Tag: defensible thymes
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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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Supercondensed matter
This 1954 promo for the Nutrilite supplement is well produced and typifies a long tradition for MLMs and related scams. Bitcoin follows the same tradition. Both pivot on a false idea of super-condensation. The product is EXTREMELY valuable because it’s EXTREMELY condensed. Condensed products are a wonderful idea, making extended storage and savings possible. Condensed…
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Might work!
Wolf continues covering the bust in office buildings. Among the usual mix of daytraders talking like ticker tapes and partisan politicians, this comment is especially interesting: = = = = = START QUOTE: Converting office space to traditional apartments is very complex, yes. But what about dorm-style living like what we have at colleges? A…
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One huge point
The latest article by Charles Hugh Smith makes one HUGE point that I haven’t heard before. It resonates deeply. The one huge point: AI is winning because the people in charge of making decisions NO LONGER HAVE A QUALITY HUMAN PRODUCT TO COMPARE WITH. The deciders don’t know how shitty the new offshored or AI’d…
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US equivalent of Holy Wells
Kingsnorth’s latest magical Holy Well reminded me instantly of a holy place I knew when I was young. = = = = = START 2016 REPRINT: Spokane’s idiot misgovernment has succumbed to blackmail by the EPA Terrorist Army, and is building a number of Miasmal Swamps. Three of them appeared last month in my neighborhood.…
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Sounds good at first…
This Brownstone article proposes an official health agency devoted to pushing dietary fads. The article starts with one valid point. Since 1920 the medical establishment has ignored basic aspects of health like diet, exercise, confidence, and sunlight, focusing EXCLUSIVELY on adding more pills. Doctors will rarely tell you to eat less and walk more. But…
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That’s not the purpose.
Pointed by Denyse as usual, this article discusses the problem with meta-analysis studies. It says that meta-analyses are designed to combat misinformation but too often do the opposite. No. A meta-analysis may happen to weed out bad studies, and may happen to emphasize bad studies. Either result is irrelevant. The PURPOSE of a meta-analysis is…
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Today is Scouse Day!
Scouse Day is an annual festival in Liverpool. Wikipedia gives a complex list of dubious origins for the word. The one clear fact is that it was originally Lobscouse. My favorite British dictionary from 1867 says: Lobscouse, a dish made of potatoes and meat and biscuits boiled together. The dictionary doesn’t list scouse at all.…
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Obsolete?
Recently I focused on the role of gelatin in printing. Got curious. With all the current fads and “laws” about vegan and GMO and gluten-free, you’d think gelatin had long since been replaced by synthetics. Has it? Nope. Gelatin isn’t a very large part of industry in monetary terms, but it’s steadily GROWING, gaining new…
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Ease and comfort
Previous item about retirement emphasized ‘ease and comfort’, a time when you don’t have to be anywhere or satisfy anyone except yourself. Strikes an immediate resonance. During the “virus” holocaust I was fighting all the time, churning out courseware and graphics, walking every day and making the hellish storetrip twice a week by bus. Now…
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Kimchicillin?
One of my perpetual themes is that research sponsored by real business to solve real problems is ALWAYS better than research done by universities to satisfy government lunacy. The best real research is in agriculture. Today I learned, as they say on Reddit, that Korea has a World Institute of Kimchi. = = = =…
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Witches and trust
Mentioned witches and trust yesterday. Here’s a rehash of a couple earlier items relating to both. = = = = = From 2017, dealing with the RUSSIAN_HACKING witch hunt, now resumed after the hunters satisfied their killing frenzy with the “virus”. = = = = = START REHASH: We have two competing witch-hunts underway. The…
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