From my friend David D Levine comes a pointer to this post about a poignant burial site — which includes the oldest record we have of a domesticated dog. The skeleton of a puppy, from 14,000 years ago. Plus a woman in her twenties, and a man in his forties. Buried “with honour and ceremony.”
But there’s no question the dog was domesticated. It was nursed “through three bouts of distemper when it was four to five months old.”
More at this 2018 paper.
Dave Winer writes: “If I see something on Micro.blog that I would Like on another system, I don’t comment, I just do nothing, not because I’m bashful or overly quiet, rather because this is a language, and a comment has different meaning from a Like.”
This is another example where science fiction fanzines had this situation decades before online venues. (Not a surprise — many online customs clearly have precursors.) In this instance, there’s an acronym. RAEBNC. Read And Enjoyed But No Comment.
I’ve said before among my circle on Facebook that the FB Like fulfills much of the function of RAEBNC. Twitter is somewhat different, because of velocity. Instagram, because of the implicit aesthetic assessment.
But both Like and RAEBNC are doing that same thing — I read it, I agree with it, and no more communication at this time, Captain. (snappy salute)
Dave Winer wrote that, back in 2005. “People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.”
I did, Dave.
Alert users might have noticed I make my posts linkeriffic. One of the things I’ve missed on Twitter and Facebook is the ability to link more than once, maybe twice. Because links are a form of footnoting, to me. Even Ted Nelson might appreciate that. And I want to reach beyond Wikipedia entries, and go to people’s own sites, if possible.
And then there’s the AuthaGraph projection.
As you can see, they’re claiming it can be folded into a sphere, but I have to squint really hard at the end result to see it. Russia, for example, looks distorted to me.
This entry is here mostly because I want to reduce my reliance on Google to find it.
(Ah. I was right. The way I found Justin Haruaki Kunimune, who came up with the Danseiji IV projection, was I was googling term “AuthaGraph,” and found his post, Secrets of the AuthaGraph Revealed!)
“It’s discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty, and how few by deceit.”
Noël Coward
Blithe Spirit
(This is partly a test to see if copy/paste works with formatting intact)
Well, after a fashion.
Archive.org appears to have a successful snapshot of this site from 2019-09-01. I’ve yet to hit a dead link, after some superficial testing.
Between that and my Dreamwidth archive, that makes a fairly full backlog of content.
I was just watching a program on HGTV where the designer was oh-so-proud of putting a map on the wall of an office they had provided for someone who was known to like maps. And in my mind I was hearing a John Cleese voice going, “Madam, what is this? Mercator projection? Are you completely deranged?!”
But I’m weird.
I like maps. Always have. I know (as most map geeks know) that Mercator has more and more distortion the farther away you get from the equator. I stood up and applauded when I saw the West Wing episode about maps. I’m the kind of guy who might say, “I was using Dymaxion before it was cool.”
In that spirit, I want to show you something:
Those pale blue discs are called Tissot’s Indicatrix (sometimes Indicatrices when people aren’t fussy about their plurals). They start as circles. If they get bigger, you’re seeing distortion of size; if they look stretched, distortion of area. If they look like equal sized dots, there’s no distortion at all; the more they get away from that, the more distortion you’re seeing.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the great advantage of the Danseiji IV projection, by Justin Haruaki Kunimune.
Here it is again, in a more traditional political map:
Yes, the oceans are a bit odd, but in a white-on-white color scheme, you can just trim the map to a rectangular frame, and it’ll look just fine. In the classic Greenland vs Africa comparison, note how Greenland is much smaller. Since Greenland is 830,000 sq mi and Africa is 11,730,000, you’d expect that.
Like I said… I’m weird.
(And before I go, here’s a physical version, just because I think it’s purty:)
(And for a fascinating approach, check out this page using the photographs of a room, chopped up in the views of many map projections, although the Danseiji IV is the very last one.)
I had heard about the efforts of a bunch of libertarians to move to Grafton, NH, and run it on libertarian principles. I never heard how it worked out, though.
Not too well, as it turns out.
If nothing else, they’ve given a great addition to storytelling. Every story sounds better with, “And then the bears came.” As a schtick, I’ve already used it once, and I think it works.
I’m going to use the opening of “The Night We Met,” by Lord Huron. This is mostly to see if I can play with the typeface for the Quote attribute.
I am not the only traveler…
Who has not repaid his debt.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Yes, it looks meme-like. It was made by me, at a meme generation site (I forget which one). The quote comes from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, back in the old days on the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.fandom on USENET. It’s a good chunk of why I have the US flag emoji up on the header on top.
As Patrick pointed out at the time, the US flag, as a symbol, is not feared by many traditionalists around the world because it represents rah-rah chauvinism, or our powerful military. No, it’s feared as a symbol because it represents the kind of ideas he lists.
