Directed by Alex Graves. With Alan Alda, Stockard Channing, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney. A day in the lives of presidential candidates Bob Russell, Matt Santos, and Arnold Vinick, who are in Iowa trying to gain support for their campaigns. Iowa is the first state in the nation to hold their presidential caucuses, and issues affecting farmers and rural areas are the focus. The most important issue on the table is the large federal subsidies for ethanol fuel given to corn growers, ...
I've come and gone from Micro.blog several times before. I joined long before the Kickstarter, when barely anyone was there. I tried it again after the Kickstarter, when the community looked more like it does today. And I came back again a few weeks ago for the most fun, if not the longest, period of time I've spent there.
Directed by Laura Innes. With Stockard Channing, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Joshua Malina. A rapidly-escalating international crisis involving Iran and the UK requires C.J. to wake the President, triggering a confrontation with Abbey about allowing him enough rest to properly manage his MS. British Ambassador Lord John Marbury is summoned, and proceeds to wander the halls looking for "Gerald" while threatening to bomb Iran. Toby and Professor Lawrence Lessig meet with a delegation from...
"Category theory is a universal modeling language."
Background.
Success is founded on information. A tight connection between success (in anything) and information. It follows that we should (if we want to be more successful) study what information is.
Grant proposals. These are several grant proposals, some funded, some in the pipeline, others not funded, that explain various facets of my research project.
This weekend I attended the first Oxford Indieweb camp, kindly organised by Garrett. Day 1
Due to an early start, and not enough coffee, I had left my phone at home, and so couldn’t log into anything. Two factor auth on things ...
Don’t keep us in suspense… What was the new plugin?!
This weekend, the lovely and amazing Garrett put together an IndieWeb camp for two days, for free, in Oxford!
After hearing about it through Garrett a few months back, just before an amazing talk at Oxford Geek Nights by Jeremy Keith, I thought:
This is cool, but… how… how does it??? How does it...
The Indie Web movement is a movement all about content ownership, in the current times of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. It has been something I’ve been interested in ever since hearing Jeremy Keith talk about it at a conference last year. So I was super excited to hear that the wonderful Garrett was organising an Indie Web Camp in Oxford! Here’s a summary of what I did over the two days:
This weekend, I attended part of Oxford’s first ever IndieWebCamp! As a long (long, long) time proponent of IndieWeb philosophy (since long before anybody said “IndieWeb”, at least) I’ve got my personal web presence pretty-well sorted out. Still, I loved the idea of attending and pushing some of my own tools even further: after all, a personal website isn’t “finished” until its owner says it is! One of the things I ended up hacking on was pretty-predictable: enhancements to my recently-open-sourced geocaching PESOS tools… but the other’s worth sharing too, I think.
Glenn Zucman's Business Cards
Over the weekend, I attended WordCamp Los Angeles and ran into my friend and fellow educator Glenn Zucman. Though I suspect we both know where to find each other (online via our many websites), we traded business cards and chatted about business cards and art for a bit.
Because Glenn is such a creative genius, I wanted to take a moment to share his brilliant business card idea which I loved. Since he does some painting in his work, he’s using variously colored paint chips (choose your favorite color, natch) as business cards over which he’s using a stamp and ink to add on his contact details. What a great mixed-media idea using “found art” for an artists’ business cards.
What I loved even more is that he not only found some nice sized paint chips, which are about twice the size of a typical business card, but he found chips for a paint brand which he actually likes and endorses.
Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.
In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.
Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.
Ordered on 9/20/2018 after bookmarking
Arrived 9/22/2018
We are growing three kinds of basil in our garden: “regular” basil, purple basil, and Magic Mountain basil. The regular basil and Magic Mountain basil have been thriving quite a bit; the purple basil, less so, as it is growing at the base of the regular basil plant. But the other two, my goodness. The regular old basil was going to seed, though, much to the chagrin of my partner. I’d promised for weeks on end to do something with all that basil, as the stems grew woodier, and as the flowers turned from brilliant white to the brown of kraft paper. Meanwhile, the Magic Mountain basil also grew tall and bushy, went to flower, but only because that’s what it’s supposed to do. I’ve been reading Edward Espe Brown’s No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, slowly, after picking it up on a personal retreat a few weeks ago. I have found it to help ground me in the practice of cooking, something I love to do when I have time (as I do right now, in the midst of time off from work), but loathe when I’m too busy. Standing outside, next to our raised bed, with garden shears in hand, I finally felt myself reconnect back to these lush and marvelous green and purple wonders growing in our raised beds. I felt the sunlight envelop me, and I saw how absolutely blissful the pollinators were amidst our basil plants: not just bees, but spiders, ants, and other bugs, too. And with all that basil, there’s but one thing to do: make lots and lots of pesto. One of the things I’ve learned over time is that there’s no wrong way to make a pesto. Yes, there are wrong ways to make pistou, or pesto alla genovese, but that’s beside the point. With a good blender or food processor, you can do just about anything. With a mortar and pestle, it’s harder but you can appreciate the effort. But you don’t need a recipe to make pesto. Sure, there are proportions you have to get “right,” but that’s all a matter of preference, too. So here’s a recipe, lovingly imprecise, in the spirit of Ed Brown, based on how I make it. It might or might not work. It’s up to you to figure it out. pesto about four parts green stuff (herbs, greens, arugula, carrot tops, what have you) one part fat (oil, lard, butter i guess) one to one and a half parts umami/textural stuff (shredded hard cheese, nuts, breadcrumbs, maybe some dried mushrooms if you wanna get wild) some alliums (garlic if you’re a traditionalist, could get wild with some scapes or shallots) Chop how you’d like, as much as you’d like. Mix it together in some kind of bowl or vessel. Add salt, pepper, or anything else you like. Taste it; if you don’t like it, add what feels like it might be missing. If you make a lot, stick some in the freezer as a nice surprise. If you want to make a spread out of it, add some yogurt, or sour cream, or coconut milk.
Belle B. Cooper (blog.bellebcooper.com)
Marcus Povey (Marcus Povey)
Henry James Blyth (henryblyth.com)
Mark A. Matienzo (Mark A. Matienzo)