Linklist: December 27, 2021
"Luxury claret was first created for very specific conditions in the English market by a Frenchman who could not have foreseen that the rapid increase of duties on French wine would be conducive to his endeavour. The claret he produced became the only style that was worth its high cost, a price that was dictated by English tariffs regardless of the wine’s quality. Thus by 1700 most claret imported into England was the luxury variety. Nothing less than the finest claret would sell in a market that was flooded with inexpensive Portuguese and Spanish wines, not to mention a host of other new and fashionable beverages such as coffee, tea and cocoa. As it turned out, this ‘New French Claret’ was precisely what the post-revolution social order demanded. Indeed, luxury claret, although a product of France, was a cultural artefact of England. It was a wine that only wealthy consumers could afford, but more importantly it was a wine that could be appreciated, contemplated and discussed. Its arrival in England might have been inspired by Restoration courtliness, but its triumph as the wine of fashion in the early 18th century reflected the fact that the old order had changed. Luxury claret not only reflected the new political order, it also helped to construct it because it confirmed the consumer’s politeness and good taste. As Robert Walpole understood better than most, this was a world where political legitimacy was increasingly determined by wealth as much as by birth. Taste was power."
"For the past decade, Elsevier has been amassing a tools and analytics business that competes directly with major elements of Clarivate’s portfolio, building Scopus and associated impact metrics, acquiring and developing Pure and Mendeley, and more recently acquiring Aries, to take a few key examples. With its enlarged portfolio, Clarivate is positioned to compete effectively with Elsevier — minus the STEM primary publishing.
At a purchase price of more than $5 billion, the Clarivate acquisition of ProQuest is the most financially consequential impact of open access. Unsurprisingly, however, leading voices in the open community have expressed substantial concern about the transaction.
From my own perspective, I do think there are legitimate concerns about the analytics driven business models that appear to be scaling up as a consequence of open access. The broader Clarivate offers “analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation.” Beyond the offerings for academic science, most of its portfolios are targeted to some degree on intellectual property, including focus areas on patents, pharmaceutical and biotech, and trademark and brand protection. Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe has raised questions about the privacy implications of such models, arguing that as a result the reader is often “the product.” It is little wonder that Invest in Open associated Clarivate’s acquisition of ProQuest with a further growth in what it terms “surveillance capitalism.”"
"There are over a million posts on the “dark academia” tag on Instagram. The images are quite disparate: cardigans, young women reading old books, photos of Oxbridge colleges, candles, and, more bizarrely, a black-and-white still of Ross from Friends. Autumn is a recurrent theme.
Like another recent online aesthetic, “cottagecore,” dark academia depicts a retreat from modern life and from other people. What unites these pictures isn’t a shared visual language — though features like colors and locations do overlap — so much as a mood or vibe. This mood is scholarly, romantic, and solitary. Most images show young people standing alone, often facing away from the camera.
While subcultures tend to bring their adherents together through shared practices, online aesthetics like dark academia and cottagecore are individual practices that bring people into an imagined community in which they never have to come into contact with any other adherent. Aesthetics are like something between a genre and an ordering principle for someone’s lifestyle. This particular ordering principle is structured around an idealized, romanticized version of learning. Learning in dark academia is an object of fantasy: the books are to be posed with rather than read; the photos of libraries rarely show them actually in use; the writing might come with difficulty, torn up paper scattered everywhere, but the end result is always flawless.
Aesthetics can function like a self-selected structure of feeling; the images shared and the clothes and decorations bought are intended to create particular emotional states. For dark academia, this is often something like a romanticized way of encouraging concentration and motivation. Images and signs, rich with compressed meaning, push those who engage with the aesthetic to feel and act in a particular way. A lot of the content is intended to bring about more directly a studious affective state: study playlists called things like “crying in an old library on a rainy day (dark academia),” consisting of movie soundtracks and gentle melancholic piano music set against shifting images of old libraries and steamy cups of tea, rack up millions of views on YouTube."
"The suburban subjectivity is built into the architecture of ultra-thin towers. Because they are so slim, it is possible to create full-floor (or more) condominiums. There may be neighbors above and below you, but there are none by your side. In his new book Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, architect Matthew Soules writes that the ultra-thin delivers “all the asociality of a detached home, but in the sky.”
Each luxury high-rise is designed to resemble its own securitized and inward-facing community. As the anthropologist Setha Low has shown, New York City luxury apartment buildings operate under the same basic premise as suburban gated communities, with private security, exclusive pricing, personal workforces, and owner-only amenities walling off their occupants from the surrounding world. By no means the most lavish, the offerings at 111 West 57th are both luscious and bizarre: not only a twenty-four-hour doorman (standard in high-end New York City housing) but also a concierge, meeting rooms, a lounge with terrace, a catered private dining room, a study, a two-story gym, private cabanas, an eighty-two-foot pool, as well as sauna, steam, and treatment rooms. The building is its own exclusive neighborhood.
For all their attempts to build a private community, however, condos in ultra-thin buildings are notoriously under-occupied. Soules calls this phenomenon “zombie urbanism”: “de facto density that is significantly below designed capacity. . . . exhibiting an eerily low level of vitality in relation to their scale. They are not dead, but they are also not quite alive.” The skyscrapers are built in a context of both rising supply and rising demand. Yet they neither add to useful stock nor absorb demand from owners without other places to live. A New York Times study of the ultra-affluent area between Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue from East 59th Street to East 63rd Street found that more than half the homes were empty for most of the year. Sixty-nine thousand new housing units were built in New York City between 2014 and 2017; that year, nearly seventy-five thousand units were purposely unoccupied.
To most New Yorkers, all this waste is a travesty; to buyers on Billionaires’ Row, it is a perk."
"Since long before the dawn of humanity, eating has been a social act. Some of our primate ancestors shared food. Early humans were more successful when they banded together to hunt; they enjoyed greater security when they cooked and ate their food together.1 Farmers have long collaborated in a range of tasks, from chasing away the animals consuming their crops, to forming work parties in order to make some tasks possible and others easier or more pleasant.
I worked for many years in Mueda, a remote rural district in northern Mozambique. As I sat conducting ethnographic interviews in the yards outside the homes of peasant farmers, the daily activities of processing and preparing food went on all around. Young women peeled cassava and cut it into cubes, or removed kernels of maize from dried cobs. These staples were then placed into wooden mortars that reached mid-thigh-high, and were pounded with pestles nearly as tall as the women themselves. Rather than each of them working their own mortar, they would generally work one together. The laborious beat of a pestle, when integrated with another — sometimes two — produced a more energetic, often syncopated rhythm. At the top of each stroke, the women would release the pestle and clap hands, adding further percussive complexity. Playful competition emerged, as the women added additional claps, or increased the tempo until one of them missed a beat, and laughter gave them momentary pause from their work. When I asked them why they made the task more complicated, they generally told me that working together “animated” them, making the job easier despite the extra energy they put into it.
Many are the foods that bear evidence of the human inclination to share company in preparation and consumption. The geographical origins of dumplings are hotly debated among food historians. Variants are found all over the world. Traditional sizes, forms, and fillings vary from region to region, but they are generally a labor-intensive food. And in many places, this work has historically been done in groups — generally of women — sitting together, not only keeping one another company, but also passing on techniques, imitating and improving upon one another’s recipes and aesthetics. Men, too, share the work of preparing food. In south Texas, to give just one example, Chicano men stand together around the grill, barbecuing the off-cuts of meat that are central to their working-class cuisine; through playful banter equating meat with manhood, they reinforce group solidarity.2 To labor alone and, especially, to eat alone, is not only shameful in many cultural contexts, it is often considered monstrous or sub-human. In the villages of Mueda where I worked, there was a special word for one who ate alone: nkwaukanga. Such people were traditionally condemned as greedy, even ugly."
"Public staircases are a guilty pleasure of mine. There's one that I use often, a south-facing set of steps that links a pedestrian bridge over the river to our local greenmarket. It's a lovely, sun-drenched place to sit, and when the market's open, its top step is about sixty feet from a Breton couple that makes crepes.
I can't explain why I feel so comfortable sprawling across these concrete stairs, laying my bags down alongside me, when I'm convinced it would be basically gross to do the same on a city sidewalk. But obviously I'm not the only one who feels compulsion and permission here; big public staircases like this do the work of a hundred benches.
In many ways they're better than benches: No matter how long your legs are, you can comfortably set your feet down. Teenagers in particular seem to enjoy the many possibilities to sit above, below, and on top of one another, to see and to be seen. Staircases were the dominant social architecture of my high school, both inside the building, where a ceremonial stair overlooked the lobby, and outside, where brownstone stoops made bleachers of the whole neighborhood. And because public stairs must function first and foremost as passages, they are to some degree immune from the hostile architecture that regiments and prescribes the use of most high-design public seating.
In the case of Paris's La Defense business district, one of the world's worst public spaces is redeemed by a well-placed staircase. The Spanish Steps, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Seagram Building Plaza, the Escadaria Selerón... those stepped monuments barely need another word from me. The apartment staircase, "the place for a careful making or a difficult unmaking of a community," is another subject entirely."
"y now effectively all ;login:’s readers have heard the term “web3” and “dapps” bandied about as if they are some great revolution. They are not. The technical underpinnings are so terrible that it is clear they exist only to hype the underlying cryptocurrencies. The actual utility of these “decentralized” systems is already available in modern distributed systems in ways that are several orders of magnitude more efficient and more capable. But first some terminology. A distributed system is composed of multiple, identified, and nameable entities. DNS is an example of such a distributed system, as there is a hierarchy of responsibilities and business relationships to create a specialized database with a corresponding cryptographic PKI. Similarly the web is a distributed system, where computation is not only spread amongst various servers but the duty of computation is shared between the browser and the server within a single web page.
A decentralized system, on the other hand, dispenses with the notion of identified entities. Instead everyone can participate and the participants are assumed to be mutually antagonistic, or at least maximizing their profit. Since decentralized systems depend on some form of voting, the potential for an attacker stuffing the ballot box is always at the forefront. After all, an attacker could just create a bunch of sock-puppets, called “sibyls”, and get all the votes they want.
In a distributed system sibyls are easy to deal with because there are responsible entities in the system who act as gatekeepers. These gatekeepers are often recruited to also prevent “undesired” activity. This is especially true of financial gatekeepers who perform payment processing and have legal obligations to block large swaths of criminal activity.
Decentralized systems purport to eliminate the presence of gatekeepers. But there is a problem as without such gatekeepers there is no efficient solution to the sibyl problem. Instead there are ugly hacks, such as a “proof of work” system where sibyls are only prevented by the need to waste resources, or “proof of stake” where the design literally becomes “he who has the gold makes the rules”."
"Germany is set to close almost half of its nuclear power capacity before the end of the year, putting further strain on European grids already coping with one of the worst energy crunches in the region’s history.
The shutdowns of Grohnde, Gundremmingen C and Brokdorf -- part of the country’s nuclear phaseout -- will leave just three atomic plants, which will be taken offline by the end of 2022. Beyond the squeeze on supply, the closures remove a key source of low-carbon power in a nation where emissions are on the rise.
After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Germany vowed to ditch all of its reactors. At the time, the country was a leader in renewables, but the phaseout has left it more reliant on coal and lignite for electricity generation. The nation fell behind in the net-zero race after making major concessions to the coal lobby, to protesters against wind farms and to manufacturers, particularly carmakers.
“From a pure emissions perspective, it was always a questionable idea to shut down German nuclear before the plants have reached the end of their lifetime,” said Hanns Koenig, head of commissioned projects at Aurora Energy Research. “It was always clear that the nuclear phaseout would need coal and gas plants to run more and therefore cause substantial extra emissions.”
Atomic plants are designed to generate power around the clock, providing valuable backup when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. While the shutdowns have been known about for years and are unlikely to cause a spike in prices, the removal of 4 gigawatts of baseload output highlights a dwindling reserve of buffer capacity in Germany. It’s one reason why prices are higher next year: electricity for delivery in 2022 has jumped more than fivefold this year."
"Cannabis is one of the most common mind-altering substances. It is used both medicinally and recreationally and is enmeshed in a complex and changing legal landscape. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some software developers may use cannabis to aid some programming tasks. At the same time, anti-drug policies and tests remain common in many software engineering environments, sometimes leading to hiring shortages for certain jobs. Despite these connections, little is actually known about the prevalence of, and motivation for, cannabis use while programming. In this paper, we report the results of the first large-scale survey of cannabis use by programmers. We report findings about 803 developers' (including 450 full-time programmers') cannabis usage prevalence, perceptions, and motivations. For example, we find that some programmers do regularly use cannabis while programming: 35% of our sample has tried programming while using cannabis, and 18% currently do so at least once a month. Furthermore, this cannabis usage is primarily motivated by a perceived enhancement to certain software development skills (such as brainstorming or getting into a programming zone) rather than medicinal reasons (such as pain relief). Finally, we find that cannabis use while programming occurs at similar rates for programming employees, managers, and students despite differences in cannabis perceptions and visibility. Our results have implications for programming job drug policies and motivate future research into cannabis use while programming."