Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Ugh I’ve got a chest cold which could mean endless coughing. The good news is I have a recliner for sleeping mostly upright, and copious amounts of guaifenesin-pills-and-water, and the right sort of social network.

• When I woke up early, I commanded Siri #4 to narrate amaruuk’s sweet Rosie & Johnlock series Paternity

• Got a phone call from kestrell

• Hopped on here, and tozka linked me to an excellent concert from Cathy Fink, Marcie Marxer and Chao Tian, hosted by the Smithsonian. Fink & Marxer were role models when I was a "movement musician" between 1976-1981, and I love how closely Chinese yangqin (hammered dulcimer) and Appalachian banjo music can intertwine

• Today’s prettygoodword was the wonderful campanulate

• minoanmiss shared strategies for smuggling the good bacteria past TSA

My public library’s Kanopy subscription provided two profound films, both under nine minutes:

• CODA is an animated short from 2015. This Irish masterpiece follows a lost soul’s encounter with death. Pro captions, no audio description, no gore. Watch on YouTube or ( stream here )

• Bacon & God’s Wrath meditates on loss of faith when Razie Brownstone, at age 92, tries bacon for the first time. CONTAINS: Very lifelike animated dead pig’s head, racist autocomplete results, emesis mentioned. Watch on YouTube without captions or ( stream here )

Grady Hillhouse, PE is a civil engineer who’s expanded that professional credential into a media empire:

Practical.Engineering

I look forward to his 20-minute videos twice a month at PracticalEngineeringChannel. He explains crucial infrastructure—water and sewage systems, power distribution grids, transportation—with luscious stock footage and homey see-through models he cobbles together in his garage.

I strongly recommend his Valentine’s Day contribution: An Engineer’s Love Letter to Cable-Stayed Bridges

( stream here with autocraptions (Grady's voice matches Google’s autocraption algorithms) )

I agree that cable-stayed bridges are exquisitely beautiful—they bring the gracious sweep of sailboats back to our bodies of water. Their simple central towers hold a fan of cables to suspend the roadway. As Grady explains, they’re faster and cheaper to build as well as easier to maintain.

Grady doesn’t go into the history, which begins centuries ago and accelerates in the past 50 years. Thanks to excellent PR, I assumed they were originated by Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava. Close to home, he used similar technology on the 2001 extension to the Milwaukee Art Museum. This STRUCTURE magazine article explains how wrong I was--they cite 1615 for the first cable-stayed bridge!

Have you seen a cable-stayed bridge? Is there another infrastructural design that makes you grin?

And if you’re wondering what he’s talking from 0:17 to 0:30?

5 other geeky YouTubers

Destin = SmarterEveryDay
Grey = CGPGrey
Matt = numberphile
Vi was @vihart.youtube but the content is offline
Alec = TechnologyConnections

Wow I loved this doc! Is there anybody out there?, 87 minutes, UK, 2023. Directed by Ella Glendining, in English with precise captions and audio description.

Blurb:

Born with a rare disability, filmmaker Ella Glendining wonders if there is anyone who can share the experience of living in a body like hers. This simple question—one which non disabled people take for granted, leads to a journey to not only others who live like her—but to the realization that meeting them changes how she views herself in the world, as well as many surprises along the way.

Glendining includes archival footage of her own childhood (older videotapes with flashing lights across the bottom of the screen) as well as horrifying evidence of rank bigotry that disabled kids in the UK. She talks about loving bodies, her own and others’. She documents accepting parenting from her own youth and with her own child, as well as the challenges of wanting to have a "perfect birth" (no drugs, no knives). She demonstrates access intimacy and cross-disability solidarity, interacts with one great doctor and one surgeon-on-a-mission to normalize kids through massive pain, and finally answers the title question yes! meeting three people with bodies similar to hers. I got bi vibes from the doc but I don’t remember her explicitly coming out. In this extensive interview at Diva Magazine, she does explore her bisexuality: https://diva-magazine.com/2023/11/13/ella-glendining-is-there-anybody-out-there/.

I want every parent of a kid with orthopedic impairments to watch this film today, before they ponder any more "treatments." It would also be a great discussion starter for a classroom or activist group.

( Where to watch and trailer )

erinptah collates amusing and horrifying examples of large language models ("AI") spewing nonsense after they steal the hard work of artists like herself:

https://erinptah.dreamwidth.org/tag/artificial+unintelligence

ysabetwordsmith posted eighteen subtle and beautiful eclipse shots at the "share your photos" community common_nature https://common-nature.dreamwidth.org/253608.html

jenroses’s Fork Theory is a most excellent complement to spoon theory

http://jenrose.com/fork-theory/

You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right?

Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.

A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.

Finally, this pro-captioned video summarizes the findings from an Hungarian research paper published last month in Cell. It supports that dogs make mental representations of human words.

stream on YouTube or … ( stream here )

Boros, Magyari et al. (2024) Neural evidence for referential understanding of object words in dogs https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.02.029

...how would Christian practices be orientalized? @spacevinci provides a snappy demonstration. Their persona is deeply involved in Jewish ritual, channeling the supremely self-confident attitude that power enables.

My family is Jewish; I was raised in a strictly atheist household. I never attended temple or Sabbath dinners. @spacevinci's disinterest in the timing, pronunciation, or meaning of Christian observances resonates with my experience growing up -- Christians assumed I'd know all about their prayers, holidays, and traditions.

Three minutes, without captions
https://www.tiktok.com/@spacevinci/video/7169050739803688235

https://linktr.ee/spacevinci is Miriam Reid

Their Critter Conglomerate filk explores the tender communion that makes us human -- with jazzy folk music. Stream on Soundcloud

I am not a person, I’m 3 possums in a coat
And we like to claim it’s GUCCI, but we got it from a goat
Say it’s vintage or it’s avant-garde, whatever boats your float
I don’t care, I’m not a person, I’m 3 possums in a coat

Full lyrics

Or listen right here:

( sweet silly music )

Back in July 2021, I raved about James Morrison’s NYT Op-Doc short film "Look me in the eye." I’m thrilled the New York Times has published three more of his short films.

First up: I Stutter. But I Need You to Listen focuses on writer John Hendrickson, a writer who stutters.

Morrison’s 8:15 film (pro captions and audio description) shines with visual representations of stuttering, while demonstrating what happens during disfluency and how quickly we can become better listeners.

direct YouTube link

( play it here )

The audio description script is narrated in synthetic speech, which is an odd choice.

( more on Hendrickson )

Two days back, the NYT published "I Have a Visual Disability and I Want You To Look Me in the Eye," a wonderful 12-minute video by Maine filmmaker James Robinson. Robinson demonstrate how his complex vision impairments makes the world look, as well as illustrating the notional borders between normates and disabled people. Along the way, he names his vision as whale eyes (given that whales don’t have binocular vision, and they rule in the undersea world below the USS Normal).

Pro captions and audio description (Settings -> Audio track -> choose English descriptive)

direct YouTube link

( watch on YouTube )

He's there in the YouTube comments, answering the useful questions and politely ignoring those attempting to spin inspoporn.

I love his expert film making, and I also feel very seen. My vision issues are different, but it's so wonderful to know that people also view our world aslant.

Vox Media posted this excellent explainer on ‌Why you can't compare Covid-19 vaccines, in particular why the one-dose J&J vaccine’s "66% efficacy" is a statistic, not a problem.

tl;dr: efficacy rates are only comparable when studies occur on the same population at the same time. The studies for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines finished before the virus spiked. The people in the placebo arm of the J&J vaccine study were much more likely to come in contact with COVID because there was more COVID in the world. All vaccines do an excellent job of minimizing hospitalization and death.

direct link

( YouTube with captions and lots of pretty, undescribed diagrams )

Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, noticed how quickly Zoom fatigue arose as video conferencing became commonplace during the pandemic. His open-access article explores why: Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue from Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000030

Bailenson notes four aspects of the Zoom interface that create "nonverbal overload"

• Excessive amounts of close-up eye gaze
• Cognitive load
• Increased self-evaluation from staring at video of oneself
• Constraints on physical mobility

While based on tested theory, Bailenson admits no Zoom-specific research has yet tested these barriers; he wants the article "to point out these design flaws to isolate research areas for social scientists and to suggest design improvements for technologists." He uses Zoom as a generic, focusing on its particular affordances since its 30-fold growth between December 2019 and May 2020.

18-minute BBC podcast with author Jeremy Bailenson
https://pod.link/261786876/episode/0c576ae6b94be62a85abd2a6bbeff520

My first MetaFilter post after a decade on site.

( links to analysis of 6 January 2020 insurrection )