Reads, Listens

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Read A Skeptical Farmer’s Monster Message on Profitability by Chris BennettChris Bennett (AG Web)
Adam Chappell was a slave to pigweed. In 2009, several years prior to the roller coaster rise and fall of commodity prices, he was on the brink of bankruptcy and facing a go broke or go green proposition. Drowning in a whirlpool of input costs, Chappell cut bait from conventional agriculture and dove headfirst into a bootstrap version of innovative farming. Roughly 10 years later, his operation is transformed, and the 41-year-old grower doesn’t mince words: It was all about the money.
Interesting to read this after hearing the experimental anthropologist Scott Lacy talk about farming technologies in Africa earlier this morning in Anthropology and the Study of Humanity. The African farmers described sounded much more in touch with their needs and their land than the majority of American farmers apparently are. Based on this, it almost sounds like Big AG has been doing to the industry what ride sharing tech companies are trying to do elsewhere, they’re just doing it with different tactics.
 
Somehow AG Web seems like the sort of journal I ought to check in on occasionally. 
Read Automatically sending Webmentions from a static website by James Mead (jamesmead.org)
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.

Read - Want to Read: Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) (Cambridge Core)
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.
Read From Bean to Brew: The Coffee Supply Chain (Visual Capitalist)
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.
Read Opinion | California, Reject Prop 22 (nytimes.com)
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

Read New Clues to Chemical Origins of Metabolism at Dawn of Life by John RennieJohn 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

Read - Reading: Raven Black (Shetland Island #1) by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur Books)
Raven Black begins on New Year’s Eve with a lonely outcast named Magnus Tait, who stays home waiting for visitors who never come. But the next morning the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby, and suspicion falls on Magnus. Inspector Jimmy Perez enters an investigative maze that leads deeper into the past of the Shetland Islands than anyone wants to go.
Finished chapter 3

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Read - Want to Read: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis (House of Anansi Press)
Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? Anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.
In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true Lost Civilization, the people of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the Earth really is alive, while in the far reaches of Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from forty-five years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally we settle in Borneo, where the last rainforest nomads struggle to survive.
Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. For at risk is the human legacy -- a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time.
Read How to Cover a Sick Old Man (nytimes.com)
The president is hospitalized and reporters are fighting for basic facts. What should elderly leaders — many of America’s top politicians are over 80 — reveal about their health?
We definitely need to cover these things more closely and not be so precious about them. Once a leader is unable to function on a solid basis, it’s time for them to get off the stage and let others take their place.
Read 43 Student Journalists Quit N.Y.U. Paper After Dispute With Adviser (nytimes.com)
A post signed by nearly all of the Washington Square News staff accused its new adviser, a longtime journalism professor, of being “rude and disrespectful.”
Definite cultural divide here between the student journalists and their much older advisor who doesn’t get the younger generation.
Read At the White House, an Eerie Quiet and Frustration With the Chief of Staff (nytimes.com)
With President Trump hospitalized, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, delivered no guidance to aides about how they were expected to behave in a moment of crisis.
When the dictator is out, apparently there’s a major lack of leadership at the level below. This could be disastrous if the worst comes to pass.
Read Opinion | A Brief Guide to 21st-Century Blackface (nytimes.com)
Twenty years ago, Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” skewered America’s love of minstrelsy. Has Hollywood learned anything about blackface since?
There’s apparently been a lot more blackface in the past several decades than I was aware of. I’d love to read some of the more academic treatises on the topic from a media studies perspective.
Read A White Male Professor Reportedly Faked Being a Woman of Color, This Time to Troll Scientists on Twitter (Jezebel)
Somehow, beyond all reason and understanding, another person has been caught pretending to be a woman of color. At least this time around, the story has an extra fucked-up layer. Anonymous internet sleuths uncovered Professor Craig Chapman, who teaches chemistry at the University of New Hampshire, posing as a woman of color on Twitter under the name The Science Femme. According to The New Hampshire, Chapman was brought down by his own hubris when he tweeted about his brother’s brewery from both his fake account and his real account. The Science Femme and Chapman’s personal account have both been deleted, but unluckily for him, screenshots exist.
A good reminder that I really should unsubscribe to “people” I don’t know personally or have an exceptionally high expectation of who they really are and what content I’m actually consuming.