From egg to the air: 21 days of bee development condensed into one mesmerising minute.

Optimizing for the wrong metric, part 1: Microsoft Word.

The boss needed item 3 inserted into a numbered list of hundreds of items. The intern used a mouse to select the original 3 on the screen, then typed 4, then selected the original 4, then typed 5, then scrolled down, then selected the original 5, then typed 6, and so on. Another intern sat watching the screen to make sure there were no mistakes.

Navidrome – FOSS Personal Music Streamer (via andrewmichaelsmith.com).

Navidrome allows you to enjoy your music collection from anywhere, by making it available through a modern Web UI and through a wide range of third-party compatible mobile apps, for both iOS and Android devices.

Oliver Malcolm: The Machine.

Busy filling buckets that are bottomless it seems.

New Riffs on the Old Mind-Body Blues: “Black Rhythm,” “White Logic,” and Music Theory in the 21st-Century.

(…) this article draws upon and tests concepts from critical race and whiteness theory, and asks whether, in taking “black rhythm” as its subject, some contemporary music studies reinscribe what the sociologists Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have called “white logic”: a set of intellectual attitudes, prerogatives and methods that, whatever the intentions of the musicologists concerned, might in some way restage those division practices now widely recognized as central to early musicology.

State surveillance and the COVID-19 crisis (via cabinet.the-syllabus.com).

States have long recognized the value of controlling information in times of crisis.

Migrazine: Online Magazin von Migrantinnen für alle.

The Online Magazine by Migrant Women for Everyone.
Onlajn magazin migrantkinja za svakog.
Revista online de mujeres migrantes para todes.
Kovara Online ji Jinên Koçberan bo Herkesî.
Magazine de mulheres migrantes par tudos.
Göçmen Kadınlardan Herkes için.

Why Web Scraping Is Vital to Democracy.

The fruits of web scraping—using code to harvest data and information from websites—are all around us.

TeX: A tale of two worlds.

Here is where the timelines diverge. In one, TeX was just the beginning. Computer typography evolves rapidly as the decades go by, building on Knuth’s prior work and taking advantage of the million-fold increases we’ve seen in computing power. Browsers, e-readers, and word processors deliver beautiful type to every person who looks at a screen, with almost no effort from authors.

In the darker timeline… none of this happens.

Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder (via scientificamerican.com).

Stress testing technology in the context of the worst moments in history might have illuminated what social scientists and propagandists have long known: that humans are wired to respond to emotional triggers and share misinformation if it reinforces existing beliefs and prejudices. Instead designers of the social platforms fervently believed that connection would drive tolerance and counteract hate. They failed to see how technology would not change who we are fundamentally—it could only map onto existing human characteristics.