2019-01-18T18:31:14+01:00
Sad to learn that the American poet Mary Oliver has passed away. I always enjoy her keen obervational poems that show her high attentiveness to the natural world. Read some of her poetry on the Poetry Foundation.
2019-01-18T12:48:59+01:00
The photography project "Wasteland" by Kadir van Lohuizen contains some very powerful images of large cities and how they manage their waste. I think that the waste managment and recycling process has been going on too much in the background, and the only way out is to reduce our trash. See also this article in the Financial Times on why the recycling system became more visible. In the word of Kadir: “If the world is not prepared to think about waste reduction and actually treat waste as a resource, next generations will drown in their own waste.”
2019-01-17T12:46:17+01:00
This is an interesting use of a so-called Sankey diagram (a type of flow chart) to visualise spelling mistakes, by Collin Morris.
Misspellings of ‘Gyllenhaal’ by Colin Morris
2019-01-16T11:44:10+01:00
The following stop motion animation movie “In a Nutshell” is absolutely mesmerising. It tries to capture the world in a nutshell: “From a seed to war, from meat to love, from indifference to apocalypse”.
2019-01-15T16:07:36+01:00
In response to the protests of the gillets-jaunes the President Emmanuel Macron has started a “grand débat national” to discuss the grievances. In an opinion piece for AOC-media, Bruno Latour discusses how for the general public describing their problems may difficult however as we are between different visions for civilisation:
2019-01-15T15:17:36+01:00
The following really well video from the German channel Kurzgesagt provides a very balanced view, using lots of sources, to answer if organic vegetables and fruits are really better. The overall recommendation that I can extract from their message would simple and seems quite logical: eat more fruits and veggies that are produced locally and in season.
2019-01-15T14:45:24+01:00
As an author from Wired tried to sell his personal data and found out it isn’t worth much, some economists made the following valid remark.
Yet data can be worth a good deal in the aggregate — just ask some of the major tech companies. The economics here are a bit like the economics of voting. If it were legal, and you tried to sell your vote and your vote alone, you might not get much more than 0.3 cents. That vote is unlikely to prove decisive. Yet average and marginal value do not coincide. If someone could buy a whole block of votes, which in turn could swing an election, the price could be much higher.
2019-01-14T14:27:20+01:00
An interesting interview with Professor Mark Blyth on the “crisis of globalisation”. His view on commodification of our personal data seems a bit unsophisticated though: how would we actually be able to put a price on the use of our data, and wouldn’t this still leave all the power with the big companies to buy them off from us? But I agree that there is a general problem in governance.
2019-01-14T13:41:26+01:00
An opnion piece on The New York Times discusses why deleting your Facebook account may not be an effective way to drive the company to change and may cause harm by “recasting a political issue as a willpower issue”.
2019-01-13T14:51:10+01:00
The New Yorker writes on the doomsday preparation strategies of the super rich in America, preparing for survival and escape from the society they helped create.
Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.