Fluff and nonsense

[wertfi-penguin]

Maybe the most damming thing about Nolans odyssey is i haven’t seen a single gifset from it

[geekyhistoriansunite]

[dyk-tv-theme-song]

Visit Original Link

Do you recognize this TV theme song? #788

I know this and can name the series

I know this but can't name the series

I might know this

I've never heard this

Remaining time: 6 days 9 hours

[tarradiddle12]

Nostalgia unlocked! I also got to play the secondary game of pausing a few seconds in, once my brain said "I know this one and I'm pretty sure there's about to be a title drop" so I could try to come up with it first.

[theprofessional-amateur]

I love a good Very Specific Resource. Here are the links to my posts about resources carefully crafted to share a specific bit of history (updated as needed)

Streaming Music from Around the World - No algorithms, lots of options, amazing music nerds helping you discover more music.

Professor Shoelace - everything you ever needed to know about shoelaces

Commercial Pattern Archive - over 50,000 scanned sewing patterns dating back to the 1850s

Public Domain Image Archive - thousands of images from various repositories no longer under copyright

Medieval Murder Maps - interactive maps of murder and accidents in medieval London, York, and Oxford

Travel in Times - plan travel routes in England and Wales in various centuries

The Quilt Index - a digital repository of quilts, makers, and their stories

Louis Armstrong Archives - Some highlights from the archives and how to access the full collection from home!

RSN Stitch Bank - hundreds of sewing and embroidery stitches, their uses, their structure, how to make them, and history!

Archive of 80s mixtapes - a whole lot of tapes from the 80s and also tapes of background music from Kmart in the 80s and 90s

Feast Afrique - What started as an exploration and celebration of West African culinary heritage has since expanded to include history, language, culture, and customs of West Africa and the African diaspora.

Letterform Archive - Thousands of high quality images celebrating graphic design, calligraphy, and typography. The beauty of letters!

Historic Menu Collection - Over 17,000 historic menus, 1.3 million historic dishes transcribed. Historic popularity and price range, map it, and more.

Palestinian Embroidery - Digital archives dedicated to the preservation of Palestinian embroidery. Over 1,000+ free patterns

Black Craftseople Digital Archive - enhancing knowledge of Black crafts people (both free and enslaved) and the objects they produced.

Georgian Lady's Magazine Embroidery Patterns - Free embroidery patterns from 1770-1819

The Dutch Textile Trade Project - History and trade of textiles in the 17th and 18th centuries. Fabric types, images, data on trade.

Estonian Knitting - Bog knits! History! Techniques!

[depsidase]

[meanderinginthemarigolds]

Books that have made me a better person

Here is a list of books that have made me a better person by teaching me about the world we live in, empathy, how to live in community, and how we change it for the better. I highly recommend checking out these books:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmer

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Palsm for the Wild Built and Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers

The Zoologist Guide to the Galaxy by April Kershenbaum

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon

Instructions for Traveling West (poems) by Joy Sullivan

Afterworld by Debbie Urbanski

The Three Body Problem (trilogy) by Cixin Liu

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

[starlightxraven]

Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry.

[appalachian-werewolf]

"Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry."

It fucking better.

[mrsjdavis]

Like to charge, reblog to cast?

[newbarktownalumni]

[keplercryptids]

I spent the afternoon arranging our books by size and color (and it’s so satisfying and looks amazing) and my partner came home and stared in shock at the bookcase and then said “i’m a librarian, you can’t do this.”

[keplercryptids]

him: you split up all the song of ice and fire books

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

him: [self-destructs]

[operativesurprise]

You’re a monster

[thetumblrofrassilon]

As a former bookstore employee, this hurts my soul. I mean, sure it looks nice, but how do you find anything?

[keplercryptids]

it has occurred me during this process that apparently not everyone thinks about books by what color they are? like, literally when i’m looking for a book, i picture it in my mind. i have a very…tactile experience with the books i read and idk! i thought everyone did that lol.

my partner was like “how will i find [this book] for instance” and i replied “easy, it’s purple” and he looked at me like i was a witch.

[holdmecloseandfast]

OP your brain is neat and I love you for it you funky little color-coded cupcake. But you’re still a monster.

[krsonmar]

This actually is interesting in terms of information-seeking behavior, which is a thing librarians think about a lot and often actually study (some library jobs require you to publish, and academic librarians, for instance, will often use the students at the college they work at to study how they search for information in order to figure out how to best provide them services).

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s "about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.

And also, OP is a monster.

[tarradiddle12]

This is somewhat hilariously timed for me - I just spent some time rearranging books to eke out a little more shelf space and I care so much about aboutness. Fiction is all by author, then series, that's easy. But do foraging books go with field guides or gardening? Book of myths for children with children's stories or mythology? Beowulf with "books that we've kept since college", history, or poetry?

I sometimes think about reorganizing our substantial collection of graphic novels and I can't think of a way that would be easier to navigate. (Currently it's split first by company, then grouped by title and the titles are grouped loosely by "aboutness" - all the batman books are together, then there's a shelf with series starring major female DC characters, and eventually you get down to grouping by vibes with choices like Green Lantern next to Blue Beetle...

[dyk-tv-theme-song]

Do you recognize this TV theme song? #675

I know this and can name the series

I know this but can't name the series

I might know this

I've never heard this

Voting ended onJul 9

[lauralot89]

Grammar tip: If you're unsure whether to use who or whom, reverse the sentence and see which pronoun you use. For we/she/he/they, use "who." For us/her/him/them, use "whom."

Who is going to the party? They are going to the party.

Whom do you like best? I like them best.

[tarradiddle12]

Yes, technically this advice is correct. But also: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whom#usage-discussion-1

"...whom now has a decidedly formal feel and is not commonly used in ordinary speech and writing, where it can seem awkward and unnatural. In all but the most formal contexts, it is standard to use who instead,"

[kaomojiloser]

i did not get the hype on ryan gosling until they gave him glasses, a cardigan, and anxiety. it's better late than never.

[mckitterick]

[rip-quizilla]

[fullest-circlest]

If you're writing 18th century dialogue, this website lets you search words and phrases to double-check whether they were in use & meant what you intend. It doesn't include every period-accurate use of a word/phrase, but it certainly helped me separate genuine 18th century grammar from the vague tangle of 💬old-fashioned fancy-speak💬 I've internalized from TV and video games.

[my-deer-friend]

Other websites that let you do this:

Johnson's Dictionary Online (thanks @yellowbelliedtoad!) – 1755 and 1773

Green's Dictionary of Slang – 1300s to today

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – 1788

Feraud's Dictionaire critique de la langue française – 1778

[zisurru]

A dictionary of the English and Italian languages by Giuseppe Baretti is a bilingual dictionary from 1790!

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[penny-anna]

hokay so i was curious as a point of contrast to the Guardian list how well tumblr would do on a best 100 SFF novels list. so i went looking for one and google directed me to NPR's top 100 novels list and i'm like aight i'll just use that one keep it simple. but as i scrolled down the list i was like wait there's been no Octavia Butler at all?? which i honestly found quite offensive but i was deep into adding books to my list challenge by that point.

also the version of the list i was looking at only had 97 entries on it; i am unsure if that's a counting error bcos some of the entries are series or if it's just missing 3 items off the NPR list but i opted to rectify both issues by adding 3 Octavia Butler books on the end.

so here is my list challenge of the 97 book long NPR top 100 list but I added Octavia Butler:

Nprs Top 100 Fantasy/Sci-Fi to Read

NPR top 100 books except there were only 97 on the list so I added 3 Octavia Butler's on the end. why in the world the original list had...

How many of the NPR: Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books list have you read?

0-10

11-20

21-30

31-40

41-50

51-60

61-70

71-80

81-90

91-100

Voting ended onMay 23

where a series is listed you can count that as the first book or the whole series at your discretion.

[kyleblackpaw]

Visit Original Link

Well as long as we’re talking about the ancient internet, who remembers this.

[drphaffot]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

… I just realised that some of my mutuals are Too Young to get flashbacks from this. I hate the internet.

[moniquill]

Robot Unicorn Attack is from 2010. The window for ‘ancient’ keeps getting smaller. Anyway, All your base are belong to us.

[firespirited]

I’m a simple person, i see the delightful duo that are flamboyant and nerdy Erasure, and reblog to share the love. Whether you discovered them via a scrubs episode or a flash animation, seek out more. It’s all wierd and wonderful.

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)