Quotes

History cannot tell us the origin of wheat

Quoted Les Merveilles de l'Instinct Chez les Insectes: Morceaux Choisis (The Wonders of Instinct in Insects: Selected Pieces) by Jean-Henri FabreJean-Henri Fabre (Librairie Ch. Delagrave (1913), page 242)
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of king's bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.
An aphorism which should be more broadly known, particularly as fearmongers begin to attack the public going into election cycles. I thought I’d make an ironic motivational poster out of it.

Hat tip: Jeremy Cherfas’s excellent Eat This Podcast

Photo credit: poppy in wheat field flickr photo by Grey World shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

👓 About | Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Annotated About by Eric RasmusenEric Rasmusen (Eric Rasmusen's Weblog)

This weblog is mainly for myself, used as a commonplace book in which I put ideas, quotations, facts, and citations that I might want to use later. That’s why the topics are diverse and often esoteric. I’m not trying to build an audence or get a lot of hits on a counter. My impression is that most visitors arrive because search engines have led them to here and I’m one of the few websites in the world that address some key word they’re interested in.

Since I am not writing for other people, especially (you will see the exceptions—things such as posts I also use as comments on other blogs, excerpts from letters or articles I have written or will write, and so forth), please do not think I am deliberately trying to offend someone or that I am cleverly pushing a hidden agenda. I’m not, simply because I don’t expect enough people to read this blog for such efforts to be worthwhile. Actually, I probably shouldn’t even fix my typos, and perhaps I’ll stop doing that. You’re weclome to read, and I’ll try to write well simply to avoid getting into bad habits, but I’ll not expend more effort than if I were writing this into a hidden fil in my PC.

An excellent statement on an About page in which someone explicitly states that they use their site as a commonplace book and do so primarily for themselves.

📑 How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters | New York Times

Annotated How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters (nytimes.com)
The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.  ❧

📑 Standard Notes | Nelson’s Log

Annotated Standard Notes (Nelson's log)
I love the voice of their help page. Someone very opinionated (in a good way) is building this product. I particularly like this quote: Your data is a liability to us, not an asset.  ❧

📑 How social media makes fascists of us all | UnHerd

Annotated How social media makes fascists of us all (UnHerd)
All tribes need tribal leaders, who in turn need loyalty. Followers of Corbyn and Trump will both detest the comparison, but note how both have the merch, the chants, the hagiography. They’re radically different, but both are products of the tribalism that social media has accidentally brought about.  ❧

📑 The Right Time to Burn A Match | Alyson Indrunas

Annotated The Right Time to Burn A Match by Alyson IndrunasAlyson Indrunas (Spoke & Hub)
I learned a valuable lesson that the haters have all the energy in the world to share their outrage but the people you really want to reach respect you, your time, and what you’re doing and they are often too busy to take the time to express gratitude.  ❧

📑 Our Cultural Commonwealth

Quoted Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences [.pdf] by Marlo Welshons (ed.) (acls.org)
...cyberinfrastructure is something more specific thanthe network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular proj-ect, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline.  ❧
Quote highlighted in the video from module 1 of EDU522

Looks like an interesting report. I’ll note that Jeremy Dean has annotated a bit of the report in the past, so it may be useful to circle back around and read the entire thing.

📑 Launching #EDU 522 Week Zero | INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION

Annotated Launching #EDU 522 Week Zero by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
I also think as educators we should own what we make, or at least have it released to the Commons. Copyright on teacher created materials in the public school makes little sense. Nobody wants to steal your stuff and no municipality will ever profit on sales. Give it an open license.

📑 Unfollowing Everybody | Anil Dash

Annotated Unfollowing Everybody by Anil Dash (Anil Dash)
It turns out, I don't mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.

📑 Community, Privatization, Efficiency | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Annotated Community, Privatization, Efficiency by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
This displacement is of course operative in the de-funding of public universities, effectively transforming them into non-profits rather than state institutions. The effects of this program of neoliberal1 reform run deep, not least that the dominant motivator behind these privatized institutions becomes sustainability rather than service, leaving universities, like non-profits, in an endless cycle of fundraising and budget cuts.

📑 Community, Privatization, Efficiency | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Annotated Community, Privatization, Efficiency by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
Throughout Generous Thinking, one of my interests lies in the effects of, and the need to reverse, the shift in our cultural understanding of education (and especially higher education); where in the mid-twentieth century, the value of education was largely understood to be social, it has in recent decades come to be described as providing primarily private, individual benefits. And this, inevitably, has accompanied a shift from education being treated as a public service to being treated as a private responsibility.

📑 Highlight of “Interviewing my digital domains”

Annotated Chris Aldrich response to “Interviewing my digital domains” by wiobyrne (Digital Breadcrumbs)
Chris Aldrich used Hypothesis to annotate my post on Interviewing my digital domains.
Testing out the ability to more easily highlight content on the web and display it on my website using the Post Kinds Plugin. Typically a highlight wouldn’t include a textual note (like this), otherwise it would be considered marginalia or a general annotation. Perhaps I’ll get around to adding an annotation type shortly as well.

I’ve got an archive list of highlights now as well as a highlight feed.

📑 Highlighted A Reply to Laying the Standards for a Blogging Renaissance by Aaron Davis

Annotated Reply to Laying the Standards for a Blogging Renaissance by Aaron Davis by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)
I’m not looking for just a “hipster-web”, but a new and demonstrably better web.
Quoted Slack chat by Chris BeckstromChris Beckstrom (chat.indieweb.org)
...holy crap this stuff [IndieWeb] is great. When I started getting webmentions from social media using Bridgy I flipped. It's like we're in the future!!!
I remember the early days of Twitter when people were excited about what it was and what it could do. Even then I don’t think people were as excited as Chris Beckstrom was when he made what is certainly the IndieWeb quote of the week this morning.