Americans Need to Kick Addiction to Polling - Bloomberg
Yeah, and maybe not just Americans, eh?
Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit
Here's hoping this sensible person soon becomes active in IndieWeb things.
How quick and dirty Covid tests could end the weariness | Tim Harford
Far too sensible for anyone in position to make it happen, to make it happen.
Protests and Power (Idle Words)
Seems fair to me.
On the efficiency of my scythe | Small Farm Future
Another great post from Chris Smaje, and how about those comments?
The reason that you see farmers nowadays with combines and not with scythes is because energy and capital are cheap, labour is dear, and most people don’t work the land. Like it or not, I think all this is going to change in the future.
I had a scythe once. I loved that thing, and the sheer joy of becoming skilled in using it and keeping it sharp.
How to pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations | Chartable
Wow! Great read from Lisa Charlotte Rost on colours in visualisations. I have a lot of work to do ...
PhD student reporting what it's like to use a Zettelkasten for the first time with my classes — Zettelkasten Forum
What this really needs, for me, is a largish piece of paper tucked into the physical book, which I have done, in the past. The insight is to procss those notes later in the day.
Town Hall Clock: read it and weep
“Are you still there? Mum?”
I kept my voice steady. I didn’t show that I was crying
“Moschatel. Adoxa moschcatellina, is the Latin name but I think I taught you town hall clock.”
Did MySpace Kill the Potential for Customization on Social Media?
Sure, the defaults are elegant, but they are constant reminders that you’re ultimately building castles in someone else’s sandbox, which is sad and unfortunate when you’re trying to build the coolest castle you can.
This is about far more than merely being able to customize the look of your site, although that is clearly important too.
Just Too Efficient
I wish there were a way to quantify effectiveness rather than efficiency. It is surely effectiveness that matters.
Krugman revisits pellagra to illuminate the US response to Covid-19
the United States is exceptional, in a very bad way.
It's not the only country that's exceptional, but it is exceptionally bad.
What was it like?
Anyone who thinks blogging died at some point in the past twenty years presumably just lost interest themselves, because there have always been plenty of blogs to read. Some slow down, some die, new ones appear. It’s as easy as it’s ever been to write and read blogs.
Phil Gyford's lovely look back to SXSW 2000 and the blogging around it. I don't actually have a crucial event like that, maybe BlogTalk in Vienna, which I didn't do nearly enough to record at the time.
https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/the-man-who-reads-1000-articles-a
I have about 100 Chrome bookmarks, and I try to visit at least 2 or 3 of them a day to make sure I’m not missing something. But even as I do that, I do it with a private irritation that they don’t have an RSS feed.
Yeah, me too. Except for the bit about checking Chrome bookmarks, because life is too short.
New decade, new theme – Lea Verou
I was hesitating to blog about it because I was embarrassed at how my website looked. This is it, I thought. If it has gotten so bad that I avoid blogging because I don’t want people to be reminded of how old my website looks, I need to get my shit together and fix this, I told myself.
Isn't that the most perfect reason of all?
Paul Ford's new outlet
Yay! That is all.
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage
The madness of some markets.
Search Engine Etiquette: Never, Ever Ask for a Backlink
In a nutshell ...
Once Google set the plot point, backlinks became hard to ignore. And marketers looking to get an edge started using a variety of tactics to gain a coveted spot on the front page that didn’t involve actually creating good content that people want to read.
Tim Bray, reflecting on the numbers for his Bye Amazon post.
But aren’t blogs dead? · Um, nope. For every discipline-with-depth that I care about (software/Internet, politics, energy economics, physics), if you want to find out what’s happening and you want to find out from first-person practitioners, you end up reading a blog.
Was true, is true, will be true.
The Technium
I know everybody and her mother have already linked this and bookmarked it, but I want it here for myself, because there is some good stuff in this list.
Gardens and Streams
I have a suspicion that people retreat into protocol work to escape from the human work that must be done. And there’s no getting around it: we should learn to better work in this medium and we are really resisting having to confront it.
This is a very real tension, to me.
Friday 17 April, 2020 | Memex 1.1
So many interesting ideas about not returning to normal when (if?) this thing is over.
Rachel Cooke on criticism: ‘What is the point of a critic if not to tell the truth?’
Very interesting longish article on the role of the critic today. Artists are increasingly unleashing their fans on critics, and ignorant "critics" are doing a poor job of serving their audience. I don't know, though, how new this phenomenon is. Sure, in the olden days it was hard to get 3 million people issuing death threats, but nor was the relationship between critics and creators always a love-in of mutual respect.
Nicely anachronistic writing tool, too.
Working from home can be magical - BrettTerpstra.com
There have been endless articles on how to work from home. And so many of them are wrong in one way or another, yet each proclaims itself to be true for you and your productivity. The fact is that working from home means a lot of different things, and every individual has to find their own rhythm. And for some of us, it’s downright magical compared to working in an office.
At last, some sense.
I’ve learned to reframe “procrastination” as “marination.”
I'm still learning. Have been for 45 years.
COVID-19 by the Numbers by Anatole Kaletsky - Project Syndicate
On the plus side, maybe more people will stop using "exponential" as a synonym for "very large".
Nah.
G-FEED: COVID-19 reduces economic activity, which reduces pollution, which saves lives.
"I calculate that the reductions in air pollution in China caused by this economic disruption likely saved 20-times more lives in China than have currently been lost due to the virus in that country"
Oh boy! Data analysis rocks.
Get political reporters off the coronavirus story because they don't distinguish between right and wrong | Press Watch
[W]hen they’re just talking smack, maybe the best thing to do would be to ignore them – and instead rely on sources who actually know what they’re talking about and reporters who know enough about health and science and reality to discern between what’s true and what’s not.
That would be almost all the time, right?