Sonia Connolly

From the Plantation to the Thicket: Juneteenth, Black Freedom, and ‘Marronage’ in Texas by DaLyah Jones.

[P]rior to 1865, many Afro-Texans reclaimed their sovereignty and autonomy well before the federal government acknowledged their basic humanity, though there’s a dearth of centralized information about Black placemaking in Texas from this time. This reclamation was called “marronage”—a term borrowed from French for this act of antebellum self-emancipation.

Problematic Authors: Can We Separate the Art from the Artist? by Naomi Jacobs. "In chronological order here is what we know about these problematic writers." Content note: Some of your favorite authors might show up on this list.

How playgrounds reinvented childhood by Frank Jacobs.

Playgrounds helped transform childhood from participation in public life into preparation for adulthood. From now on, childhood would be supervised and sanitized, zoned into a designated area and limited to a sandbox. No more pirate play on the Mississippi — for better or worse.

A solar farm was built to make energy, but the ground beneath the panels quietly began doing something no one planned for by Carlos Albero Rojas.

These two sites were different by design. Instead of bare gravel or closely mown grass, the panels were raised higher off the ground, leaving room underneath for something to grow.

Then the builders did something unusual. They carefully chose native grasses and wildflowers and planted them right under and around the rows, hoping to rebuild the habitat that used to be there and to hold the soil and water in place.

Language learning methods that actually work #1: The binge.

Speaking as a linguist who has read the literature on second language acquisition and understands 4 languages, I’ve always maintained that Duolingo is a trap; it will keep you spinning on wheels and feeling as if you’re learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours on it and fully gold a tree and you’ll get nowhere. [...]

When in reality, what you should have been doing is to spend all day browsing memes on French Instagram, or playing Animal Crossing in French.

Kruunuvuorensilta, the new icon of Helsinki.

The new Kruunuvuorensilta bridge connecting Korkeasaari and Kruunuvuorenranta is the longest, tallest and longest-standing bridge in Finland – and it is also globally exceptional as bridges of this size have not been built for the sole use of public transport, pedestrian traffic and cycling. The bridge thus becomes an interesting attraction not only due to its size, but also due to the advanced traffic thinking behind its design.

For anyone who lives in or is planning to visit California, offer good until July 6, pass lasts through the end of the year.

I had to try it in several different browsers and I think I went through the account creation process twice, but this finally worked on Firefox to get a free California Parks pass for the rest of the year.
News Release
Free pass link

When I was a kid, history class meant boring dates about which white man was elected or made a speech or started a war. I read historical novels that centered women and children and didn't realize that was history too.

In the NFO (National Folk Organization) newsletter a while back, there was an article about The Grace McMillan Project.

In early 2023, dance historian Erica Nielsen Okamura came across a rare 1912 Australian edition of Miss McMillan's Swedish Recreative Exercises. Fascinated by this discovery, Erica embarked on a challenging quest to piece together Miss McMillan's life story and to determine how the Nääs dances and games were used in Australia. The Australian edition seemed out of place. Other early 20th century folk dance resources from the UK and USA did not have Australian editions. Erica had to know: Who was Grace McMillan, and why did an Australian edition of her book exist?

Erica Okamura wrote a book about her research and discoveries, which is available as an ebook for free in full. Grace McMillan & Swedish Recreative Exercises by Erica Okamura.

Mary Anne's Story by Mary Anne McMillan is also available.

Mary Anne McMillan (later Donges), born in 1904, lived with her Aunt Grace McMillan from about 1917 until 1922. She wrote about this period of her life in 1989.

I'm fascinated by the persistence and curiosity required to piece together the details of someone's life, including tracking down documents as well as generous people who share their living memories of the person. If it weren't for Erica Okamura's interest, this story would be lost.

The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. by Minas Karamanis.

Alice can now do things. She can open a paper she's never seen before and, with effort, follow the argument. She can write a likelihood function from scratch. She can stare at a plot and know, before checking, that something is wrong with the normalization. She spent a year building a structure inside her own head, and that structure is hers now, permanently, portable, independent of any tool or subscription. Bob has none of this. Take away the agent, and Bob is still a first-year student who hasn't started yet. The year happened around him but not inside him. He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade.

Appearing Productive in The Workplace from No One's Happy.

The reckoning will not be subtle. The firms still doing the work properly will be in a position to charge for it. The firms that have hollowed themselves out will discover that what they hollowed out was the thing the client was paying for.

The AI Bubble from No One's Happy.

The reason none of them can stop is that the investment, the revenue, and the justification for the next investment are the same transaction. If Microsoft reduces its OpenAI commitment, it loses one of Azure’s largest customers, the AI revenue line that justifies $192 billion in capex, and the earnings growth that holds its stock price — all at once. The same logic binds Alphabet and Amazon to Anthropic: the equity position and the cloud contract are the same bet, and unwinding one unwinds both.

Funny but serious, Chieng issues an AI warning to grads by Liz Mineo, Harvard Staff Writer.

He continued, “Whatever your chosen profession is, please don’t let AI rob you of the fun part of it. Your generation’s upcoming battle won’t be humans against AI; that’s at least two months away. … It’s going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It’s going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles.”

Quality in the Age of Slop by Sinclair Target.

This blog post is very long and almost entirely about the 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is also about AI—there will be some juicy takes, pinky swear—but those familiar with ZAMM should consider themselves warned. [...]

Quality is related to caring because once you care, once you are interested, you have a vantage point from which to make Quality judgments. These Quality judgments (e.g. "Is this good code?") are based in part on the romantic mode of understanding and so within the classical mode alone aren't defensible. But they are necessary, because in the moment-to-moment work on the machine, there are thousands of facts you could consider, thousands of alternative threads you could follow, all equally valid in the classical mode, and the only way to make any sense of it all is to apply a Quality-focused version of Occam's Razor.

How To Not Be Wrong About AI by Greg Wilson. A slide deck on how to evaluate and create studies about AI to get real, usable information.

Do You Love the Color of the Sky by Rachel A. Rosen. A haunting and sharply detailed time travel story.

Long list of Tumblr classic stories. I can't see all of these without a Tumblr account, but many of them. Fabulous stories.
Love how Tumblr has its own folk stories

For example, You are a long-forgotten god by dycefic.

You are a long forgotten god. A small girl leaves a piece of candy at your shrine, and you awaken. Now, you must do everything to protect your High Priestess, the girl, and her entire kindergarten class, your worshipers.

Back in 2019, I posted links to the fabulous Amalgamation Choir from Crete, led by Vasiliki Anastasiou. In particular, I loved Tis Trihas to Gefyri from Pontos in 9/8. (lyrics)

Recently I went to a concert by Phoebe Vlassis, who weaves at a loom and sings at the same time, with the rhythm of the loom in sync with the singing. At the end of the concert she raffles off the weaving she made during the concert. She opened with Tis Trihas to Gefyri, which I recognized immediately. I asked her about it after the concert, and she said it was the first song she tried combining with weaving.



So I looked around for Amalgamation Choir, and it turns out they're still around! Here's a 20 min concert, posted in 2020.

I'm still playing Exponentile and I want to drop in a note that I got up to 106,840 this time. A while ago I got up to 161,724, and I don't think I'll ever get past that again.

I'm getting better at stopping when I want rather than getting completely hijacked by it. For a while it made my right elbow hurt, which was an inducement to stop playing, or at least play less. Lately my left elbow has been hurting, but I think that has more to do with weight-lifting, or maybe leaning on the arm of my chair while I'm typing. I'm hoping it gets better without having to take a break from weight-lifting entirely.

I biked 100K (65 miles) today out in the Livermore Valley, an all-women organized ride called Cinderella Classic. I first rode it in 1991, the 15th ride, and this was the 50th. I'm proud of my collection of patches, one for each year I did the ride.

It was beautiful out there! It's been rainy, so the hills were green, and we rode past farms and ranches. We rode on some of the rural roads I remember fondly from past rides, and avoided a lot of the annoying suburban riding with long traffic lights. There was a dog-leg out to Sunol that I had never ridden before that was gorgeously tree-lined and empty of traffic. There weren't even any cyclists around while I was doing that part of the ride.

I'm slow, but I get there eventually. I caught the first BART train of the day at 6:39am, started the ride at 7:30, and got back to the starting point at around 2:15. I chatted with other riders at the rest stops, and even rode with people for a while.

One woman said I was amazing because I and my bike were all kitted out for rain (fenders, rain pants, boots rather than cycling shoes that clip into the pedals) and still doing the ride. When we were going uphill into the wind I got in front so she could draft behind me, and she was very grateful. It felt good not to be the slowest rider on the road.

One of the nice things about an organized ride for just women is that it's less competitive, and women who don't ride as much and aren't as strong feel safe to come out and try it. It was my first long organized ride back in 1991.

We had clear skies and sun for the first couple of hours, to where I was regretting my wool socks. But then the dark clouds rolled in and we had intermittent cloudbursts for the rest of the ride. I was glad for all my gear! I got home just before the skies opened up here and it poured down rain for a couple of hours, with some rare lightning and thunder.

During the ride, I was focused on weather, physical comfort, looking at the pavement for directional arrows, and looking around at the scenery. The state of the world and the state of my personal life didn't cross my mind.

The miles added up surprisingly quickly, and I wasn't worried about being able to finish the ride once I got started. Even though I carry my own food and only get bananas at the rest stops, organized rides are still fun. The route arrows, the volunteers directing traffic, the camaraderie, the string of colorful riders ahead all add energy. For the Cinderella ride, lots of women wear short rainbow or pink or orange tutus over their bike shorts, and/or tiaras and flowers on their helmets. I had forgotten about that part!

And I almost forgot to include the Lemon Drop Man. He used to be at the top of the only major climb on the route, but since it got rearranged I thought we would miss out on that tradition. But toward the end of the ride, on a random suburban intersection, there he was. He put 2 lemon drops in my outstretched hand as I rode by, and I happily popped one in my mouth. It seems to have been gluten-free, whew, but I wasn't going to stop and quiz him about ingredients, and the nostalgia was worth the risk.

COVID probably killed 150,000 more people in its first two years than official U.S. tolls show by Meghan Bartels.

The untallied cases show the burden of the pandemic in the U.S. fell most heavily on marginalized people.

“These vulnerable groups are just taking a higher risk at every step, and the accumulation of all of that is this disparity in COVID mortality at the end,” says Mathew Kiang, an epidemiologist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.

Nine observations from carbon dioxide monitoring by A. Grieve-Smith.

I’ve been checking carbon dioxide levels for over three years now, and I’ve started to see patterns. I don’t have to keep checking the same places, because they have the same levels under similar conditions. [...] I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned, so that you can benefit even if you haven’t been monitoring carbon dioxide on your own.

A couple of interesting links from Industrial Workers of the World, a union for all workers. Direct Action and Sabotage and The Black Cat (Sabo-Tabby).

Birbs and Borbs Birds with queer flags. I'm eyeing the bisexual oystercatcher sticker. Pride is resistance!

Resist and Unsubscribe. Unsubscribe from services that support fascism. Every little bit helps! I didn't subscribe to any of these things in the first place, so I guess I've been resisting all along.

Taking action against AI harms by Anil Dash. Speaking can help get businesses off X and schools off ChatGPT.