For much of my week of Monday 24 to Sunday 30 January 2022 it felt like I was battling some minor illness. Not the covid, because I was taking tests, but just some fatigue-causing lurgi. Or it might just be that we’re all just completely over the world right now. So to make up for the lack of productivity there’s a whole bunch of recommendations.
Photos
- I’ve updated my Waratah sequence 2021 for another week. This takes us up to day 152. Progress is currently slow as the two remaining seed pods slowly get fatter and browner.
Media Appearances
- My January 2020 article for ZDNet, Twitter bots and trolls promote conspiracy theories about Australian bushfires, was cited in the paper Are we always in strife? A longitudinal study of the echo chamber effect in the Australian Twittersphere.
Articles, Podcasts, Videos, Corporate Largesse
None. You can read my previous writing at Authory, where you can also subscribe to an email compilation of any new stories each Sunday morning. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel for when new videos appear.
Recommendations
My recommendations have been few in number over the past few weeks, so here’s a big batch to make up for it — and there will be another one next week.
- Here’s a fascinating YouTube channel: “DUST presents thought-provoking science fiction stories, exploring the future of humanity through the lens of science and technology.” It says there’s new films every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
- Here’s another one. Adam Something presents brief, snarky explainers about urban development, transport, technology, and the like. I’ve recently enjoyed his The HyperPort Is Dumb And Will Most Likely Explode, How Our Streets Got Stolen From Us, and his ode to prefab concrete apartments, Commie Blocks Are Pretty Good, Actually.
- Nothing Sacred: These Apps Reserve The Right To Sell Your Prayers, reports BuzzFeed. It’s venture capital funded, of course, and whether you use the “prayer modules” about divorce or porn or whatever is then sold to Facebook for targeted advertising.
- Trouble on the tracks: is Australia’s $14bn inland rail project going off the rails?
- All the lighthouses in the world in an animated map, or so they say. “The map is even better than it might seem at first glance: the colours are the real colours, the patterns are the real patterns, and the size of the dots is the distance at which each light is visible,” though it does look somewhat sparse in Australia and Africa, so maybe it isn’t all of them after all.
- Emirates has made another remarkable TV commercial, this time for the Dubai Expo, and yes they really did fly to get that shot. They’ve done it before. Here’s that advert and the making-of video.
- How accurate is your RAT? 3 scenarios show it’s about more than looking for lines.
- An Audible-exclusive short audiobook, Michael Pollan’s Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World, is a fascinating two-hour journey through the history of the drug. I think that some of his narrative confuses correlation with causation, but it’s fascinating nonetheless. The section on caffeine’s problems has reinforced my urge to sort out my sleep patterns.
- And finally, you should check out @OzKitsch’s Coldest 100 videos, their parody of Triple J’s Hottest 100. You can watch the short versions of songs on Twitter, or the full versions on the YouTube playlist.
The Week Ahead
You know that geek-work for clients that I keep talking about but never seem to get to? Well, I am definitely going to get some of it done this week. Monday and Tuesday will be dedicated to that. Mostly.
On Wednesday I’m heading down to Sydney, where I’m spending the afternoon with a client kicking off their new project.
Some time this week I’ll be recording the next episode in The 9pm Edict summer series, but things are only pencilled in at this stage.
This may be the planned episode with Dr Space Junk aka Dr Alice Gorman and perhaps a colleague about the International Space Station Archaeological Project — the first archaeology to be done somewhere other than Planet Earth. But it might be something else, depending on people’s availability.
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Further Ahead
- APRICOT 2022 / APNIC 53, 28 February to 3 March 2022.
- Aaron Chen at the Enmore Theatre, 5 May 2022.
- Nigel Ng’s The Haiyaa World Tour, Enmore Theatre, 9 June 2022.
[Photo: The clear summer sky of Sydney, photographed from Belmore Park on 28 January 2022.]