I remember when I did not have to spend quite so much of my life charging things and making sure that the things are charged
Josh Withers shares frustration with stagnation in the ebook market.
I agree, and blame the Amazon monopoly. That monopoly is created and maintained by laws, not markets.
Amazon needs to be required to allow competing products to read its ebook format. Problem solved.
Right now, that kind of compatiblity is outright illegal.
Threads: A mall inside the store inside the mall
I signed up for Threads. Unenthusiastically. I want to use fewer social media platforms, and concentrate my focus, rather than doing more.
Hopefully, Threads will follow through and become a full citizen of ActivityPub, and also connect to the blue Facebook platform. That will make my social media activity simpler.
Even better: Everybody needs to wake up and realize that we don’t need a platform to serve as the internet town square. The internet already is the town square.
About 7-10 years ago, JC Penny announced a bold new initiative to start opening independent shops within its stores. At first I thought that was brilliant, and then I said, “Wait a second—you want to open a mall inside the store inside the mall? How’s that going to work?”
I’m @mitchwagner on Threads. So far, my entire Threads activity consists of a single photo of the dog.
Every so often I am tempted by an Ember coffee mug and then I look at the price and I fall over unconscious.
Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook “delve into the mysteries surrounding the Ark of the Covenant.”
The most important object in the universe, but also a somewhat invisible presence in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant has fuelled stories for millennia… as a weapon of mass destruction, an elaborate filling cabinet for sacred laws, or as the very location where God and man meet.
The Rest is History: Raiders of the Lost Ark
Also:
“Who drinks the water I shall give him, will have a spring inside him welling up for eternal life.” A deeply mysterious object which doesn’t appear in the Bible, was the Holy Grail really the chalice used by Jesus during the Last Supper, and the very cup that caught his blood at the crucifixion? Or is it merely a symbol representing Christ’s bloodline? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the Holy Grail, the origin of the tradition, and the role it played within medieval Christendom.
“Why do we have so little access to what’s happening under the hood?" Neuroscientist David Eagleman discusses how almost everything we do is controlled unconsciously. Our consciousness and free will are just illusions, thinking we’re in control but really just along for the ride.
I’ve seen the metaphor elsewhere comparing consciousness and free will to a toddler riding in a car with one of those child-safety seats that has a toy dashboard and steering wheel built in. The kid thinks they’re driving, but they’re not.
I made heavy use of Google Reader, checking it several times daily every day. But I never used the social features—I barely knew about them.
Learning about them now, I think I would have loved them. Most of what I do on social media is share things I find elsewhere on the Internet, sometimes commenting on them. I’ve never found a platform where that kind of behavior was a perfect fit. Reddit comes close, but there’s a lot of overhead on Reddit finding the right community to comment in, and figuring out those communities’ sometimes esoteric rules.
Raymond Scott was one of the most famous musical composers of the 20th Century, though his name is nearly forgotten today. He was also a brilliant electronics engineer, and his life’s work was the Electronium, an automated music-composing machine. Scott came up in in the Big Band era, and later worked with Berry Gordy, who founded the Motown record later. Scott’s music appears in Looney Tunes, Ren & Stimpy, and the SImpsons cartoons.
Player Piano, an episode of the Last Archive podcast featured on 99% Invisible.
The Last Archive: The Word for Man is Ishi: The amazing story of Ishi, only member of his Native American community to survive genocide, who was discovered in a small town in northern California in 1911.
Celebrated during his life as “the last wild Indian,” Ishi moved in to the new Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a living exhibit. But he also took control of his own life, moving around the community, attending vaudeville shows, and giving newspaper interviews.
Ishi’s life is a microcosm of American imperialism, and how white America celebrated, romanticized, and mourned Native American culture, after first subjugating that culture, committing genocide against it, and sidelining actual, living Native Americans who were—and are—still here.
Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber worked with Ishi and became Ishi’s friend, though Kroeber eventually betrayed Ishi. Ishi died in 1916.
Thirteen years later, Kroeber had a child, who grew up to become one of the most famous and well-respected science fiction writers of the century, writing again and again about imperialism and its victims.