Some 360 video is better than others....
Almost at peak Wisteria
Westonbirt Arboretum
Arb Show 2018 is very good. But not as good as the entire rest of the arboretum!
Jim's Ukulele Songbook
Goodness gracious me, Jim Carey has updated his 2000+ song songbook for ukulele. You can get it from his amazing website here in pdf form.
(Though if you are online it is worth looking at them on his website because you can transpose any song into any key, change the chord diagrams if you are left-handed, change what instrument you are using etc. It’s a real piece of work.)
Facebook's T&C Reading Level is College-Age
I thought I'd run a reading-age checker over Facebook's Terms. I did not include the onerous "other terms and policies" because they are only available as separate documents. (It is curiously tricky to just get all the terms you sign up to in one place.)
The Flesch Reading Ease level is 39.6. This is the middle of the "College Age" range (30-50).
It seems to me that any Terms document should be written at the reading-age of the youngest people you allow to create accounts. Facebook's is currently thirteen. (I am assuming of course that all people over college age have a reading level that reflects that. They don't.)
Fingle Bridge
How to Fight Climate Change: Figure Out Who's to Blame, and Sue Them
There is a (miserable but) brilliant article in Wired today.
“In a climate “tutorial” that was part of the California cities’ lawsuit in March, Chevron’s attorney Ted Boutrous didn’t attempt to deny a single thing about the physics and chemistry of climate change, or even that human activity caused it. He just said it didn’t make sense to blame oil companies. Burning hydrocarbons doesn’t kill people; people burning hydrocarbons kills people.”
“We don’t know what will happen, but no one thought tobacco litigation would succeed, and that completely changed public health policy”
““The future is here,” Herring says. It’s a future of terrifying disasters—and a future where scientists know more about the underpinnings and mechanics of those disasters. But maybe most importantly, it’s a future where you can attribute a cause. It’s a future where you can ascribe fault.
And that means you can sue the people responsible.”
What was I thinking?
WAS I thinking?!
How to Strike
Wow - this is absolutely the way to do it...
Okayama buses strike by continuing to run and refusing to take anyone’s money
“In cases such as this, management may use the labor stoppage against the drivers, appealing to the public that they are putting their own needs before the community’s. So to show that isn’t the case, Ryobi drivers are continuing to clock in, but without performing the part of their job that requires them to accept payment during certain times. In other words, free bus rides for all!”
Read the whole article in Japan Today (02/05/18)
Who Gives a Crap?
“We started Who Gives A Crap when we learnt that 2.3 billion people across the world don’t have access to a toilet. That’s roughly 40% of the global population and means that around 289,000 children under five die every year from diarrhoeal diseases caused by poor water and sanitation. That’s almost 800 children per day, or one child every two minutes.”
Read the rest here.
Kevin B Parry
Kevin B Parry is an absolute genius. I first saw him (unwittingly) in this tremendous video of walking styles, all of which he completely nails, and which is over six minutes that you will certainly gawp at to the end and wonder where the time went.
Then it turns out he's all-over talented, as this
and this
demonstrates.
Oh, and this.
We love you Simone
RSS Readers are Due for a Comeback
It does seem we've all forgotten that you can curate your OWN news/social feeds.
“THE MODERN WEB contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there’s no panacea for what ails this internet we’ve built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that’s been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It’s time to head back to RSS.”
Swan Songs
NPR's All Songs Considered have compiled a list of songs that their listeners would like at their funerals and, knowing that, listening to it is really quite touching. You can do that on this Spotify Playlist. Or read about it here.
Rainbow Connection... I mean... You can't go wrong!
Bad Lipreading does Zuckerberg
This is tremendous.
Waitrose and GDPR
The irony of receiving an email from Waitrose advising me of their GDPR Privacy Notice despite me repeatedly asking to be removed from their mailing list has not gone unnoticed.
Chroma Keying Fun
Nothing especially interesting to show for it yet... But I'm having fun working out green-screen/chroma-keying...!
Tiny Desk Concerts
NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts are the best and most fertile part of the web for music you may not have heard of and will probably be glad you discovered. This is a playlist that I'm adding my favourites to.
Another rescue
Our cat is horrible.
Deaf profile in cinema
The Shape of Water is great. I watched it last night and despite (because of?) being a cross between Amelie and Bioshock, it's utterly glorious. Off the back of that though I found this article in the LA Review of Books that does a good job of discussing Deaf Gain and cultural appropriation.
“While it is exciting to see these films, among others, trying to show us Deafness as a part of diversity and as something that is a “gain” rather than a loss, we won’t fully get the Deaf experience on screen until writers, directors, and actors are actually Deaf people themselves. Right now we have movies about Deafness for hearing people. We can hope for a future with many Deaf and disabled stars, but till that time, we must remain content to be “people of the eye” on rare occasions and get our gains when and where we can.”