September 29 2019

Learn music theory in half an hour (YouTube) – now I can better understand Adam Neely videos as well as those by Nahre Sol

Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth | Oslo Architecture Triennale
Inspired by these transformed venues of Oslo, Enough inhabits their robust existing building fabric and creates new institutions of degrowth: The Library, The Theatre, The Playground, and The Academy. These institutions promote sharing our resources, imagining alternatives, freedom to play, and democratic education; all issues central to transitioning to a future free from the growth imperative.

The Library celebrates sharing, de-commodification, and democratisation of goods and ideas in a welcoming heart of a community.

The Theatre reveals the constructedness of our world that invites participants to question reality and actively explore generating alternatives.

The Playground initiates a deeper game of exploring and listening to the city reclaiming the streets as a site of joyful and thoughtful experimentation.

The Academy offers a platform for discussion and research to battle injustice and extraction

What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years – cdixon blog

Women in tech facts [pdf]
FEMALE RETENTION: What are the rates of attrition for technical women? According to a study by the Center for Talent Innovation:• Eighty percent of women in SET report “loving their work” (Hewlett, Sherbin, with Dieudonné, Fargnoli, & Fredman, 2014). • Yet 56 percent leave their organizations at the mid-level points (10-20 years) in their careers (Hewlett et al., 2008).As Figure 1.5 illustrates, female attrition is higher in technology than in science and in engineering. In all cases, the quit rate for women is higher than it is for men. In the high tech industry, the quit rate is more than twice as high for women (41 percent) than it is for men (17 percent) (Hewlett et al., 2008).

September 26 2019

I’m your summer girl — HAIM (YouTube)

Untitled Goose Game (HONK) – lovely use of Transport font

YouTubers React to Experimental Music – featuring the work of Maryanne Amacher ‎– Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear) – 1999 https://vimeo.com/88559973

Ask Polly: ‘My Fear of Climate Change Is Eroding My Sanity!’

O whatever God or whatever ancestor that wins in the next life
And it begins to dawn on you that the stories were all myths and the epics were all narrated by the villains and the history books were written to rewrite the histories and that so much of what you thought defined excellence merely concealed grift. [ht]

September 11 2019

P-values Broke Scientific Statistics—Can We Fix Them? SciShow

Why exercise is hard – Minute Earth

Set up to fail: Why women still don’t win elections as often as men in Canada We found women are more likely than men to find themselves running in hard-to-win ridings and to get less financial support. And it appears that this year’s federal election will be no exception.

The Statue of Liberty was created to celebrate freed slaves, not immigrants, its new museum recounts

September 4 2019

On the Origins of Modern Biology and the Fantastic: Part 13 —Ursula K. Le Guin and Lynn Margulis | Tor.com
“Margulis’ revolutionary paper also hit at a time when it was most impactful, but also had to deal with intense criticism. Neo-Darwinists balked, holding that organelles arose from stepwise mutations and deeming symbiotic theory neo-Lamarckianism. Furthermore, its “feminine” implications of mutual cooperation flew against dominant survival-of-the-fittest narratives. Margulis detested this kind of narrow thinking and was not shy about debating her critics publicly, armed with a growing body of evidence in her favor. “

Mike Rugnetta: TAKE: Efficiencymaxxing
I make no claim as to the effectiveness of orthotropics (Mike Mew was recently ejected from the British Orthodontics Society fwiw) but a certain community of Internet Men have taken it to suggest if they put their tongue in the right place for long enough they’ll reshape the front facing bits of their cranium and get smokin’ hot thus attracting … *ahem* … “females”.Mewing has become a candidate for inclusion into a regiment that also includes – as Natalie Wynn recently discussed – “skinmaxxing” and other deeply uncomfortable bizarroverse simulacra of self-care which are means towards the end of ~obtaining~ others and not, y’know, caring for the self.

Just Delete Me | A directory of direct links to delete your account from web services. [ht 4 short links]

September 2 2019

How much does it cost your cell phone provider to send your text messages? | OpenMedia
It’s common practice for companies to offer packages of unlimited texts for $5 or $10, which seems like a deal, right? Not when you look at the actual cost of sending a text. University of Waterloo professor Srinivasan Keshav estimated in 2009 that a text message, taking into consideration billing costs and the required network equipment, costs cell phone companies a third of a cent to transmit.

Let us now stop praising famous men (and women) | Aeon Ideas
Assessments of praise and blame tend to reflect existing hierarchies of power and status, thereby reifying them. This is because praise and blame have as much to do with the person judging as the person being judged. If everyone in a meritocracy wants to get ahead, assessments of praise and blame will be influenced by whatever helps people to get ahead – namely heaping praise on the powerful and respected, and castigating those without power and status. [ht Final Boss Form]

Women Don’t Negotiate Because They’re Not Idiots | Psychology Today
What you probably haven’t heard is what happens when women do negotiate. Often they end up worse off than if they’d kept their mouths shut. A 2006 study Babcock did with Hannah Riley Bowles and Lei Lai helped explain why women are less likely to negotiate their starting salaries (referred to as the Bowles study). When they do, both men and women are less likely to want to work with, or to hire, them. The effect size is large. Women who negotiated faced a penalty 5.5 times that faced by men.

Mark Blyth – A Brief History of How We Got Here and Why – YouTube
This lecture sets out a brief history of two versions of capitalist software. The first drove the capitalist hardware during the period known as the Great Compression—1945 to 1980. The second did the same for the period many refer to as the era of neoliberalism—1980 to 2008. This lecture describes the bug in the system that crashed the first version of the capitalist software and the subsequent design of the neoliberal software. It also describes the bug that led to the 2008 Great Recession, landing us in the current transitional period that we might describe as the era of neonationalism or Global Trumpism. A key idea is that the emergence of contemporary populist politics, both left-wing and right-wing Trumpist variants, are attempts to rewrite the software of capitalism once again. [ht Robin Sloan]