Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social
I like languages (spoken & programming) and live in the Midwestern US but enjoy all places and cultures. Favorite genre: slice of life. https://fasiha.github.io
So Day One (the journaling app I use) stopped syncing between devices a couple of days ago:
http://help.dayoneapp.com/day-one-sync/sync-status
It's surprising how inconvenienced I am by that—notes I've created since Monday are distributed on three devices and I'm surprisingly annoyed I can't find notes 2/3rd of the time when I reach for a given device.
P2P/decentralized lesson: even if data is stored locally on devices (like Day One does), let devices sync by themselves (ScuttleButt takes this idea to the extreme).
@22 podcast, graphic novel, scholarly work -- *one* of these should be comfortable!
Oh, and this is loosely related except it does cover an interregnum and anyway I love it: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html
Three Kingdoms is an enormously confusing story in itself -- I just sort of float along and trust the reader to remind me where we last met the character who just popped up and betrayed someone. (Lots of betrayals. Maybe they slow down near the end? I'm not there yet.)
Um of course I should clarify that cooking isn’t by any means the limit of gender roles in these societies nor that equality in the kitchen translates to equality everywhere else, just that, I’m happy to see the gender roles assigned by society subverted in any way that invites people to live their lives and treat each other independent of socially received wisdom.
Ah, she also was screenwriter for *Toradora!*, another show I liked a lot, in no small part because the 🐉 guy (regularly!) prepares breakfast for the 🐅 girl 😍. Subverting gender roles is always something I can get behind.
She's worked with Nagai Tatsuyuki as director more than once too, to great effect. Awesome.
@22 There's a graphic novel series that is simplified compared to Mote but not frivolous, and there's a wonderful podcast of someone reading The Romance of the 3 Kingdoms and explaining the confusing bits. It's like having your really nice older cousin readin to you over the summer, or something. Respectively
http://stonebridgestore.squarespace.com/shop/understanding-china-through-comics
“To know, deep in your bones, how everything you experience is fleeting, poignant, and unreliable undermines the rationale for trying to grasp hold of, possess, and control it. To fully know suffering begins to affect how you relate to the world, how you respond to others, how you manage your own life. For how can I seek lasting solace in something that I know is incapable of providing it?” —Stephen Batchelor, *Confessions of a #Buddhist atheist*, is a superb modernizer and explainer.
Helpful.
https://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/locals/#12/35.0140/-224.2356
Map of tweets by locals versus tourists, #Kyoto. How frustrating—no dates, no basemaps!
But I think the big blob of red is Kyoto Station, and the cluster of red/blue northeast of that is Kawaramachi/Gion/Nishiki/etc. I can also pick out Arashiyama to the west.
Meanwhile. https://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/brands/#8/35.299/-223.102 has a much cooler way to give geographic context.
2/2
"In Marcionite belief, Christ was not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent by [the True Christian God] to reveal the truth about existence, thus allowing humanity to escape the earthly trap of [the terrible Jewish creator God]. Marcion called [the True] God, the Stranger God, or the Alien God, in some translations, as this deity had not had any previous interactions with the world, and was wholly unknown." —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism#Teachings
What a delightful, well-wrought idea!
#TIL about Marcion, a Christian thinker circa 140 AD, who had a deliciously Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman worldview: Wikipedia will suffice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism#Teachings
"Marcionites held that the God of the Hebrew Bible [who created the world] was inconsistent, jealous, wrathful and genocidal, and that the material world he created was defective, a place of suffering; the God who made such a world is a bungling or malicious demiurge."
In contrast…
1/2
"As I cried my eyes out, some part of me wondered if sad tears and happy tears tasted differently. I tried licking my tears, and they really did taste differently from usual."
"I thought the outside world would be more extravagant than this, I found myself thinking."
How delightful: a chapter excerpt from #anime screenwriter Okada Mari's autobiography, translated into English. And $7 on Kindle? Bought! Of course I love the cover—Anohana and Anthem of the Heart mashup, I think?
It blows my mind that when we drive from Dayton to Columbus (in Ohio, USA), we drive from bedrock from
- Upper Ordovician, 461 to 444 million years ago, to
- Middle and Upper Silurian, roughly 428 to 416 mya, to
- Middle and Upper Devonian epochs, roughly 397 to 359 mya. FYI, Devonian is when land animals appeared!
We see this Paleozoic rock at places like Clifton Gorge and John Bryan State Park, where half-an-eon-old bedrock is exposed by ten thousand year old river.
#Geology FTW. 🤯
pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70136641
I took this amazing "Geologic map of the United States (exclusive of Alaska and Hawaii)" by Philip Burke King, Helen M. Beikman, and Gertrude J. Edmonston, published 1974, showing the age of rocks (Cenozoic, Mesozoic, Pre-Cambrian!) in the US, found its projection coordinates, and reprojected it to equirectangular so anyone can clip out interesting tidbits from it.
https://github.com/fasiha/steppe-map for the cartographic goodness.
A detailed in-depth study of Chinese interregna could be really interesting. There are so many ways for a government or state to collapse, and so many interesting things that happen through and after the collapse. I'd love to read it. #BooksThatHaventBeenWrittenYet
Two neat maps I found in *Les Animaux*, volume 5, *Animaux des déserts, des steppes et des villes* (Hachette, 1968), texte: Robert Frédérick, direction artistique: Maurice Fleurent, mise en pages: Bernard Duvivier, illustrations: C. Hemeret, P. Bentegeat, R.B. Kock, P. Leroy, H. Mercier, M. Baruel, C. Broutin.
Asian steppes and deserts. Reminded me of my work recovering projection parameters from images of maps: https://github.com/fasiha/steppe-map
https://octodon.social/media/NfCVCxOB8ibacPh-Ng4 https://octodon.social/media/RDoY7727eqPK-4fqfKM
Full-res crop of the hypothesized "moss flower", and with a thumb for scale.
I love the structure around the tip of the capsule, like the Statue of Liberty's crown.
https://octodon.social/media/_43-_r1FIUeVnoKQ0TI https://octodon.social/media/84oxJR2s7DoAhb9Exd4
I think these are the spore capsules of what appears to be moss growing on this tree. The—dare I say—"moss flowers" are very tiny, sub-millimeter. I'll post a full-res crop in the reply because the structure of the rosette is 🤯.
f/2.4, 8.8mm (equivalent to 24mm on a film camera), so the depth of field is razor thin. The side of the lens is resting on the tree, leaving the middle of the lens maybe two centimeters away from the subject.
(Yes that's a Brian Jacques nod.)
I forgot that what I was primarily interested in this (and Jay's subsequent work like https://blog.koto.ai/2018/03/12/tenure-track-china-in-comparative-perspective/) was concrete quantitative ways of describing a country's government as autocratic, or how to objectively say when a government "falls".
An art project that someone could do is, a crowdsource app letting visitors vote how long each country that currently "exists" (including Taiwan, Palestine, etc.) will last, for some criterion or 3rd party analysis like http://oefresearch.org/datasets/reign
"Onsets and Terminations of Democracy, 1955-2010.xls" by Jay Ulfelder:
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?fileId=2420019&version=RELEASED&version=.0
A nearly 300-row spreadsheet showing the flipflops of democracy↔︎autocracy, from Albania, Argentina, Armenia to Yugoslavia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, including numerous notes about what happened and who did it.
Chilling.
(https://gist.github.com/fasiha/cab949bc04da155d1671c16634eae7c6 is my readable browseable version for the convenience of the spreadsheet-challenged, like me.)
“now that we know that war casualties actually do have a fat-tailed distribution, we should not be astonished when military historians tell us that World War II could have claimed far more than sixty million lives if Hitler had launched the invasion of the Soviet Union earlier in 1941 or had intuited the destructive power of the atomic bomb. The possibilities were once real—and numerous.” —Tetlock and Gardner.
Taleb. Kahneman. Anders Ericsson. Duncan Watts. Tetlock is a synthesizer and doer.
