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micro

Wired is running an editorial arguing that the 10,000-year clock is a waste of time (get it?).

The thrust of the article seems to be that the world sucks today, and that building a monument to inspire long-term thinking is a waste of resources – “a pleasant distraction” – since everybody alive today will be dead before any good comes of it. Which, I don’t know, seems like it’s sort of the point.

There’s plenty to criticize about The Long Now – I swing by The Interval once a year or so, always hoping that it will have become an interesting place to spend time and always leaving disappointed – but I don’t think the idea of the clock is one of them. The rate of progress on the clock(s) is another matter.

The article, however, reminded me of the idea of protopia, a neologism first coined by Kevin Kelly and lately championed – in a slightly different manner – by Monika Bielskyte.

micro, gear, air, medical

Cloth masks are probably ineffective (at best) at preventing respiratory infection.

At worst, they may create a breeding ground for pathogens. A study of healthcare workers found that “moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection.” Stick with real N95 respirators, which may not look as hip, but do actually work.

micro, gear, edc, blogroll

Clothing provides shelter, cultural signaling, and the structure upon which other tools are carried.

I enjoyed EDC Part 0: The Individual Uniform at Swift, Silent, Deadly.

micro, food, quote

The cow collapse is nigh.

The Guardian reports on the end of food and the cowllapse:

We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.

RethinkX envisages an extremely rapid “death spiral” in the livestock industry. Only a few components, such as the milk proteins casein and whey, need to be produced through fermentation for profit margins across an entire sector to collapse. Dairy farming in the United States, it claims, will be “all but bankrupt by 2030”. It believes that the American beef industry’s revenues will fall by 90% by 2035.

Story via John Ellis. Cinemagraph via Overhead Compartment.

micro, gear, bicycle

I added a bottle cage to my rear rack.

A Cleaveland Mountaineering Fork Clamp Mount allows me to mount a King Cage to my old Tubus Vega rack, providing another option for carrying water. I’ve wanted something like this since I saw Logan’s Vega modification on bikepacking.com. Cleaveland’s mounts makes it easy.

Rear Rack Bottle Cage

I use Norma Torro Worm Drive Hose Clamps to attach the mount. These German made clamps are far superior to the Chinese hose clamps frequently found in hardware stores. The 9mm wide, 8-16mm diameter clamps are the right size for this job.

micro, books

The best place to spend a rainy day reading in San Francisco is the UCSF Kalmanovitz Library on Parnassus.

The library is open to the public. You want the Lange Room at the back of the fifth floor. The Lange Room has half a dozen or so comfortable leather chairs, and large windows looking north across Golden Gate Park and the Presidio to the spires of the Golden Gate Bridge. If it was clear, you’d see the Marin Headlands, but if it was clear you’d be reading outside. The room is almost always empty.

It provides all the ingredients necessary for taking full advantage of a rainy day: a comfortable chair, plentiful natural light, good views, a book, and an environment that discourages human interaction.

micro, media

The Watchmen TV series takes place in an alternate dystopic timeline where there are locking holsters that are even worse than the Blackhawk Serpa.

I fully expected the next frame to be this guy shooting himself in the leg, but the scene just ignores his sloppy trigger finger and complete disregard for safety.

Other than that scene, I’ve enjoyed the first couple episodes of the show and its soundtrack so far.

micro, toolchain

I use FeedIron to repair neutered RSS feeds.

FeedIron is a plugin for my feed reader, Tiny Tiny RSS. It takes broken, partial feeds and extracts the full article content, allowing me to read the article in my feed reader the way god intended. The plugin can be configured to extract content using a number of filters. I find that using the xpath filter to specify an element on the page like div[@class='entry-content'] corrects most neutered feeds.