Friday, January 3, 2025
Well, after another trip around the old sun, here we are again, back where we started. May I interest you in some newsletter?
Item 1: a link
Maxwell Neely-Cohen, a fellow at the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, asks via a handsome website, if you had to store some data for 100 years, how would you do it? He takes quite a (pleasantly) long time to get to the answer, meandering through the history of digital media, and it's kind of a bummer - the basic answer is there's not a great way to do it right now, and the organizations we might expect to be leading the charge to improve the situation mostly don't care enough to do so. And this isn't really mentioned in the manifesto, but the rise of AI, with its easy generation of accurate-seeming output that may or may not bear any relationship to truth or reality, will only make this more difficult - and more essential.
tl;dr: invest in libraries, invest in decentralization, invest in right to repair, save a bunch of backups of everything.
Item 2: a list
Historic Holiday Desserts from Around the World, ranked:
- Cookies
- Buñuelos
- Hot Chocolate
- Eggnog
- Yule Log (no wait, I meant Yule Log) (bonus item)
- Baklava
- Hamantaschen (bonus item)
- Gingerbread Houses
- Kagami Mochi
- Figgy Pudding
- Fruitcake
Item 3: a media recommendation
Vehicle Assembly Building - Jared Owen
I still recommend that you go back and watch all of this guy's space-related videos.
Item 4: word of the week
Quincunx
No, I don't know why our fingers aren't arranged in a quincunx layout, and yes, I agree it would probably make it easier to play video games. Now go do your homework.
Item 5: a photograph
See ya!
Thanks for reading. Enjoy your first weekend of the year. See you back here in a week or so.
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