Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media

Economy & Finance

Wash... [More] by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

I suppose it should come as no surprise that I’ve been playing this with Kath. As long-time Crossword (even occasionally cryptic crosswords) and Spelling Bee fans, Wordle fits right in. And it takes only a couple of minutes per day.

In Wordle, you have to guess a 5-letter word. All guesses must be real words. The puzzle indicates letters that are in the right position with a green background and letters that are in the solution, but in the wrong position with a yellow background. It’s kind of... [More]

With enough time having passed since it aired, I would have believed you had you said that this real commercial was an SNL spoof from the 70s.

Shlitz Malt Liquor with Wilson Pickett (YouTube)

It was great enough before before the bull showed up and Pickett elevated his egg-shaped lounger up out of reach.

If you want to test or hone your CSS skills, check out the CSS Speedrun. It lets you warm up with a relatively easy “intro”, then takes you through ten levels. Generally, each level tests a different feature of CSS (usually a specific selector). The final question (pictured) makes you combine what you’ve learned or used from other levels.

The image below is from my second time through. The first time through I needed about nine minutes; the next morning, I got through much more quickly. I... [More]

I’ve known about nth-child(n) for a long time. It selects the nth child from a structure if that child happens to match the given tag. You can always select the nth child by omitting the tag.

For example, div :nth-child(2) (two selectors) will match the second child of any div, regardless of type. However, div span:nth-child(2) will only match if the second child is also a span.

You cannot write a selector that says “select the second span” using nth-child. That’s where nth-of-type(n) comes... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Andy Weir manages to comes up with consistently interesting science-fiction ideas and entertaining yarns (even if it’s rather obvious in some places where he’s almost writing a screenplay). I really wish he would find a co-author to help him smooth out some of the more YA aspects of his writing. Still, this was a fun book to read—after the first third.

As with The Martian, it took me about that long to either get used to the writing style or for Weir to settle in and... [More]

I wanted to watch a Swiss TV show that broadcast last Tuesday. I have a wealth of choices available to me.

UPC media box?

I have a “media box” from UPC, but it’s not connected because it draws too much power, even in standby mode. We (almost) never need its features, so we leave it off almost all the time. Maybe during the Olympics, we’ll hook it back up. We’ll see.

Anyway, I didn’t want to mess about with hooking up the media box—It’s not that difficult; I’d just have to connect the cable... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

It’s January 6th, so half of the U.S. media has its panties in a bunch again about the B&E that happened a year ago at the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. It’s not just the usual suspects either—everyone is getting in on the hyperbole. For example, the article What Do You Call a Failed Insurrection? PRACTICE by Greg Palast is by a great investigative journalist. He’s done great work. He’s still rehashing and republishing details that were disavowed nearly a year ago.

“Forget the whack-jobs who invaded... [More]”

The article China: Xi’an residents in lockdown trade goods for food amid shortage by Robin Brant (BBC) suggests that the BBC’s standards are perhaps not what they used to be. I read through the article, but it contains nothing but unsourced conjecture and anecdotes. There’s “Social posts show”, “numerous complaints on social media”, and “One video showed a resident appearing to […]”

It’s not that I don’t believe that this is happening to at least some degree. Of course not. In a city of 13 million, anything and... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is one of the earliest stories in the entire Expanse universe. It takes place before even Leviathan Wakes. This is Amos Burton’s origin story. It tells the story of how he started as a young thug named Timmy, in the employ of Baltimore crime lord Amos Burton. He ends up running protection for an identity-grifter named Erich who works for Burton. Timmy lives with Lydia, an older woman who rescued him after his mother had died. She also had worked for Amos Burton, as a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the first book of the Expanse series. The crew of the ice-hauler Canterbury includes Earther XO Jim Holden, Belter Chief Engineer Naomi Nagata, Martian Navy pilot Alex Kamal, and Earther engineer Amos Burton. While they are on an excursion to investigate a distress call from the ship Scopuli, a stealth ship appears and destroys the Canterbury.

Holden establishes his reputation by broadcasting his suspicions of it having been a Martian attack to the whole solar... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is one of the earliest stories in the entire Expanse universe. It takes place before even Leviathan Wakes. This is Fred Johnson’s origin story. It tells the story of how he started as an Earth marine and how he came to be known as the eponymous butcher.

The present-day Fred Johnson has been taken captive by Anderson Dawes, then-leader of the OPA. But Fred Johnson hasn’t been captured because he’s a danger to the OPA. Quite the contrary: Johnson has become a drunk and... [More]

Hot takes are not a good thing for online discourse. They’re occasionally funny, but they tend to kill thought as people start to one-up each other with more hot takes. Or, even worse, “takedowns” of what were obviously meant as hot takes.

Is Anything on the Internet Real? by minutephysics (YouTube)

Listen first. Or read. Ingest.

Pause to think about what you’ve just read or heard. Try to sort out where it might go in your existing knowledge. Does it fit? No? Why not?

Try to imagine why the other person might have written or communicated the thought... [More]

Are people who say “this year sucked” necessarily spoiled and blind to their own privilege? Or are they extending their moral obligation to mean that, even though they personally benefitted, “this year sucked”—and that things will continue to suck—for a lot of other people?

The article ‘Wow, What A Terrible Year!’ Say People Living At The Absolute Peak Of Human Civilization (Babylon Bee) is intended as satire, but as with all satire, there is supposed to be an underlying truth to it. That’s what... [More]

1. Big Mouth S05 (2021) — 7/10
2. Michael Che: Shame the Devil (2021) — 8/10
3. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) — 8/10
4. Dune (1984) — 8/10
5. K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) — 8/10
6. Charité intensiv: Station 43 (2021) — 8/10
7. F is for Family (2021) — 8/10
8. Office Christmas Party (2016) — 8/10
9. Shazam! (2019) — 8/10
10. Taken (2008) — 7/10
11. Don’t Look Up! (2021) — 10/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve... [More]

Hoo-boy, no wonder this app has a two-out-of-five-star rating on the App Store. It’s absolutely terrible.

This is one of the first pages I saw:

Cut-off options

I had used my Swiss ID card as my proof of identity during the purchase. Now, I was supposed to actually send a photo of it to UPC so that they could verify it.[1] Unfortunately, I couldn’t see my option in this list. I was not encouraged that the second button was labeled “Passp”. I clicked that first, thinking that maybe the app just thought that all... [More]

Hot off the presses of the conspiracy-theory pressure-cooker is the idea that the new movie Don’t Look Up—which is about a world that ignores the dire warnings of scientists about an incoming comet—is “predictive programming”. I suppose that means that it’s not just entertainment, but material intended to train people into acquiescence when something does arrive? Like aliens? The article Looks like that global UFO “attack” may be impending after all by Mark Crispin Miller (News from Underground) includes this quote from a reader,

“I... [More]”

I recently read through the a11y myths. They’re quite interesting and should be required reading for managers running projects that develop web sites.

From it, I learned about the evils of overlays (see the Overlay Fact Sheet) and that there are really good resources out there, like Understanding Conformance (W3C) with WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).

“All WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria are written as testable criteria for objectively determining if content satisfies them. Testing the... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Programming... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

I hadn’t ever really thought about it because I don’t use the API very much, but it turns out that the border-radius property is not only a shorthand for setting all four corners at once, but also sets the horizontal and vertical lengths simultaneously. To set them individually, use a / between two values.

The corner radii are then calculated using ellipses as shown in the following visualization,

Border-Radius with ellipses

The article CSS Border-Radius Can Do That? by Nils Binder on October 9, 2018 (9 elements) has many more examples. It also introduces a Fancy-Border-Radius... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This novel felt a bit like others I’ve read about tenured professors in America, like Roth’s The Dying Animal. It’s not got much of a plot to speak of. Instead, it’s more a set of character studies of Jack Gladney and his odd family: Babette (his third wife, I believe) and a mix of his and her children, Heinrich, Denise, Steffie, and Wilder. There are other children and their mothers (Jack’s exes) scattered around the country, who make rare appearances. Jack teaches Hitler... [More]

I recently stumbled across a recommendation on Reddit from /u/schoschi1337 for reading articles that are behind paywalls (without paying for the subscription, of course). I recommend paying for the content that you read online. I pay for a lot of stuff I read online.

Paying for content honestly the only way to combat low-quality, high-engagement tripe that is otherwise the lowest common denominator of 95% of the Internet, where everyone’s hustling for the increasingly fragmented and... [More]

I dunno, Dilbert has always been dark, but I thought these three recent cartoons were even more cynical than usual.

Dilbert: Burrow Into A Team (14.12.2021)

Dilbert: Guy With No Talents (15.12.2021)

Dilbert: Lower The Quality (17.12.2021)

I feel like they come at it from opposite angles, but Dilbert and Existential Comics have a lot of overlap in critiquing the existing system.

A recent one about anarchism was great.

Existential Comics: Anarchy on the Street

I think Austin Bragg and Andrew Heaton (of Reason Magazine) make pretty funny videos.[1] Their latest is about the recent the congressional cryptocurrency hearings. These are a good idea—you can’t just hand your economy over to a world of unregulated scamming without asking a few questions[2]—but some of the people seemed…unprepared, to be charitable.

What Should Have Happened at the Cryptocurrency Hearings by ReasonTV (YouTube)

A not insignificant part of the community doesn’t want the COVID vaccine. So, they’re coming up with their own versions. I heard from one friend that he’s taking dandelion extract. He’s convinced it will help fend off COVID, so that means he thinks he’s developed a partial vaccine, at least. The picture below comes from an anti-vaxx blogger I follow,[1]

Nyquil: just as good as the vaccine

The guy posted it without comment, other than to title it “A safe alternative to the “vaccine”“, so I have no idea whether he’s just kidding... [More]