Floccinaucical

Elsewhere for April 2, 2023

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 4/02/2023:

Art, Music, and Film

Inside the Fan-Powered Push for a Bigger Extended Edition of Lord of the Rings Hardcore Tolkien fans have learned over the last 20 years of a huge treasure trove of scenes from these films that have never been publicly released, and now an alliance of online personalities, podcasters and educators are organizing in the hopes of a Second Extended Edition being released with the 25th anniversary of the films.

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

Write Note Pads: Notebooks and Planners Referral link for quality affordable notebooks, memo pads, and planners.

Food and Drink

History and Archaeology

The Shaman’s Secrets

The ideology of 1930s Germany helped shape scholars’ initial interpretation of the grave. Discovered barely a year and a half after the Nazis took power, politics quickly became enmeshed in the skeleton’s story. Archaeologists were a fundamental part of Adolf Hitler’s nation-building program, which sought to locate physical evidence of the original Aryans, who the Nazis believed were blond-haired and blue-eyed and came from northern Europe.

Referral link: Curiosity Stream delivers shows across the full spectrum of the non-fiction genre to demystify science, nature, history, technology, society, lifestyle and more. $19.99/year for thousands of films (or $2.99/month).

Technology

My impossible search for the best, most powerful, most private journaling app ever

I started out looking for a way to keep a digital journal. I ended up trying to figure out what it means to have a space of my own online — and whether an app can be both good and responsible.

SetApp: A Suite of macOS Apps for a Single Price Affiliate link for a great collection of ver 200 apps for macOS and iOS for a flat subscription fee.

Women’s Work

Indigenous elder removed from Barack Obama event for being ‘too difficult’

“I am 78 years of age. I have never been treated or spoken to in this way in the past. I do not want this to be a reflection on President Obama. I am a leader of the Wurundjeri Nation. I asked to be treated as an equal.”

Yes, of course, the Nazis got it pretty much completely wrong. Subsequent examination of the bones and artifacts revealed that the adult was a woman, from the Mesolithic era, much earlier than the Nazis asserted. Later excavation of the original site garnered far more data and material, including enough for modern DNA analysis. The adult woman was possibly a shaman, and positively someone important to her community, even generations later. Read the article; it’s detailed, reasonable and well documented.

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

Nathan Lane Says Robin Williams Stepped In To ‘Protect’ Him From Being Outed On ‘Oprah’

Something Wonderful

The Hereford Mappa Mundi, the Largest Medieval Map Still in Existence (Circa 1300) High resolution scans allow you to thoroughly examine the map, depicting one medieval concept of the known world.

Buy me a Coffee! If you find this site interesting, and would like to see more, buy me a coffee. While I may actually buy coffee, I’ll probably buy books to review.

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Elsewhere for March 26, 2023

Posted on March 26, 2023 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 3/26/2023:

Art, Music, and Film

Vermeer’s Daughter

A speculative theory holds that Maria Vermeer was not only a model for her father but also an artist who created several of the paintings attributed to him. Could it be true?

How these art sleuths reunited a family after centuries apart

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

Book thief who stole more than 1,000 manuscripts ‘wanted to cherish them before anyone else’

The former publishing employee who stole manuscripts of books by Margaret Atwood, Sally Rooney and Ian McEwan has said he had a “burning desire” to feel like he was a publishing professional, and had no intention of leaking the books he stole.

Filippo Bernardini pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in New York in January, encompassing the theft of more than 1,000 manuscripts.

Ben Jonson work from 1603 may contain ‘lost’ Shakespeare sonnet, say experts I haven’t read the bppk yet, but in the sonnet there are some echoes of Shakespeare’s hobby-hrse phrases and stylistic habits.

Write Note Pads: Notebooks and Planners Referral link for quality affordable notebooks, memo pads, and planners.

Food and Drink

Know your onions! The definitive and surprising guide to organising your fridge

Handing down the family secrets – one dish at a time

I was taught to cook by a mix of demonstration and oral instruction. The recipes I learned from my mother and aunts were recited and assumed a certain level of familiarity with the ingredients and methods: quantities were approximated, timings loosely described, such as “until the oil rises to the top”.

___

There is a word used across the Indian subcontinent for this: andaaz – loosely translated as estimation. The vagueness is not intended to be difficult; rather, it speaks to the different expectation in what a cooking instruction is supposed to do. In being imprecise and allowing room for variation, it allows a home cook to be able to improvise where needed. Your grandmother would hope you can figure it out even if you’re short an onion and only have green and not red chillies available.

History and Archaeology

Remains of Roman aristocrat[ic woman] unearthed in ‘extraordinary’ cemetery near Leeds

Unusually for an ancient cemetery, the remains found in Garforth belonged to people from the late Roman and the early Saxon eras. The skeleton of the late Roman aristocratic woman was found alongside the remains of 60 men, women and children from the two periods.

My neighbor found Lincoln’s hair in his basement. I found a mystery

Bent nails at Roman burial site form “magical barrier” to keep dead from rising

Archaeologists excavating an early Roman imperial tomb in Turkey have uncovered evidence of unusual funerary practices. Instead of the typical method of being cremated on a funeral pyre and the remains relocated to a final resting place, these burnt remains had been left in place and covered in brick tiles and a layer of lime. Finally, several dozen bent and twisted nails, some with the heads pinched off, had been scattered around the burn site. The archaeologists suggest that this is evidence of magical thinking, specifically an attempt to prevent the deceased from rising from the grave to haunt the living, according to a recent paper published in the journal Antiquity.

Archaeologists Discover Worship of Unknown Gods at Ancient Desert Monument

Mustatils, huge stone monuments concentrated in northern Saudi Arabia, were the site of rituals and early pilgrimages according to new research.

Politics and Society

Pete Buttigieg: One year in, parenting has taught us about vulnerability and gratitude

It was what they call a “surprise” adoption scenario — a mother had given birth that day and wanted to arrange adoption. The agency explained that there were some sensitive circumstances and potential health complications for us to weigh, but also that we would need to quickly decide whether we were prepared to travel to the rural hospital and begin the process. And one more thing to consider: it was twins!

Senior care is crushingly expensive. Boomers aren’t ready.

Beth Roper had already sold her husband Doug’s boat and his pickup truck. Her daughter sends $500 a month or more. But it was nowhere near enough to pay the $5,950-a-month bill at Doug’s assisted-living facility. So last year, Roper, 65, abandoned her own plans to retire.

John Oliver on timeshares: ‘Lying is a key strategy’

Women’s Work

Mary Beard: ‘Everyone is policing everything, and the left are just as bad as the right’

“The most useful advice I ever received,” she says, “came from a man who was a real toughie. He would say things that you would never get away with now. I had written one of my first academic papers and given it him to read. We met, I remember, to discuss it in that original Pizza Express in Coptic Street near the British Museum. We were probably on our second bottle of wine and he said something about my paper which I’ve never forgotten: ‘It may be right, Mary, but it’s bloody boring.’ I was 24 or 25. I thought about it. Up until that moment I had always believed writing was just about saying what you wanted to say. But after that I realised there was someone else involved: you had to think about the reader.”

Something Wonderful

Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee let his domain registration lapse. This wasvquickly seized upon as an opportunity by creative LGBT+ tech workers.

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Elsewhere for March 12, 2023

Posted on March 12, 2023 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 3/12/20232:

Art, Music, and Film

Adults complained about a teen theater production and the show’s creators stepped in.

Rehearsals were going well. But about three weeks in, the director, music teacher Vanessa Allen, got an email from the Cardinal Schools’ Superintendent asking why he was hearing about the school musical. “And he mentioned something about inappropriate content,” says Allen.
There is some dispute over what the objections were. Allen says she was told school board officials’ concerns included “sexual innuendo” and “the gay dads.”

BBC will not broadcast Attenborough episode over fear of ‘rightwing backlash’

Senior sources at the BBC told the Guardian that the decision not to show the sixth episode was made to fend off potential critique from the political right. This week the Telegraph newspaper attacked the BBC for creating the series and for taking funding from “two charities previously criticised for their political lobbying” – the WWF and RSPB.

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow Turns 50 – by Ted Gioia:

Man Who Painted ‘Groomer’ on Libraries Caught With Child Pornography, Police Say

Libraries around the country face increasing threats from right-wing activists and extremists who call staff “groomers”—accusing them of pedophilia—because they offer books that feature LGBTQ+ narratives or characters, or host queer-friendly events like drag queen storytimes. Dozens of libraries have been threatened with bomb or active shooter threats. In Florida, some school bookshelves stand empty, as teachers hide books to avoid felony charges after they were ordered to “remove or cover all classroom libraries until all materials can be reviewed” for “prurient” or “offensive” material. Right-wing activists and Republican lawmakers are attempting to group any books that include LGBTQ+ themes into these criminal definitions.

Education

A Florida School Board Member Speaks Out About Being Targeted by DeSantis

My concern about book banning, which is a cornerstone of fascism, is that we already have a policy in place that if a parent is not happy with a book or a lesson plan, they merely have to speak to their teacher and the teacher will not allow the book to be checked out of the media center for that student. Or, if there’s a lesson plan, the teacher will substitute a different lesson for that student. So why is it that any parent feels that they have the right to speak on behalf of other parents’ rights for their child to read a book or have a lesson? That’s just pure politics and fascism. Plain and simple.

Write Note Pads: Notebooks and Planners Referral link for quality affordable notebooks, memo pads, and planners.

Food and Drink

My grandmother’s indulgent recipes show how Indian women express their love

Labour-intensive recipes, from yakhni pulao to kucho gojas, were my grandmother’s speciality in a culture where cooking can be a form of artistry and self expression for women.

How fake sugars sneak into foods and disrupt metabolic health

Education

H/T hollie: The Sooner We Start Thinking of the College Board as a Business, the Better by Jon Boeckenstedt

What people didn’t know then, and what they still seem not to understand now, even as the entity is in the news for the ongoing controversy over Florida’s involvement in amending the Advanced Placement curriculum in African American studies, is that the College Board is a business, despite its lofty mission statement, which suggests that it’s about “connect[ing] students to college success and opportunity.” Yes, it’s a not-for-profit business, but not-for-profit does not mean that it’s a charity. In fact, it’s about the furthest thing from a charity that you can imagine. Not-for-profit does not mean that it’s altruistic in its purpose; it simply means that excess revenue as profit is not distributed to private owners or shareholders but rather held by the company. (There was a brief period when the College Board changed its web domain from .org to .com, perhaps revealing more of itself than it should have, but this misstep was quickly corrected.)

History and Archaeology

It’s not a darning tool, it’s a very naughty toy: Roman dildo found Contemporary humans sometimes seem to believe they invented sex, They didn’t.

Roman shrine discovered near Leicester cathedral graveyard

“There’s always been a tradition that the cathedral was built on a Roman temple, based on antiquarian discoveries in the 19th Century,’ said Mathew Morris, excavation director for the University of Leicester’s Archaeological Services (ULAS) which carried out the dig.

“We’re now finding a Roman building that looks like it had a shrine status to it.
“There are no tests that can prove what it was. That it was a shrine is the most likely theory, but there aren’t really any others.”
He added he believed it was likely used as part of a shrine to a god like Mithra, Dionysus or Isis.

Politics and Society

So, a Top Guardian Editor Was Married to the Founder of Mumsnet

Seriously: When do you ever just sit and think about the fact that Ian Katz of the Guardian (recently boycotted for its transphobia) and the BBC (routinely protested for its transphobia) was married to Justine Roberts of Mumsnet (a primary radicalizing hub for UK transphobia) for twenty-five years? Most people don’t! I didn’t, until I heard it from the poet Roz Kaveney during an interview. It got trimmed from that piece, and I have been trying to wedge it into different pieces ever since, to no avail. Sometimes, when I talk to other trans people, I will mention that a top Guardian and/or BBC editor was married to the founder of Mumsnet; almost always, when I mention this, I will find out that they didn’t know.

Science and Nature

Technology

Vinyl overtakes CD sales for the first time since 1987

No longer just a niche hobby for dads and hipsters, vinyl is experiencing a major resurgence in mainstream music. According to the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) annual revenue report, vinyl records outsold CDs in the US last year for the first time since 1987, selling 41 million units against 33 million for CD.

SetApp: A Suite of macOS Apps for a Single Price Affiliate link for a great collection of ver 200 apps for macOS and iOS for a flat subscription fee.

Women’s Work

When the words won’t come. This is my life with aphasia.

Within days of my injury, I could unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth and create an odd sound every now and then, but I couldn’t communicate in any traditional sense. I felt like a human radio pumping out static — with sporadic bursts of clarity.

Japan’s military ignored her sexual assault claims, so she went public

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

Discreetly, and at peril, Russian volunteers help Ukrainian refugees

“My relatives told me I need to go out to protest and I said I don’t think it’ll be easier for you if I’m fined and then jailed. They agreed with me,” the Ukrainian-born volunteer explained. “So volunteering was the only way for me.”

Something Wonderful

A dying baby turtle survived after drifting 4,000 miles to Ireland

A family strolling on a beach in Ireland earlier this month spotted a seafarer that had washed up on the rocks. Her body was battered. She was dehydrated, suffering from hypothermia and in danger of having her eyes pecked out by shorebirds.

Death was close.

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Elsewhere

Elsewhere for February 19, 2022

Posted on February 19, 2023 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 2/19/2023:

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

From the Unshelved Comic Strip

3D Imaging of an Italian Stationery Binding

Oldest complete Hebrew Bible expected to break auction records

The earliest and most complete Hebrew Bible ever discovered – a “vital touchstone of human history” that dates back more than 1,100 years – is to be sold at auction.
The ninth-century volume, referred to as the Codex Sassoon, is a critical link between the Dead Sea scrolls and the Bible of today. It is being offered by Sotheby’s with an estimate of $30m-$50m (£25m-£42m), making it the most valuable historical document or manuscript to appear at auction.

Write Note Pads: Notebooks and Planners Referral link for quality affordable notebooks, memo pads, and planners.

Education

Florida Teacher Is Fired for Posting Viral Video of Empty Classroom Bookshelves

Brian Covey, a substitute teacher in Jacksonville, Florida, was fired this week for posting a video showing rows of empty bookshelves in his classroom in late January, which several local teachers did after schools in the Florida’s Manatee and Duval counties received a directive to “remove or cover all classroom libraries until all materials can be reviewed.”

Wait till DeSantis finds out what’s in the Bible!

History and Archaeology

Ancient road found beneath new town in Devon

Last year, the team at Sherford found “Ice Age megafauna” including mammoth, rhino and wolf remains.
Now experts have discovered the area was also a “key route” for human communities thousands of years ago.

Politics and Society

Heat pumps boom in Maine, despite frigid cold and oil industry pushback

Science and Nature

Celebrities and scientists mourn mountain lion P-22 at sold-out memorial

City’s most famous feline was euthanized last year after being hit by vehicle, but his legacy lives on with a highway wildlife crossing.

On routine house call, pest control finds 700 pounds of acorns in the walls

After arriving at the house around 8 a.m. with two colleagues, Castro used a drywall knife to create a 4-by-4-inch hole in a second-floor bedroom’s wall. Acorns rushed out of the pocket. Castro said the pile stood about 20 feet high.

Tiny creature unlocks life before the ice age

A cave in Canada has been declared a globally significant location to preserve a rare amphipod.
Stygobromus canadensis is believed to have survived since before the glaciation of the surrounding landscape during the last ice age.

Technology

“Link In Bio” is a slow knife

We don’t even notice it anymore — “link in bio”. It’s a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web link can be found on that user’s profile. Its presence is so subtle, and so pervasive, that we barely even noticed it was an attempt to kill the web.

H/T @emilymbender@dair-community.social via @baldur@toot.cafe: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it.

Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it’s still a computational guessing game. ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a ‘bullshit generator’. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. The language model has no idea what it’s talking about because it has no idea about anything at all. It’s more of a bullshitter than the most egregious egoist you’ll ever meet, producing baseless assertions with unfailing confidence because that’s what it’s designed to do.

What teens think parents should know about phones

SetApp: A Suite of macOS Apps for a Single Price Affiliate link for a great collection of ver 200 apps for macOS and iOS for a flat subscription fee.

Women’s Work

Codebreakers find, decipher lost letters of Mary, Queen of Scots

An international team of codebreakers said Wednesday they have found and deciphered the long lost secret letters of 16th-century monarch Mary, Queen of Scots, one of the most argued-over figures in British history.

‘I had to get out of there’: an Australian survivor of homosexuality ‘cures’ tells her story

One time after pretending to take her pills, Clayton hid behind a curtain. She says it was then that she overheard that she had been nominated by staff for brain surgery. “I heard them saying ‘Lee Clayton, we’re going to send her off to have a cingulo’. I thought, ‘No you’re not’. I had to get out of there.

Something Wonderful

Carl Bergstrom: How to befriend crows

If you feed them regularly, they will come to recognize you. They’re remarkably good at recognizing faces, gaits, and even the sound of a particular car’s engine.
In the rain wearing a new jacket with the hood up? They recognize me.
After a year away from the office due to COVID policies, I thought my office friends would have forgotten me. No. They spotted me within a few yards of the parking garage.

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Elsewhere

Elsewhere February 5, 2023

Posted on February 5, 2023 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 2/05/2023:

Art, Music, and Film

Tudor Mystery review – who could have painted such medieval strangeness?

our weird kids in black clothes turn their big eyes in unison as they sing what you imagine is a melancholy song about death. The great, great (and a few more greats) grandmother of Wednesday Addams is on keyboards, playing the virginals, the leader of the group. Her clothes are grave but more decorated than her brothers’ dark jerkins. She looks at you in a charged, even angry, way.

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

Hide your books to avoid felony charges, Fla. schools tell teachers

The removals come in response to fresh guidance issued by the Florida Department of Education in mid-January, after the State Board of Education ruled that a law restricting the books a district may possess applies not only to schoolwide libraries but to teachers’ classroom collections, too.

House Bill 1467, which took effect as law in July, mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and “suited to student needs.” Books must be approved by a qualified school media specialist, who must undergo a state retraining on book collection.

Write Note Pads: Notebooks and Planners Referral link for quality affordable notebooks, memo pads, and planners.

Food and Drink

The best way to de-seed a pomegranate is also the most therapeutic

The link between our food, gut microbiome and depression

History and Archaeology

‘Incredible’ Roman bathers’ gems lost 2,000 years ago found near Hadrian’s Wall

Metal detectorist unearths Tudor gold pendant linked to Henry VIII in Warwickshire

What the Birmingham cafe owner had discovered was a huge and quite spectacular early Tudor pendant and chain, made in gold and enamel and bearing the initials and symbols of Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon.

Politics and Society

H/T @Kissane: Alternative Facts, Alternative Truths

Using scripture this way is not particularly surprising: the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century was centered on the idea that sacramental rituals and the teachings of Catholic authorities were obscuring the centrality of scripture as the word of God. However, it was not until observing a “direct reading” of the Bible that I saw how literal translations of the Bible are used as a mechanism for other critical assessment.

This observation is relevant to more than what happens inside Bible studies. At one point during the meeting, the Pastor turned from the Bible to the new tax reform bill, where he encouraged the group to apply the same “deep reading.” The group poured over the text together, helping each other decide what it really meant rather than relying on mainstream media coverage of the bill. In that moment, I realized that this community of Evangelical Christians were engaged in media literacy,

Science and Nature

The great European house cat migration

Until recently, we thought cats spread to northern Europe from the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity, around the 3rd to 7th century AD.  Advances in zooarchaeology in the last 20 years have complicated that picture.  We now know that domesticated cats were present in Serbia and Poland around 6000 BC.

Technology

Twitter GodMode still available to all engineers, following hack of Apple and other accounts This was supposedly close in 2020. Nope.

Ivory for Mastodon Review: Tapbots Reborn

There’s an intangible, permeating quality about Tapbots apps that trascends features and specs: craftsmanship. With Ivory, launching today on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, you can instantly appreciate that level of care and refinement that the Texas-based duo is well known for after more than a decade on the App Store. But there’s something else, too: for the first time in a few years, it feels like Mark and Paul are having fun again.

Mysterious ‘whirlpool’ appears in the night sky above Hawaii Probably related to a SpaceX satellite.

SetApp: A Suite of macOS Apps for a Single Price Affiliate link for a great collection of ver 200 apps for macOS and iOS for a flat subscription fee.

Women’s Work

The miracle of the commons Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight

Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.

‘A lot of the demons seem a little cheesy now’: Sarah Michelle Gellar on Buffy, her burnout and her comeback

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

Farmer dies; town learns he secretly paid strangers’ pharmacy bills

Something Wonderful

With the discovery of 12 new ones, Jupiter now has more moons than any other planet

Buy me a Coffee! If you find this site interesting, and would like to see more, buy me a coffee. While I may actually buy coffee, I’ll probably buy books to review.

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Elsewhere for January 22, 2023

Posted on January 22, 2023 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 1/22/20223:

Food and Drink

Rachel Roddy’s recipe for Italian breakfast biscuits</a

The word biscotto, like biscuit, is a generic word with a Latin root, panis biscoctus, which refers to bread (panis) cooked (coctus) twice (bis) in order to make it durable. It is a durable “rusk” that requires dipping in liquid to make it edible. Over the centuries, this rusk evolved and sweetened into hundreds of different forms, some of them twice-cooked, others not, many with new names, others simply biscotti al latte (milk biscuits), biscotti savoiardi (sponge fingers), biscotti regina (small logs covered with sesame seeds). Then there are stout, oval biscotti di Prato, from Prato in Tuscany, which are traditionally dipped in sweet wine, and are also known as cantucci, though they have travelled the world as simply biscotti.

History and Archaeology

Norway archaeologists find ‘world’s oldest runestone’

The runestone was discovered in the fall of 2021 during an excavation of a grave near Tyrifjord, west of Oslo, in a region known for several monumental archaeological finds. Items in the cremation pit — burnt bones and charcoal — indicate that the runes likely were inscribed between A.D. 1 and 250.

“We needed time to analyze and date the runestone,” she said to explain why the finding was first announced on Tuesday.
Measuring 31 centimeters by 32 centimeters (12.2 inches by 12.6 inches), the stone has several types of inscriptions and not all make linguistic sense.

‘Better than finding gold’: towers’ remains may rewrite history of English civil war

Archaeologists say finding medieval gatehouse at Coleshill was ‘real shock’ and ‘highlight of our careers’

Science and Nature

Dolphins seen in Bronx River for first time in five years

Technology

The Shit Show

One thing I’ve noticed is that everyone is going to great lengths to make something that replaces the clients we’ve known for years. That’s an excellent goal that eases a transition in the short-term, but ignores how a new open standard (ActivityPub) can be leveraged in new and different ways.

Federation exposes a lot of different data sources that you’d want to follow. Not all of these sources will be Mastodon instances: you may want to stay up-to-date with someone’s Micro.blog, or maybe another person’s Tumblr, or someone else’s photo feed. There are many apps and servers for you to choose from.
It feels like the time is right for a truly universal timeline. That notion excites me like the first time I posted XML status to an endpoint.

App Store Rejection of the Week: Ice Cubes, a Splendid New Mastodon Client

I don’t generally call for anyone to be fired, but an App Store reviewer who cannot see how Ice Cubes “differ[s] from a mobile web browsing experience” is an embarrassment to the company, and providing fodder for every frustrated developer who thinks Apple has completely lost its way as a company and platform steward that respects the work of independent developers.

Women’s Work

‘If I’d had a therapist, do you think any of this would have happened?’: Pamela Anderson on being chewed up and spat out by fame.

On women who talk, and also write books

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Elsewhere for January 15, 2023

Posted on January 15, 2023 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 1/15/2023:

Food and Drink

A six-pack of sauvignon: could canned wine help save the planet?

A 2014 report by the Wine Institute, an industry association of California wineries, found that glass bottles accounted for 29% of the carbon footprint of wine – and that’s not including transport, during which the vessels’ heavy weight pushes emissions up further. To top it all off, the creation of glass bottles in white-hot furnaces is hugely energy-intensive. We think of glass as recyclable, which technically it is – but in the US, only 31% of glass is recycled, compared with 50% of aluminium cans. For wine drinkers who care about the planet, considering alternative containers is essential.

History and Archaeology

An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar

In at least 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens groups drew, painted and engraved non-figurative signs from at least ~42,000 BP and figurative images (notably animals) from at least 37,000 BP. Since their discovery ~150 years ago, the purpose or meaning of European Upper Palaeolithic non-figurative signs has eluded researchers. Despite this, specialists assume that they were notational in some way. Using a database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, we suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the —functioned as units of communication. We demonstrate that when found in close association with images of animals the line <|> and dot <•> constitute numbers denoting months, and form constituent parts of a local phenological/meteorological calendar beginning in spring and recording time from this point in lunar months. We also demonstrate that the sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning . The position of the within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies. Our data indicate that the purpose of this system of associating animals with calendar information was to record and convey seasonal behavioural information about specific prey taxa in the geographical regions of concern.

Science and Nature

‘Cool’: nine-year-old finds rare, ancient shark tooth on Maryland beach

Green comet approaching Earth for first time in 50,000 years

“Comets are notoriously unpredictable, but if this one continues its current trend in brightness, it’ll be easy to spot,” NASA said on its blog earlier this month.
“It’s just possible it could become visible to the unaided eye under dark skies,”

The icy celestial body – called C/2022 E3 (ZTF), a “mouthful of a name”, according to NASA – is making its closest approach to the sun on 12 January before making its closest approach to Earth on 2 February.

Women’s Work

Why Evangelical women are questioning the church—and their faith

The sheer joy of Jamie Lee Curtis cheering Michelle Yeoh sets a new bar for female best-friendship

Something Wonderful

After three years of covering covid, I built my own air filter

Washington Post health reporter Lena H. Sun used in making a do-it-yourself box fan air filter, also known as the Corsi-Rosenthal Box.

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Elsewhere

Elsewhere for January 8, 2023

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 1/8/2023:

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

H/T @carnage4life@mas.to: What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround?

Then it started to happen—book sales at Barnes & Noble began rising again. Sales in 2021 quickly got back to pre-pandemic levels, and then kept growing. Readers regained trust in the company. The workers at the stores were more motivated and started genuinely acting like booksellers.

Man pleads guilty to stealing more than 1,000 manuscripts

Write Note Pads: Notebooks and Planners Referral link for quality affordable notebooks, memo pads, and planners.

Food and Drink

Lead and Cadmium Could Be in Your Dark Chocolate

H/T: Road Not Taken @yoohooair@universeodon.comThis Depression-Era ‘Magic Cake’ Has a Secret Ingredient “Hit with hard times, American bakers turned to tomato soup.”

SetApp: A Suite of macOS Apps for a Single Price Affiliate link for a great collection of ver 200 apps for macOS and iOS for a flat subscription fee.

Women’s Work

In Her Own Words: Pelosi Steps Back After Decades In Charge

Meet Cheryl Johnson, the clerk running the House

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

Scarborough’s New Year fireworks cancelled to protect walrus

A man broke into a high school to shelter dozens from Buffalo blizzard

Something Wonderful

Zisha Craftsman making a Traditional Teapot

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Elsewhere

Elsewhere for December 24, 2022

Posted on December 24, 2022 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 12/24/2022:

Art, Music, and Film

An Academic Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad

Donna Reed’s daughter plays guardian angel for ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking.

Via @b_hawk@hcommons.social (Brandon W. Hawk): An Ox, an Ass, and Three Kings: A History of Apocryphal Christmas Traditions

Humanists All What is lost in the precipitous decline of the arts and humanities

Teaching the arts and humanities well confers proficiencies such as good writing and clear speaking. Critical thinking emerges—take nothing on authority, absorb but question traditions, conserve in order to reform. Embracing past experience, the arts and humanities put current predicaments in perspective: achievements since ancestors set foot in Olduvai clay, alliances with evil, triumphs over disease, social contracts defeating brute force—all represented from the cave paintings of Chauvet to the caves of virtual reality.

Huntsville Public Library (Tx) Privatized After Pride Display

The Huntsville Public Library (HPL) has been under fire since this summer, when a book display riled up city officials. Now, following the removal of two book displays at the public library, the city decided to privatize the library.
Though officials claim the move to hire Library Services & Systems (LS&S) will reduce library operational costs over the next ten years, it comes on the heels of the city removing a Pride book display and a Banned Books Week display in September. City Manager Aron Kulhavy called for the displays to be taken down, temporarily closing the library. Following the removal of both displays, the library was told they could not create any additional displays, pending the city’s review of policies and procedures about them. The City Librarian was also placed on leave.

Write Note Pads: Notebooks and Planners Referral link for quality affordable notebooks, memo pads, and planners.

Food and Drink

The Difference Between Puff Pastry and Phyllo Dough

History and Archaeology

Researchers discover 168 mysterious carvings in Peru’s ancient Nazca plain

Archaeologists Devise a Better Clock for Biblical Times

Politics and Society

In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism

How Johnson became an unlikely part of an emerging voter revolt against Trumpism is not so much the story of some political strategy, or even the policies of the national Democratic Party, which has long been accused of ignoring places such as northwest Georgia. Rather, it is the story of a thousand life experiences that add up to a certain kind of American character, one that can arise from the very landscape where the Trump movement took root.

Science and Nature

H/T Introversion: Crows Perform Yet Another Skill Once Thought Distinctively Human

Crows are some of the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom. They are capable of making rule-guided decisions and of creating and using tools. They also appear to show an innate sense of what numbers are. Researchers now report that these clever birds are able to understand recursion—the process of embedding structures in other, similar structures—which was long thought to be a uniquely human ability.

Recursion is a core conpt of human languages, so this is really cool.

The mysterious song of the dinosaurs

Technology

Elon’s stale playbook “At Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk was a jerk with a grand vision. At Twitter, he’s just a jerk.”

Elon Musk blamed a Twitter account for a stalker. Police see no link.

The Twitter owner threatened legal action, changed the platform’s rules and suspended journalists’ accounts after a confrontation involving his security team at a gas station. But the incident’s timing and location cast doubt on a link to the @ElonJet account.

Making ActivityPub Your Social Media Hub for Mastodon and Other Decentralized Services

SetApp: A Suite of macOS Apps for a Single Price Affiliate link for a great collection of ver 200 apps for macOS and iOS for a flat subscription fee.

Something Wonderful

As ‘Mr. Christmas’ fights cancer, his former students bring the holiday to him

H/T Glenn Fleishman @glennf@twit.social
Eleanor Morton : JRR Tolkien Writes a Christmas Book

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Elsewhere

Elsewhere For December 18, 2022

Posted on December 18, 2022 by Lisa Spangenberg / 0 Comment

You should read this for 12/18/2022:

Art, Music, and Film

H/T @wynkenhimself@glammr.us: The Art of Decorated Papers The University of Edinburgh acquired Simon Beattie’s collection of decorated papers; this is an exhibit about them.

Tom Lehrer releases rigtts to the public domain: In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.

The new (4th) edition of Erik Spiekermann’s Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works is out and is now free. It’s a classic primer by a famous type designer about using fonts more effectively. It’s quite helpful, albeit very opinionated.

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

Guðbrandur Þorláksson, Ein ný húspostilla (1597)

How one right-wing activist is fighting to ban over 3,600 books from Florida schools

Among the books he forced the school board to remove is The Girl From The Sea, an award-winning graphic novel in which “two girls hold hands and, at one point, share a kiss. There is no sex, no swearing, and no nudity.” Friedman told Popular Information that he objected to the book’s presence because girls are “not in school to learn how to be better lesbians.”

Write Note Pads: Notebooks and Planners Referral link for quality affordable notebooks, memo pads, and planners.

Food and Drink

A scallion pancake recipe is layered with thoughts of family, China and a tiny secret

History and Archaeology

Advent calendars, explained: Where they came from and why they’re everywhere now

5,000-year-old ‘bog body’ found in Denmark may be a human sacrifice victim

Archaeologists say find near Stonehenge is an ancient goldsmith’s toolkit

Science and Nature

‘A remarkable sign’: flurry of wolf births offers hope for California comeback

How one digital book led to an important COVID-19 discovery

Technology

Before Musk Riled Everyone Up With Misleading Twitter Files About ‘Shadowbanning,’ Musk Used The Tool To Hide Account Tracking His Plane

How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg

Thank you. We are trying to make the web a better place with everything that we make. We’re always asking, “How can we put users more in control? How can we align our business model more with what our customers and users want?”
Open-source is obviously at the core of everything we do. WordPress is open-source, GPL (General Public License). We also open-source Pocket Casts. We are open-sourcing Tumblr, but it is taking a while.

IPv6 Internet Is Broken

Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons Of High Profile Journalists

Just after finishing that last post about Twitter banning the official Mastodon account on Twitter for tweeting about the ElonJet tracking account existing on Mastodon, it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new “free speech absolutist” Twitter have really come off. In quick succession, a whole bunch of high profile reporter accounts were suspended, including Aaron Rupar (who famously covers and quotes videos of high profile politicians), Drew Harwell from the Washington Post, Ryan Mac from the NY Times, Donie Sullivan from CNN, and Matt Binder from Mashable.

SetApp: A Suite of macOS Apps for a Single Price Affiliate link for a great collection of ver 200 apps for macOS and iOS for a flat subscription fee.

Women’s Work

The pioneering Black feminist Dorothy Pitman Hughes has died at aged 84

Revealed: how women bankrolled rival to 17th century Globe theatre

Male performers may have dominated the early modern stage, but female investors were a driving force behind one of the foremost playhouses of the 17th century, according to new research.
Academics have discovered that women made up a large part of the financial force behind the Fortune theatre, the great rival to the Globe, partly built by the actor for whom Christopher Marlowe wrote plays, and where Thomas Middleton’s dramas were first staged.

Alabama women, 85 and 61, sentenced after feeding stray cats

Something Wonderful

Digital Jigsaw Puzzles: Holiday 2022 Edition

Home and the birdsong In the dark, sylvan villages of medieval England, people named places after the birds that filled the night with music

Buy me a Coffee! If you find this site interesting, and would like to see more, buy me a coffee. While I may actually buy coffee, I’ll probably buy books to review.