tingilinde

billie swift takes flight

Check out Iszi Lawerence's video reading from her children's book Billie Swift takes flight.  I've heard her doing some of BBC 4's history pieces.

 

 

 

 

an encyclopedia of the imaginary

Oddly I stumbled into a pdf reproduction of Serafini's Codex Serapinianus. It was a big deal among artists back in the 80s .. completely weird with unintelligible text.   I paged through a copy at a small Manhattan bookstore thirty years ago - beautiful, very expensive and weird.

 

 

grandmother fish

Apparently evolution material at the preschool level is extremely rare.  Grandmother Fish is well regarded ..  it had to be crowd sourced as the children's book publishers wouldn't touch a subject like evolution:(

here the read-through

on cyberattacks

Jill Lepore writing in The New Yorker a few months ago on a book by Nicole Perlroth.

snip

...

The arrogant recklessness of the people who have been buying and selling the vulnerability of the rest of us is not just part of an intelligence-agency game; it has been the ethos of Wall Street and Silicon Valley for decades. Move fast and break things; the money will trickle down; click, click, click, click, buy, buy, buy, like, like, like, like, expose, expose, expose. Perlroth likes a piece of graffiti she once saw: “Move slowly and fix your shit.” Lock down the code, she’s saying. Bar the door. This raises the question of the horse’s whereabouts relative to the barn. If you listen, you can hear the thunder of hooves

...

a tip of the hat to Jim

 

 

pandemic premonitions

Chris Lydon leads an interesting discussion with the book's author and a professor of epidemiology.

snip

...

What the writer Michael Lewis delivers in book after book is not history exactly, and not hard science. It’s people, with their own ways of seeing baseball, Wall Street and now COVID. I read Michael Lewis as a nonfiction novelist of our American condition, and he’s done it again in his pandemic story, The Premonition, with his kind of characters out of the COVID cast – not Dr. Fauci and not Donald Trump, but doctors, one by one, who see through healthcare systems the way Billy Beane saw through big-league baseball, the way the short-sellers saw through the housing bubble in The Big Short. And now he gives us Charity Dean, M.D., public health doc in Santa Barbara, California, who saw herself as a dragon, at war with a pandemic that she knew was coming a week before the virus knew. Then the reflective, effective doctor and poet Richard Hatchett; then this genius of a people-watcher Carter Mecher at the V.A., the doc with dirt under his fingernails.

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space debris and global warming

The issue of a thinner upper atmosphere with increasing CO₂ is much worse than I had expected.

It seems clear anything orbited should have an active mechanism to de-orbit.

 

 

 

jungle night

A collaboration between Sandra Boynton and Yo-Yo Ma for young children

names of donald duck's nephews

 

lifelessness is stitched into our very being

An excerpt from Carl Zimmer's new book.

snip

...

Last spring, coyotes strolled down the streets of San Francisco in broad daylight. Pods of rarely seen pink dolphins cavorted in the waters around Hong Kong. In Tel Aviv, jackals wandered a city park, a herd of mountain goats took over a town in Wales, and porcupines ambled through Rome’s ancient ruins. As the canals in Venice turned strangely clear, cormorants started diving for fish, and Canada geese escorted their goslings down the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, passing empty shops displaying Montblanc pens and Fendi handbags.

Nature was expanding as billions of people were retreating from the Covid-19 pandemic. The change was so swift, so striking that scientists needed a new name for it: the anthropause.

...

 

 

world building

How a few authors do it.

a tip of the hat to Lynn