In the interests of supporting faculty, teaching staff, and students at every level, Jesse and I will be offering weekly open office hours. We welcome anyone to attend and to bring their questions and challenges to the table.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures.
A three-time Grammy Award winner, he had a string of much-covered hits in the 1970s but had not released an album since 1985.
This is depressing news. Withers is one of my favorite all time artists. It definitely isn’t a Lovely Day. There also Ain’t No Sunshine today.
I’ll pour one out for you today Bill. Thanks for leaving your music behind.
Hsiaoming Yang (Just lepture)Let's create a beautiful RSS feed UI for human before its dead in next year again.
This seems like quite a clever way of adding some human readable styling to RSS feeds. While it seems like yet another side-file, it could be a useful one. I think if I were implementing it I’d also want to include a SubToMe universal follow button on it as well
How much protection do different masks offer, and what are their limits?
The IndieWeb is a thing! They've got a conference coming up and everything. The New Yorker is even writing about it:
Om Malik writes about a renewed focus on his own blog:
“My first decree was to eschew any and all analytics. I don’t want to be driven by “views,” or what Google deems worthy of rank. I write what pleases me, not some algorithm. Walking away from quantification of my creativity was an act of taking back control. ❧
I love this quote.
Annotated on March 30, 2020 at 10:49AM
What I dwell on the most regarding syndication is the Twitter stuff. I look back at the analytics on this site at the end of every year and look at where the traffic came from — every year, Twitter is a teeny-weeny itty-bitty slice of the pie. Measuring traffic alone, that’s nowhere near the amount of effort we put into making the stuff we’re tweeting there. I always rationalize it to myself in other ways. I feel like Twitter is one of the major ways I stay updated with the industry and it’s a major source of ideas for articles. ❧
So it sounds like Twitter isn’t driving traffic to his website, but it is providing ideas and news.
Given this I would syndicate content to Twitter as easily and quickly as possible, use webmentions to deal with the interactions and then just use the Twitter timeline for reading and consuming and nothing else.
Annotated on March 30, 2020 at 10:51AM
This is the only video phone I have time for. I don't want to talk to you people, let alone see you. FFS. Apparently all of you are diving headlong into the nightmare that is video conferencing, and "Zoom" seems to be the poison of choice these days, so you should know that it's terrible: Violet Blu...
I separate collecting from processing because I don’t hack everything that pops up in my mind while I read a text into my computer. Instead, I take notes on paper.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
—Steve Jobs (via lifehacker and Zettel no. 201308301352) ❧
in other words, it’s just statistical thermodynamics. Eventually small pieces will float by each other and stick together in new and hopefully interesting ways. The more particles you’ve got and the more you can potentially connect or link things, the better off you’ll be.
Annotated on March 23, 2020 at 04:36PM
The likes of Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson have denigrated professionalism but Reagan, Thatcher and other neoliberals led the way
This didn’t seem as clearly written as it could have been.
The President’s mendacious nightly press briefings on the pandemic will go down in history for their monumental flimflammery.
He admitted he “didn’t know anything about being funny” when he joined the comedic basketball team, but he became one of its biggest stars.
Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom are policing Twitter feeds, Medium posts, and other sources of bad data and misleading charts.
It’s time to socially distance real journalism from Trump
In the interest of protecting the nation’s health, it is time to socially distance ourselves from the crazy things that President Trump keeps saying.
To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.
Acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally has died of complications due to coronavirus. The author of Master Class, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and Love! Valour! Compassion!, among many oth…