Status:

Recovery day, as expected, though once I got over the morning terrors I was able to do a bit more reading than is usual post-crash, as evidenced below.

Am having regrets at not sorting out heatwave stuff in the months since the last heatwave, such as a solar powered ceiling fan for the geodesic dome to get a bit of breeze going. And an ice-lolly mould set.

Someone on the street is selling a power bank and solar panels for a couple of grand. It’s so tempting but still a couple of grand over my no-income budget right now.

Fi had a friend over this morning. When I went to say hello the two of them were sitting in the garden drinking tea wearing summery dresses with floppy hats. At one point Wally hopped by and it looked like some idyllic painting of ladies in times gone by.

Noting for the record that ten days ago people on the allotment chat were talking about frost damage on their plants and tomorrow it’s forecast to be 31c. That’s quite a notable swing. The weather continues to get weirder on this island.

Reading:

• Hard Rain: The battle over weather modification — Really nice long-read written by a metrologist which I highly recommend spending time with. Ostensibly about cloud seeding companies (who are treated fairly neutrally here despite their dubious geoengineering goals) but going much further into the nature of weather and mankind’s historical efforts to understand and control it. “Climate change is an enormous accomplishment. From an engineering perspective, the ability to coordinate activities to modify the average temperatures of an entire planet […] is a realization of powers as considerable as anything humanity has achieved before. […] We are also, as with our other emergent powers, quite apparently terrible at it.
  • Related earworm: 🎶 Sparklehorse - Rainmaker 🎶
• David Byrne looks at water recycling efforts in California — Not mentioned here but one of the exciting potential uses of excess solar power on sunny days is water reclamation, either desalination or recycling.
• What is agrivoltaic farming? — One of the more frustrating arguments against fields of solar panels is it reduces food production. It doesn’t if done properly and can even increase yields.
• Hating AI is good, actually — Notable for when the author says they don’t really have a handle on what defines “AI” but they do know what they’re against, and that’s what matters. The non-meaningfulness of the “AI” term is a deliberate ploy by advocates as it creates a moving target which can be good (pattern-matching to detect cancer in scans) and can be bad (deskilling the workforce, etc). Best to look at what the system does to find its true purpose.
• Molly Crabapple finds the pleasure in politics — Nice interview chronicling her origins in burlesque clubs to her work documenting protests and war zones. ‌"People like to divide the world into two different realms: the sexy and the serious. There are the hot slutty girls in corsets doing some sort of shimmy, and then there are the serious men who talk about politics and shape the future. And that division is so stupid."
• Sentiers newsletter #404 — I’ve already pulled out a couple of links but the whole thing is a nice coherent read this week (with only one tedious LLM thing).

Watching:

• A grammatical murder mystery ‌(2:29) — Elle Cordova is back, personifying language’s dots and dashes as only she can. She is SO good at this.
• Cinemastix on the cinematography of Ex Machina ‌(11:19) — I really should do a re-watch of Garland’s films sometime.
• Laura Kampf ‌(20:04)

Listening:

• Origin Story: JK Rowling pt 1 — A fairly even-handed account of Rowling’s history up to the writing of that essay in 2020, told alongside milestones in the codification British gender critical feminism. Much more interesting than I was expecting, though I’d like some insight into why the left is much more TERFy in the UK than in other countries.

Bookmarking:

• The Luddite Lab Resource Hub — For those fighting “AI” and automation in the workplace. I’ve noticed a few people I know are undergoing “restructuring” in their jobs so this might be useful.