tingilinde

the book of cheese

seriously - a book of cheese

 

 

the clueless and insane trump transition

An excerpt from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

snip

...

The department of agriculture was an excellent case study. The place had an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink. Among other things, the department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.

All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American experiment was underway.

...

 

thar be a map

Maps in literature 

snip

...

In the beginning was the map. Robert Louis Stevenson drew it in the summer of 1881 to entertain his 12-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, while on a rainy family holiday in Scotland. It depicts a rough-coasted island of woods, peaks, swamps and coves. A few place names are marked, which speak of adventure and disaster: Spyeglass Hill, Graves, Skeleton Island. The penmanship is deft, confident – at the island’s southern end is an intricate compass rose, and the sketch of a galleon at full sail. Figures signal the depth in fathoms of the surrounding sea, and there are warnings to mariners: “Strong tide here”, “Foul ground”. In the heart of the island is a blood-red cross, by which is scrawled the legend “Bulk of treasure here

...

 

 

 

on tom lehrer

From a book review in Nature 

snip

...

The rousing ballad ‘Wernher von Braun’ undermines the former Nazi — who designed the V-2 ballistic missile in the Second World War and later became a key engineer in the US Apollo space programme. In Lehrer’s view, it was acceptable for NASA to hire von Braun, but making him into an American hero was grotesque. “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?’/‘That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun” — lines that still resonate in today’s big-tech ethical jungle. ‘New Math’, meanwhile, skewers the education system through the lens of a misfired revolution in mathematics, with its telling refrain: “It’s so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it

...

 

conversations with ray bradbury

Om points to a thesis consisting of interviews with Ray Bradbury.

 

 

the return of the green book

Racism created a need for the first Green Books and the fact that racism never went away has triggered a new version.

snip

...

Back in 1936, during the most racially restrictive period of segregation in the United States, a Harlem man named Victor Hugo Green began publishing a slim, pocket-sized travel guide for black Americans.

Green, a postal worker by trade, had observed the nation’s burgeoning car culture and surmised that some black people with the means to own an automobile would want to get out on the open road and travel the nation. But given the capricious and life-threatening nature of Jim Crow laws, Green reasoned that a black motorist would need to know in advance where it was permissible for them to stop for food, fuel, or overnight accommodations.

 His solution: The Negro Motorist Green Book, a state-by-state compilation of places that welcomed black travelers. In later years, the book would come to be called The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, eventually becoming best known as The Green Book — an appellation given generically to several imitations. But the best of the bunch was the original, which, as Green wrote in the introduction of his 1949 edition, aimed “to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments, and to make his trips more enjoyable.”

...

 

 

 

what dogs are thinking and feeling

A fascinating chat with evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff: on his new book:  Caine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do  via KERA Think

 

for when you have some time to kill

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue published in1788 London

a tip of the hat to Brewster

 

early color classification

Abraham Gottlob Werner's Nomenclature of Colours was a taxonomy of colors of the natural world and was heavily used by naturalists and scientists in the 19th century including one Charles Darwin during his sea journey on the Beagle. 

It's being republished by Smithsonian books as a pocket guide. 

a short history of flash photography

An excerpt from a new book