Month: October 2020
Price board for dairy products
The checkout area featuring an antique US flag and a cow splotched rear wall
Renko and Mae’s send-off.
Directed by P.J. Hogan. With Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy, Krysten Ritter, Joan Cusack. A college grad lands a job as a financial journalist in New York City to support where she nurtures her shopping addiction and falls for a wealthy entrepreneur.
Watched on Sunday October 11, 2020.
Rating: ★★★½
Evie watched a bit with us before bed and then didn’t want to go to sleep.
It’s harder to watch this now after having watched Hugh Dancy in Hannibal. But still an entertaining romp. I hadn’t noticed before, but the winning bidder for the green scarf at the end was apparently Kristen Connolly who I’d not recognized in the movie before, but who is now better known as Christina Gallagher in the US remake of House of Cards.
Cleaning up in the kitchen while watching some of the live broadcast of the Senate confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett.
Directed by Adrian Shergold. With Brenda Blethyn, David Leon, Wunmi Mosaku, Paul Ritter. A handsome young man, a coquettish student teacher, nothing in common between them - except that both were murdered and left with their bodies meticulously posed.
This is apparently only available for streaming on Hoopla, so I’m giving it a whirl there. The UI isn’t horrible though the video UI is very sparse and incredibly small to see/interact with via desktop.
Vera in this incarnation isn’t as heavy or frumpy as I might have imagined, but the show seems relatively engaging. Curious to see how the character evolves.
John Rennie (Quanta Magazine)The ingredients for reactions ancestral to metabolism could have formed very easily in the primordial soup, new work suggests.
they found that the glyoxylate and pyruvate reacted to make a range of compounds that included chemical analogues to all the intermediary products in the TCA cycle except for citric acid. Moreover, these products all formed in water within a single reaction vessel, at temperatures and pH conditions mild enough to be compatible with conditions on Earth. ❧
Annotated on October 13, 2020 at 10:20PM
Gig workers deserve the dignity of fair compensation.
Are gig workers employees or freelance contractors? It’s been a question for companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash for nearly as long as “gig work” itself — or at least the Silicon Valley version — has existed. California voters next month may finally help settle the matter.
This is another great example of companies attempting to privatize profits and socialize the losses, or in this case pass along the losses and lost productivity to their employees (or as described here their independent contractors).
Why can’t they do some of the hard “technology” work and solve the problem of helping their workers become dramatically more productive?
Annotated on October 13, 2020 at 10:58PM ❧
The backlash from gig economy companies was immediate, and Uber and similar app-based businesses have committed nearly $200 million to support a state ballot measure — making it the costliest in state history — that would exempt them from the law. ❧
This is a pretty good indicator that it will save them 10x to 100x this amount to get rid of this law.
One should ask: “Why don’t they accept it and just pass this money along to their employees.”
Annotated on October 13, 2020 at 10:50PM
How does coffee get from a faraway plant to your morning cup? See the great journey of beans through the coffee supply chain.
Nothing terrifically new here, but an interesting visualization. This might be interesting to James Gallagher, though it also reminds me that he’ll more likely appreciate this episode of Bite from Mother Jones and the associated podcast Containers if he hasn’t come across it yet.
A nice beer while I’m making corn tortillas.
Low key comfort food really makes the day.
Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) is a new tool designed to facilitate transparency in qualitative and mixed-methods research. It allows scholars to “annotate” specific passages in an article with additional information explaining how they generated and analysed their data, along with links to a wide variety of underlying data sources. These annotations are displayed alongside their articles on the publisher’s website, with pinpoint linking to the relevant sections of text.
Using Actionsflow to automate the sending of Webmentions using webmention.app
This is an interesting way for static sites to automatically send webmentions using RSS.
Perhaps it’s something I might use in conjunction with my work with TiddlyWiki, MediaWiki, or my Obsidian.md notebook projects.
I'd also like to find a way to say thank you to Aaron Parecki who built webmention.io and Ryan Barrett, Kyle Mahan, et al who built brid.gy. However, I can't see a way to do either and, indeed, the latter explicitly say "We don't need donations, promise." ❧
In the past, I’ve heard many of them say to make a donation or support the IndieWeb Open Collective instead.