Inside the Little Plastic Castle

20th Century Audio SF

The "Mindwebs" series of 30-minute science fiction and fantasy short works brings back happy memories. Michael Hanson's voice is liquid chocolate velvet and the production values are very high (though the table-of-contents leans heavily pale male). I heard some of these live on WERN/WHA, which has a good claim to be the oldest public radio station in the USA.

It’s hosted at the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410, where I’ve had no luck using their streaming player but the downloads are fine.

Accessible Pedestrian Call Buttons

Double treat: Urban infrastructure and assistive technology! Thanks to LinusBoman, who explores the tactile and auditory interface for pedestrian signals in Sweden. Unfortunately, he provides no image descriptions to the many photos and slides in his presentation:

( stream here )

Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/330teb6dst0

audio only "lyric video" — large captions on screen, but no explicit image descriptions

I just today realized that Boman worked on my favorite, default font, Atkinson Hyperlegible. He’s a type geek, choral singer, and designer of classy-looking books and cocktails under the brandname Calligraphuck. His home page is (of course) at TimesNewBoman.

1. MyGuy picked up some books at my local branch, where a librarian's T-shirt proclaimed “bookmarks are for quitters“
2. Found a light-hearted, short podcast called "What the Hell is my Job?!". Each episode is two people anonymously describing their job (with lovely sound design, although I could do without the constant music bed). The host is Irish and queer and so far the contributors are all from the UK. There are transcripts on their site under each episode. So far I’ve learned about band managing, freelance percussionists, a Task Rabbit rabbit, and a union dogsbody. They’re soliciting more unusual job-havers: https://whatthehellismyjob.com
3. Learned about What3Words, a global wayfinding app that’s divided the world into 3 metre squares and gave each square a unique combination of three words. It’s the easiest way to find and share exact locations. I appreciate that 3m is close enough to see or hear someone — it’s human scale navigation. I'm delighted they decided to signal a location with three leading back forward slashes, a design that nicely rhymes with three syllables as well as the RL file location. Sadly doesn't (yet) work with Google or Apple Maps, but it is supported by a bunch of navigation apps aimed at blind travelers as well as free Apple and Android apps.
4. Strolling in the dog park yesterday, I encountered ocean waves in Wisconsin at ///riders.loft.scout. The grass is left long by Wingra Creek: in the past three months it’s been hammered by wet snow, internally mauled by -40° temps, and then flattened by breezes. The remnants of last month’s snow are reverse whitecaps on the tattered brown creek side. ( click for pic )

Any joy in your days?

ETA: 19 Feb corrected w3w's indicator.

We've had a warm fall so far -- no frost yet! MyGuy and I live on the edge, so we didn't turn on our heat until last night (39°F/4°C). Which led me to wonder about your relationship to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.

( that's why we have polls! )

In Uncanny Magazine, Sid Jain explores how Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant Masquerade trilogy helped him understand how British imperial rule colonized his thinking and experience as a first-generation American:

Shame washes over a colonized culture in layers: first the shame Indian students were made to feel towards their vernacular in the 19th century, then the shame for their poor English. Finally, the shame we force upon ourselves after becoming too Anglicized. Like with the worst of all colonial exercises: it’s not what it does to you that you should fear, but what it convinces you to do to yourself.

[… snip …]

Shame is unhelpful. Learning is helpful. What I do with the education and the voice it gave me matters. This is part of what I find ironic about the genesis of this essay. Dickinson, while not writing from a colonized perspective, still told this powerful story from an accurate anti-colonial perspective, managing to get the conflicted feelings of a post-colonial youth so right. I imagine it took a lot of learning, curiosity, and humility.

https://uncannymagazine.com/article/seduced-by-the-rulers-gaze-an-indian-perspective-on-seth-dickinsons-masquerade/

When I was a kid I played with my Kenner Girder & Panel building set, delighting in the mysteries of cantilevers. Taking it apart and putting it together again was very gratifying. I was amazed today to see a full-size girder & panel set on the way to the library.

Lustron homes were mass-produced, all steel with baked-on porcelain finish inside and out. Designed to meet the post-World-War-II demand for housing (financed by the racist G.I. bill), they arrived in a truck and could be erected in a week.

( Before )

( Right now )

Of the 2500 prefab houses made before the company went bankrupt, 16 were in Madison, most in neighborhoods near my house. The owner of the nearest had no success renting it, and sought a demolition permit. The city asked that he take the house apart and make it available to other Lustron owners. and that’s why there’s a small-house construction set on Chatham Terrace.

Use http://www.lustronlocator.com to see if there’s one near you.

Thanks to GuyZero at MetaFilter, here's a grand visual toy. You too can while away a couple hours clicking and giggling.

Need a safety sign? August 18, 2020

Need an ANSI Z535-compliant safety sign? Sure you do. Here's a convenient sign generator in case you need to let people know that something is dangerous.

https://www.metafilter.com/188296/Need-a-safety-sign

At MeFi you’ll find more than 200 hundred meme attempts. The MeFi posts are the punchlines — you click through to see the image.

Here’s mandolin_orange's contribution. The post contains exactly the words "BUCKLE UP." This links to a generated Warning! sign with icon of closing seat belt + icon of person trapped under wheeled machine with text reading "Buckle up. I'm a fucking awful driver."

( click for pic )

Damon Burke, of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, made this tool to generate safety signs for labs, machine shops, and the insides of our overtaxed brains. To go directly to the generator, visit https://observatory.db.erau.edu/generators/signs/. Scroll down to "New to safety signs" for instructions.

I got a kick when I saw this "maintain 6 feet social distance" sign -- a wheelchair user is among the six folks sharing the path. Thank you to Public Health Madison & Dane County (Wisconsin) for inclusive design. It was a lovely trip on the Lower Yahara River trail, a ten-foot wide asphalt and boardwalk path that wanders through a marsh (remediated landfill) and then parallels a railroad line between two of our lakes.

( sign photo )

( full description in the cut )

One of the good things that happens every week is a pal (massively offline) and I go for 20 - 40 minute excursions: she walks and I use my powerchair. Walking together supports a casual and low-key conversation.

But that's not possible now: neither the sidewalks nor even the bike path that's near my door are wide enough for us to maintain true 6ft/2m separation.

She's just invented: parallel-separated-walk-and-talk PSWAT pronounced "peeswat."

We have a phone date this evening: she's riding her indoor bike and I'm walking my treadmill.

I'll let you know how it goes.

In eight 50-minute episodes, the CONTAINERS podcast producer Alexis Madrigal explores how global transport changed from humans putting individual things in ships and airplanes to putting things into train-car size containers, which are loaded via huge cranes onto huge boats. Containerization is why cheaply-made goods have flooded the world. The series examines how this change, started almost by accident during the Vietnam war, has affected billions of people in small and large ways. The series is sponsored by Flexport, who are in the container business—and it is definitely not a puff piece.

I’m pleased that Madrigal has posted transcripts at medium.com/containers and you can listen from there or from CONTAINERS’ audio on Soundcloud

Containerization is why my supermarket stocks frozen, peeled and boiled Vietnamese soybeans, even though I live in Wisconsin, a soybean producing state. Alexis Madrigal (a writer for The Atlantic) asks what happens to the dock workers and the handful of sailors who move these huge container ships around the globe. He tells how Oakland residents fought back against the concentration of diesel fumes from the new container ports where thousands of trucks idle daily.

Episode 6 begins:

This is a story about heroes in West Oakland like Margaret Gordon. This is a story about people who stood up and said, “No, not on my watch.” This is not a story about the health department. And this is not a story even about the port. This is a story about people coming together to fight for justice. And they won. And they won big. And they won in a way that had influence on what’s happening in ports all over this country. And in fact ports all around the world. I think those are the true heroes, the Margaret Gordons … They drove this change and they deserve the credit.

The series digs in to the origins and beginnings of containerized shipping.

For a beautiful and informative demonstration of containerized shipping 2012, visit ShipMap.org. There’s an autoplay audio overview, and an animated interactive map showing all the container ships on the planet and what they’re carrying.

( ABQ to Amarillo, TX )

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Final Thoughts

It was nifty to visit Albuquerque, but we sure wouldn’t want to live there.

The hellscape curb ramps mean that it’s a very car-dependent city. The bus service is at Madison’s level although it’s four times the population. It’s economically depressed and it makes us depressed. Perhaps it's all the commercial facilities for rent (at least half). The sun is abundant, and the people we encountered were very friendly.

Interstate highways are about getting somewhere else. Along our journey, drivers were targeted by the immediate needs–toilets, food, gas, sleeping–and relentless attempts to sell the past. Antiques, vintage, flea markets. It’s oh-so-American to have a tourist attraction based on the fact that the road used to go there: that is to say “historic route 66,“ which paralleled our route. Every town that still maintained a billboard advertised a route-66 related museum, whether it was automobiles or diner signs or those lighters we're going to investigate real soon now.

Hum along to "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" (lyrics at the link) ( Bobby Troup wrote, scores have made it famous )