Tools and Technology – A Honey of an Anklet

Some links: 113

An interesting perspective from Quico Toro on resolving the global warming crisis without stifling economic development: How to Save the Planet Without Screwing Over Poor People.
When “effective immediately” means “maybe.”
Richard Gilbert explains why I was confused by Harold G. Henderson’s statement that “haiku is written in 5-7-5 jion.”
Two pieces that sound the alarm that everything is ruined, by Julian Baggini and Christian B. Miller. I agree with Miller that patience is still a virtue to be sought, but the dependence on instant answers pre-dates easy access to LLMs and AI-assisted search.
I Am Hummingbird, Lord of Your Doorknob, by Julie Sharbutt.

So you and your creatures went inside to stuff your flesh beaks with sauce worms and stare at your RAWRAWRAWR wall. The time was nigh and I went to work, collecting twigs and sticks and dog fur and stems and cattails and twigs and string and SNAKESKIN and bark and moss and fish scales and thistle and hay and twine and thread and tinsel and CAT WHISKERS and leaves and twigs and DANDELION DOWN and pine needles and Halloween wig hair and USED SPIDERWEBS—THEY WERE EMPTY WHEN I FOUND THEM, GET A GRIP, THE SPIDERS ARE FINE, YOU THINK A SPIDER’S NOT JUST FINE?

Some links: 111

Beaverslide: the OG, DIY, fix-it-yourself rangeland contraption.

It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as it is a halted conveyor belt to nowhere…
‘Godot’ Is a Puzzle, However You Pronounce It, by Alexis Soloski

Jonathan Kalb, a professor at Hunter College who met with Beckett, disagrees. “It’s actually not true that there is a definitive pronunciation,” he said in a recent interview. “The fact is, he was very tolerant of different pronunciations.”

KOFF-KOFF Just about the only variation of which he was tolerant.
TIL where rapamycin came from.
Repairing cobblestone streets in New York. By hand, of course.
Collateral damage in the wars on choice and poor people: How ‘defund Planned Parenthood’ came to threaten primary care in rural Maine, by Selena Simmons-Duffin and When the G.O.P. Medicaid Cuts Arrive, These Hospitals Will Be Hit Hardest, by Emily Badger, Alicia Parlapiano, and Margot Sanger-Katz.

Unpolished

Also in the SMH Dept.: Why Does Every Commercial for A.I. Think You’re a Moron?, by Ismail Muhammad.

Meta has created a vision of life in which, without A.I. aiding his every word, an individual can be left reeling by the simplest of human interactions, unmanned by an ordinary dad joke.

Maybe stripes?

Some small research advances in the effort to reduce bird strikes at wind turbines, by Adam Welz.

And now for econ

ArXiv as an open access project, from Jonathan Kujawa.

Some links: 108

D.C. Circulator buses find new homes far from the city
Fact-Checking the ‘President Who Follows Science’ on his environmental record
An Inside Look at the Subway’s Archaic Signal System in NYC
An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy, by Anaïs Godard

Your version of the future has no room for her. Thankfully, she doesn’t need your permission to belong. She’s already here.
Leo Mazzone is still rockin’: An Old-School Pitching Coach Says I Told You So

“All anyone in the majors watches now is how damn fast a guy can throw,” he told me, rocking on his heels. “Grunt and heave, grunt and heave. It’s not pitching; it’s asinine.”
Oh, lovely, first the Colorado and now this: A Crucial River Treaty Is Tangled in Trump’s Feud With Canada

Negotiations over the Columbia River basin could affect the environment in Canada and electrical generation and flood control in the United States.
Damn, those things are much bigger than I realized: a rubber bullet in the Museum at the Times

Hmm, the Times and the Post have different headline casing styles.

Coming to a museum near you

Antique technology roundup:

Neon signs in New York City.
The ubiquitous “Gorton” pantograph font, in Manhattan and world-wide. (longread)
Blimps over Akron, O.

Two pics of neon signs in Greater New York that I’ve happened to catch in pixels over the years.

Meterstones, 2024

Small accomplishments during the year, not otherwise accounted for. Not major milestones, but bigger than inchstones.

I took on new responsibilities for Virginia Native Plant Society.
I resumed working in community theater, stage managing Dance Nation for Silver Spring Stage and Kindertransport (in rehearsal) for Rockville Little Theatre. Much waiting in traffic to cross the Cabin John bridge.
After trips to three different shops and a returned online order, I found the right replacement halogen bulb for my bedside lamp. After multiple trips to local stores, I bought a $7 (+ shipping) threaded rod from McMaster-Carr and successfully repaired a chair from IKEA (model long discontinued) that I’ve had since I moved into this house.

Meterstones, 2023

Postcards from Ohio: October 2024: Addendum

I stopped in Columbus at the Wexner Center for the Arts on my way west, and found numerous six-wheeled robots tootling around the OSU campus. A robot seemed to manage crossing a driveway (into a parking deck, for instance) just fine, but I had the uncanny feeling that it waited for me to start to cross, that being a signal that it was safe to move. The robot’s cargo bay was about the size of a backpack, but shaped more like a little bathtub.

What were these automata delivering? Library books, mayhaps? Nope, it’s food. It’s always food.

A mystery: 29: solved

Chris Staecker explains the dingus I saw in southwest Virginia last year. It’s more properly called a sector.

Some links: 104

Wheels up! Fleetwood Mac Sound Engineer Sues Stereophonic Playwright. That didn’t take very long. The New Yorker piece. My review of the show.
Tidy takedown of Ayn Rand, by Gary Saul Morson. “No one could explain to Rand that tautologies can’t be used to prove anything about the real world.” (via Arts & Letters Daily)
Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App, by Ian Bogost. Looking at you, Walter Kerr Theatre and the Hadestown producers.

Forte

Linda Holmes nails it in her response to Apple’s crass iPad advertisement.

But these are not practical items to begin with. Nobody owns a piano because it’s practical; it’s about the least practical thing you can own. It can wreck your floor. It goes out of tune. And if you happen to get a new place, you don’t just need movers for it; you may need special movers. You don’t own a piano to get from point A to point B in the most direct way you can. You own a piano for the reason we had one in my house: a person plays it. Someone sits down, as my mother did, and plays the “Maple Leaf Rag,” and you can hear the pedals lightly squeak, and you can watch hands skitter across keys, and of course you are listening to music — but also, those are your mother’s hands.

In my case, the piano’s owner was Leta and the player was Grandmother Madeline.

And in my case, the piano was in the Northern Michigan University dormitory lounge and the player was Audrey from Rockford, Ill., and the song was indeed “Maple Leaf Rag.”

Uphill battle

More developments in New York’s struggle with trash: Emily Badger and Larry Buchanan for the Times focus on the three-tiered containerization plan, and point out that Manhattan streets are stuck with the job of temporary storage because the street grid doesn’t provide alleys. Eric Lach for The New Yorker uses more ink to write about personalities.

Some links: 100

Walter Shawlee, slipstick reseller, has passed.

Over time, his customers included a weather station in Antarctica, where many electronic gadgets could not take the cold; photo editors responsible for adjusting image sizes (they like slide rules for their clear displays of different values for the same ratio); an archaeologist who found that calculators got too dusty to work properly during digs; the drug company Pfizer, which gave away slide rules as gifts during a trade show; slide rule enthusiasts in Afghanistan and French Polynesia; and “guys from NASA,” Mr. Shawlee told Engineering Times in 2000.
Sorry, overwintering turtles don’t breathe through their butts.

The notion that cloacal gas exchange helps North American turtles survive long winters trapped under the ice is pervasive in pop science, but to date, there is no solid evidence that hidden-necked turtles use cloacal gas exchange. The skin and mouth lining are where gas exchange happens during winter hibernation.
The Old English for spider is gange-wæfre (“walker-weaver”).
From Zack Stanton for McSweeney’s, “Morrissey or Trump?”

This could only happen to me / Who has been through anything like this?
Guest column for Washington Business Journal by Alan Berube and Tracy Hadden Loh: “Caps and Wizards moving to Virginia isn’t ‘regionalism.’ It’s gaslighting.”