A bit of a rest day after the weekend’s exertions. I feared a bit of a crash when I woke early in the morning to a rapid-fire slideshow of random imagery behind my eyelids, the sort of thing I would have enjoyed in an art context (and have inflicted on an audience in the past — see the second video for this project) but now recognise as a symptom of an exhausted mind. But it turned out that I just needed a few more hours sleep and was fairly fine by the afternoon.

We made a trip to the allotment to deposit the food waste and poopy rabbit hay into the compost hexagon which is now full to the brim. I expect this damper weather will speed it up after leaving it mostly dry over the summer and then it can be turned into the maturing cube.

I accidentally went mildly fedi-viral (like normal viral except on Mastodon so less traumatic) last night by sharing a life changing browser shortcut that it turns out few people know about.

In Firefox (and maybe elsewhere, I haven’t done a full survey) if you want to select the text of a link you can hold down Option ⌥ (on a Mac) and it will not activate the link.

The response to this was particularly satisfying because when I discovered it I was at work surrounded by bakers and cooks who were incapable of sharing my ecstatic delight. People who use Mastodon by comparison…

Was Pluto’s 2006 demotion a big mistake?

A fascinating look at the decision 20 years ago to demote Pluto and what the arguments are for bringing it back into the planetary fold.

Pluto’s demotion created two opposing scientific teams: the so-called geophysical camp, which believes the physical properties of a celestial body should count toward its planethood; and the dynamicists, who are more concerned with the position a body occupies, its surroundings and its direction of travel. You could characterise the split as planetary scientists v astronomers.

I’ve never been particularly partisan on this — the arguments seemed to be based on emotion rather than science — but reading the geophysical arguments I think I’m on team planet, even if that does mean Earth’s Moon is a both a planet and a moon.

For Metzger, the planetary definition excluding Pluto is based on an outmoded notion of the solar system. “They were creating a reactionary view towards an orderly cosmos, rather than the more modern scientific view where it’s chaotic,” he says. “The second problem was that I think they misread the room. The public of today is not the public of the 1800s. They’re perfectly happy understanding a dynamic, chaotic cosmos, and we missed the opportunity to teach that.”

A reactionary view of order butting up against the chaos of reality? Why does that sound familar.

Linky links:

• “I just chose words carefully.” — Marcin has a look at typesetting with monospaced fonts concluding with rs1n’s 17,000 word guide to Super Metroid where they copy-edited each line until it was fully justified without any extra spacing.
  • I was delighted, though not at all surprised, to discover our local hero Dracos does this sort of thing as a hobby.
• How record players work — Being old I knew most of this except the stereo bit and the RIAA curve which were pretty fascinating.
• Cooking with Pete: Courgette Fatteh — Way back in 2003 my friend Jez noticed that I had no idea how to cook a meal and so started posting recipes to his blog. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never managed to make one of them. But he keeps posting, because what is male friendship if not a commitment to the bit.
• The case of Aristotle and women’s teeth
• Tiny Awards voting is open
• 🎶 Fantastic Plastic Machine: Bon Voyage (escape mix feat. Yukari Fresh)