Liked April memories by Olya KotoOlya Koto (vk.com/koto_olya)

The other day I’m eating in a trolley bus, in a backpack are paint cans and a bright sweater. It is drizzling outside the window - such is St. Petersburg spring! It's time for the opening of the season. The sun has already hatched somewhere, behind me is the Nevskaya Guba, and under my feet there are coils that replace the stepladder. Again, I dare to draw!

Many thanks to the space of sevcableport, for the kindly provided place for creativity!

Pink cat and reels, April 2018

#CotoOlya #PortSevcable

spray paint canswoman in orange coat spraypaints a large pink cat onto a wallWoman in pink sweater dancing in front of a large pink spraypainted cat on a wallclose up of one of the spools which has spraypainted pink and black lines coming off of it to look like the spools material is snaking across the ground.

View of industrial area with a pink cat spraypainted on a wall with large wooden spools of wire in front so as to indicate that the cat may be playing with their string
Via: @wakest via: @liaizon

👓 The microscopic structure of a cat’s tongue helps keep its fur clean | The Economist

Read The microscopic structure of a cat’s tongue helps keep its fur clean (The Economist)
The secret is in the grooves

👓 Interviewing my digital domains | W. Ian O’Byrne

Read Interviewing my digital domains by W. Ian O'ByrneW. Ian O'Byrne (W. Ian O'Bryne)

Alan Levine recently posted a series of questions to help others think through some of thoughts and motivations as we develop and maintain a domain of our own.

I’ve written a lot about this in the past, and I’ll try to include some links to content/posts as I respond to the prompts. This is a bit long as I get into the weeds, so consider yourself warned.

And now…let’s get to it…

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Having a domain is important to me as I research, develop, and teach.

example of a domain as thinking out loud or thought spaces
blogging as thinking


This should be a space where you can create the identity that you want to have. You can write yourself into existence.

I like this sentiment. Had René Descartes been born a bit later might he have said “Blogeō, ergo sum”?


Most of this work is focused on collaboration, transparency, and working/thinking in the open.


The plan is to use the site to share surveys, interviews, and researcher notes.

Note to self: I need to keep documenting examples of these open labs, open notebooks, etc. in the open science area.


teachers hid their Facebook accounts for fear of being fired.

The sound of this to me know reminds me of the type of suppression of thought that might have occurred in the middle ages. Of course open thought and discussion is important for teachers the same way it is for every other person. However there are a few potential counterexamples where open discussion of truly abhorrent ideas can run afoul of community mores. Case in point:


PLN

personal learning network perhaps marking it up with <abbr> tags would be useful here?


luck

lucky


.A

space


I feel like this culture in academia may be changing.


academia is built on the premise (IMHO) of getting a good idea, parlaying that into a job and tenure, and waiting for death. I’ve had a lot of colleagues and acquaintances ask why I would bother blogging. Ask why I share all of this content online. Ask why I’m not afraid that someone is going to steal my ideas.

Though all too true, this is just a painful statement for me. The entirety of our modern world is contingent upon the creation of ideas, their improvement and evolution, and their spreading. In an academic world where attribution of ideas is paramount, why wouldn’t one publish quickly and immediately on one’s own site (or anywhere else they might for that matter keeping in mind that it’s almost trivially easy to self-publish it on one’s own website nearly instantaneously)?
Early areas of science were held back by the need to communicate by handwriting letters as the primary means of communication. Books eventually came, but the research involved and even the printing process could take decades. Now the primary means of science communication is via large (often corporate owned) journals, but even this process may take a year or more of research and then a year or more to publish and get the idea out. Why not write the ideas up and put them out on your own website and collect more immediate collaborators? Funding is already in such a sorry state that generally, even an idea alone, will not get the ball rolling.
I’m reminded of the gospel song “This little light of mine” whose popular lyrics include:
“Hide it under a bushel? No! / I’m gonna let it shine” and
“Don’t let Satan blow it out, / I’m gonna let it shine”
I’m starting to worry that academia in conjunction with large corporate publishing interests are acting the role of Satan in the song which could easily be applied to ideas as well as to my little light.


Senior colleagues indicate that I should not have to balance out publishing in “traditional, peer-reviewed publications” as well as open, online spaces.

Do your colleagues who read your work, annotate it, and comment on it not count as peer-review? Am I wasting my time by annotating all of this? 🙂 (I don’t think so…)


or at least they pretend

I don’t think we’re pretending. I know I’m not!


PDF form

Let me know when you’re done and we’ll see about helping you distribute it in .epub and .mobi formats as e-books as well.


This is due to a natural human reaction to “Google” someone before we meet them for the first time. Before we show up to teach a class, take a class, interview for a job, go on a date…we’ve been reviewed online. Other people use the trail of breadcrumbs that we’ve left behind to make judgements about us. The question/challenge is that this trail of breadcrumbs is usually incomplete, and locked up in various silos. You may have bits of your identity in Facebook or Twitter, while you have other parts locked up in Instagram, Snapchat, or LinkedIn. What do these incomplete pieces say about you? Furthermore, are they getting the entire picture of you when they uncover certain details? Can they look back to see what else you’re interested in? Can they see how you think all of these interests fit together…or they seeing the tail end of a feverish bout of sharing cat pics?

I can’t help but think that doing this is a form of cultural anthropology being practiced contemporaneously. Which is more likely: someone a 100 years from now delving into my life via my personal website that aggregated everything or scholars attempting to piece it all back together from hundreds of other sites? Even with advanced AI techniques, I think the former is far more likely.
Of course I also think about what @Undine is posting about cats on Twitter or perhaps following #marginaliamonday and cats, and they’re at least taking things to a whole new level of scholarship.


Guide to highlight colors

Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through

I had a long hair cat named Tycho (a Maine coon/Russian Gray mix?) for 12 years, and I don’t think in his entire life he shed as much fur as my German Shepherd Lily has shed in the past two weeks. (This doesn’t count the 20 pounds of fur I’ve bushed off of her with a Furminator in the past week either.)

Time to buy a robot vacuum cleaner I think.

👓 The Future is Meow! A Bakery in Japan Makes Cat-Shaped Bread | Nerdist

Read The Future is Meow! A Bakery in Japan Makes Cat-Shaped Bread by Blake Rodgers (Nerdist)
There’s just no limit to the wonderfully weird pieces of cuisine that Japan comes up with. They’ve made cream puff desserts into drinks, put Kit Kats on sushi, turned meat into cakes, and even made it possible to bathe in maple syrup! And their latest foray in overtaking internet searches and Twitter trends might be their cutest yet. Yes, we’re talking about cat bread.
Just what the world needs!