Reads

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Read Introducing the idea of ‘hyperobjects’ by Timothy MortonTimothy Morton (High Country News)
A new way of understanding climate change and other phenomena.

We are obliged to do something about them, because we can think them. ❧

Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:56AM

It’s very difficult to talk about something you cannot see or touch, yet we are obliged to do so, since global warming affects us all. ❧

It’s also difficult to interact with those things when we’re missing the words and vocabulary to talk about them intelligently.
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 09:00AM

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University in Houston. He is the author of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End Of The World. ❧

want to read these
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:10AM

Or global warming. I can’t see or touch it. What I can see and touch are these raindrops, this snow, that sunburn patch on the back of my neck. I can touch the weather. But I can’t touch climate. So someone can declare: “See! It snowed in Boise, Idaho, this week. That means there’s no global warming!” We can’t directly see global warming, because it’s not only really widespread and really really long-lasting (100,000 years); it’s also super high-dimensional. It’s not just 3-D. It’s an incredibly complex entity that you have to map in what they call a high-dimensional- phase space: a space that plots all the states of a system. In so doing, we are only following the strictures of modern science, laid down by David Hume and underwritten by Immanuel Kant. Science can’t directly point to causes and effects: That would be metaphysical, equivalent to religious dogma. It can only see correlations in data. This is because, argues Kant, there is a gap between what a thing is and how it appears (its “phenomena”) that can’t be reduced, no matter how hard we try. We can’t locate this gap anywhere on or inside a thing. It’s a transcendental gap. Hyperobjects force us to confront this truth of modern science and philosophy. ❧

A short, and very cogent argument here.
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:07AM

Hat tip: Ethan Marcotte #

Read The hoof and the horse. by Ethan Marcotte (ethanmarcotte.com)
On objects and slices; on design systems and scale.

Robin brings a helpful name to this problem, by way of the philosopher Timothy Morton: hyperobject. A hyperobject is an entity whose scale is too big, too sprawling for any single person to fully appreciate their scale. Climate change, financial markets, socioeconomic classes, design systems—they’re systems we move through, but their scale dwarfs our own. ❧

Hyperobject is an interesting neologism and concept
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:47AM

Read Add class attribute to WordPress "the_tags" markup by WebrockerWebrocker (Webrocker)
I'm in the process of gradually enhancing my site's markup with microformats, in order to "indiewebify" my site further. On thing I noticed while working on this at the Düsseldorf Indiewebcamp, is that WordPress (or the way my theme handles) tags on posts has no way to get an additional class insid...
David Shanske is sure to appreciate this if he hasn’t come across it. (I didn’t see it in his IW26 theme repo, so perhaps not?)
Read How To Add a Class to a Single Post in WordPress by Tom McFarlin (tommcfarlin.com)
As I’ve continued to work on the theme that I’m planning to use after Standard (and that I’ hoping to begin dogfooding within the next month or so), there have been a couple of features that I’ve wanted to implement for the sake of styling. For example, there are times where I want to be abl...
This was useful in my microformats project for the Twentyfifteen theme modifications today.
Read How To Add a Class to a Single Post in WordPress by Tom McFarlin (Tom McFarlin)
As I’ve continued to work on the theme that I’m planning to use after Standard (and that I’ hoping to begin dogfooding within the next month or so), there have been a couple of features that I’ve wanted to implement for the sake of styling. For example, there are times where I want to be abl...
Read "You Don't Look Like a Professor!" ("You don't look like a professor!")
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: “You Don’t Look Like a Professor:” Insights into Effective Teaching & Learning from Women, Marginalized, and Underrepresented Faculty. A new anthology of evidence-based inspiration and practical pedagogy, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.
Read Off-duty Secret Service agent shoots and kills dog on a leash in Brooklyn (nydailynews.com)
The agent, whose name has not been released, was turning the corner from E. 8th St. onto Caton Place in Windsor Terrace about 9:45 p.m. when he came across a man and his girlfriend walking with a female Belgian Shepard.
Read How to Clear Chrome Cache for Specific Website Only (3 Steps) (PIT Designs)
When browsing a website, Google Chrome (or any other browser) stores some data for speeding up the website pages load, in what's called Cache. This by default i
This is a clever method for quickly clearing cache for a particular page.
Read Spam almost vanquished by Jeremy Cherfas (jeremycherfas.net)
I really wanted to post this 3 days ago, on January 10th. That would have been one year since I started recording the amount of spam I was getting over on my micro-site. I first noticed the problem in November 2018, and in January 2019 started keeping track. This graph shows all the data from the pr...
Read Trying out Micro.blog by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)
Services like Micro.blog should spend more time telling everyone about features like “oh, by the way, we have a dedicated discovery page for posts about pizza“. That kind of pitch and I would have signed up for an account 2 years ago. Here I am discovering new things though. I got here beca...
Micro.blog is indeed doing some great things.

I feel so nostalgic for Posterous after reading this. It was a nice little platform.

Read How I did a Twitter giveaway, got 10K+ new followers and discovered you can hack most giveaways to win them (levels.io)
It was almost New Year's Eve and I wanted to do something special on Twitter. I had 69,800 followers and because I admittedly am an imperfect and superficial human addicted to vanity metrics, I wanted to get to 70,000 followers before midnight and it becoming 2020. To celebrate

My friend Marc again to the rescue. He suggested that since there was 10,000+ people RT’ing and following, I could just pick a random follower from my current total follower list (78,000 at this point), then go to their profile to check if they RT’d it and see. If they didn’t, get another random follower and repeat, until you find someone. With 78,000 followers this should take about ~8 tries. ❧

Technically he said it would be random among those who retweeted, but he’s chosen a much smaller subset of people who are BOTH following him and who retweeted it. Oops!
Annotated on January 13, 2020 at 01:10PM

So, based on your write up it sounds like you’re saying that if one retweeted, but wasn’t following you, one had no chance of winning. This means a few thousand people still got lost in the shuffle. Keep in mind that some states have laws regarding lotteries, giveaways, games like this. Hopefully they don’t apply to you or your jurisdiction.

Read How to read ebooks purchased from Kobo on a Kindle by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)
When an ebook is not available directly through a publisher, I’d like to purchase it through Kobo rather than Amazon. A nice part of Kobo is the option to associate your account with an independent bookstore. Once associated, the store receives some amount of money for any ebook you purchase. This...
This is almost exactly the same process and set of tools I’ve been using for several years. Who could live without Calibre?!