"Who We Are: #8 India"
The Aryan-Invasion-Theory sure looks to be basically correct. As for the archaeologists saying that there’s not enough evidence of devastation, Reich points out that they can’t really detect the fall of the western Roman Empire, which hardly means it didn’t happen. War and migration are well-known important factors in written history – why not in prehistory? Because many contemporary archaeologist and historians think that wishing can make it so. They should be paid accordingly.
PESOS from https://www.reading.am/p/4XXy/https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/who-we-are-8-india/.
‘Consider flour as flavour’: Bakers turn to whole grains to give their baked goods a boost
“Folks in the 60s and 70s didn’t know how to work with whole grains, and were getting super gritty and dense baked goods,” says Kaufmann. For many in the counterculture, eating these brick-like baked goods was an anti-authority act unto itself. “You were committed to the idealism behind baking whole wheat bread, even if that meant retraining your palate to enjoy it.”
Refusing my mother's wholewheat quiche was the anti-authority act here.
The business model of the Internet is surveillance contd.
The moral is, in a way, obvious: it’s a confirmation of Bruce Schneier’s original observation that “surveillance is the business model of the Internet”. Being a pedant, I would have said “of the Web”, but since many people can’t distinguish between the two, we’ll leave Bruce’s formulation stand.
“Who We Are: #3 Neanderthals | West Hunter
Gratuitous, but fun:
Ernst Mayr, a prominent figure in biology had opined that hybridization was an unimportant factor in evolution, as far as I can tell for no particular reason at all. For equally mysterious reasons, people paid attention to him.
From a thread on Hackernews
I have a sneaking suspicion that if tomorrow Apple or Google just subscribed everyone to 99% Invisible and waited, FM radio would be dead in a year.
Sweet thought, but unlikely.
IndieWeb generation 4 and hosted domains | Manton Reece
Owning your content isn’t about portable software. It’s about portable URLs and data. It’s about domain names.
Cannot say this often enough.
Crazy Walls
Thanks to Adactio for the link.
Chris Aldrich on Twitter: "@jgkoomey @judell This is the general idea behind the #indieweb movement: https://t.co/NG6ELqxCHC For the price of registering your own domain and some hosting, you can run your own website and still interact with other websites in an open and distributed manner."
Underscores, Optimization & Arms Races
This is the question that underscores all the subsequent ones:
[S]hould we be trying to appease Google?
Also, I hope I'm not the only one to be grateful that the article is from Anil Dash.
Airlines and Airports – The Brooks Review
This one is really interesting, and had never occurred to me. Not that I have much choice when changing continents.
PROPERLY BREAKING UP A FLIGHT JOURNEY
Simple rule, I’ve learned the hard way: 2 equal length legs of a journey are far better than one long leg and one short one. If the entire world is conspiring against you, and you cannot get a non-stop flight, pick the one with the most equal durations of flying times and try to get a 2 hour layover. That’s enough to pee, stretch, eat, and not stress if your incoming flight is delayed. Also: it’s always better to fly in and out of larger airports as there’s far better food options.
The 9 rules of design research
Duncan says:
(Researchers themselves are sometimes the most reluctant to undertake user research before spending serious amounts of money on ineffective websites.)
Strange, isn't it.
(The 9 rules themselves are at Medium and, I hope, somewhere else too. Because you never know.)
Hot Pod: Anchor 3.0, The Sauce, On Preservation
The principle puzzle of podcasting lies in the fact that because it has an extremely low barrier to entry, it has an extremely high barrier to scale.
The Dark Art of Stealing from Self-Checkouts
I've never done this myself, honest, but I can understand that it is tempting for a whole reason. And I like both ends of the spectrum of justification:
The authors further proposed that retailers bore some blame for the problem. In their zeal to cut labor costs, the study said, supermarkets could be seen as having created “a crime-generating environment” that promotes profit “above social responsibility.”
... and ...
“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron,” reads one of the more militant comments in a Reddit discussion on the subject. “There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.”
Pankaj Mishra reviews ‘We Were Eight Years in Power’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The white man, Tocqueville wrote as he observed race relations in America, ‘is to the men of other races what man himself is to the animals’, in the sense that he ‘makes them serve his purposes, and when he cannot make them bend, he destroys them.’ A social order built on systemic violence made the black man, Tocqueville recognised, an ever present menace in his white master’s imagination.
Still I find it hard to internalise this understanding, no matter how much I may "know" it.
'Is Ewok having a nice time?': the special hell of a going on a cruise
“Years later I can hear the sizzle of my right retina as the burning ember connected with the delicate, light-sensitive tissue”
Not to defend the special hell that is a cruise, but is there not one person in the editorial chain of that piece who actually understands the anatomy of the eyeball?
podTo aims to standardize podcast subscriptions
I want to make listening to or subscribing to a podcast as easy as sending an email. Or easier!
A very worthy goal, I don't doubt it. Sounds a bit like the universal Subscribe button that some people think is needed to get #IndieWeb writing going again.
In any event, I wish them much luck and will be attempting to keep an eye on podTo.
Gavin Stamp 1948-2017
Gavin belonged to a school of one. Throughout most of his career – which was a vocation conducted on his own terms – it was evident to anyone of the slightest sentience that he was the eminent architectural writer of his generation. During much of that time architectural criticism in Ingerlandlandland was no such thing; it was a matter of giving great forelock to a few big names, it was fawning, anilingual sycophancy, a barely dissembled form of PR.
He also, and this may be a little-known fact, designed letterheads for like-minded colleagues, myself included.
Atlantic City
Atlantic City came up in iTunes shuffle today, reminding of this absolute masterpiece (best enjoyed while listening along; also, if the images seem like ancient history, note they’re from just 3 months ago)
So very fine; I had never seen this before. I hope it never vanishes.
Why I cannot post bookmarks to Known automatically | Jeremy Cherfas
I've set out in as much detail as I can understand what is happening when I try to POST a Bookmark with a Description to WithKnown.
And to add insult to injury, I'm adding this Description by hand, so I can include a blockquote:
[I]f you try to POST anything other than the URL of the bookmark, it simply never appears. With the help of good IndieWeb people, especially and , we worked out what was happening.
bookmark - IndieWeb
And a bit of description
Adactio: Journal—GDPR and Google Analytics
It’s almost as if the ubiquitous surveillance of people’s every move on the web wasn’t a very good idea in the first place.
M'kay. Tell that to the squillionaires.
Someone's a bit fed up
Essentially, the non-semantic web is a balkanised hellscape of competing open and proprietary metadata standards.
And I don't blame him one bit. Moreover, I'm increasingly fed up with the idea of modifying my website to do the work of undoing the Balkan megalomania.