Bits

Deleted my Twitter account July 27 https://twitter.com/grantpotter (2007-2023)

“Some medical professionals have said Sci-Hub helps save human lives; some students have said they wouldn’t be able to complete their education without Sci-Hub’s help. Through Sci-Hub, Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in which publishers charge high prices even though authors of articles in academic journals receive no payment.” SciHub receives an EFF award https://www.eff.org/press/releases/electronic-frontier-foundation-present-annual-eff-awards-alexandra-asanovna-elbakyan

Sound & Music

“When music made collaboratively with other musicians goes right, I feel a budding, rising warmth and comfort.” What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me (The New Yorker) https://archive.ph/AZxLm

Starting with its bell-bottom hip-hugger cut, Parsons’ had the most WTF-for-its-time design: a nude woman, marijuana leaves and poppies on the front, poppies on the back, and pills and cubes (the latter likely symbolizing acid) on the sleeves. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/elton-john-missing-flying-burrito-brothers-nudie-suit-1234789732/

Between the years of 1977 and 1984, the group fired a volley of incendiary albums from their home base Dial House, an open community operating out of a 16th century farmer’s cottage on the outskirts of Epping Forest in rural Essex. https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bullsht-detector-compilation-crass-interview

There is, I think a lesson in Scott’s life, one that’s kind of a moral de detail for our own AI ChatGPT world. He walked from automatic pianos to the first computers. He sought perfection, He sought industrial scale creativity, but the trade offs he made were the relationships around him, the failure to see the humanity of the people he was trying to control. https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-4/episode-one-piano-player

Politics & Economics

But things have changed. Telling academics they can achieve career success by using today’s algorithmic-driven platforms is like telling Millennials they could afford to buy a house by eating less avocado on toast. It’s a cruel lie because social media is a shit way to share your work now. https://thesiswhisperer.com/2023/07/10/academicenshittification/

If you look at the food we need as humans, one-third … benefits from bee pollination, and of that one-third, 80 per cent of the pollination is done by honeybees. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/07/27/news/canadian-beekeepers-record-losses