Latest bookmarks (page 82 of 140)

"Scientists are using drones, bicycle power and a lot of ingenuity to test ways to plant trees in forests that have been decimated by wildfires."

"Hailed as one of the most significant archival discoveries of modern times, text seems to show the Paradise Lost poet making careful annotations on his edition of Shakespeare’s plays"

"first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves."

2020: "The landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act aims to keep aquifers healthy by requiring plans from newly formed local agencies. The policy represents a major shift, mandated by arguably the most important new California water law in 50 years. "

"Individuals can learn to use noise to “see” walls—if they can shift their heads to better track echoes"
A study on echolocation in humans.

Perspective on how social media works today:
"You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming, right? It’s a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is — by design — no graceful way to shut down. A program can only crash and try to recover from a crashed state, which might well be impossible. I came up with a term for the human version: beef-only thinking." "A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage."

"Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”."

"The history of a notebook everyone knows and loves, from 19th century Europe to a contemporary minimal redesign."

"The basic maze generating routine had been partially written by a stoner who had left. I contacted him to try and understand what the maze generating algorithm did. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain, he coded it up in assembly overnight before he passed out, but now could not for the life of him remember how the algorithm worked."
Slightly older article. More research hsa been done since then: https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue59/3/index.html