Reading Goethe's "Italian Journey". He hung out with a Frenchman, "a man of rank, who is well bred, but whose mind cannot go beyond himself and his immediate circle ... he is traveling through Italy for pleasure, but rapidly, in order to be able to say that he has seen it ... it caused me some surprise to think that anyone could ever travel in this temper, without a thought for anything beyond himself, and yet he is, in his way, a polished, sensible and well-connected person."

In Rome he is "oppressed and borne down with numberless phenomena. Wherever one goes and casts a look around, the eye is at once struck with some landscape, forms of every kind and style ... by the evening one is quite weary and exhausted with the day's seeing and admiring."

I'm finally an Aleksi Perala believer:

Visualizing sea level rise

Story time

"Don't you EVER say that to me!"

Hayabusa2NOW

I which I continue to post links to stuff I would have loved around the time I hacked together this blog.

• Sriracha, but a little bit spicier.
• Accessibility for software, but as a continuum instead of a few "accessibility features".
• Me, but with the benefit of having observed a few more cycles of my habitual reactions to things and how those are oftimes unhelpful.
• Now, but maybe paying attention to the meeting I'm in?

Coord

Someday I'm going to need this badly enough to sign up.

I'm going to need this some day. Data on busing homeless people from the Guardian

NASA FTW

Faster way to desktop wallpaper

Android Architecture Components hits 1.0 stable

I work with a great team.

Bowie 😭

Essays

Funny, well, written, it's a good blog. Say this one: Tracking friends and strangers with WhatsApp.

Paper

"Successful IT systems appear to play a major role in the recent increases in industry concentration and in profit margins, moreso [sic] than a general decline in competition."

A coloring book

Online version is beautiful, I assume the printed version is too.

Talk on Youtube

Recently got back into meditation after years thinking I just couldn't hack it. I only recently learned that meditation in many traditions actually follows a concrete series of stages, the later stages of which are apparently inexpressible experiences.

This talk has a very clear outline of the very first stages, and what it means to meditate.

Plus just listen to dude's voice and tell me you're not more relaxed.

Pink Floyd Songs Ranked. Wait, come back, it's funny and surprisingly affecting. Also, it's 19,000 words long, but unlike the subject there's not much wasted space here.

"When you walk up to the counter of your local Starbucks you are not asked, 'Would you like a large cup of our free coffee, or can I interest you in our paid varieties?'"

"Package it such that it shows off its craftsmanship" makes a lot of sense.

• How the tech industry sidelined women
• "this is written for people who are dismayed that Google fired the author of the recent diversity manifesto"
• An evolutionary biologist / psychologist comments on the memo
• Why people are outraged about the memo

Haven't read these yet. Having trouble seeing through the rage I'm feeling about acquaintances on Facebook posting "actually, the memo was thoughtful and well-argued".

Thread starts here:

story by @crosscut misses a few key points.https://t.co/3aPXPmdheI

1. vienna subsidizes social housing. it doesn't tax new housing (IZ)

— mike eliason (@bruteforceblog) June 29, 2017

of course ...

And not to be forgotten are - strong renter culture and social safety net. Part of the whole picture. (Along with transit, etc of course).

— Fernando Medrano 🙈 (@wisemonkeysblog) June 29, 2017

As a friend reminded me last weekend, everything is impossible until it isn't.

also check this, maybe better Vienna summary

Just realized I never posted my set from Lifted.

• Tabula Peutingeriana, a road map of Europe - a copy of a Roman original thought to be based on a map by Agrippa
• Guide to the Tablula Peutingeriana
• Visual guide to the map
• NYC subway map style
• Google Maps directions for the ancient Roman world

Creative Commons licensed images, public domain, etc. I wonder how to confirm that someone actually is the rights holder for an image, and they didn't just upload it to Wikipedia and claim it's public domain. Reverse image search?

• freeimages.com
• compfight - Flickr search
• Wikimedia Commons has a lot of public domain / CC stuff
• You can specify usage rights in Google Images

Well, maybe not cracks but at least evidence of limitations. Lisa Schweitzer

I am not suggesting that zoning is not a binding constraint in some locations. But there are parts of that map where there are big deficits in affordable units in locales where land is basically free. Zoning cannot be a constraint in those locales.

And ...

I’m not convinced by that all the arguments that came my way last night via Twitter that zoning is hamstringing the productivity in urban areas so that people in the countryside are suffering. Cities may boost national productivity numbers, but that is a function of aggregation, not necessarily of strong economic spillovers. It might be that lack of growth in cities ultimately dampens demand for whatever Iowa supplies to cities, but the regional distribution of economic growth over the past four decades suggests that whatever economic spillovers there might be are weak.

But then the Iowans could move to the city if the housing were not so expensive. And that’s true….and yet they have had fewer constraints on migration than people internationally have, and yet there they are, still in Iowa, while I have crazy people telling me we need a wall (even though we already got one) because California and New York are too full of immigrants. People should be able to move to where the jobs are, sure, but I also think David Imbroscio has a point: people should be able to stay home and live a decent life, too.

Although aggregation might be a big deal if you think return on investment in some industries is nonlinear. Say, winner-take-all industries like tech.

Unpaywall extension for Chrome

I know, it was more exciting when it was illegal.

Useful resources and reassuring commentary

Also Medium's design is nice and friendly to those of us whose eyes are giving up in protest after years of looking at too-small text on glowing screens.

I want to die with a dry-erase marker in my hand, drawing a final arc between two poorly-drawn boxes.

Loopy webapp

'An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts'

bahahahaha

Flagging for Android

1. Build an app for an obscure message board
2. ???
3. Beer!

What the fuck just happened today?

Trump news that actually matters (love/hate Twitter but the signal/noise ratio ...)

1880 by Kobayashi Kiyochika

Choice afx track I hadn't heard before

Another, the bit at 0:23 is too rewind-worthy

A proper brain cleaner

One fine day

This is the kind of stuff that's embarrassing to read years later, but right now I just want to give other people the chance to read it.

What makes me the enemy, you may ask? In their mind it’s very simple: if you’re not among the victims, you’re among the culprits. In your case, you’re that modern bogeyman called the liberal urbanite hipster ...

I resemble that remark.

But it took our leaders ten years to figure out they needed to actually go to the slums and to the countryside.

So, twenty years for the Democratic Party, then?

Ironically, one of the architects of the Democratic party's drift away from its base is folksy charmer Bill Clinton. The situations are not completely parallel. There were some engaged Democratic incumbents who lost. And some who faced a strong Republican challenge and held fast. But overall I think he's right that the Democratic party needs to have a stronger connection to voters. The link between the DNC and voters seems to be broken. I would argue that part of the problem is a professional class operating at an excessive level of abstraction but maybe I'd just be projecting.