be around 46 million people, about a quarter of the US adult population.

Something is ontologically off with e-bikes, which time and adoption alone can’t resolve. Whether as bicycles haunted by motorbikes or as mopeds reined in by bikes, e-bikes represent not the fusion of two modes of transit, but a conflict between them.

The truth will differ based on circumstance, but the result is the same: a weird ambiguity.

A motorcycle signals power (and maybe a caricature of outmoded masculinity) from its exhaust.

In theory, the easier ride that an e-bike provides should make it more tempting than a standard bike. For people with certain mobility issues, it may indeed be. Yet for the most part, all the nuisances of biking still crop up: hot or cold or wet weather, needing to transport something heavy or awkward, taking on another errand during the day that requires a drive, and so forth. Counterintuitively, because the e-bike is easier to ride than a normal bike, I feel less inclined to adopt it as a regular practice, let alone a whole commuting identity. All the downsides of biking still remain, without the satisfaction of persisting in the face of adversity.

Rights are larger than laws, and Google has violated the former, even if they are not bound by the latter.

Working backwards, Google isn’t legally compelled to give Mark a hearing about his digital life (Sixth Amendment); they are wrong not to. Google isn’t legally compelled to give Mark due process before permanently deleting his digital life (Fifth Amendment); they are wrong not to.

Again, Google is not covered by the Bill of Rights; all of these Amendments, just like the First, only apply to the government. The reason why this case is useful, though, is it is a reminder that specific legal definitions are distinct from questions of right or wrong.

Munroe, though, assumes the opposite: liberty, in this case the freedom of speech, is an artifact of law, only stretching as far as government action, and no further. Pat Kerr, who wrote a critique of this comic on Medium in 2016, argued that this was the exact wrong way to think about free speech: Coherent definitions of free speech are actually rather hard to come by, but I would personally suggest that it’s something along the lines of “the ability to voluntarily express (and receive) opinions without suffering excessive penalties for doing so”. This is a liberal principle of tolerance towards others. It’s not an absolute, it isn’t comprehensive, it isn’t rigorously defined, and it isn’t a law. What it is is a culture.

Hill’s story noted that in 2021 the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the only entity legally allowed to hold CSAM (NCMEC also manages the PhotoDNA database), “alerted authorities to ‘over 4,260 potential new child victims'”. We don’t know how many of those children were subsequently rescued, but a question worth posing to anyone unilaterally opposed to Google’s approach is how big that number would have to be to have made it worthwhile? But, to return to the original hand, one of those 4,260 potential new child victims was Mark’s son (and another was taken by Cassio, a second father found by Hill caught in the same predicament, for the same reasons): the question for those applauding Google’s approach is how big the number of false positives would have to be to shut the whole thing down?

And I sit here in my straight leg jeans that prompted my partner to say that I look like “Diane Lane in an ‘80s movie” (compliment!) and/or that I’m about to go out and farm, I’m reminded of how uncomfortable I felt in skinny jeans for the first time — but also how outmoded my flared low-rise had come to feel. None of this jean discourse is really about fashion, or figuring out what you like. Same, much of the time, when it comes to other forms of bodily discipline, particularly with food and exercise. There’s always a “choice” about what kind of maintenance you want to pursue, but it’s a severely delimited one. So much of this maintenance is about not falling behind, particularly as a woman. To fall behind is not only to lose a grip on your class status, but your visibility and value within society at large. It’s not just middle class a woman is communicating with “appropriate” clothes and body and grooming. It’s vitality, participation, and gameness in a game in which you’re always already losing.

Truly wealthy people buy items that are timeless; middle-class people buy items that need to be replaced, either because of poor construction or wear or aesthetic dating, every five to seven years. Middle-class clothing is valued for its quality — it shouldn’t look cheap, or worn, or wrinkled — but also for its homogeneity, its clear markers of belonging. Styles and silhouettes travel through middle class acceptability: first introduced as cutting edge, experimental, fashion-forward, slightly terrifying….and then gradually incorporated into the standard middle-class uniform.

As Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Fear of Falling, the thing we often forget about the middle class is that it requires constant maintenance. Despite the myths we tell ourselves about our country, the poor largely stay poor and the rich almost always stay rich. To maintain middle class status is to be constantly treading water, to be proving and reproving middle class social and financial capital.

She admits she was naive, and that getting close to human remains is almost indescribably transformative. Her senses are sharpened; she is appreciative and humbled. And she is convinced that, as Poppy Mardall advises, your first corpse shouldn’t be someone you love: no one needs to handle the shock of death and the shock of grief at the same time. Life would be better lived if we knew death better.

He insists that three things are always found at murder scenes: a weapon, an inebriant, and porn or a sex toy. His customers disgust him.

He’s 55, still sitting the way popular high school boys sit, which is easy to confuse with self-satisfaction but is really lack of concern so pure that the question of whether or not to feel satisfied wouldn’t ever come up.

There’s a way of looking at stars as something aspirational, and a way that’s the opposite. It’s akin, I think, to looking at a wealthy person and seeing a benevolent future peer or looking at a wealthy person and seeing a monster forged from luck and evil.

Imagine the worst life one could live without wishing one had never been born. Now imagine the kind of life you dream of living. For those who embrace the Repugnant Conclusion, a future in which trillions of us colonize planets so as to live the first sort of life is better than a future in which we survive on Earth in modest numbers, achieving the second.

We believe the meatverse can enable better social experiences than anything that exists today, and we will dedicate our neurocapital to helping achieve its potential. As I wrote in our original covenant: “we don’t build services to make money; we also don’t make money to build services; we seek to escape the cycle of death and rebirth through the merger of flesh and capital.”

But religion comes naturally to Homo sapiens. Perhaps the first big reason is that for much of humanity’s passage across time we were manifestly not in control of our destiny, just ephemeral sparks of life blown about by whims of climate and disease and geography and the population dynamics of our prey and predators, those sparks often snuffed out with no warning. It would have been comforting to think that Someone was in control. Maybe the improved ability to steer one’s own life, enjoyed today by those in developed societies and with an education, is partly responsible for the fading of faith?

the-cybersmith asked: Your Mother-in-law is wiser than you know.Fiat currencies come and go, but gold and silver stay valuable.If some catastrophe happens, and you and your family wake up to realise that you've all been transported to ancient Babylon, or the Persian Empire, or the Roman Republic, or Medieval England, or Ming Dynasty China, your credit cards and your bitcoin and your bank notes with Illuminati symbols on them will be useless.Gold and silver? Melt them down and sell them, you'll immediately be able to trade with the locals. ms-demeanor answered: It’s a smoky day in the postapocalypse.

Colchicine is widely used in plant breeding by inducing polyploidy in plant cells to produce new or improved varieties, strains, and cultivars.[63] When used to induce polyploidy in plants, colchicine cream is usually applied to a growth point of the plant, such as an apical tip, shoot, or sucker. Seeds can be presoaked in a colchicine solution before planting. Since chromosome segregation is driven by microtubules, colchicine alters cellular division by inhibiting chromosome segregation during meiosis; half the resulting gametes, therefore, contains no chromosomes, while the other half contains double the usual number of chromosomes (i.e., diploid instead of haploid, as gametes usually are), and lead to embryos with double the usual number of chromosomes (i.e., tetraploid instead of diploid).[63] While this would be fatal in most higher animal cells, in plant cells, it is not only usually well-tolerated, but also frequently results in larger, hardier, faster-growing, and in general more desirable plants than the normally diploid parents. For this reason, this type of genetic manipulation is frequently used in breeding plants commercially.[63] When such a tetraploid plant is crossed with a diploid plant, the triploid offspring are usually sterile (unable to produce fertile seeds or spores), although many triploids can be propagated vegetatively. Growers of annual triploid plants not readily propagated vegetatively cannot produce a second-generation crop from the seeds (if any) of the triploid crop and need to buy triploid seed from a supplier each year. Many sterile triploid plants, including some trees and shrubs, are becoming increasingly valued in horticulture and landscaping because they do not become invasive species and do not drop undesirable fruit and seed litter. In certain species, colchicine-induced triploidy has been used to create "seedless" fruit, such as seedless watermelons (Citrullus lanatus). Since most triploids do not produce pollen themselves, such plants usually require cross-pollination with a diploid parent to induce seedless fruit production. The ability of colchicine to induce polyploidy can be also exploited to render infertile hybrids fertile, for example in breeding triticale (× Triticosecale) from wheat (Triticum spp.) and rye (Secale cereale). Wheat is typically tetraploid and rye diploid, with their triploid hybrid infertile; treatment of triploid triticale with colchicine gives fertile hexaploid triticale.

A goat tower you can drop into some farmland, the wilderness, or for extra chaos, a village.

By the 1910s, younger generations no longer associated it with death. This caused at least one memorable incident in Weaver’s family, when his Quaker grandmother thought she’d bake raisin pie to make a good impression with her in-laws in Lancaster. “She thought she was doing a great thing by bringing this old lady, who was some kind of great-aunt, a raisin pie,” Weaver says. “But she was horrified, like, ‘You think I’m going to die? Do you know something I don’t know?’”

Like the highly-anticipated white bread, raisins would have been considered a luxury in the 1800s. Prior to deseeding technology, producing raisins meant the painstaking process of removing grape seeds (and usually stems) by hand. Given that the memorial banquet would feature multiple raisin pies and each recipe called for about a pound of the precious dried fruit, Schmeichel says making a funeral pie was “an absolute labor of love.”

One of the weirder things about my Hippocrene Concise Sorbian-English dictionary (2000) is that it has the same sentence as an example for two separate words ("with", "wrong") three pages apart, and that sentence is: Što je z Kevinom? What's wrong with Kevin?

In Ireland: Conor/Seán - your parents panicked and picked the first thing that came into their heads Kathleen/Eileen/Maureen/Bridget - you must be at least 80 by now Niamh/Fiona/Sinead/Ciara/Orla - standard "it'll do" names Sorcha/Ríona/Bébhinn etc. - yes we get it, your parents are posh Aisling - what an American would call 'basic': there's even a book called "Oh My God, What A Complete Aisling"

But look, if a state or any other kind of business names themselves after a real word but pronounce it weird, I'm going to say the word the way that it's said. I have way more respect for languages spoken by real people than the brand guidelines of legal fictions

You play as Regency-era occultists. None of the play happens in meatspace, it’s all play-by-post. Literal post, as in tree-corpses letters. Each turn takes a month. You can write multiple letters in a turn, to the GM and other players.

His vision of the future has no sharp edges, no dark places, no erotic frisson. Supposedly, Meta is working on photorealistic faces, but for now, the avatars available in Meta’s environments are soft and Pixar-like, with big, childlike heads. They sit smiling at each other across a conference table, or they blast off into space on adorable rocket ships. Everything is nauseatingly cute and childlike, and yet it’s not meant for children. Nothing is truly funny or weird, or potentially dangerous in any respect. The sample animation Meta released suggests that it may be possible to someday customize yourself into a giant robot, if you like, but only a cute, funny robot, not a spiky, scary one. The robot sits in a conference room and does his work because he is an adult.

Heraldic and personal rebuses are still being created today, though their usage is much diminished. One way they are hanging on is in text messaging. North London teenager Isla Burgess, for example, says her friends refer to her by using the emojis for island and then iceberg on text messages. “We all do it,” Burgess says, smartphone in hand. “My friend Oliver is the olive. Martin is the martini glass. It’s much easier to type.”

Derived from the Latin expression non verbis sed rebus, which means “not by words, but with things,” a rebus is a puzzle in which a word, or part of a word, is represented by a picture.

What we pay attention to and the language in which we pay attention are the only realities worth considering, which is one reason why stories are so often framed by the idea that nobody is talking about a problem, when the problem is often quite endlessly talked about—just not solved. Why isn’t the media covering this story? is a common refrain that is just as often accompanied by a link to an article about the story, which is how the complainer learned about it in the first place.

timer jobs (think spicy cronjobs)

How can you generate category and tag pages? More generally, how do you generate any limited set of pages based on querying information from other content, without having to manually create a new (probably empty) content file?

What those developers probably mean is that they find static site generators elegant.

a bunch of technical language

One workaround is using separate files in the same folder or in subfolder, than use the content API to retrieve them. Each such “resource” can have a body and metadata.

A theming infrastructure imposes a lot of technical restrictions and indirection, such as template lookup orders (see: Hugo), having to specify a handful of default template names (Hugo, again), and having to specify strange content conventions for mapping content to those default template names (still Hugo). Frankly, if a user really wants a template inheritance and theme inheritance mechanism, they’ll probably bite the bullet and work with WordPress or Drupal.

On top of traversing and retrieving content, templates should be able to transform formats (Markdown to HTML, parsing JSON and maybe YAML) and process images.

There should be a full content traversal API, which could be modelled after Kirby’s API (itself inspired by jQuery). Other sources of inspiration: Globbing, e.g. find('posts/*.md'). DOM traversal (there’s no reason why your content tree cannot be a tree of nodes).

as we said we’re making a tool for technically-minded people

Most generators use restrictive template engines, and feed a restricted context (aka a set of data and functions) to those templates. This seems to come from a misguided need to keep templates “simple”, “logic-less”, and other kinds of baloney.

Another consequence of restricted templates is that SSG documentation will then tell you to work in a third place: not in content, not in templates, but in “config code”. This is a problem because A) it’s probably one place too many and B) it’s often unclear at what time this config code is running or how often: once for every page generation or template run, or just once at the start of a build?

To surface this information efficiently, the generator may need to come with a GUI (a web UI could work).

How may users control the transformations that are applied to content (processing of Markdown or other formats, templates, image transformations)? Should this be defined in the content or elsewhere?

What will be ignored?

Or you have to write some configuration code that populates “Collections” ahead of build time. (Too indirect, and breaks if you change your information architecture a bit. We need something a bit closer to direct manipulation!)

Sometimes it’s just not possible to work with content hierarchies and partial content. (Most JavaScript static site generators fall into that category.)

the plain-files-and-scripts philosophy

I sometimes talk with developers who praise static site generators as simple, which is hogwash. I’ve seen a few projects where content editors were handed off a site based on a SSG (especially in startups where devs may dominate the conversation), and could not manage any change without a lot of training and assistance. Nothing simple about that.

{{< imgproc sniffles-4months.jpg Resize "600x" />}}

how to prepare images themselves (in Photoshop, Gimp or similar software)

Users are expected to know what formats like HTML and Markdown are

they are expected to know how to put those files online to publish them. This can require software such as a FTP client, or more complex setups involving one or two additional command line tools.

They’re often written by developers — professionals or hobbyists — to power their own small website or blog, and as such they tend to have a limited feature set. SSG are close parents to scripts: short programs (a few hundred lines of code), which can be used from a command prompt to achieve specific tasks. They’re often built as a hobby by one developer, sometimes getting help from a few others months or years later.

Programming consists of overcoming two things: accidental difficulties, things which are difficult because you happen to be using inadequate programming tools, and things which are actually difficult, which no programming tool or language is going to solve. Joel Spolsky reviewing Beyond Java

In short, since the rise of the content industry, established journalistic institutions have struggled to survive and been forced to produce news that functions like content.

the content industry is also adept at appropriating existing texts, images, moving images, and recordings.

Does a classic film streamed online rather than projected in a movie theater become content simply because of the context?

Take Banana no hi (Banana Day) for example. Broken down, the Japanese pronunciation—ba-na-na—corresponds to the Japanese for eight (ba) and seven (nana). The seventh day of the eighth month, August 7, thus becomes “Banana Day.”

In the field, workers operate potato harvesters, made by the German company Grimme. The technology is common among area growers and specifically designed for wet soil, he said. The machines are mounted onto tractors. After the machines scoop potatoes from the ground, the potatoes fall onto a web where loose dirt falls back to the ground The company’s largest machine can harvest four rows at once, Wisdom said. He said he sees technology continuing to evolve. “I think in our lifetime there will be automated potato harvesting equipment,” Wisdon said. At the company’s packing and shipping plant, there is more technology, such as a machine that scans the potatoes and discards imperfect or meager spuds. Wisdom said workers can program the machine to reject undesirable features, such as those green in color or with blemishes. These “cull” potatoes don’t go to waste. Wisdom said they are shipped to a plant and turned into dehydrated potato. After another machine separates potatoes by size — small, medium, large and extra large — and a second sort takes place, with workers inspecting potatoes at a detailed level.

But I guess that’s a product of the time we live in.

Maybe it’s just me noticing this a bit more lately, but it feels as if people are a lot less engaged with the world around them and they don’t really care about their surroundings. And you can see it everywhere when you start paying attention.

The world around us is pushing us more and more toward selfishness. Social media itself is—for the most part—a self centered world. How many people have IG profiles filled with selfies? I’d probably say way too many.

Opening the code of the algorithm might be a good place to start, but it’s not unlike making an architectural excavation site open to the public: without the guidance of an archaeologist to explain it, it’s just a set of pottery shards. There is not much we as end users can do with “The Algorithm” as-is.

But let’s say you come up with 10000 Flits to recommend? You can’t show them all in any given timeline, so what do you do? 

As is typical of these controversies, it's hard to parse exactly what Jackson did wrong

Those who put stock in sensitivity reads seem to mostly imagine that the practice offers a form of insurance, preempting allegations of this -ism or that -phobia, although it rarely pans out that way.

authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.

“GeoCities was not about self-promotion,” Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. “It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge.”

Well the Letter saw that idea coming, and what I love so much about it is the fact that is wants married women to consider that “[n]ow you are married, and have descended so low from so high – from the likeness of angels, from the beloved of Jesus Christ, from a lady in heaven, into carnal filth, into the life of an animal, into servitude to a man, and into the world’s misery”.[3] There it is – servitude to a man. Sure, you might enjoy having kids and all that, but ultimately “whatever advantage or happiness comes of it, it is too dearly bought”.[4]

In raccoon societies, asking this for any reason other than genuine concern about potential danger is considered the height of rudeness. The traditional response is "why does your face look like that?"

It’s just too easy to accidentally give a good result to a controversial topic, and have the law makers pounce on you.

You’ll notice there are no actual books here. There are only lists of best books. Cynical me notes that if you were to actually list a book, someone could find it controversial. Instead, you can link to institutional websites, and let them take the controversy for their picks.

Every recipe site I’ve ever seen is like this — nobody cares about how this recipe was originally your great-grandmother’s. Just tell us what’s in it.

This is not the first time that classified information on modern-day weapons systems was leaked on the War Thunder forums.

Poop-scooping regulations serve as a way to manage dogs in urban spaces, but also underline the idea that they are pampered pets.

The price the rescues ask for dogs (whether they label it as a ‘rehoming fee’ or whatever, it is a sale price) has climbed with demand, with some asking four figures for these allegedly unwanted dogs. Yet for the end owner (or consumer) of the dog, having the rescue serve as a middleman means they don’t feel they have bought from a puppy mill. It’s a win-win for the dog owner: they get the particular breed they want by going to a specialised rescue, and they get the moral value of ‘not having bought from a breeder’.

The messaging that animals are needlessly euthanised, and could have been saved, has been very effective. However, the argument that it is better to adopt a dog rather than to buy one from a breeder overlooks the fact that the shelter population has dropped dramatically since the 1970s. There are, in fact, not enough dogs in shelters to meet demand, if every would-be dog owner went there for a pet.

One of the clearest cases of this was the poodle. A specific genetic bottleneck in the breed is traced to a champion dog named Annsown Sir Gay, born in 1949. A prolific stud, he fathered 21 litters, containing more show winners. Other kennels were keen to have dogs from this line, spreading their genetic influence through the breed. One son, Gay Knight, fathered a litter at the Wycliffe kennels in 1959, containing five winners. This litter’s genes are still found today – identified in genetic analysis as ‘x per cent Wycliffe’ – and pedigree poodles in the UK, the US and Australia all share this heritage. By the 1990s, registered poodles had more than 40 per cent of their genes from this Wycliffe bottleneck, and for black poodles it is as high as 50 per cent.

Boosts empowers even non technical users to create with the web rather than simply consuming it.

It has always been possible to run user scripts and styles via browser extensions, but the developer experience of creating an extension has never been particularly beginner friendly. I’ve personally never seen extension development integrated so seamlessly and directly into the browser.

Rice believed noise was unhealthy

20-something woman new to Brooklyn

In England, 18th-century farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an election slogan in 1765.

In the mountains, guanaco and vicuña (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to the fine clay particles in the animals’ stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water. Eventually they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.

Crimes of the Future (June 3), David Cronenberg’s deeply weird but oddly stirring look at the ways people connect in an imagined, post-human, dystopic future, one in which our fascination with the inside of one another’s bodies fuels something deeper.

Brian and Charles (June 17), a kind of warmly comedic take on Frankenstein in which an eccentric inventor in a tiny English village accidentally invents a robot that becomes his best friend and, eventually, his family

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, for instance. Based on the viral YouTube shorts of a decade ago, the feature is about an inch-high shell named Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate) who lives a lonely life with his grandmother, Nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini) in a largely vacant Airbnb.

We Met in Virtual Reality (July 27), a vérité documentary shot entirely inside the virtual reality platform VRChat.

In recent decades, some environmentalists have been advocating for swapping red meat with white meat, because red meat — especially beef — emits far more greenhouse gasses than white meat. (Though plant-based protein usually pollutes less than them all.)

Rather, says Jens Tuider of ProVeg International, a Berlin-based organization that advocates for reducing meat consumption, “it’s the flexitarians that drive this development.”

The people of the cloud

a basic ratio of three parts soy sauce to three parts oil to one part vinegar and one part sugar, all by volume.

The Sandman 8/5 (Netflix)

Virtue doesn’t reside in the sky, or the cloud, or any form of abstraction; it must be passed from one person to the next. By reinforcing and augmenting the foundations of civilization, we invite the next generation to become builders too. But a lack of authority deprives them of this role, tells them that civilization is already full (or maybe empty), and thus leaves young people with two terrible choices: despair or rebellion.

If empirical truths are up for debate, then non-empirical truths are basically dead on arrival for most people. But relational authority can still create a little force field, a little stay against the storm; if someone holds fast to unseen principles, their conviction can radiate outward and maybe even pull another into its orbit.

The Romans revered their city’s legendary founding and greatly admired those who had laid the foundations. They called their ancestors the maiores—literally, “the greater ones”—and carefully passed down their wisdom from one generation to the next. In the Eternal City, Arendt writes, “religion literally meant re-ligare, to be tied back, obligated.” Here, the weight of the past leaned heavily and welcomely on the present. The citizen who could bear up well under such weight had gravitas, and the one who strengthened and augmented (from the Latin augere) the city’s cherished foundations had auctoritas.

maya let me know that there is actually some history of composers recording piano rolls in the early 20th century (i.e. "classical" composers, not just ragtime or saloon music, which is the context in which I usually think of piano rolls being used)—and music-knowers don't think of them any differently than a traditionally recorded performance. Neat! Yet another reason I should've waited to blog about it instead of firing off a post, because I might've thought to look that sort of thing up first. Then again, I might not've. Don't know what I don't know, and all that.

If you know me, you know I am unlikely to ever be coming from the gym, and if I am it will be the first thing I mention because I will expect a parade or commemorative plaque.

I’m trying to stretch myself these days. I’m 50, and only a fool or optimist would believe I am middle-aged. I’m closer to the end than the beginning, and people I love are dying at a prodigious rate. One does not want to be the last man standing. So, I signed up to be part of this bonsai club. We gathered at a local coffee shop this weekend. The convener gave a little presentation on a particular type of tree that several of us had bought at his suggestion. We then spent an hour or so trimming our tree’s roots and repotting them. In the end, the trees looked basically as they did when we started, but we were dirtier and had spent an hour laughing, telling stories, and meeting each other. Among others, there was the mullet-having, trucker-cap-wearing landscape worker, the young lesbian mother who had her 7-year-old in tow, the Jack Black lookalike who does marketing communication and plays in a band, the 70-year-old dentist, plus whatever it is that I am. It was a group of people unlikely to be in the same room by accident, and I found myself having fun, despite my apprehensions. Clubs are dying out. My parent’s generation thrived at the end of the reign of things like the Rotary Club and The Lions Club, which still exist but as a shadow of their former glory. Archie Bunker’s bowling league sounds quaint and archaic when one watches All in the Family reruns. But one advantage they served, for which technology has yet to give us a substitute, is the fostering of unlikely relationships. And I think we are poorer for the loss.

Then it clarifies and brightens into something unrecognizable, and there’s no way of reversing the process.

Krishna Gade took a job at Facebook just after the 2016 election, working to improve news-feed quality. While there, he developed a feature, called “Why am I seeing this post?,” that allowed a user to click a button on any item that appeared in her Facebook feed and see some of the algorithmic variables that had caused the item to appear. A dog photo might be in her feed, for example, because she “commented on posts with photos more than other media types” and because she belonged to a group called Woofers & Puppers. Gade told me that he saw the feature as fostering a sense of transparency and trust. “I think users should be given the rights to ask for what’s going on,” he said. At the least, it offered users a striking glimpse of how the recommender system perceived them. Yet today, on Facebook’s Web site, the “Why am I seeing this post?” button is available only for ads. On the app it’s included for non-ad posts, too, but, when I tried it recently on a handful of posts, most said only that they were “popular compared to other posts you’ve seen.”

When we talk about “the algorithm,” we might be conflating recommender systems with online surveillance, monopolization, and the digital platforms’ takeover of all of our leisure time—in other words, with the entire extractive technology industry of the twenty-first century. Bucher told me that the idea of the algorithm is “a proxy for technology, and people’s relationships to the machine.” It has become a metaphor for the ultimate digital Other, a representation of all of our uneasiness with online life.

The Airbnb hosts’ concerns were rooted in the challenges of selling a product online, but I’m most interested in the similar feelings that plague those, like Valerie Peter, who are trying to figure out what to consume.

On top of trying to boost their rankings by repainting walls, replacing furniture, or taking more flattering photos, the hosts also developed what Jhaver called “folk theories” about how the algorithm worked. They would log on to Airbnb repeatedly throughout the day or constantly update their unit’s availability, suspecting that doing so would help get them noticed by the algorithm.