MaisonBisson

Whet Moser pointed out this enlightening Twitter thread that explains an aspect of Sears I hadn’t considered before: by disrupting retail stores with mail-order, it was empowering a demographic that was often underserved in their communities:

The Sears catalog succeeded because it got the goods to people who couldn’t get to stores. One of those demographics? African-Americans. In a lengthy Twitter thread, Cornell historian Louis Hyman writes that it freed up black Southerners from going to general stores, which was often (at best) a humiliating experience. Store owners were so incensed that they “organized catalog bonfires in the street.”

It served as a similar resource for Appalachian coal miners, providing huge discounts over rip-off company stores. Sears also had “a policy that his company would fill any order it received, no matter what the medium or format”—a boon to customers who struggled with literacy.

On The Media’s Brook Gladstone spoke with Louis Hymen, the author of that twitter thread and professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in a podcast extra last week. Listen or download.

Whet Moser, suddenly making sell-by dates on food products relevant to me:

About a quarter of US methane emissions comes from food rotting in landfills.

The dates on our packaged food products look so authoritative, but the way Moser tells it, they were invented by marketing folks to increase sales at the cost of disposing of otherwise good products that have an expired sell-by date.

Isaac Blankensmith writing in PetaPixel about building an Instax instant film back for a Hasselblad 500:

Instant photos are magical. They develop before your eyes. You can share them, gift them, spill water on them, draw on them. The only problem is that most instant cameras are pretty cheap — that’s why I’ve always wanted to hack my medium format camera to take instant photos with shallow depth of field and sharpness.

Since Fuji ceased production of their Polaroid-compatible peel-apart films a few years ago, there has been significant interest in a Fuji Instax back. At least two Kickstarters have been announced, Hasselblad Square Instant Film Back and Rezivot Instant Film Processor, but neither of those was successful.

@instantmediumformat on Instagram converted an old Mamiya Press Camera, but has offered few details for those who wish to follow. Blankensmith’s post is a pretty good starting point for people who’ve been considering building one for themselves–possibly people like me.

From Wikipedia

a common misconception is that takt time is related to the time it takes to actually make the product. In fact, takt time simply reflects the rate of production needed to match the demand.

Said again: it’s the required rate, not the actual rate.

Matthew Taub, writing in Atlas Obscura

Around the same time, the first modern restaurants were rising around Paris. These establishments, primarily for the wealthy, sought to recreate the experience of dining in an upscale home. The experience was about more than food. Waiters had to retain the appearance of domestic valets, who were forbidden to wear mustaches as a sign of their rank. Diners were “paying to humiliate people in an almost institutional way,” says historian Gil Mihaely, who has published extensively on the subject of French masculinity. The clientele had “paid for an experience. And the experience was to be the master.”

And then the waiters struck. They were petitioning for better pay, and the right to grow facial hair.

The Parisian waiters won the right to mustaches, but the fight for a living wage continues to this day: Marriott hotel workers have been striking for a week now. Today’s strikers don’t give a darn about mustaches, but like the Parisian strikers, they do demand a living wage.

Karl Bode in The Verge:

In policy conversations, ISP lobbyists lean heavily on the FCC’s flawed data to falsely suggest that American broadband is dirt cheap and ultra competitive, despite real-world evidence to the contrary. ISPs also use this false reality to imply meaningful consumer protections aren’t necessary because the market is healthy (as we saw during the fight over net neutrality).

CloudFlare on the frustrations of clock skew:

It may surprise you to learn that, in practice, clients’ clocks are heavily skewed. A recent study of Chrome users showed that a significant fraction of reported TLS-certificate errors are caused by client-clock skew. During the period in which error reports were collected, 6.7% of client-reported times were behind by more than 24 hours. (0.05% were ahead by more than 24 hours.) This skew was a causal factor for at least 33.5% of the sampled reports from Windows users, 8.71% from Mac OS, 8.46% from Android, and 1.72% from Chrome OS.

They’re proposing Roughtime as a solution.

The title is a quote from Nikita Prokopov, who is wallowing in disenchantment.

Way back in 2013 I wrote:

I’m sure somebody will eventually develop software to automatically blur the backgrounds of our smartphone photos, but until then, this is basic physics.

The new camera system in the iPhone XS seems to have moved computational photography from the world of parlor tricks to the mainstream.

Update

This blog post from the developer of Halide, a premium camera app for iOS, goes into a lot more detail about all the computation going on in the new cameras.

Goldfinger, the 1964 Bond film, is based on a premise that is incredibly foreign to today’s audiences: moving gold between countries was illegal. Oliver Bullough in The Guardian asks us all to think about that a bit more:

The US government tried to defend the dollar/gold price, but every restriction it put on dollar movements just made it more profitable to keep your dollars in London, leading more money to leak offshore, and thus more pressure to build on the dollar/gold price. And where the dollars went, the bankers followed. The City had looser regulations and more accommodating politicians than Wall Street, and the banks loved it. In 1964, 11 US banks had branches in the City of London. In 1975, 58 did.

If regulations stop at a country’s borders, but the money can flow wherever it wishes, its owners can outwit any regulators they choose.

A few git commands I find myself having to look up:

Resolve Git merge conflicts in favor of their changes during a pull:

git pull -Xtheirs
git checkout --theirs the/conflicted.file

Source

Viewing Unpushed Git Commits

git log origin/master..HEAD

You can also view the diff using the same syntax:

git diff origin/master..HEAD

Or, “for a little extra awesomeness”

git log --stat origin/master..HEAD 

Updated since it was first posted:

Starting with Git 2.5+ (Q2 2015), the actual answer would be git log @{push}… See that new shortcut @{push}

And:

Outgoing changes: git log @{u}.. Incoming changes: git log ..@{u}

@{u} or @{upstream} means the upstream branch of the current branch (see git rev-parse --help or git help revisions for details).

Air pollution is making us dumber, study shows:

The team found that both verbal and math scores “decreased with increasing cumulative air pollution exposure,” with the decline in verbal scores being particularly pronounced among older, less educated men.

Study links urge to pee with impairment:

Snyder and his team ran the study on eight individuals, who each drank 250 milliliters of water every 15 minutes until they reached their “breaking point,” where they could no longer hold their urine. As subjects’ self-reported pain levels increased, so too did their levels of cognitive impairment as measured by simple tasks on the computer that tested attention and working memory.

Abby Sewell, with photographs by Jeff Heimsath, in The National Geographic:

Every spring, communities gather to take part in a ceremony of renewal. Working together from each side of the river, the villagers run a massive cord of rope, more than a hundred feet long and thick as a person’s thigh, across the old bridge. Soon, the worn structure will be cut loose and tumble into the gorge below. Over three days of work, prayer, and celebration, a new bridge will be woven in its place.

The Q’eswachaka bridge has been built and rebuilt continuously for five centuries.

The bridge is 120 feet long, over a gorge of considerable, but unstated, depth.

It’s said to be at -14.3811214,-71.484012.