Tuesday Tidy Up
Well, it’s Tuesday. Tuesday is just Monday’s hangover. Everything you tried to ingest and process to start the week makes a re-appearance in a less attractive form. But we must soldier on. Let’s clean up the pixel pavement pizzas in our browser bookmarks and try to get ready for Wednesday, which is just Tuesday’s stepchild.
What we lose when phones take away boredom and interstitial time
Yet the smartphone’s triumph over boredom might prove a Pyrrhic victory. As Jonathan Haidt showed in The Anxious Generation, the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media, particularly by the young, led to many negative unintended consequences such as increased rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm. So, too, our efforts to vanquish boredom have had deleterious impacts such as on our ability to let our minds wander, to cultivate patience, and to experience anticipation.
Boredom? Yes, yes of course. But it’s frustration that causes people to make profound changes. Boredom has always led to useless amusements.
So now MCT, which attempts to show “persistence” of inflation, is predicting a substantial re-acceleration of inflation – the “persistence” part – driven largely by non-housing services and to a small extent by core goods. So housing cost inflation, as measured by rents, is no longer the driver of this inflation; it’s non-housing services and to a small extent, core goods.
Inflation is going down so let’s count it a different way.
Collections: Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire
Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so. Indeed, part of the reason there was such confusion over what a general is supposed to shout instead of ‘fire!’ is that historical tactical manuals don’t generally have commands for coordinated bow shooting because armies didn’t do coordinated bow shooting. Instead, archers generated a ‘hail’ or ‘rain’ (those are the typical metaphors) of arrows as each archer shot in their own best time.
If I’m looking for historical research, about the last place I’d look these days would be a university or a news outlet. The internet has legions of geeks who do a better job.
A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes
Patented as a “Method of Preserving the Dead,” Karwowski provided diagrams and directions “whereby a corpse may be hermetically incased within a block of transparent glass” and thus “maintained for an indefinite period in a perfect and lifelike condition.” First the corpse would be drenched with “sodium silicate or water-glass,” and then, once dried, covered with “molten glass.”
The appeal of this method, ahem, remains to be seen.
Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer
Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife – a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwritten notes on Wife and you get back a finished manuscript, edited while it was typed. What computer can do that? Wife meets all of Berry’s uncompromising standards for techno-logical innovation: she’s cheap, repairable near home, and good for the family structure. Best of all, Wife is politically correct because she breaks a writer’s “direct dependence on strip-mined
coal.”
I pasted a short blogpost of mine into Chad AI and didn’t tell it who wrote it, and asked it to look for similar works. It compared it to a half-dozen writers, all either Nobel laureates or Pulitzer winners or similarly exalted so and sos. One was Robert Frost. So far, so good. Another was Wendell Berry. I closed the browser.
Software update makes HDR content “unwatchable” on Roku TVs
Complaints started surfacing on Roku’s community forum a week ago. On May 1, a company representative posted that Roku was “investigating the Disney Plus HDR content that was washed out after the recent update.” However, based on user feedback, it seems that HDR on additional Roku apps, including Apple TV+ and Netflix, are also affected. Roku’s representative has been asking users to share their experiences so that Roku can dig deeper into the problem.
Well, television was unwatchable anyway. I’m immune to further unwatchability. I can’t not watch it any harder.
Auburn University’s help desk is still answering the public’s calls 70 years on
The desk looks different today than it did seventy years ago. For starters, it’s in an expensive, modern-looking student center. The old Foy Hall still exists, and now houses a few small student-engagement offices; but it’s got low ceilings and could use an update. There used to be stacks of books at the desk—encyclopedias and dictionaries, reference texts, phone books, the Farmers’ Almanac, the Guinness Book of World Records, and Emily Post’s Etiquette—but they’ve been replaced by three desktop iMacs, the really nice ones, whose backs are blue and orange, like the school’s colors.
I’ve seen that movie. It was displayed perfectly clearly on my screen, by the way:
Speaking of life imitating art, here’s perhaps the greatest example ever:
Sometimes I wonder what could have been accomplished if all the money and time and effort expended on trying to get famous on social media was channeled into something more productive. Then I got a headache and stopped wondering.
The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams
With Teams, users have access to many of the same core features they use in Skype, such as one-on-one calls and group calls, messaging, and file sharing. Additionally, Teams offers enhanced features like hosting meetings, managing calendars, and building and joining communities for free.
My mother loved Skype. She tried to sign on to it over and over to see her grandchildren, and almost always failed. She’d mis-type her login, or give out a malformed Skype address to her friends. Then she’d sign up for it all over again with tiny changes in her logins each time. If someone tried to contact her, she could never figure out which set of credentials went with what. She finally tearfully admitted all this to me, and asked me to fix it. I spent a month trying to get Microsoft to meld all her accounts together. Microsoft said sure, just don’t sign up for any more accounts for 30 days, and they’ll all be under one login. Her grand-daughter-in-law signed her up for another Skype account 29 days later. Mom said it was OK, because GDIL was “good with computers.” I won’t miss Skype.
I Cooked Meat by Launching It To Mach 3
Ever wonder why the Houthis can chase aircraft carriers out of the Red Sea? If YouTube geeks can make their own hibachi rockets, I imagine there are Robert al Abdullah Goddards everywhere at this point. Plan accordingly.
Have a great Wednesday, people. Tuesday? We won’t mention it again.
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