hitchhiker

happy new year!

2025-01-02T01:23:28Z

comments

the death of anklebones

2024-11-16T20:43:40Z

https://minoanmiss.dreamwidth.org/1524650.html

Really good Bronze Age short story by my friend minoanmiss.

comments

reflective altruism

2024-09-24T09:25:43Z

Consider an insight from the Jewish tradition. The ancient rabbis were exquisitely sensitive to the psychological needs of poor people, and they argued that these needs should also be taken into account. So they decreed that you shouldn’t only give poor people enough money to survive on — they need to have more than that so they themselves can give charity to others. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “On the face of it, the rule is absurd. Why give X enough money so that he can give to Y? Giving to Y directly is more logical and efficient. What the rabbis understood, however, is that giving is an essential part of human dignity.”

from https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/372519/charity-giving-effective-altruism-mutual-aid-homeless, the article is worth reading too

comments

tradition!

2024-09-08T21:22:45Z

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

-- G K Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"

what really fascinates me is that in the larger context, chesterton was making an argument *for* tradition (or, rather, for democracy, on the grounds that everyone agreed tradition was good and tradition was a form of democracy, so therefore democracy was clearly good). i most often see this quote paraphrased today by people arguing *against* tradition.

more extended excerpt from the book here

comments

the world turned upside down

2024-05-12T23:43:27Z

i tried to see the aurora on both friday and saturday, but it was too cloudy and light-polluted. i did manage to take a night vision picture that showed a bit of pink haze. i'll take it :)

but also stargazing always reminds me of a charming little poem by piet hein, so here it is...

( Read more... )

comments

workers of the world

2023-10-31T21:30:22Z

Fascinating story I hadn't been aware of:

Take the UAW strikes: for many years, the UAW was an objectively bad union, ruled over by a dirty-tricking clique who sold out the membership. It's normal to blame workers for bad leaders, but the UAW old guard had rigged union elections, making sure that they would stay in charge. It's not workers that like corrupt unions – it's bosses.

Before the UAW could fight back against their bosses, they had to fight back their bosses' minions in the upper ranks of their own union. That's where the the Harvard Grad Students' Union comes in. After years of worsening exploitation and working conditions, the Harvard Grad Students organized under the UAW, then joined forces with reformers in the union to oust the corrupt leadership.

During the leadership struggle, Harvard Grad Students helped their comrades from the auto-sector master the union's baroque constitution, so when the old guard tried to prevent motions from reaching the floor, the grad students were able to cite chapter and verse back at them. In the end, grad students and auto-workers together won the victory that paved the way for the strikes.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/25/huzzah/#bad-king-richard

comments

prayer

2023-10-11T00:29:10Z

thinking of this song today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OK7ts5Uy-w

comments

mic drop

2023-10-03T00:32:37Z

In 2013—after enduring multiple professional setbacks, one denied grant after another, and a demotion at the institution to which she’d been devoted for decades—Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., walked out of her lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine for the last time.
...
That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”

https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-of-year-2021

comments

all the news that's fit to print

2023-10-02T07:29:00Z

In a digital age of 24-hour rolling news, newspapers worldwide are investing resources in their online editions. But a US publisher has gone back in time by launching a print-only broadsheet in the style of a 19th-century newspaper.

Called County Highway, it is responding to a demand from readers for in-depth stories and writing that needs time to savour. It will not have an internet edition.

Focusing primarily on the US and publishing every two months, it has a format partly inspired by Charles Dickens and other 19th-century authors whose stories were serialised in journals. It will include serialised books from its own new publishing house – an independent company that is taking on the conglomerates that dominate the industry.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/oct/01/americas-new-print-only-newspaper-county-highway-reinvents-the-art-of-reading-slowly

there's the inevitable moralistic spin to it, and i wonder how much of the early interest is simply due to novelty, but it's also interesting to see that a lot of people are keen on having something like this.

comments

hexagons are the bestagons

2023-09-25T19:59:31Z

fun little video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY

comments

a brief history of orange

2023-09-22T00:07:17Z

https://lithub.com/color-or-fruit-on-the-unlikely-etymology-of-orange/

What happened between the end of the 14th century and the end of the 17th that allowed ‘orange’ to become a color name? The answer is obvious. Oranges.

comments

the road to a malaria vaccine

2023-09-09T05:35:05Z

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-didnt-get-a-malaria-vaccine-sooner

Long and interesting history of the ongoing battle against malaria.

comments

states' wrongs

2023-08-27T08:46:32Z

99.67% of Americans don’t live in Montana.

99.67% of Americans can be fired for no reason given.

When I read on this subreddit "and I can be fired for no reason because I live in an at-will state" I just want to people to wake up. You can be fired for no reason given because you’re American.

It feels like the "At-will state" BS is just to make it seem like the whole country isn’t that bad. That surely there are other states with worker protections.

Nope, just Montana. A whooping 0.0033% of all Americans. All the 49 other states are at-will.

https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/162h5ty/america_is_an_at_will_state/

i truly had not realised that either! it really is an effective verbal trick.

comments

corporate pride

2023-08-23T20:43:14Z

And I watched as all this happened and companies started back-burnering Pride support and events and sports teams cancelled their Pride night and all the rest, all these internet folk ostensibly on the side of the rainbow angels bellowing from every corner: rainbow capitalism, pinkwashing, fake allies, we don’t need corporate Pride!

Now, I’m not saying we all need to rush out and drink a barrel of Bud Light each for the cause because, I mean, I want rights and all but there’s lines even I won’t cross for the revolution, but saints and ministers of Milk defend us are you actually kidding me we desperately need corporate Pride and we cannot afford to lose it now.

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/it-may-not-be-praxis-but-we-need

comments

american chop suey

2023-08-23T02:58:17Z

There is an Indian Chinese dish, American Chop Suey, distinguished from the (also Indian Chinese) "Chinese Chop Suey" by having a sweet-and-sour tomatoey sauce. Interestingly enough, there is also a New England dish called American Chop Suey, which is completely different (and also called American Goulash depending on region).

There is a wikipedia page, but it only mentions the American version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chop_suey - maybe I'll work up an edit at some point.

comments

the hero nobody needs

2023-08-17T23:29:51Z

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

Long but satisfying takedown of the whole "hero's journey" idea.

comments

tequila

2023-08-14T19:55:33Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVCC0MBT6bE

comments

let's go!

2022-07-04T01:35:42Z

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2022/07/02/brandon-brown-lets-go-brandon-chant-child-autism-book/7797838001/

Brandon Brundidge of Cottage Grove, Minnesota, was on a spring-break trip to Houston in March and saw signs with the “Let’s go, Brandon” slogan. Brundidge believed the signs were meant to encourage him. He consequently started trying activities he’d never attempted before, such as learning to swim and removing the training wheels from his bicycle.

His mother, Sheletta Brundidge, used that story to write a children’s book titled, “Brandon Spots His Sign.” [Brandon] Brown had the cover of Brundidge’s book on the hood of his Camaro for his Xfinity Series race Saturday at Road America.

comments

fiddling while rome burns

2022-06-26T22:35:49Z

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3537104-biden-does-not-agree-with-expanding-supreme-court-jean-pierre/

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Saturday that President Biden “does not agree with” expanding the Supreme Court after it ruled a day before to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion.

“So, I know I’ve … I was asked this question yesterday, and I’ve been asked it before — and I think the president himself … about expanding the Court. That is something that the president does not agree with. That is not something that he wants to do,” Jean-Pierre said on Air Force One while en route to Munich, Germany.

comments

rip roe v wade

2022-06-25T00:31:05Z

that we saw it coming doesn't make it any less terrifying :( and the republicans are already openly salivating over what other fundamental rights they can dismantle.

also this post by amaebi is a good concise summary of why the supreme court really needs to be radically expanded, so our freedoms no longer balance on a knife-edge.

comments

the donkey vote

2022-04-20T21:19:23Z

I just learnt about donkey votes and I am oddly fascinated by the entire thing. I would love to see a breakdown on the various reasons for doing it.

In electoral systems which use ranked voting, a donkey vote is a cast ballot where the voter ranks the candidates based on the order they appear on the ballot itself. The voter that votes in this manner is referred to as a donkey voter.

Typically, this involves numbering the candidates in the order they appear on the ballot paper: first preference for the first-listed candidate, second preference for the second-listed candidate, and so on. However, donkey votes can also occur in reverse, such that someone numbers the candidates from the bottom up the ballot paper. In systems where a voter is required to place a number against each candidate for the vote to be valid, the voter may give the first preference to the candidate they prefer, then run all the other numbers donkey fashion.

Donkey votes are most common where preference voting is combined with compulsory voting, such as in Australia, particularly where all candidates must be ranked on the ballot paper.

Donkey votes may occur for several reasons, including voter apathy, protest voting, simplicity on how-to-vote cards, the complexity of the voting system, or voter ignorance of the voting system rules. Alternatively, what appears as a donkey vote may in fact be a genuine representation of a voter's preferences.

comments

best song cover ever

2022-04-06T07:52:17Z

comments

how are portable am radios possible?

2022-03-31T04:07:36Z

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2022/03/30/portable-am-radio/

Interesting little fact about radio antennas.

comments

a brief history of tiramisu

2022-03-23T20:56:51Z

https://www.newyorker.com/news/afterword/the-husband-and-wife-whose-restaurant-gave-the-world-tiramisu

comments

on magical thinking and technoutopianism

2022-03-20T04:14:09Z

https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/

Excellent interview that touches on utopianism, communes, silicon valley culture, solutionism vs the real world, and a lot more.

comments