19desiderata @19desiderata - Tumblr Blog

reflections on inflection points

(from the eve of Sept. 3, 2020 but i didn’t get around to posting until now whoops)

i’m about to start my first, real, official, full-time job and the current moment feels like i’m on the precipice of so many inflection points in so many different areas of my life

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→ issa new blog, go read the rest there.

pw is my first name if you know me irl. most content will be boring work journal entries, any interesting reflections will probably be cross-posted here.

vanish

"I have always wrestled with what has been expected of me as a woman versus what I expect of myself. The conflicting messages of millennial womanhood: to be ambitious but never bossy, strong but skinny, honest but polite, supportive of my fellow sisters’ success while the culture gets off on girl fights."

This is everything <3

wholesomethemedmemes

This is how Tiffany Haddish ended her standup special. I’ve never been so happy to be cursed.

today’s mood

The myth of the bullied white outcast loner is helping fuel a fascist resurgence

As liberals sneer at the “ignorant” middle American white Trump voters, Trump’s most vocal young advocates — and the youthful base of American fascist movements going forward — are not the anti-intellectual culture warriors or megachurch moralists of the flyover states. Though the old cultural right still makes up much of Trump’s voting base, the intelligence-fetishizing “rationalists” of the new far right, keyboard warriors who love pedantic argument and rhetorical fallacies are the shock troops of the new fascism. These disgruntled nerds feel victimized by a thwarted meritocracy that has supposedly been torn down by SJWs and affirmative action. Rather than shoot-from-the-hip Christians oppressed by book-loving coastal elites, these nerds see themselves silenced by anti-intellectual politically correct censors, cool kids, and hipsters who fear true rational debate.

#Long Reads #nerd culture

A powerful reminder of the subconscious apathy and ignorance we experience every day.

treedance

Introduction to Bullshit

Via Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, two professors at the University of Washington, whose course, “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data,” launched this Spring:

The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.

We’re sick of it. It’s time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.

Video lectures from the course are available on the class web site.

H/T: OpenCulture.

“Bite of China” is the poor man’s “Chef’s Table.” Not that the production values are low-grade or the cinematography hokey — in fact, it’s chock-full of absurdly sexy shots of temptingly delectable food with visuals and narration that both recall the BBC’s “Planet Earth” — but in that it profiles the little guy, the family selling five-cent buns, not three hundred-dollar dinners. It focuses on the people who make food in rural and urban China, carrying on regional food traditions and biking their products two hours to the nearest town to sell, foraging for rare mushrooms in the high mountains of Tibet, picking lotus roots in knee-deep water. It’s “Planet Earth” for the food-lover, “Chef’s Table” for the proletariat, Jiro Dreams of Sushi for all of China’s vast cuisine.

Why You Should Watch “Bite of China” Instead of “Chef’s Table”, Naomi Tomky

#<333 #food #china #foodporn

transitmaps

GIF: The Evolution of Metro Systems in China, 1990–2020 by Peter Dovak

In the USA, new transit takes time. Whether it’s Environmental Impact Statements that take seven years to write, or tunnel boring machines that take longer than expected to do their work, or lawsuits from people angry that light rail might take away one of their beloved exit ramps, or mayors who want to rip up new streetcar tracks after they’ve been installed… the list goes on.

China, however, is a completely different matter… as this great timeline GIF from Peter Dovak illustrates. Using his lovely “Mini Metro” framework, he’s created a year-by-year breakdown of the growth of mass transit in China… and the end result is certainly breathtaking. Watch out especially from 2010 onwards, when the number of systems (and lines within individual systems) just explodes.

Source: Peter’s website

#china #transit