20200925

Fri Sep 25 06:00:01 EDT 2020 ======================================== Slept from ten-thirty to six without waking. Mostly sunny. Highs in the upper 70s. South winds up to 10 mph. Fifteen-minute walk in the morning. Sunny and cool. Heard crows. Work ---------------------------------------- - Check on HP laptop with wifi issues Done. - 2:30 PM weekly Entrata call Done. - Review phase 8 migration checklist Done. - Change FMO setting for cancelled apps for all properties Done. - Review invoices No. Home ---------------------------------------- A sort of file sharing/Internet file system experiment from Rob Pike: https://upspin.io/ A woman w/ Covid-19 spread her infection to 27 other people in a Korean Starbucks (she was sitting under the air conditioner, most patrons weren't masked up), but all 4 masked employees escaped infection. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-25/this-starbucks-in-south-korea-became-a-beacon-for-mask-wearing https://kottke.org/20/06/the-pandemics-epidemic-of-loneliness https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/coronavirus-isolation-negative-effects-health-loneliness-1016478/ > In The Price of Isolation for Rolling Stone, Alex Morris writes about how trends toward increasing social isolation in America left us ill-prepared to face weeks and months of time by ourselves during the pandemic. Studies have shown that humans in isolation are less healthy and less able to fight off disease than when other humans are around. This part in particular really really resonated with me: > > Sometimes, though, the body can be tricked. When Cole and his colleagues started looking for ways to combat the physical effects of loneliness, they didn’t find that positive emotions made a difference at all. But one thing did: “It was something called eudaimonic well-being, which is a sense of purpose and meaning, a sense of a commitment to some kind of self-transcendent goal greater than your own immediate self-gratification. People who have a lot of connection to some life purpose? Their biology looked great.” Even when researchers compared lonely people with purpose to social butterflies without it, purpose came out on top. In other words, it’s possible when we’re doing things to better our society, the body assumes there’s a society there to better. We’re technically alone, but it doesn’t feel that way. Carl Jung: > An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.” DNS-based alternative to the web for structured data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24354559 https://www.num.uk/blog/announcing-num http://web.archive.org/web/20001207014600/http://decss.zoy.org:80/ Acorn Woodpeckers Have Multi-Day Wars, and Birds Come from All Around to Watch https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/acrorn-woodpecker-wars > Power struggles are messy affairs, even in the world of acorn woodpeckers. Dozens of birds, grouped in coalitions, can fight for days on end, while spectators fly in from nearly two miles away to witness a battle for the right to breed. And word spreads fast—when a bird’s death creates a vacancy in prime territory, the battle to fill it breaks out within minutes, and faraway onlookers can arrive in less than an hour. > “You can see birds with eyes gouged out, with blood on their plumage—they fall to the ground holding each other’s legs when they’re fighting,” says Sahas Barve, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “These birds have spears for mouths so they can do a lot of damage.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24553433<Paste> > Two days ago I heard a loud, "SQUEE! Bock bock bock bock." from our back yard. Two (Flicker) woodpeckers were fighting in the branches of a maple, our chickens standing around foot of the tree seemingly captivated by the spectacle. I assume the cause of the commotion was the tussle finding its way to the ground, startling the chickens. > When I realized what was going on my daughter and I crept outside to watch. The woodpeckers and chickens ignored us as we sat down at the tree. The contenders hopping from branch to branch, diving at each other, dodging, and trying to get an angle on the other. They landed together on the roof of the nearby coop jumped up in the air and locked together in a flurry of feathers. Again the loud, "SQUEEE!" right before they hit the ground, both of them alighting on their feet, one with two of the other's breast feathers in its beak. The apparent victor of the clash exaggeratedly held the feathers above its head and gently placed them on the ground before the two of them zipped away to a power line where they remained for a while, seemingly calm. My daughter recovered the two feathers, both a downy orange quill extending up to a stark black dot, and shared her experience the next morning with her class mates.<Paste> https://sarkos.tumblr.com/post/179631937468/salt-fat-acid-heat-is-a-marxist-fantasy-come > In the new Netflix show Salt Fat Acid Heat — based off the bestselling book by, and starring, chef Samin Nosrat — all the food production is extremely inefficient. Whether it’s traditionally brewed soy sauce in Japan (which ferments in the barrel for two years) or flavored honeys in Mexico (which are delicately extracted from a hive via tiny syringe), Nosrat goes out of her way to tell us how little the producers can make compared to industrial factories. (One Tixcacaltuyub bee hive yields less than a liter of honey each year, compared to 30 to 40 kilos annually for a more traditional hive.) Her point isn’t to communicate the rarity of these ingredients in a Most Expensivest kind of way — there are few purchases and no prices on the show. The inefficiencies in SFAH are just a component of what makes the show so enjoyable: its vision of unalienated labor. > In one of what are called the 1844 Manuscripts, Karl Marx described his theory of estranged labor: workers under capitalism encounter their product as something “hostile and alien.” Value is sucked from the worker’s body, through the commodity produced, into the owner’s pocket. Unlike the sole proprietor (such as the proverbial ox-cart man), the harder an employee works, the less they have. No wonder the products seem hostile. Think about the difference in the way you’d feel toward a hamburger you make for a drive-thru customer versus one you prepare for yourself or with a loved one. One is depleting, the other nourishing. > Alienation is not only a feeling of detachment from the world, in Marxism it is a condition of literal theft. Workers exit the day with less than they had when they entered — Americans know this instinctively if not explicitly, which is why our national dream is to “work for myself” before a company “uses me up.” A reality show about the line cooks at a moderately expensive brunch place wouldn’t feel anything like Nosrat’s slow-food explorations; there’s nothing calming or even appetizing about the corner-cutting necessary to cook for someone else’s profit. When it comes to food, industrial efficiency is often gross. > Contrariwise, unalienated labor is sublime. This is virtuosity performed for its own sake, and it’s the truth behind the saying “the best things in life are free.” For example, hallowed above all on fine-dining TV from Top Chef to Chef’s Table is the concept of the “family meal” — the pre-service food that chefs cook for their restaurant staff. Unlike the alienated dinners they’ll serve later, family meal is a place for experimentation and risk. You can’t buy your way in, it’s the workers’ privilege alone. Most creative professions have their version of the family meal, and those of us who work in those jobs are willing to trade a lot for the occasional unalienated moment when we can give and/or receive work directly. https://www.vitra.com/en-un/page/chair-times This might be what I've been looking for — a tiny web view toolkit for Go with webkit instead of Chrome: https://github.com/webview/webview Servings: grains 6/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 4/2, meat 4/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: banana, cucumber, Cheetos, coffee Lunch: orange, egg and avocado wrap Dinner: hot dogs

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