Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

Ethan Zuckerman's list of properties for a "civic logic" of social media is surprisingly close to Mastodon/ActivityPub feature list:
* many, smaller communities
* creating their own rules for moderation/administration
* interoperability so people can try different ones
* different ways to support them financially
#DPinfrastructure

This speculative fiction about far-future college football is legitimately the most excited I've gotten about a sporting event in years.
https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020
I got so tense and excited watching the lateral play in Chapter 7. #20020

Writing letters to voters is one of the only relaxing things for me:
https://votefwd.org

Some alternatives:
* conferences and journals in languages other than English (although English as the lingua franca is certainly a benefit for me, and having a common language is a benefit for cross-country collaboration);
* more prominent writing centers in universities, and an expectation that you worked with your writing center before submitting a paper;
* making our conferences and journals into writing clinics, where peers don't just review, but collaborate on the writing

I feel guilty when writing these reviews, because it's almost certain that the authors speak English better than I speak their first language. Or it feels unfair because the authors may have done really great research work and just not written it up very well, and whether this paper gets published is the indirect way of evaluating their research work.

But papers *are* a communication of the work, not (just) rewards for having completed the work.

It's not uncommon for me to review a computer science paper where the gist of my review is:
this work *might* be really interesting and valuable to the field, but the writing is poor enough that I can't understand whether it is and I don't think most readers will get the full value from it.

if you've been getting subsidized health insurance premiums, but then unexpectedly make less income than expected this year (say, related to massive global economic instability), and so end up with less than the federal poverty level -- technically you're required to pay the government back the entire year's subsidies, because you're too low-income to receive a low-income health insurance subsidy
#kafka

I posit that it's a new take on steampunk, and I think it's appealing in a similar way. The older technology appears less sleek and unknowably complex, and it's at once both wondrous and sensible that it should be possible to accomplish so much more (than is historically contemporary) while maintaining the aesthetic of tools that seem more comprehensible because they're simpler, older or less advanced.

I am appreciating the recent aesthetic trend of retro sci-fi TV, where technology uses 70s-80s external apparatus (chunky keyboards, beige panels, rainbow stripes, dials, lights, switches) but futuristic capabilities (robots, AI, mind interfaces, antigravity).

Examples so far (I personally only require two items for a trend):
* Maniac (Netflix), retro Japanese/Apple ][ aesthetic, set in dystopian New York City
* Tales from the Loop (Amazon), 70s research lab aesthetic, set in small town Ohio

I didn't expect this Memex presentation to focus on a quantified self personal history database -- I think of the memex as being about the trails that the user explicitly creates connecting relevant resources. But it definitely triggers a similar interest at being able to query everything that you have read/consumed electronically.
#babycastles #wordhack #memex #vannevarbush

"I thought about the garden tended by a monk living in mindfulness. His flowers are always fresh and green, nourished by the peace and joy which flow from his mindfulness.

We ought to listen to music or sit and practice breathing at the beginning of every meeting or discussion."
📖 Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness

The vegetables in the midsummer garden are struggling to keep up with predating insects (squash bugs, cabbage worms, others I haven't identified yet!), but the flowers are looking lovely. #florespondence

Do you want to do the responsible thing and get tested for COVID? hahaha you can't.

well, you can, but you have to wait a week for an appointment and another week for test results, by which time the results are no longer very informative or actionable. and you should look forward to waiting in long lines in your car or spending hours on the phone, in order to find out that you can't be tested.

But if so, why do we call it windflower in English? My conjecture is that it's because in North America we have anemones like Pulsatilla nuttalliana (previously Anemone nuttalliana) and other pasqueflowers (another interesting etymological debate on that term), whose long, flowing styles are designed so that the seeds will blow away on the wind. So the anemone/windflower terminology made sense again (even though the pasqueflowers get removed from the Anemone genus later).

So maybe the Greeks imported the myth of a beautiful man tusked by a boar and the blood-red flowers that sprung up and kept a Grecian version of the previous name for the flower.

And then a Roman (Ovid) re-tells the story of Aphrodite and Adonis in the Metamorphoses and says the name is a poetic reference to how quickly the petals blow away in the wind, because he knows Greek and it needs a wind-related etymology, and he doesn't know the Phoenician history.

Sure, it seems like "Anemone" must come from the Greek word for winds (~ anemoi), and we also call these windflowers in English, but everyone refers to the myth of Adonis and what does that have to do with the winds?

Well, the myth of Adonis is derived from the Syrian/Phoenician myth of Nea'man (also Tummaz or Dumuzid), also tusked by a boar, and the flowers are still known in Arabic as the blood/parts of Nu'man or ~ an-nu-man.

#florespondence

Our garden plots are coming along. The flowers (poppies, phacelia, sunflowers) are beautiful and comforting, but it's also producing a fair amount of our produce now: snap peas, broccoli, lettuce, kale, green beans that we harvest once or twice a week.

To come in the second plot, with luck: shishito peppers, corn, cucumbers, carrots, more green beans, more kale, more flowers.
#florespondence #garden #communitygarden

It looks to me like the City of Durham State of Emergency declaration marked the beginning of a rapid change in behavior: either because Mayor Schewel picked up on an inflection point in larger trends or because residents responded to that announcement.

The City, County and State Stay-at-Home orders seem mostly to have confirmed the behavior that was already taking place, rather than creating a large change through legal mandates.