Haemin Sunim is the Buddhist monk whose hugely successful self-care advice books have made him a celebrity
2019
‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
“Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
Had a little fun playing with a jumping spider that was exploring my computer screen; they will actively try to pounce on the cursor. After a few tries this one gave up in disgust and went off to look for a new hunting ground.
The world’s most popular coffee species are going extinct. And scientists say we are to blame
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/16/health/coffee-species-extinction-climate-study-trnd/index.html
coffeeresearch.org is a fascinating site
http://www.coffeeresearch.org/
New plant-focused diet would ‘transform’ planet’s future, say scientists
‘Planetary health diet’ would prevent millions of deaths a year and avoid climate change
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/16/new-plant-focused-diet-would-transform-planets-future-say-scientists
Capitalists.
Children of Dune mini-series
Watching the Dune and Children of Dune mini-series from the early 2000s, I was struck how much films have changed in the years since. There are almost no black or brown skinned actors, certainly none in leading roles. In Frank Herbert’s book, the leading Atreides family are said to have olive-brown skin, but on screen they are all very white. A few years of film history seems to have done more for human diversity or fusion of the gene pool than ten thousand years in the Dune films. Of course there were always some films and TV series, like Star Trek, that did diversity better, but nowadays I’m not sure it would even be possible to do a film in this genre that is so blatantly white.
Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’
“Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems
Changing the language indicator from flags
My MX linux laptop was showing flags for the two languages that I need to write in. I don’t happen to like either of those flags, with all that they represent, and certainly don’t want to have to stare at them all day long. And who says that languages should be represented by flags anyway? As if languages are so closely aligned with nations.
So I went to the trouble of creating new icons for these languages with just letters instead of flags. MX (or XFCE) needs an .svg formatted picture. It turns out that GIMP doesn’t do SVG. I had to export the pictures to .pngs, import them to Inkscape, then save them there as .svgs. In MX, the files are all in /usr/share/xfce4/xkb/flags/ so that’s where I placed them. But then, nothing happened. I logged out, logged in, restarted the computer, but the flags were still there. Hmmm. Then I discovered that my machine isn’t using XFCE’s keyboard input switcher at all, but one called “fbxkb”, from an earlier linux installation. The flags there were in /usr/share/fbxkb/images/ but in .png format – so fortunately I already had the files ready. Now I don’t have to look at those nasty flags anymore.