drewish


Short order of links   19 October 2014

I haven’t been reading as much stuff over the last week since there’s been a lot going on with the new house. But here’s an unsorted smattering of things I found interesting.

Maybe breast is best should renamed. Something a little wordier but closer to the truth. How about:

If your body is making milk and you are able to breastfeed, and want to, and it works for you, or it doesn’t at first but for whatever reason you want to put in the time and effort to make it work and have the resources and flexibility to do so, and then you still want to do it and are able to, then GREAT, feel free to do so for as long as you feel you can and want to and it works for your life and particulars. Otherwise, formula is great, too. http://jezebel.com/cancer-survivor-still-hassled-about-not-breastfeeding-1647774458

Many have been in a situation similar to the one web developer and interaction designer Sarah Hallacher found herself in last year: going through a painful breakup and noticing how you and your partner’s lives are tangled up in all sorts of ways you’d never realized. http://m.fastcoexist.com/3036536/this-is-the-user-experience-of-a-heartbreak

What it was to be uprooted from your life and dragged to this mysterious, secret city on top of a dead volcano, surrounded by barbed wire fences, and not have your partner be able to tell you what it is he’s working on at the end of the day when he comes home. http://www.vox.com/2014/10/17/6993305/manhattan-project-facts-wgn-manhattan-interview-sam-shaw-season-finale

“There’s a Trader Joe’s in Vancouver, now?”

“No, there’s a Pirate Joe’s in Vancouver.” http://priceonomics.com/the-man-who-smuggles-traders-joes-into-canada/

If the Wisconsin legislature says witches are a problem, shall Wisconsin courts be permitted to conduct witch trials? http://www.vox.com/2014/10/14/6975013/voter-id-law-study-race-white-black-2014-election

The San Francisco Lyon knew in the ’40s and ’50s is, in many ways, gone: Telephone booths and newsboys have vanished, the population has exploded, and the children, whose games he loved to photograph, rarely fill the streets. http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/10/13/fred_lyon_photographs_san_francisco_in_his_book_san_francisco_portrait_of.html

Asset forfeiture policies mean there are two kinds of crimes: crimes that a police department can make money off of busting, and crimes that it can’t. The first category involves drugs, prostitution, fraud, and organized crime — crimes where there’s likely to be cash or lots of property that was bought with ill-gotten gains. The second category — the kinds of crimes that (for cops) don’t pay — include murder and other violent crime. http://www.vox.com/2014/10/14/6969335/civil-asset-forfeiture-what-is-how-work-equitable-sharing-police-seizure

They said, ‘What’s in the box?’

I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.

So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’

I said, ‘gold.’

And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’

‘The King of Sweden.’ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/10/10/nobel-prize-airport-security/

The theory is that, as above, the mechanics of an interstellar drive (the center of the idea) is not important: all that matters is the impact on your characters: they can get to other planets in a few months, and, oh yeah, it gives them hallucinations about past lives. Or, more radically: the physics of TV transmission is the center of an idea; on the edges of it we find people turning into couch potatoes because they no longer have to leave home for entertainment. Or, more bluntly: we don’t need info dump at all. We just need a clear picture of how people’s lives have been affected by their background. http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/

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