One Thousand Words

Thanks to oursin for this link:
Literacy in Early Modern England
We've got this modern vision of earlier humans, no matter when or where, as ignorant rubes who didn't know how to eat properly or clean themselves or travel or... read and write. This is yet another article about how humans from early modern England were more familiar with writing, and with holding a pen, than is generally thought. And I want to note that "using a pen" absolutely is a skill - not just with modern pens and pencils, but especially with old quills. It's incredibly easy to fuck them up entirely, to not be able to make a mark at all or to just leave a big old blotch.

"The Girl Who Smelled Pink
Interesting article about synesthesia. For me, personally, some numbers (10-12) have a personality or general feeling/aura about them. 12 is the vaguest and frankly might solely be the result of having had to memorize times tables but not being good at it.

Dyslexia Doesn't Work The Way We Thought It Did
Little article that doesn't go super in depth about the topic, but essentially dyslexia doesn't seem to be language related. It's a brain plasticity/memory thing.

I was going to do a big link round up on Friday but this just kept getting bigger and bigger so I'm publishing it early.

How Centuries Old Whaling Logs Are Filling In Gaps In Our Climate Knowledge
Whaling vessels used to keep meticulous logs about pretty much everything, including the weather. Oceanographers and climate scientists are wading through (see what I did there?) 54,000 log books that include things like wind speed, cloud cover, and rainfall. One of the big benefits of whaling logs is that they weren't capturing weather from cities and other areas that are already pretty well studied. This is new information taken from the middle of the ocean far from human observation.

Cistercian Numerals
Cistercian monks came up with a numerial system around the same time that Arabic numerals were gaining traction in northwest Europe. You may have seen an image of this on tumblr or pinterest and this page has a bit more information. It reminds me a bit of Ogham, a vertical line with ligatures. As with Ogham it wasn't used to record a great deal of information.

The Messages that Survived Civilizations' Collapse
An interesting look at what written languages survived throughout history, and why. There's also some discussion of how to write a message that will survive into the future and be understood, which reminds me of Ryan North's book How To Take Over The World.

Scotland Is Poised To Become The World's First "Rewilding Nation"
There's some really exciting ecological improvement and repair happening in Scotland, replanting native trees and plants and reintroducing native animals (or near native... beavers native to Scotland have all been killed but other beavers are being brought in). One of the most amazing things about nature is that when you start to make things even a little bit better it takes off pretty quickly. One of the most frustrating things about our current world is how corporations and politicians are actively fighting making things even a little bit better. Anyway, Chicago's Parks District is currently ripping out non-native trees and plants in parks and along the river, in stages, and planting native varieties. I'm looking forward to seeing the result!

Why Did We All Have The Same Childhood?
One of the great things about having a kid or interacting with kids regularly (which hopefully you're able to do when you have a kid/s) is watching them play. So much of what they do is familiar! It's stuff that you did as a kid. But sometimes it's strange. My kid, at the age of 6 or 7, enacted Minecraft tasks like "chopping trees" (using their fists or a stick to feign chopping down a tree) to build a house so creepers wouldn't be able to get them. Sometimes they would play tag with friends, one person being the creeper who would explode if it caught someone. Creeper tag! Building an imaginary house, playing tag, so similar yet also different. The above is a brief article about just that, and about how important childhood play is; how it's not actually vanishing even with ooga booga modern technology; and how adults just... don't get it. We aren't fluent in it, so to speak. It's an interesting read.

All The Free Resources You Can Find At Your Library
This is a pretty short bit by Wired about different free resources you can find at your library, focusing primarily on digital content. Yes, you can get eBooks, audio books, stream tv shows and movies, get passes to read paywalled content. You can also physically go to the library to get DVDs/Blue Rays, CDs, read newspapers and magazines. You can take classes. BUT ALSO! Many libraries have museum passes! Some have baking equipment you can check out! Some have tools you can borrow! Some have recording equipment! Some have 3D printers! Some have seed catalogs! Our local library branch has fishing rods (it's right near a branch of the river)! Libraries are really cool and are run by passionate people. And as pointed out in the article, it would absolutely be impossible to get them funded by the state/federal government now... although many communities offer similar, specialized services carrying items that their local library doesn't have.

Delete Never: The Digital Hoarders Who Collect Tumblrs, Medieval Manuscripts, and Terrabytes of Text Files
Some people are currently scrambling to document beloved Twitter moments: Dril and Birds Rights tweets, the story about the rice delivery, the Olive Garden knife fight, the white lady who nearly bought a haunted house, Seanan McGuire's various lizard stories, etc. However collecting digital ephemera has a long standing tradition (as does collecting physical ephemera). Personally, I have a vast collection of custom content for the Sims 2, it is something that I would search for, download, and organize when I was manic (I'm bipolar II). Other people specialize in tv shows and movies that aren't available for streaming, or books, or instruction manuals for vintage video games, or punk show flyers, or geocities websites. I'm not sure how I feel about my horrible geocities website being made public, quite frankly.

How Do We Preserve The Vanishing Foods Of The Earth?
This starts and ends a little abruptly, and references things that have come before this little essay has started. It's an excerpt from the book Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food by Lenore Newman, which I'm going to pick up. It's a delicate musing on undiscovered foods, extinct foods, what and how we eat. It makes biodiversity personal and is the sort of essay kids should read in school: it demonstrates WHY plants going extinct is bad. It makes our lives smaller, our choices smaller. It takes the magic of new things out of the world.