/ in English


Robert Cornelius’ Self-Portrait: The First Ever 'Selfie' (1839)

The First Ever ‘Selfie’ (1839).

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Music that kills. Literally.

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Highlights from In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Reading it, I couldn’t help but notice several parallels between what was happening in 1933 & 1934 as Hitler worked to establish an authoritarian government in Germany and some of the actions of our current government and its President here in the US. If you think that sort of statement is hyperbolic, I urge you to read on and remember that there was a time when Nazi Germany and its rulers seemed to its citizenry and to the world to be, sure, a little extreme in their methods, fiery in their rhetoric, and engaged in some small actions against certain groups of people, but ultimately harmless…until they weren’t and then it was too late to do anything.

Here’s everything I highlighted on my Kindle presented with some light commentary…much of it speaks for itself and the parallels are obvious. I apologize (slightly) for the length, but this book provided a very interesting look at the Nazi regime before they became the world’s canonical example of evil” (Jason Kottke).

Read this summary!

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Amazing performance.

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Deprecating scripting

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Plastic Bag Bans Might Do More Harm Than Good

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Where we are

Loren Roberts for The Planetary Society after a concept by Olaf Frohn

WHERE WE ARE ON 1 JULY 2019
From the July Solstice issue of The Planetary Report.

Source: http://www.planetary.org/explore/the-planetary-report/where-we-are-spacecraft-locator-july-2019.html
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”In our effort to save the climate, are we destroying the environment” (Michael Shellenberger)?

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Want to check for retractions in your personal library — and get alerts — for free? Now you can

We’re thrilled to announce a collaboration with Zotero, the free and open-source research platform, that will allow its users to be alerted to retractions of any papers in their personal libraries” (Retraction Watch).

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Competition can fix Big Tech, but only if we don’t make “bigness” a legal requirement

I’m all for making Big Tech small again and fixing the internet so that it’s not just five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four, not to mention doing something about market dominance, corporate bullying, rampant privacy invasions and so on” (Cory Doctorow).

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Open gardens

To summarize:

  • Open gardens have curators instead of gatekeepers.
  • Open gardens use standards so that the same formats exist inside and outside the platform.

This is only possible by embracing the open web. I believe it’s an important part of the way forward for all great platforms” (Manton Reece).

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Ikea Recreates Famous TV Living Rooms Using Only Their Furniture

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Britain is setting new records for going without coal-powered energy. In the latest milestone, it has gone for more than eight days without using coal to generate electricity — the longest such period since 1882” (The Guardian).

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Fake News is Spam

Crank calls and robocalls were spam of the phone era. The[n] email had its spam. Text messages also became spam. Why are we surprised that social media posts became spam — in most cases as fake news. Tomorrow it will be video and virtual reality spam.

At the end of the day, we have to remember: spam is an unsolicited or undesired electronic message. The network and the tools of delivery don’t matter” (Om Malik).

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I open mail, the screen freezes for about 30 seconds, and now this. Two hours and counting. Sigh.

Update: After four and a half hours I finally got the volume up/down, power button dance to work.

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Neal Stephenson Explains His Vision of the Digital Afterlife

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Apparently, you can steal a joke. Maybe. I stole this story from Om Malik.

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Sleep Cycle knows when I fall asleep, why doesn’t my audiobook app? Is there podcast apps that do this already? Wouldn’t it be awesome to listen to a book, fall asleep and then, in the morning, find the book (or podcast) position marker (“playhead”) set to, say, three minutes before you fell asleep?

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Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us?

You can find me on micro.blog/carrington.

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I am not a fan of time travel stories. There are just too many “but, why didn’t they…?” Always fun to watch a Marvel movie with my favourite teenager though.

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Uber Questions

However, if I bought individual stocks [ … ], I would be out: this S-1 is so devoid of meaningful information (despite its length) that it makes me wonder what, if anything, Uber is trying to hide. If I am going to be taken for a ride I want at least some idea of where I am going — isn’t that the point of Uber in the first place” (Ben Thompson)?

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Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good

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Commander in cheat? Donald Trump’s 18 golf tournament wins examined

In an extract from his book on Donald Trump and golf, Rick Reilly explains why the president’s game can tell us more about him than a roomful of psychologists” (The Guardian).

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