Tag: defensible thymes
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Dogs hate it (reprint from 2023)
Generative AI is securitized IP. It’s identical to those Mortgage-Backed Securities that blew up in 2008. Suck up a million real houses and farms, mix the debt together into batter, bake it, slice the cake into a million pieces, each containing a hologram of the originals without any way of identifying the original property. Sell…
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50 year unsync
In 1958, TV Radio Life magazine interviewed Martin Klein, who hosted a weekly science program on LA television station KCOP, listed as ‘independent’. It’s still there, still on channel 13 with the same call letters. They asked Klein to predict 50 years into the future. How would we live in 2008? Klein worked for Cohu…
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Where are the goddamn philosophers?
After mentioning Sidney Webb’s history of the Russian Revolution I tried to find it online. Couldn’t find it in free form, but an accidental reference was worth reading. A 1929 article in a British journal of socialism [Klugmann, p 48 of PDF] discusses the takeover of politics by ideology. Sounds mighty familiar. Klugmann was focusing…
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400 year sync
Evan Barker’s podcast on the NYC win by Mamdani accidentally creates a 400 year resonance. One of her guests is smoking the modern vape version of an old Dutch long pipe. Strange as it Seems was the best of the 1930s human interest podcasts. My favorite episode dramatizes New Amsterdam’s governor Willem Keeft, a petty…
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One-stop shop
History Today tells how medieval scribes adapted to the onset of printing by reusing and expanding their existing materials, tools and skills. = = = = = START QUOTE: At its height Oxford’s book trade enjoyed the establishment of Dominican and Franciscan friaries in need of books for university activities and preaching, and an early…
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Snacks and turkeys
The website devoted to Hudson material includes quite a few Dealer Bulletins. These gave dealers the company’s talking points on this year’s cars and options. Each bulletin started with a long set of features and fillers, giving salesmen some jokes and bits of knowledge to spice up their talks. I’m an avid consumer of Features,…
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Farm focus to the next level
Many stations in rural states focused on farming. WIBW in Topeka, my nighttime companion in the 50s, devoted most of its mornings to agriculture and timeshared the frequency with KSAC, the all-ag station at K-State. WEKZ in Monroe, Wisconsin took farm focus to a new level. They owned and operated a farm right next to…
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The Foy Rebellion HAS ARRIVED.
Headline: Art majors beat computer majors. = = = = = START QUOTE: For computer science and computer engineering, the unemployment rate in those fields was 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively — notably higher than the national average. Finance majors were 3.7%. By comparison, the unemployment rate for art history majors was 3%, and for nutritional…
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No horseshoes, no butterflies
Seems like the Chemtrail people are proliferating, at least in the places I’m reading. RFK’s Deepstate-sponsored antivax movement is helping them. Chemtrail fans and Global Warming fans are both wrong in the SAME way, not opposite ways. It’s not the supposed ‘horseshoe’ effect. Both are attributing vast permanent natural patterns to a TINY change in…
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The one difference
Since I’m doing random food-related stuff this week, here’s another. Fussy foodies have always been a complex mix of types and classes. Some of the species have moved their ‘coding’ over the decades, but the species are constant. The measurements treated as important in Fussy Food Talk changed just once, rather dramatically. The three major…
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Microwaves and SOEs
A 1969 promo film declares as an established fact that microwave ovens are yet another fine spinoff of our Capitalist Space Program, yet more evidence that Capitalism Beats Socialism because we hit the moon faster. Microwave ovens were invented to help the astronauts cook while in space. = = = = = Debunk 1. The…
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Today is Life in the Cracks Day
From the National Days website: The Festival of Life in the Cracks Day on March 10 celebrates the sprouting of greenery in the cracks of sidewalks and walls to commemorate the coming of springtime. This annual event acknowledges the complexity of the cycle of life and how renewal and rebirth are integral parts of it.…
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Brutalist typography
This 1970s film is teaching journalism students about proper design. It’s unapologetically brutalist, in the same denaturing spirit as Corbusier in architecture or Cage in music. Remove all beauty. Remove all decorations. Remove all variation and improvisation. Only stark colorless rectangles are allowed. Replace it with squared-off type masses… Short words, short sentences and short…
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Amazingly good
Trudeau’s response to Trump’s pointless lunacy is pretty damn good. He starts with a history of Canada and US working on the same side in wars and crises. He actually understated Canada’s WW2 contribution, since Canada started fighting a year earlier. Then he talks about the shared economy, missing the earlier period when Canada was…
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The Creeping Thyme solution
Matt Stoller tries his hand at diagnosing the D party’s ailment. = = = = = START STOLLER: For the last few weeks, I’ve been mulling over a question that I think will bedevil all of us in the anti-monopoly space for years, perhaps decades. Anti-monopoly policy is immensely popular, and there hasn’t been an…
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