Medieval History with Africa at the Center, Europe at the Margins:

A new history of late medieval Ethiopia and its interactions with Europe by historian Verena Krebs does something a little unusual, at least for a professor at a European university: it treats the horn of Africa as the center of civilization that it was, and Europeans as the members of far-flung satellite states that Ethiopians could not help but see them as being.

I don’t see an actual link to the work here, I’ll have to revisit… But the concept looks like an awesome work.

WSJ: ‘After Apple Tightens Tracking Rules, Advertisers Shift Spending Toward Android Devices’:

Patience Haggin, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

After the tracking change took effect in April, many users of Apple’s iOS operating system have received a high volume of prompts from apps asking permission to track them—requests that most have declined. Less than 33% of iOS users opt in to tracking, according to ad-measurement firm Branch Metrics Inc.

As a result, the prices for mobile ads directed at iOS users have fallen, while ad prices have risen for advertisers seeking to target Android users. […]

Digital-ad agency Tinuiti Inc. has seen a similar pattern in its clients’ spending, research director Andy Taylor said. When iOS users opted out of tracking, Tinuiti advertisers couldn’t bid on them, he said. That dearth of iOS users drove up demand—and ad prices—for Android users. About 72.8% of smartphones world-wide use the Android operating system, and about 26.4% use iOS, according to Statcounter.

Tinuiti’s Facebook clients went from year-over-year spend growth of 46% for Android users in May to 64% in June. The clients’ iOS spending saw a corresponding slowdown, from 42% growth in May to 25% in June. Android ad prices are now about 30% higher than ad prices for iOS users, Mr. Taylor said.

If any part of this is surprising, it’s the claim that as many as one-third of iOS users have opted in to tracking.

 ★ 

The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination - The Atlantic:

Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to frequent.

If you care about The Internet, capital I, this is worth a read and think… The systems that underpin everything outside the corporate theme parks of Facebook and Google have stayed alive almost miraculously, but need help…

And yet… The fact that this was posted on The Atlantic may well mean that some visitors will be paywalled from seeing it, one of the great harms that I didn’t see in the essay.

Some Amazing Shots from the Last Decade of Movies:

ILM visual effects artist Todd Vaziri asked his Twitter followers to share their favorite shots from a movie made in the last decade. The replies are a visual feast (and heavy on blockbusters) — here are a few of my favorites.

Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night: Great Art Explained - YouTube:

via - kottke.org

Brickit: Rebuild your Lego:

Using your iPhone camera, scan a pile of legos and the app will give you builds which use those pieces.

via - kottke.org

Covid: Europe risks new wave, WHO warns - BBC News:

Covid-19 infections have risen by 10% in a week in Europe after two months in decline and the risk of a new wave of cases is growing, says the World Health Organization. Regional director Hans Kluge said the risk had been heightened by sluggish vaccine rollouts, new variants and increased social mixing.

When We Have Come to This Place: The Aliens Series as Cosmic Horror | Tor.com:

In cosmic horror, meanwhile, the villains (whom I am going to refer to as The Horrors, to distinguish them from other villains) are built on a vastly different scale along many possible axes. Often, they’re millions or billions of years old; they’re immune to weapons; they’re able to modify the laws of space and time; they have other powers that humans don’t have and can’t acquire; and they’re just generally so over-the-top Every Adjective In The Dictionary that humans often can’t even look at them (or think about them, depending on the story) without losing their grip on reality.

CARROT’s Apple Design Award unboxing - YouTube:

CARROT and her idiot Maker unbox their Apple Design Award.

I think CARROT really captures the heart of what your devices really think about you.

The World’s Most Beautiful Gas Stations:

A selection of great photos from a number of photo-essays.

The United States of Guns:

Like many of you, I read the news of a single person killing at least 8 people in Indianapolis, Indiana yesterday, which comes on the heels of several other mass shootings in 2021. While these are outrageous and horrifying events, they aren’t surprising or shocking in any way in a country where more than 33,000 people die from gun violence each year.

America is a stuck in a Groundhog Day loop of gun violence. We’ll keep waking up, stuck in the same reality of oppression, carnage, and ruined lives until we can figure out how to effect meaningful change. I’ve collected some articles here about America’s dysfunctional relationship with guns, most of which I’ve shared before. Change is possible — there are good reasons to control the ownership of guns and control has a high likelihood of success — but how will our country find the political will to make it happen?

The Ukiyo-e Technique: Traditional Japanese Printmaking - YouTube:

via - kottke.org

The Da Vinci Reborn Series - YouTube:

Get inspired by the genius of Leonardo Da Vinci through the recreation in 3D of some of his most famous inventions.

via - kottke.org

‘Private Choices Have Public Consequences’:

None of these personal choices actually make anything better for the person making them. In the case of the vaccine, those choices have devastating downstream impacts for all the people who glance off the choice-maker as they carve their personal hero’s journeys through the world. None of this matters as much as the idea that the choice is theirs to make.

This is not the original essay, but that was paywalled and the kottke.org summary captures a good selection.

‘Meet Some Of The Last Papyrus Makers In Egypt Keeping A 5,000-Year-Old Craft Alive’:

XXXX Swatchbook - Evelin Kasikov – Art Direction & Graphic Design – London: I so want this.

via - kottke.org with more examples of unconventional book constructions…

All the Sitcom References from WandaVision Explained:

In this extensive video, The Take not only explains the themes and ending of WandaVision (spoilers, obvs) but walks through all of the sitcom tropes, references, and Easter eggs present in the show, from The Dick Van Dyke Show to the beeping Stark toaster commercial to Bewitched to Full House (Olsen sisters!) to The Office. Weirdly, they kinda glide right over perhaps my favorite trope referenced in the show: the recasting of the Pietro character a la Darrin in Bewitched and Aunt Viv in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Period-Specific Cartoon Homages to Wandavision:

Art director Riana McKeith is watching Wandavision, each episode of which takes place in a different time period from the 50s to the present day. As a loving homage, she’s illustrating scenes from the show in the style of cartoons from each time period. Here’s the first episode, which takes place in the 50s a la I Love Lucy or Leave It to Beaver:

Sgt Pepper Photos – Sgt Pepper Photos:

I’ve now set myself the challenge of hunting down all of the original pictures on the sleeve. Any other oddities I discover on the way will also be added here. If you can help or want to contact me go to Twitter and search for @ChrisShawEditor or #SgtPepperPhotos

via - kottke.org

Disney’s Recycled Footage & Animated Doppelgangers:

For animators under time constraints and on a budget, recycling footage was a sensible thing to do and probably wasn’t widely known among the viewing public until extensive at-home viewing, digital editing, and collecting sleuthing via the internet became available.

The American Health Care System Cares Not for Your Health:

If an actual health care professional had to work this hard to get what he needed, what are the chances that someone without his level of knowledge, time, and resources is going to be able to? This whole extractive, regressive system needs to fucking go. (thx, matt)

The Animation That Changed Cinema - YouTube:

via - kottke.org

Watch Two Korean Master Potters at Work:

jwz: Wet Bulb Temperature:

This should scare you. If it doesn’t, you don’t understand it yet and you need to re-read it until you get how bad this will get.

"Wet bulb" temperature is the temperature + relative humidity at which water stops evaporating off a "wet" thermometer bulb. If air is sufficiently humid (saturated w/ water vapor), evaporation will no longer cool the bulb, and it gets continuously hotter. [...] Dry air has essentially infinite capacity to absorb moisture, so, humans can survive in very high temps if the air is dry [...] But, the wet bulb is not about heat, per se. It's about the absorptive capacity of air. A wet bulb temperature in the mid-80s F can, and does, kill humans. Heat waves in the EU & Russia in 2003 and 2010 killed over a hundred thousand people at ~ 82 F. [...]

If sweat won’t evaporate, our body temp rises, continuously. And when body temp hits ~108, we’re dead. For a vulnerable person in wet bulb temp, this takes much less than an hour. Naked. In the shade. […]

So, what does this have to do with you? Well, up until last ~ 40 years, wet bulb temperatures were extremely rare on this planet. But that’s over, now. We’re already seeing multiple wet bulb temperatures per year in multiple locations. By mid-century, parts of the Southeastern U.S will see weeks of wet bulbs every year.

Original thread - twitter.com/mateosfo/…

LeVar Burton’s Quest to Succeed Alex Trebek - The New York Times:

Bear in mind that this might be paywalled when you try for it, but I love LeVar Burton too much to skip over it as I’d normally do with sites that are likely to block content.

If the right person catches the right project at the right time, the culture will always hold that person close. Do it three times, as LeVar Burton has done, and our relationship becomes something even deeper. Through his performances as Kunta Kinte in the landmark 1977 television mini-series “Roots,” as Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which aired in syndication from 1987 to 1994 and is the greatest of all “Star Trek” iterations (I’ll brook no arguments to the contrary) and as host of the beautifully ambling PBS children’s educational series “Reading Rainbow” during its run from 1983 to 2006, Burton established himself as an icon of grace and humanism, an enduring part of the fabric of American culture. Which might explain why, this past spring, there was an organic social media groundswell to get Burton, who is 64, the shot he wanted at replacing another beloved figure, the late Alex Trebek, as host of “Jeopardy!”