Boris Mann (Boris Mann's Blog)This blog is now powered by Jekyll 3 hosted on Netlify. Netlify builds the site from git.
👓 Colophon | Boris Mann
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Boris Mann (Boris Mann's Blog)Followed Johan Bové
Front-end developer and senior Web Consultant at Deloitte Digital in Düsseldorf, Germany.
👓 The unexpected question I ask myself every year | Ben Werdmüller
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)Okay, but seriously, how can I get to work on Doctor Who? It's a dumb question, but my love for this show runs deep - I've been watching it since I was five years old at least. As a non-aggressive, third culture kid who couldn't fit in no matter how he tried, growing up in Britain in the eighties an...
👓 Checking in on my social media fast | Ben Werdmüller
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)Three weeks ago, I decided to go dark on social media. No convoluted account deletion process; no backups. I just logged out everywhere, and deleted all my apps. It's one of the best things I've ever done. I thought I'd check in with a quick breakdown: what worked, and what didn't. Here we go. Wh...
👓 I’m going dark on social media for the rest of 2018. | Ben Werdmüller
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)For a host of reasons, I've decided to go dark on social media for the remainder of 2018. If my experiment is successful beyond that time, I'll just keep it going. Originally, I'd intended to do this just for the month of December, but as I sat around the Thanksgiving dinner table yesteryday, surrou...
👓 Building towers, not tunnels | Ben Werdmüller
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)Years ago, someone broke into my home and stole my laptops while I lay in bed upstairs. I had left them out on the dining table, and the burglar broke their way into my back garden and smashed through one of my rear windows with a brick. This was Oxford in the winter, and I had a hard plastic sheet ...
👓 Foursquare/Swarm iCal feed | Phil Gyford
🔖 Foursquare Feeds
We've made the feeds available (using private token URLs) to make it easy for you to construct simple frontends like Wordpress plugins and Dashboard widgets without having to use our regular API. The iCal (ICS) and Google Calendar formats are especially nice for importing and displaying your entire Foursquare check-in history in your Calendar on your computer.
👓 Playing with the Indieweb | Notist | Stephen Rushe
I’ve recently been exploring the world of the IndieWeb, and owning my own content rather than being reliant on the continued existence of “silos” to maintain it. This has led me to discover the varied eco-system of IndieWeb, such as IndieAuth, Microformats, Micropub, Webmentions, Microsub, POSSE, and PESOS. I’ll give a whirlwind high-level tour of each and also show examples of the related projects I’ve spend my time on in recent months, including hand-crafted artisanal music scrobbling.
👓 When you’re on a plane for 16 hours | supine-owl.com
Serena (supine-owl.com)When you’re on a plane for 16 hours you have to find something to do.
Originally I had scanned @camilladerrico colouring book into the Pigment app, but in the end @procreate was the better app for what I wanted to do.
Also, it creates a time lapse of my progress.
I need to work on colouring skin.
👓 Tabor Theme Now Available as a Free Gatsby Theme for WordPress | WP Tavern
Gatsby WordPress Themes, a project launched earlier this year by a group of collaborators, has just released its second free theme. The team is led by Gatsby and GraphQL aficionados Zac Gordon, Jas…
👓 Loveland Public Library to Host Free Beginners WordPress Class Online May 22, 2019 | WP Tavern
Public libraries are one of the few remaining community centers where people freely pass on valuable skills to neighbors young and old. In addition to offering free access to books, computers, and …
This library looks like it’s essentially hosting a WordPress-sepecific Homebrew Website Club and doing something in the wild that Greg McVerry and I think would be a great public model.
👓 New in EditorsKit 1.5: Justify Text Alignment, Autosave On/Off Toggle, and Highlighted Text | WP Tavern
WordPress plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang continues to plough forward with new features for EditorsKit, a collection of page building block options for Gutenberg. What began as a block visibilit…
Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired.
To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature.
Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading―the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators―to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history―what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States―by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.
hat tip Jeff Jarvis.
👓 A Crisis of Cognition | BuzzMachine
Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine)Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher of science at Duke, pulled this rug of storytelling out from under me with his new book How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories. In it, heargues that the human addiction to the story is an extension of our reliance on the theory of mind. That theory holds that in our brains, humans balance beliefs and desires to decide on action. The theory, he explains, springs from lessons we as humans learned on the veldt, where we would mind-read — that is, use available information about our environment and others’ goals and past actions to predict the behavior of the antelope that is our quarry; the lion we are competing with; and our fellow tribesmen with whom we either compete or must trust to collaborate. “Since mind readers share their target animals’ environments, they have some sensory access to what the target animals see, hear, smell, taste, and so on,” Rosenberg says.
An interesting reframing of journalistic problems here.