March 6
Notes from the human population implosion
“There is fundamentally no way to do this that doesn’t end up treating women’s bodies as a tool.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus (previously) examines the demographic transition: the decline in childbirth alongside the growing number of elders. A long read, grounded in South Korea's experience.
How to draw a line that is not stupid
Anne Carson on writing with Parkinson's: "When I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated. I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year. Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks just embarrassing. Or, Barthes would say, stupid. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame."
Perhaps the most important archaeological discovery in New Zealand history
A waka, or Polynesian voyaging canoe, has been discovered in the bank of a creek on Rēkohu (Chatham Islands). It is astonishingly complete, with elaborate carvings, obsidian decorations, and even intact parts of sails and rope. [more inside]
Arial
"A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century." [more inside]
Their brief moment in the sun foretells our own present darkness
It begins as a shuffle but soon becomes an unstoppable march. What ska had imbibed from American jazz and R&B was a musical ESP about where to put the emphasis and where to leave some space. It called out for a new way of moving—picture someone strolling down a city street who suddenly breaks into an agitated, quasi-military trot. Reggae was a slow skank, feeling the earth between your toes; ska was Saturday-night show-out and exuberance—lean, jangled, calisthenic. Like they did with Northern soul and rockabilly, British youth took this elsewhere music and made it over according to their own exacting style diktats. from An Unstoppable March [Harper’s; ungated]
FiveThirtyEight is no more.
ABC shuts down FiveThirtyEight and pulls the plug on its website. The last 15 or so employees of the once influential data aggregator are set to be laid off by Disney’s ABC News Group, according to a Tuesday report by the Wall Street Journal. (Archive.ph) The main URL already redirects to ABC News.
The Smell of Success
Anosmia, or loss of the sense of smell, is a frequent consequence of COVID-19. Most people recover spontaneously in weeks. However, some do not, and for them anosmia has high impact on quality of life. For the latter there is now hope in a new treatment: Platelet-rich Plasma. [more inside]
The decline of letters: Denmark edition
BBC: Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century. The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company's letter service. Denmark's 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June. Guardian: PostNord Denmark will deliver its last letter on 30 December ... The government said it would still be possible to post letters despite the changes. The Local: Sending letters internationally from Denmark will therefore probably mean using a global courier such as UPS or DHL and sending the letter as part of a small package.
Saul Steinberg, yesterday and today
Saul Steinberg, as a figure in American art, is poised to evaporate. A specificity or worked out theory of admiration for Steinberg, from the rare few who even bother to profess admiration towards the work, is neglected, because not much is said beyond occasional measured and brief praise. Where is Steinberg in contemporary illustration, art or even culture itself? A stroll through visual America today shows little appetite for Steinberg's thought through line, and his status as a public, albeit graphic, intellectual seems deeply foreign to our times. The mere notion of him: a compressed entity of an idea, a thinking artist in the metropolis, whose mental expressions were tangled, dense and then excreted with a signature perfection. [more inside]
WordPerfect
It is March 30, 1992. Right Said Fred’s "I’m Too Sexy" has begun its descent from the pinnacle of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs sweeps the Academy Awards. And WordPerfect Corporation, producer of the industry-standard word processing software, fires its Chief Operating Officer. [more inside]
Small ship stuck
The Humber estuary is a challenging place to navigate. At high tide, its wide expanse of open water conceals a constantly-shifting network of mudflats, through which ships must follow a uniquely twisting, meandering path marked by a series of floats, to avoid running aground. The mud shifts so rapidly that new charts are published every two weeks. The crew of the H&S Wisdom apparently got it wrong, and must now spend the next month sitting on one of those mudbanks. They were assisted by Humber Rescue, one of the UK's independent local lifeboats.
Think ahead
Many people struggle to make tradeoffs between present wants and future wishes, resulting in the tendency to overly discount the value of future rewards. To explain such behavior, past work has pointed to future self-continuity or the perceived connection between a person’s current and future selves. Yet, most of this past work has been conducted on small-to-medium size convenience samples, and as such, little is known regarding the population-level statistics of future self-continuity or how its link to important financial health variables like saving behavior and financial well-being play out in a nationally representative sample. Here, we use a nationally representative sample of over 6,000 Americans to investigate the generalizability of future self-continuity and its connection to financial outcomes such as savings behavior and global financial well-being. from Exploring the distribution and correlates of future self-continuity in a large, nationally representative sample [Cambridge University Press]
March 5
Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)
When you’ve spent years watching how some tech bros break the rules in pursuit of personal and economic power at the expense of safety and user protections, all while wrapping themselves in the flag of “innovation,” you get pretty good at spotting the pattern.
Captive-bred eastern quolls released into Tasmanian Midlands
Endangered eastern quolls released into wild in Tasmanian conservation project.
An ambitious conservation effort to boost declining eastern quoll populations in Tasmania is underway, with 24 of the animals released onto a 5000 hectare property. Eastern quolls are marsupial carnivores about the size of a small domestic cat, with adult males measuring 53 to 66 cm (21 to 26 in) in total length, including the 20 to 28 cm (7.9 to 11.0 in) tail, and having an average weight of 1.1 kg (2.4 lb). Females are significantly smaller, measuring 48 to 58 cm (19 to 23 in), including a 17 to 24 cm (6.7 to 9.4 in) tail, and weighing around 0.7 kg (1.5 lb).
Don't forget, Europe's been through all this before.
As they politely remind us here, ca 2017, I'm sure we remember why. As I run into things that might help us all I will try to keep them up here.
What if we just said: no.
REI's worker union is asking members to vote "withhold" on all Board candidates Unionized employees of REI, a US-based coop store that sells outdoor gear, are asking members to mark “withhold” on their ballots after a Seattle activist and a top Greenpeace leader were excluded from the ballot. [more inside]
Truly, it's the video for our times
Olivetti Industrial Design
This Bill Could Make It Legal for AI to Prescribe Medicine
The Healthy Technology Act of 2025 would amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to allow AI and machine learning to qualify as practitioners eligible to prescribe drugs if authorized by the state involved and approved, cleared, or authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for other purposes. (MedScape)
It’s a fitting moment to discuss enemy feminisms
Just as the so-called “socialism of fools” comes from a truncated analysis of capitalism, resulting in national socialism (i.e., fascism), the feminism of fools, if you will, arises from bad materialism, a diagnosis of the sex/gender system that is fatally foreshortened. This leads it to form a wounded attachment to ontological womanhood. The feminism of cisness, for example, has spread like a pogrom. Today, it is unsurprising to find self-described feminists at the forefront of policymaking to deny gender-affirming health care, or to make bathrooms and sports lockers cissexual at all costs, in the name of women’s rights. from Feminist Fascisms
A conversation with Sophie Lewis [The Baffler; ungated]
March 4
New Australian dinosaurs and the oldest megaraptorid fossils
New Australian dinosaurs and the oldest megaraptorid fossils in the world. Australia’s first carcharodontosaur fossils unearthed along Victoria’s Cretaceous coast.
voting?
The SAVE Act, if passed, would represent substantial barriers to voting for not only transgender adults but also for more than 140 million Americans who do not have a passport, as well as 21 million Americans who do not have access to their birth certificate or other documentation or the millions of Americans, including 69 million married women, who have changed their legal name [americanprogress]
The Gulf of Unreasoning
Amidst a trade war with American's neighbors and partners, and a crashing economy, US President #47 will address a joint session of the US Congress starting at 9p.m. ET (watch live on YouTube)
Timeline Cleanse
NHK World presents A Cat's-Eye View of Japan, 42 5-minute episodes showing various places in Japan as seen by the cats who live there.
Never gonna give up dancing at the Pink Pony Club
Because somebody might need this today: Rick Astley covers Chappell Roan's Pink Pony Club.
"We still live in history —and at the mercy of biology."
There’s no magic here
What do you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I find that they take up a lot of screen space. So this week I figured out how to run pong inside mine.
"Tell her I exploded, and tell her it was very sad"
George Lowe, iconic baritone voice of cult TV classic Space Ghost Coast to Coast, dead at 67 [more inside]
Tom Petty truly belonged among the wildflowers
I stumbled across this documentary: Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free - The Making of Wildflowers, and I can't recommend it highly enough. The insights you get from Tom, the band, and producer Rick Rubin are fascinating. [more inside]
And so it begins
↔
Could time flow in both directions rather than just moving forward? A groundbreaking study from the University of Surrey suggests that under certain quantum conditions... [spacedaily/nature]
Time is eccentric and unforgiving; at least it’s quite dependable
With their uniformity and certainty, calendars feel like periodic tables of time. You can see the last days of the previous month and the first days of the following month at the beginning and end, looking a little embarrassed to be caught in a picture in which they don’t belong. But while next year’s calendar might feel full of promise (who knows what I might be up to on August 7th next year?), the next millennium’s calendar registers as eerie. I do not know what cataclysms, invasions, and extinctions will have occurred by September 20th, 3025 but I do know that it will fall on a Tuesday. from "Time" is the Most Common Noun in the English Language
March 3
Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style"
The Elements of Typographic Style is a book on typography and style by Canadian typographer, poet and translator Robert Bringhurst. ... A history and guide to typography, it has been praised by Hermann Zapf, who said "I wish to see this book become the Typographers' Bible." Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones consider it "the finest book ever written about typography." ... Because of its status as a respected and frequently cited resource, typographers and designers often refer to it simply as Bringhurst.* [more inside]
Greater gliders' spectacular recovery after Blue Mountains bushfires
Greater gliders' spectacular recovery after Blue Mountains bushfires.
The endangered marsupials' population in part of the southern Blue Mountains has increased by 45 per cent since before the fires began in 2019. (Australia).
The world is riddled with maggots
A song by Chumbawamba that isn't Tubthumping Chumbawamba is often thought of as a one hit wonder, but there's a lot more to them. They're anti-fascist, pro-union, and loved to do protest songs. This one is even more relevant now.
The most beautiful invention of all time
Its design is a chef's kiss. It can scale from love note to embracing the world. And it united countries and continents in the aftermath of war. In this short SLYT, mathematician Hannah Fry explains why she adores A4. [more inside]
"I am quite absurdly in love with him."
Letters and diaries tell the story of the love between two survivors of the final Scott expedition to the South Pole. via the Atavist.
¡Siempre volverá sano e contente!
In the 1970s, the Mar Chiquita lagoon (english), which lies in the province of Córdoba, in central Argentina, swallowed neighboring Miramar. The waters destroyed 102 hotels, 198 homes, 65 businesses, the thermal complex, the casino, and the amphitheater, leaving Miramar on the brink of collapse. The economy was obliterated, and many families chose to leave the city, drastically reducing its population. Those who stayed rebuilt their lives in other parts of Miramar, away from the lagoon ... It wasn't until 2003 that the waters of Laguna Mar Chiquita began to recede, amid the worst drought in decades. The scene was desolate: abandoned structures covered in salt and petrified tree trunks standing crookedly as silent witnesses to what was lost. from The Return of a Lost City [The Dial]
A world in which corporations controlled all media--set in 2018.
The owners eventually decide that [he was] getting bigger than the game, and that his popularity as a player is a threat to their control. No, this isn't about the controversial Luka Doncic trade--it's a look at Norman Jewison's underrated movie Rollerball, which my father took me to see at the Sunnyvale drive-in theater when I was nine years old.
How do you make a decision? (Weekly Free Thread)
How to master decision making in a world of uncertainty What kinds of decisions are you trying to make lately and you don't know what to do about them? Commiserate, ask for advice, or just talk about whatever else is going on for you in this week's free thread.
Japanese pencils
The golden age of Japanese pencils "It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow's managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at enormous cost, to make the best pencil Japan had ever seen." [via]
Do you know your ‘penis age’?
Guardian: Johnson spends a reported $2m (£1.6m) a year on project Blueprint, his personal programme aimed at defying the ageing process ... For starters, he goes to bed at 8:30pm every night and takes more than 100 pills a day ... He also eats all his meals before 11am, bathes in LED light, and spends a part of his day sitting on magnets ... Recently Johnson posted his penis data online, comparing it to data from his 19-year-old son Todger Talmage.
Soft, Strength, Structure
The Striking Buildings of Zaha Hadid. "The Iraqi-British Zaha Hadid became famous for her intensely futuristic architecture characterized by curving façades, sharp angles, and severe materials such as concrete and steel. The structures she designed successfully accomplished what mystifies so many when they observe great architecture: She took the strongest materials in the world and manipulated them to form objects that appear soft and sturdy at the same time."Over the last two decades, her work has been honored by a long list of awards: In 2004 she was the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Prize; in 2010 and 2011 she received the Stirling Prize, a British decoration for excellence in architecture; in 2014 her Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, like an undulating sheet of graph paper, won the Design Museum Design of the Year Award; and in 2016 she became the first woman to win the RIBA Gold Medal. Hadid’s projects, many of which transform depending on the viewer’s perspective, turn architectural convention on its head."(ungated link) [more inside]
Alive in Kingston, but also Still Alive in Kingston
Kingston, Ontario filmmaker Jay Middaugh and his love for the city in film. Jay has written and directed two movies set in Kingston; both heavily feature local musicians/bands. His first film, 2017's Live in Kingston, can be watched in its entirety at the link. (I'll also post it in FanFare.) [more inside]
Ding-dong
The Fish Doorbell has been activated again (link to Dutch news website)
Peek to see if perch wants to pass, and press the bell to permit.
A blame-the-system impulse
On the internet, where there’s no tone of voice or body language to send signals, using particularly evocative phrases is even more important than normal. Ugh, Capitalism and all its variations are a reliable way to give any statement that oomph, that hit of seriousness. It can signal that you’re one of the Good Guys, one of the people who gets it. from Ugh, Capitalism by Jeremiah Johnson [Infinite Scroll]
Kate can walk but often uses a wheelchair to get around. Here's why
One in three wheelchair users are ambulatory (eg can walk a few steps). This article explains why people who can stand up for a brief moment still need a wheelchair due to severe pain; balance issues; falls; or severe exhaustion.
March 2
bighorn beat brown bear but busted my bracket
March Mammal Madness. You (or your biology students) learn enough about sixty-five animal species to predict who would come out on top if the two encountered each other in the higher-seeded animal's habitat. These fictional encounters them play out through March. This year's bracket. BlueSky hashtag. [more inside]
Al Schmitt
For his work on more than 150 Gold and Platnium records, audio legend Al Schmitt won 22 Grammy Awards - more than any other engineer or mixer. In 2014, he became the first engineer honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was beloved of his colleagues. In short, he was the GOAT. [more inside]
NYT review of MeFi's own Omar El Akkad's New Book
Irish author Fintan O'Toole reviews One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by
MeFi's own pre-eminent science fiction author Omar El Akkad for the New York Times. [more inside]