In her new book “Nuts and Bolts Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way),” structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines the seven of most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump.
— Nuts and Bolts [99% Invisible]
Born into extreme poverty, [Cary] Grant was told as a child his mother had died. She had actually been placed in a psychiatric institution. It was the start of a life of repression and extraordinary reinvention.
— The Trauma of Cary Grant: How He Thrived After a Terrible Childhood - As Told by His Daughter. (The Guardian / Emma Brooks)
Grant was determined to give his only child, a daughter, born when he was 62, the good upbringing he never had. So he walked away from his film career to devote the rest of his life to raising her. That daughter, Emily Grant, is now an executive producer on a four-part TV series about her father’s life.
Want to read: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚Good interview with Hoffs, formerly of The Bangles, on Debbie Millman’s podcast. Hoffs is surprisingly smart. She’s written a novel and it sounds good.
Finished reading: Persian Fire by Tom Holland 📚 Fascinating story, a non-fiction history of the Persian-Greek war 2500 years ago. But a challenging read. The author uses ornate sentences that I had to read two or three times to get the gist of. I’ve read other Holland history books and enjoyed them, and did not find them quite so difficult.
Yesterday at the supermarket, I saw a man with a dog. The dog wasn’t wearing a service dog vest. It was just a dog, but inside the supermarket. It looked like a chocolate lab, but with a wiry tail.
I happened to be buying treats for Minnie at the dog treats shelf at the moment I saw the dog. The supermarket dog sniffed the shelves with great interest, then turned away.
Later, I saw a teen-age girl with an e-bike in the supermarket. She wasn’t riding it in the supermarket. She was just pushing it. Still, it was odd.
After that, I decided we were just bringing any dang thing we wanted into the supermarket, so I brought in the car and drove it up and down the aisles rather than walking, throwing my purchases from the shelves over my shoulder onto the back seat. I knocked a lot of things over, but it was otherwise very convenient.
I deleted Meta Threads from my phone. I may come back to the service, but I’m not feeling urgency, and I don’t like app’s privacy policies.
Threads grabs a great deal of user information, including text messages.
Text messages?! Are you kidding?!
I’ve got Facebook on my phone. That’s bad enough.
Has anybody found a news alerts service for the phone that only alerts you for world-changing news? All the news alert services I’ve tried are too noisy.
I want an alert if Biden or Trump drops dead, or if Ukraine boils over into World War III. I don’t need an alert to let me know somebody got murdered 15 miles away, or the Walmart killer got sentenced or—true alert I got from CNN yesterday—how to not get bedbugs from hotel beds.
Basically, I only want to get a news alert once every few months. All the news alerts I’ve subscribed to send alerts every few hours.
I fear the service I’m looking for may not exist.
Dolly Parton does not want to be an AI hologram, thank you very much: ‘I don’t want to leave my soul here on Earth’ (Boing Boing / Rusty Blazenhoff)
Jo Walton writes about Heinlein’s Worst Novel. I 98% agree.
My favorite Heinleins are his early books, particularly “Citizen of the Galaxy.”
I loved “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” and “Starship Troopers,” but I’d love them even more without the lectures.
I loved “Stranger in a Strange Land” when I was 13 years old, but it ages badly.
And “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” are just plain bad.
I often think about the failed US Heinlein describes in “I Will Fear No Evil” and “Friday.”
How actors are losing their voices to AI.. Actors who signed away their voice rights many years ago are now competing for work with AI versions of themselves, and hearing their own voices used in scams. (Madhumita Murgia / FT)
In a sign of what’s to come for many white-collar workers, artificial intelligence is eating the software industry, as companies turn to generative AI tools to save money on programmers.
Some 70% of coders are already using or plan to use AI in their work, with one-third saying the primary reason they do so is because it makes them more productive, according to survey by Stack Overflow.
What Will AI Do to Your Job? Take a Look at What It’s Already Doing to Coders. By Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal.
How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided With Reality. “The superstar quarterback is among the celebrities dealing with the fallout from the crypto crash. Others, like Taylor Swift, escaped.” (The New York Times / Erin Griffith and David Yaffe-Bellany).
Seems like Brady and other celebrities were both victimizers and victims, as is so often the case with people in pyramid schemes at any level. They’re not entirely guilty but they’re not innocent victims either.
And they’re all still rich. Maybe they lost a few millions or tens of millions, but they can afford it.
I was and am disappointed to see celebrities I liked and respected, like Matt Damon and Larry David, get caught up in this grift. I thought they had more integrity.
I remember when I did not have to spend quite so much of my life charging things and making sure that the things are charged
Josh Withers shares frustration with stagnation in the ebook market.
I agree, and blame the Amazon monopoly. That monopoly is created and maintained by laws, not markets.
Amazon needs to be required to allow competing products to read its ebook format. Problem solved.
Right now, that kind of compatiblity is outright illegal.
Threads: A mall inside the store inside the mall
I signed up for Threads. Unenthusiastically. I want to use fewer social media platforms, and concentrate my focus, rather than doing more.
Hopefully, Threads will follow through and become a full citizen of ActivityPub, and also connect to the blue Facebook platform. That will make my social media activity simpler.
Even better: Everybody needs to wake up and realize that we don’t need a platform to serve as the internet town square. The internet already is the town square.
About 7-10 years ago, JC Penny announced a bold new initiative to start opening independent shops within its stores. At first I thought that was brilliant, and then I said, “Wait a second—you want to open a mall inside the store inside the mall? How’s that going to work?”
I’m @mitchwagner on Threads. So far, my entire Threads activity consists of a single photo of the dog.