morning computer 18feb22

The wind is booming here, and I want to try something new in the “digital notebook” framework here, using a legacy title. Listening to this while I try the thought out:

I hadn’t noticed this, and will likely forget it again, so I’m making a note: the Bandcamp phone app now allows for queueing and playlists. I have bought (checks site) 1355 records through Bandcamp, so this is a good thing for me, except that I will now spend days trawling through those 1355 records building playlists I will hardly ever use.

Probably the most expensive photograph in the world, apparently. Also, world photos from the month of January 2022 from Foreign Policy. Though I certainly still miss the flow of imagery from Instagram on the desktop, my RSS feeds are still highly visual — and I don’t have the tug of IG on a phone to go look at some nice photos for a few minutes.

Nathen Chen didn’t even take his phone to the Olympics: “so as to escape the cognitive drain induced by “the urge to scroll for hours through social media.” He brought his guitar instead, choosing to replace dopamine hacking with high quality leisure.” In leisure reading, the Guardian has a short primer for starting with James Joyce – I’ve been dipping back into both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake over the last several months. Ulysses remains beautiful:

Old and secret she had entered from a morning world

And FInnegan’s Wake remains the exhausting, if often lovely, work of a man who should have been beaten to death for compulsive punning:

Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback

(But lovely!)

The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where ashes lay.

“Analysis of a colossal anthropological dataset that systematically collects characteristics of societies around the world throughout all of human history and prehistory shows that an important bottleneck preventing growth in ‘collective computation’—the ability of social groups to solve problems—may be the development of writing systems.”

Studies suggest that writing systems emerge only when cities emerge. James Joyce said of Ulysses that if the city of Dublin was destroyed tomorrow, “Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick.”