Link dump 2
#Things I have been reading recently.
Illustrated edition of Margaret Cavendish, the Blazing-world, 1666 (also as a thread on Bluesky)
The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World is commonly considered a very early SF novel. It has strong elements of the fantastical as well as science and engages with and criticizes science. It is also unique with centering on women characters.
Sydney apartment layouts don’t suit families, study suggests
“Generally, developers focus more on the number of bedrooms and location than on architectural design or room layout,” says Prof. Oldfield. “They prefer generic, standardised apartment layouts that meet the minimum regulations because they’re cheaper to make and easier to sell, but that is fundamentally mismatched with what families want.”
Voters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, create a local clean energy utility
The most radical dimension of the plan is to use the city’s utility franchise rights to build wires between properties, so that they can share excess solar power locally. Most everywhere in the country, customer-led upgrades have to stay on the customer side of the utility meter; crossing that boundary to sell power to a neighbor violates the utility’s legally enforced monopoly. This stands in the way of visions for interconnected neighborhoods generating and selling power with each other based on who needs it at a given moment.
Spirit Airlines CEO Got A $3.8 Million Bonus A Week Before Its Bankruptcy
Is the bankruptcy actually bad? Sure shareholders will get wiped out. Guess what? GOOD. They deserve it. They opted for an illegal deal instead of a legal one. Plus Spirit will keep flying as a competitive airline, at least for now. This particular kind of bankruptcy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means you reorganize the creditor relationships but keep the entity as a going concern.
I’ve Stopped Using Box Plots. Should You?
These alternatives to box plots can be used to communicate a wide variety of useful insights, don’t require the audience to understand complex concepts like quartiles, and show distribution shapes clearly (i.e., they don’t make everything look bell shaped). More to the point, they make more visual sense than box plots, so audiences grasp them in seconds instead of minutes, and they’re less prone to misinterpretation. Ultimately, this means that using these chart types instead of box plots substantially improves the odds that your audience will understand and act on your distribution-based insights.
The decline of disruptive science and technology
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein prior accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, “stand on the shoulders of giants”. Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields of science and technology.
The Social Dynamics of Programming Together in Dynamicland
Virginia has no prior programming experience but has started combining code she finds around the space into her own creations. Here’s part of a birthday surprise she left me over winter break. Even our visiting ethnographer Goetz created a great spatial music game in Dynamicland (also no prior programming experience). Like learning French by going to France, people in Dynamicland learn programming through immersion.
What the Myth of the Coffee Cup Mass Gets Wrong - and Why It Matters
What Day learned from the “Coffee Cup Mass” was that the ceramic cup from which the homeless Christ sips her morning coffee is no less holy and no more profane than the gold chalice that holds Christ’s blood in the form of wine at the Mass: “There Christ is with the poor, the suffering, even in the cup we share together, in the bread we eat.”
To Hell With Good Intentions, Silicon Valley Edition
Part of the problem in the case of these Americans in Mexico is that they could not understand the language. But that is only part of the problem. The more significant issue is a deeper incapacity to listen to others not because you do not speak the language but because you have already decided that you know what is best for them. Then, convinced of your wisdom and goodness, you are prepared to impose your will on the other.
Ephemerality in User Interfaces
The constraints of hypermedia, and the desktop form factor, created empowering software. The keyboard and mouse allow high-bandwidth, high-frequency interaction. They permit creation. Users were expected to be “computer literate”, to learn to operate the computer before a specific software program. Desktops are interactive. Phones are cramped, bad at multitasking, impossible to type on. Nothing is expected of mobile users. Phones can only be interpassive.