nikhil.io

one hundred and eighty-eight links of interest

In 1942, Bob Emmett Fletcher agreed to manage 90 acres of farmland for his Japanese neighbors who had been forcibly moved to internment camps. (wikipedia.org)

And because no good deed goes unpunished, Fletcher claimed to have been harassed by his own community and he also found bullet holes in his barn. Fletcher used the proceeds from farming the land to pay the taxes for the interned Japanese. From 1942 to 1945 he managed the Tsukamoto, Nitta, and Oka…

“I Fucking Hate Jira” is a collection of people sharing their feelings about one of the worst pieces of software I continue to use every day. (ifuckinghatejira.com)

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link) Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially d…

“We All Want Clean H2O” is a Podcast about Water Quality, Policy, Agriculture, and Climate Change (apple.com)

It’s hosted by three University of Iowa engineers and scientists who are tired of “cropaganda” and is rather entertaining. The latest episode calls the recent E15 Law a “Fart in a Hurricane”. One of the hosts is an engineer named Chris Jones who also writes a very lively blog with wonderful nugget…

“Translanguaging” is the act of interleaving elements of two or more languages together to communicate more effectively. (ealjournal.org)

Very common in India. And that article is from a journal that offers EAL news. EAL (English as an Additional Language) is not the same as ESL (English as a Second Language). EAL is favored above ESL among the language pedagogy community: Why? Because sometimes it is not clear what an individual’s…

“Windows is more than just an operating system; it’s a fabric woven into our lives and in our work.” (microsoft.design)

No. It’s just a fucking operating system1. A giant program on a computer. What weird, disconnected, embarrassing bullshit ‘spiritual’ techbro nonsense. “We made a website full of memes you can search through, powered by Bitcoin and Machine-Learning (of course), and are changing the world.” No. Sto…

I’m not sure why YouTube’s Omniscient Algorithms recommended this video but I did not learn a damn thing about “After-Dinner Drinks” from the star of this pretentious watch and signet ring ad. (youtube.com)

A guide to elegant post-dinner debauchery from Mr Wei Koh, watch aficionado, Style Council member and founder of The Rake Magazine, in partnership with IWC Schaffhausen. The ‘guide’ in a nutshell: “Drink whatever you want, with whomever you like, talking about anything you’d want to, on any day…

A List of Hacker News ‘Classics’ (jsomers.net)

When you’re following a bunch of feeds, it’s easy to forget that the web is the greatest library in the history of the world—and that a good library doesn’t just have a rack of newspapers, it has a vast collection of books and archives: the stacks. These are stories that get reposted a lot. Many…

Should I Be Worried (github.io)

is a simple and aptly-named COVID tracker that uses data from Johns Hopkins. As of September 1st 2020, my state of Iowa is #1 (woohoo!) with a 7-day infection rate of 261/100,000 people (“there might be 2 to 6 times as many recent infections”) and an R0 rate of 1.7. “Over the past 30 days, 246 peop…

Powells (powells.com)

, ThriftBooks, and Bookshop are three alternatives to purchasing books on Amazon. Powell’s is withdrawing from the Amazon Marketplace: “The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive. We will not participate in undermining that vitality.”…