Sunday, March 21, 2021

Listen to Wikipedia

 In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

— Penelope Lively, born in 1933

Recycled Teenager, Simon Beck (born 1958) is a British snow artist and a former cartographer. He has walked more than 50 miles (80km) in circles wearing snowshoes to create vast snow drawings in Colorado.

It’s hard to imagine how he manages to “see” what he’s done from where he works, at snow-level. ( and sand )

Snow Art


 DuckDuckGo uses App Store privacy labels to call out Google for ‘spying’ on users.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo’s search engine for years, but increasingly they’re becoming a full-spectrum privacy services company.


The Invention of a New Pasta Shape


SCIENCE AND SOULS CAN BOTH BE TRUE: Los Angeles Police Detective Jimmy Wallace begs to disagree with those who claim science has disproven the existence of the human soul. One might think, in view of Soul Music like Wilson Pickett’s, that shouldn’t be a point in dispute, but alas, it is, particularly on the Left where the totalitarians do their most determinedly anti-God thing. And don’t miss the teaser about something new coming soon for HillFaith.


Listen to Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a constantly changing entity with hundreds of edits occurring every minute and now you can experience that dynamism as ambient music: Listen to Wikipedia. Additions, subtractions, and new user signups to the site are tracked as they happen and represented as different tones — here’s a video recording from a few years ago:

Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell.





       Used bookshops in ... Istanbul 

       In Daily Sabah Matt Hanson writes on In a literary bind: Used bookshops in Kadıköy
       Always love to see and hear about used bookstores -- browsing in which I have sorely missed --, even if I have no idea what stuff like this means:
The used bookshop, Sevgi, in that sense, is a free, public zone by which to realize the cusp where late modern thought crystallized into the postmodern. The moment, as it was analyzed and symbolized through different kinds of storytelling, discursive and metaphorical, could be said to have effected an attempt at psychological self-actualization on an international scale, toward a holistic embrace that includes all of collective memory. 
       But kind of neat to see that this kind of stuff can get published in a newspaper. 



Marieke Lucas Rijneveld | Self-publishing in ... Tamil

       Marieke Lucas Rijneveld 

       International Booker Prize-winning Marieke Lucas Rijneveld author recently also garnered some attention for being selected to translate the poem Amanda Gorman performed at the 2021 American presidential inauguration, The Hill We Climb, and then turning down the commission after some controversy about the choice; see, for example, the Deutsche Welle report, Amanda Gorman's Dutch translator steps down
       Rijneveld has now also addressed what happened in a poem of her own, published simultaneously in several different languages and publications: see the Dutch original, Alles bewoonbaar, in de Volkskrant, and Michele Hutchinson's English translation, Everything inhabitable, in The Guardian