Random Posts – Page 6 – Chris Aldrich

👓 Pressed 2019 Demo HTML

Read Pressed 2019 Demo HTML (bionicteaching.com)

Replied to Five RSS feeds I followed today by

Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)

I followed several new to me feeds today and then decided—why not share? There may be no other way to rediscover the social network that is blogging.

Jeremy, it’s great to see someone else following peoples’ content directly from their own websites! I was surprised (but maybe not really) to see that some of the feeds you had followed were those from the IndieWeb community! Did you happen to catch Tantek’s talk at WordCamp US (▶️) just before the State of the Word?

Coincidentally, I came to your post while playing some feed reading catch up post-WordCamp US and ran across a status update on Helen’s site:

Remember when we used to read each other’s individual blogs? I miss that.

I noticed one other person (you) had “liked” it and clicked myself down the rabbit hole that led me to your post. There are still apparently some interesting old-school discovery methods on the open web.

If you like following interesting sites, I often find Kicks Condor’s HREFHUNT an great regular source for discovery.

I’m curious what feed reader you use for subscriptions? I wrote a short note the other day about some interesting new developments I’ve been seeing in the feed reader and discovery space.

And last, but not least, I followed both the IndieNews and This Week in the IndieWeb blogs via the main indieweb.org site as part of an effort to get more familiar with that community and technology.

If you’d like a crash course on IndieWeb, particularly as it’s applied within WordPress, I’m happy to donate some time to get you up to speed on the next few steps beyond what Tantek outlined. If you’d like to follow more, I have a following page which has a large number of IndieWeb-related developers, designers, and sites including an OPML file for following many of them quickly.

In any case, welcome to the IndieWeb! I can’t wait to see how your explorations there turn out; I’d love to hear about your experiences in that space. There are a lot of friendly people around to help you get started or chat if you need it.

And thanks again for tacitly sharing your list of RSS sources. I’d bookmarked Weinberger’s book a short while ago and can’t wait to read it. I’m looking at your other links presently.

👓 The case for quarantining extremist ideas | Joan Donovan and Dana Boyd | The Guardian

Read The case for quarantining extremist ideas by Joan Donovan (the Guardian)

When confronted with white supremacists, newspaper editors should consider ‘strategic silence’

Custom Zettelkasten Stationery?

For those who have a significant paper-based zettelkasten practice, have you considered commissioning custom made cards? There are a variety of stationers who do custom work and one could also purchase directly from Chinese manufacturers to get costs down by buying in bulk.

Ryan Holliday is one of the few I’ve seen in the wild who has mentioned custom making cards, usually done on a per-project (book) basis where he’ll put a header title at the top of his note cards. Example: https://www.instagram.com/p/CeWV6xBuZUN/?hl=en

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A post shared by Ryan Holiday (@ryanholiday)

Other options could include doing custom/personalized stamps. (I have a date stamp handy for quickly stamping the dates of creation/updating in the corner of cards.)

I’m curious what suppliers/manufacturers folks have researched/used? What were your experiences? What sort of templates or printing did you use on them? Paper weight? Did you go Grid, blank, dot, lined, or all of the above? If you were looking to purchase something for yourself, what would you want?

👓 Red state, blue state | Science News

Read Red state, blue state by Rachel Ehrenberg (Science News)

Resizing geographic areas by population gives more accurate view of 2012 election.

Liked a tweet by

Laura Gibbs (Twitter)

oh my gosh: how did I not know about this counting-out system called Yan-Tan...?!
I was looking up something about the nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock, which some people think is a counting out rhyme, and that led to this British sheep-counting system: https://t.co/NWfJgyicB6 pic.twitter.com/azXjrpo8ob
— Laura Gibbs (@OnlineCrsLady) November 15, 2019

Listened to Making sense of modern recipes It's not your fault; even professional chefs encounter problems by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Peter Hertzmann tells a great story of a chef telling a bunch of students to go and double the recipe for a batch of cookies. Minutes later, one returned and said he couldn’t do it because the oven wouldn’t go up to 700 degrees. Ho, ho, ho.

But there’s a serious issue here for people who are trying to follow a recipe without a clear understanding of the process and methods beneath it. Come to think of it, Peter says, even for professionals, there can be big problems trying to follow some modern recipes. Which prompts me to wonder, how many people these days buy cookbooks in order to use the recipes?

Notes

Peter Hertzmann’s website à la carte will keep you occupied for hours. If you just want the paper we were talking about, here it is.

Measure for Measure is the article I mentioned by Raymond Sokolov on why Americans measure by volume. It was published in Natural History magazine, July 1988, pp 80–83, and there seems also to be a version in the 1988 Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking. Good luck finding it online. Or, drop me a note …

I was pleasantly surprised to find a facsimile of the original Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book at Amazon.

Thanks to Dr Ana Tominc and the organisers for allowing me to attend the 1st Biennial Conference on Food and Communication at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh.

Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:16 — 19.2MB)

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So many useful and important things in this episode. We need more content about food that helps teach people how to really cook. There isn’t nearly enough basic knowledge about science among cooks for them to really do their job as well as they should. Too much cooking media these days is geared at aspirational cooking rather than actual cooking. Our sad dependence on recipes is just deplorable. It kills me that most people don’t know how to properly measure ingredients.

👓 Koko The Gorilla Dies; Redrew The Lines Of Animal-Human Communication | NPR

Read Koko The Gorilla Dies; Redrew The Lines Of Animal-Human Communication (NPR.org)

Koko fascinated and elated millions of people with her facility for language and her ability to interact with humans. She also gave people a glimpse of her emotions.

🔖 Evidence for a limit to human lifespan | Nature Research

Bookmarked Evidence for a limit to human lifespan (nature.com)

Driven by technological progress, human life expectancy has increased greatly since the nineteenth century. Demographic evidence has revealed an ongoing reduction in old-age mortality and a rise of the maximum age at death, which may gradually extend human longevity. Together with observations that lifespan in various animal species is flexible and can be increased by genetic or pharmaceutical intervention, these results have led to suggestions that longevity may not be subject to strict, species-specific genetic constraints. Here, by analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the world’s oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints.

[1]

X. Dong, B. Milholland, and J. Vijg, “Evidence for a limit to human lifespan.,” Nature, vol. 538, no. 7624, pp. 257–259, Oct. 2016. [PubMed]