July, 2018 | Chris Aldrich

👓 Why Some of Instagram’s Biggest Memers Are Locking Their Accounts | The Atlantic

Read Why Some of Instagram's Biggest Memers Are Locking Their Accounts (The Atlantic)

More meme accounts are going private. Their owners say it’s a new way to gain followers on a crowded platform.

👓 Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it | Aeon

Read Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it by Jon Tennant (Aeon)

The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 per cent of the global corpus of research knowledge is ‘open access’, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

I agree with much of what he’s saying here, but it’s so dense and talks around the issue so much that it’s simply just another diatribe against the system. While there is a prescriptive portion, we’re going to need a whole lot more in terms of a list of what individuals and institutions should be doing.

So yes, more of the how to fix it piece please.

👓 Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography | The Atlantic

Read Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography by Nancy West (The Atlantic)

When photography was new, it was often used to preserve corpses via their images. An Object Lesson

Fascinating to read about some of the cultural shifts and norms in our society over the past century or so.

👓 Selfies at Funerals | The Atlantic

Read Selfies at Funerals by James Hamblin (The Atlantic)

A new Tumblr compiles self-portraits taken at funerals and shared with the world. Here are a few, interspersed with more traditional efforts at celebrating life and publicly reflecting on mortality.

An interesting and excellent follow-on from the prior story I read. Somehow the older mores of photographing and arranging the dead seem at least connected to those we’ve lost whereas some of these funeral selfies or so-called “caskies” they don’t seem to be mourning much of anything except the minute amounts of fame they may be losing.

📺 Gene Editing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver | HBO via YouTube

Watched Gene Editing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver from HBO via YouTube

Scientists are developing new ways to alter the genetic code of living organisms. John Oliver explores the risks, rewards, and wolf-related hazards of gene editing.

👓 How to pack your library: A guide | Chris Adami

Replied to How to pack your library: A guide by

Chris Adami (Spherical Harmonics)

That's right folks, this is not a science post. After 45 posts about information, quanta, intelligence, and what not, a how-to guide? Well I only have one blog, and I didn't know where to put this stuff, that I think could be helpful to others, because I've done this several times and I learned a bunch. So now you get to read about how to move your library of precious books from one house to another.

I like your method and did much the same myself this past September. The smallest “book box” one can find is certainly the key.

One thing you’re missing, at least in several of the photographs, that would help for both general shelf wear as well as for packing/moving is to have all of your dust jackets covered with book jacket covers. This will help protect your dust jackets from wear and tear and help increase their long term value, particularly for rarer first editions.

I notice that some of your collection likely already has these, à la the Heinlein, though it’s obvious in that case that a book seller likely jacketed it far too late to protect the pristine original. At least it’s protected from further future wear. If you think it’s worth the time and protection, it may be a worthwhile thing to do when you’re unpacking and reshelving them on the other end.

Brodart is one of the larger sellers of dust jacket covers and they make a huge variety of shapes, sizes, and types. I’ve found that their Advantage I covers are pretty solid and versatile for most of the book sizes you’ve got. Though fair warning: you can go down the rabbit hole and lose a few hours researching dust cover materials and archival types. In the end you want to look for something that covers the jacket, but doesn’t stick to it. This will allow you to replace the jacket cover with a new one if necessary without causing damage to the dust jacket itself.

An IndieWeb Magazine on Flipboard

This morning I set up an IndieWeb Magazine on Flipboard. While it is “yet another silo”, it’s one that I can easily and automatically syndicate content from my site (and others) into. I’ve already seeded it with some recent posts for those who’d like to start reading.

Until more tools and platforms like micro.blog exist to make it easy for other Generation 2+ people to join the IndieWeb, I thought it made at least some sense to have some additional outreach locations to let them know about what the community is doing in a silo that they may be using.

While I’ll syndicate articles of a general and how-to nature there, I’m likely to stay away from posting anything too developer-centric.

If you’d like to contribute to the magazine there are methods for syndicating content into it via POSSE, which I’d recommend if you’re able to do so. Otherwise they have some useful bookmarklets, browser extensions, and other manual methods that you can use to add articles to the magazine. Click this link to join as a contributor. For additional information see also Flipboard Tools.

View my Flipboard Magazine.

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