Solar saros 145 is an eclipse cycle with 77 solar eclipses repeating every 18 years, 11 days, 8 hours. It is currently a young cycle producing total eclipses less than 3 minutes in length. The longest duration eclipse in the cycle will be member 50 at 7 minutes and 12 seconds in length after which the durations of eclipses will decrease until the end of the cycle. In its central phase it will produce mainly total eclipses (41 of 43 central eclipses).
Reads, Listens
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
🎧 Containers Episode 8: Robots, Piers Full of Robots
In the conclusion of this series, we peer into the future of human-robot combinations on the waterfront and in the rest of the supply chain. We’ll hear about the strange future of cyborg trucking and meet the friendly little helper bots in warehouses. The view of automation that sees only a battle between robots vs. humans is wrong. It’s humans all the way down.
The key to replacing jobs lost to robots and automation is going to be much more education, and we’re doing a painfully poor job of it. This episode is a bit more upbeat about the technology side as well as the human side of things. It’s fine to do the one, but it does a disservice to the other without the added complexities of the problems.
In sum, this was a great series of episodes that shows a lot of what the average person is missing about how global trade happens and how intricate it can be. It’s impressive how much ground can be covered in just a few short episodes. I recommend the entire series to everyone.
https://soundcloud.com/containersfmg/episode-8-robots-piers-full-of-robots
👓 60 seconds over Idaho | Jeremy Keith
I lived in Germany for the latter half of the nineties. On August 11th, 1999, parts of Germany were in the path of a total eclipse of the sun. Freiburg—the town where I was living—wasn’t in the path, so Jessica and I travelled north with some friends to Karlsruhe. The weather wasn’t great. There was quite a bit of cloud coverage, but at the moment of totality, the clouds had thinned out enough for us to experience the incredible sight of a black sun.
🎧 Containers Episode 6: And They Won, They Won Big
It started with a puzzle: why were people in West Oakland dying 12-15 years earlier than their counterparts in the wealthier hills? The people in the flatlands were dying of the same things as the people in the hills, just much younger. Meet the doctor who helped make the case that air pollution from cargo handling was one big part of the answer, and the smart-dressing, wise-cracking environmental activist who helped to clean up the air. This is an inside look at the problems that come with being a major node in the network of global trade—and the solutions that people have devoted their lives to implementing.
This episode has a great example of a negative externality. Our current administration would like to paper over such effects in society, particularly when they involve non-whites, and call fixing such problems “over regulation” instead of charging the businesses and corporations which cause them to fix or clean them up. I’m glad this particular one was managed to be dealt with, but I can’t help but think about all the others, many of which we simply don’t know about for lack of interest or data to measure them. Far better if we call them citizen protection measures and fix them.
https://soundcloud.com/containersfmg/episode-6-and-they-won-they-won-big
👓 Breitbart editor: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump will be ‘out by end of year’ | The Hill
An internet prankster posing as Stephen Bannon baited Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow into saying he would assist Bannon with his "dirty work" and help push Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner out of the White House. The Breitbart News editor said Kushner and Ivanka Trump would be "out by end of year" from their roles as White House advisers, according to the emails provided to CNN by the anonymous web troll, who has the username @SINON_REBORN on Twitter. The fake account — designed to look like it was Bannon's — first messaged Marlow on Sunday in an apparent attempt to fool Marlow into talking about Trump and Kushner.
👓 How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks | The Outline
For about five years, Mic.com was a place where readers could go to get moral clarity. In the Mic universe, heroes fought for equality against villains who tried to take it away. Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” “This Brave Woman's Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.” “Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.” “The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We're Not Talking About.” “The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.”
It’s disappointing to see such a huge disconnect between publishers and their journalistic staff. There’s also a business take away in that things typically won’t bode well in the long term when things like this happen. It’s going to be far more difficult for the publishers to find their way going forward.
🎧 Getting to know the cinta senese on its home turf | Eat This Podcast
In the town hall of Siena is a series of glorious frescoes that depict The Allegory of Good and Bad Government. In one of them is a pig, long snouted and thin legged, black with a white band around its back and down its front legs, being quietly chivied along by a swineherd. It is absolutely recognisable as a cinta senese, a Belted Sienese pig, today one the most favoured heritage breeds in Italy. But it wasn’t always so. Numbers dropped precipitously in the 1950s and 1960s, to the point that the herd studbook, recording the ancestry of all the animals, was abandoned. And then began the renaissance. One place that contributed to the revival of the cinta senese is Spannocchia, a large and ancient estate not far from Siena. I was lucky enough to visit earlier this summer, to see the pigs first hand and to learn about them from Sara Silvestri. Perhaps the biggest surprise, to me, was that not all cinta senese are blessed with the white belt that is deemed a characteristic of the breed. Some have white spots or stripes but not the full band, and some don’t seem to have any white at all. This could be flaky genetics – odd for a breed with a supposedly ancient lineage – or it could be the result of marauding male cinghiale, which are a problem in Spannocchia and elsewhere. Right now, all these visually defective animals (and most of the perfect specimens too) end up on a plate. I wonder how long before every piglet born is properly belted.
Oh, how I dream of pork… I’m beginning to wonder if there’s an Eat This Podcast 12 step program.
For a minute toward the end I though that Jeremy had slipped and let the audio quality of the episode go to pot. Took me a minute to realize that it had started to rain during the interview and the audio was really just supplementing the arc of the story–as always. I suppose I have to let go and trust his producerial sense.
I’d been away from podcasts for a chunk of the summer, so today was a great day to have the chance to catch up on one of my favorites.
👓 Is Anybody Home at HUD? | ProPublica
A long-harbored conservative dream — the “dismantling of the administrative state” — is taking place under Secretary Ben Carson.
I was just thinking yesterday, HUD has been awfully quiet. What has Ben Carson been up to?
The answer is appallingly painful, but seemingly par for the course, for the current administration.
While certainly having a particular point of view, this article is well reported with some great history/background, and specific examples. Sadly, it appears that the people Trump specifically said he was out to help are going to get the shaft even worse than I would have expected.
👓 This 1972 photo of women in miniskirts helped persuade Trump to commit to war in Afghanistan | Quartz
Trump's national security advisor used the photo to show how "western" Kabul had been in the past.
👓 I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It. | New York Times
I supported the president in dozens of articles, radio and TV appearances. I won’t do it any longer.
👓 ‘20 seconds of burning’: Friends partly blinded after watching solar eclipse warn of dangers | Washington Post
“We thought we were invincible, as most teenagers do,” said Roger Duvall, who briefly looked at a partial eclipse without protective eyewear.
I was wondering where these stories were hiding. I was surprised that I hadn’t seen more of them prior to the eclipse today.
👓 ‘Psychologically scarred’ millennials are killing countless industries from napkins to Applebee’s — here are the businesses they like the least | Business Insider
Millennials' preferences are killing dozens of industries. There are many complex reasons millennials' preferences differ from prior generations', including less financial stability and memories of growing up during the recession. "I think we have got a very significant psychological scar from this great recession," Morgan Stanley analyst Kimberly Greenberger told Business Insider. Here are 19 things millennials are killing.
There could be some more solid data in here, particularly since some of these businesses have been declining for more than a decade and some of that decline began during the recession.
👓 More on My LinkedIn Account | Schneier on Security
I have successfully gotten the fake LinkedIn account in my name deleted. To prevent someone from doing this again, I signed up for LinkedIn. This is my first -- and only -- post on that account. Now I hear that LinkedIn is e-mailing people on my behalf, suggesting that they friend, follow, connect, or whatever they do there with me. I assure you that I have nothing to do with any of those e-mails, nor do I care what anyone does in response.
More than any other network, I’ve been hearing more and more people quitting LinkedIn for security and other reasons.
👓 Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable by Ethan Zuckerman
Most distributed publishing tools are simply too complex for most users to adopt. Mastodon may have overcome that problem, borrowing design ideas from a successful commercial product. But the example of lolicon may challenge our theories in two directions. One, if you’re unable to share content on the sites you’re used to using – Twitter, in this case – you may be more willing to adopt a new tool, even if its interface is initially unfamiliar. Second, an additional barrier to adoption for decentralized publishing may be that its first large userbase is a population that cannot use centralized social networks. Any stigma associated with this community may make it harder for users with other interests to adopt these new tools.
Like many others, I can see many more and stronger reasons for a decentralized web than not. This article takes a look at a little bit of the downside of the model. (Though to be honest, I think the downside for this is even bigger in the siloed model.) Naturally the long term effects are far more complex than described here, but this is also very interesting during a week when there’s a continuing resurgence of neo-Nazis, the alt-right, and other white supremacists in America as well as a growing list of major companies that aren’t allowing them a safe harbor.
The US Government subpoena to DreamHost this week for visitors of an anti-Trump website and backbone internet companies like CloudFlare kicking off “The Daily Stormer” are particularly intriguing in the larger ecosystem as well.
I think there’s a lot here that’s both interesting to the IndieWeb community and from which we can all learn.
As I’m thinking about it, I wonder a bit what happens to the role of “community manager” in a larger decentralized and independent web? I hope it’s tummelers like Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, Jeremy Keith, Martijn van der Ven and others who continue to blaze the trail.
👓 Subscription Attrition | Brooks Review
I’ve been running this site as a “member” supported site since July of 2012. That’s what I call my subscription based, paywall model, a member-site. I’ve tried a lot of different methods to what I charge for, over the years, so I know a thing or two about subscriptions. I’m not selling software, but the consumer mindset on most any recurring payment is similar across the aisles. I’m sure Amazon could tell you some amazing stories about people being unwilling to use ‘Subscribe and Save’, but we are going to have to wait awhile for that TED talk.
Some interesting thoughts on diminishing returns and subscription pricing for personal blogs and related content.