The Blue Bear

...of that trip, disjointed and frozen in amber. 1) I had a Little Dot comic book (presumably purchased to keep me quiet on the trip) which just fascinated me. 2) I had to sleep on a couch under the gaze of a stuffed moose head, which was absolutely terrifying. Clutching the Little Dot book helped the terrors to some extent. 3) I remember meeting my great-grandparents at what I assume was their front door. I remember that I stood the height of my gr...

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Bonfire of the Billys

...uthor and woodworker Christopher Schwartz’s said in The Anarchist’s Design Book that, “it annoys me when I see an IKEA Billy bookshelf in a woodworker’s house.” Schwartz goes on to explain why, Yes, you get about 15 linear feet of shelving, plus a carcase that is ridiculously unstable. Only two shelves are fixed. So unless you secure the Billy to the wall (or other Billys), it will rack in short order . . . I say this with experience. When my wife...

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The Connection Between Human Health and Soil Health

...ian and author Dr. Daphne Miller discusses in the lecture above and in her book Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing. In the research for the book Miller visited farmers who, as she put it, “farm in the image of nature,” who approach the farm as a living organism. While she cautioned that there is little research behind the connection between farming practices and health, she suspects that biodiversity...

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Inside the Internet Archive: A Meat World Tour

...he building, our tour guide showed us the contraption they use to digitize books. He noted that the majority of the books they digitize are sent to the Philippines and digitized with cheaper labor. You can donate books and other materials to the Archive. They have an app that will tell you if they need a particular item and will sometimes pay for shipping. The Internet Archive is a throwback to the heady, more optimistic days of the Internet famil...

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Escaping the AI Vampire Castle

...AI generated children’s stories. This is just part of a flood of scammy AI books on Amazon. The AI children’s books advertised on my Kindle combine titles that have an English-as-a-second-language vibe, vaguely Manga style cover illustrations and author names such as “Leanor Varelade” that either yield no search results or are close to the names of real people (Leonor Varela is a Chilean actress). In short these books are what you would get if you...

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