My birthday was yesterday! To celebrate, I ate an overly large and overly expensive steak and sorely undercooked brussels sprouts. Do yourself a favor and always roast brussels sprouts until they are caramelized and crunchy, then put some reduced apple cider and maple syrup on top. YUM! Technology, while making the world more accessible than it has been in the past, has a lot of work to do for people with disabilities.| thisisimportant.net
David W. Butterfield (American, 1844 - 1933) Vermont and Massachusetts Railroad, about 1870 - 1880, Albumen silver print 42.2 x 56.6 cm (16 5/8 x 22 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Once upon a time (okay, the first one was in 1871), fish were carted across America in railroad cars. Of course, this was terrible for native fish species, but great for fisherman looking to fish fish that were in demand.| thisisimportant.net
Instruction manuals, and instructions in general, are incredibly important. I could be biased, since part of my job involves writing instructions for systems, but really, they’re important! As this look into the historical importance of manuals makes clear, manuals (and instructions) make accessible professions, tools, and devices to anyone that can read them (which, admittedly, could be a hurdle of its own): “With no established guild system in place for many of these new professions (pr...| thisisimportant.net
It may seem like a Hallmark holiday, but there aren’t any cards for it (if there are please mail me one). It exists to commemorate the 1981 signing of the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data by the Council of Europe. Accordingly, Europe celebrates this day as Data Protection Day. Let’s start with some basics… Use secure passwords, and store them securely.| thisisimportant.net
Librarians are an underused, underpaid, and underestimated legion. And one librarian in particular is frustrated by e-book lending. Not just the fact that libraries have to maintain waitlists for access to a digital file, but also that the barriers to checking out an ebook are unnecessarily high. As she puts it, “Teaching people about having technology serve them includes helping them learn to assess and evaluate risk for themselves.”| thisisimportant.net
The Senate Intelligence Committee released hundreds of pages (soon available as a book) detailing acts of torture committed by the CIA. The New York Times calls out 7 key points from the report. The Atlantic takes to task leadership proclaiming that “this is not who we are”, by reminding us that torture is who we are. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande tweeted about the role of medical professionals in the torture, and it is truly appalling.| thisisimportant.net
Taylor Swift has been blowing up the music industry lately, first by surprising everyone with the beauty of her latest album. SNL dubbed it a result of Swiftamine, and I can certainly say I’m under the spell. Then, pre-release, she removed her entire discography from Spotify. The Atlantic reflects on this decision by pointing out, “Owning music outright, instead of renting it through a streaming service, would be better for listeners and artists in the long run.| thisisimportant.net
Americans are still reading books, Internet and all! Younger Americans are actually reading more than older generations, which could be partially due to the fact that with the rise of texting and social media, so much of our communication is text-based, so everyone is doing a lot more reading (and writing) in order to communicate with their friends. The original study is linked in that article and in this graph:| thisisimportant.net
Public health in the U.S. tends to focus on chronic diseases (like cancer or diabetes), but in other parts of the world, much of the focus is on drugs that either no longer afflict the U.S., or aren’t cost-effective to treat. Sickle cell anemia can be treated when it’s identified early. But that doesn’t happen much in the developing world, it is still a serious issue. So a diagnostic test that is simple, fast, and cheap is ideal, and currently in development.| thisisimportant.net
Hello! Long time no talk. I heard you all singing this song, and I’m back! Here’s some strange and utterly fascinating research: When a landfill was dug up to find out if Atari had buried its games there, it wasn’t a bunch of guys with a bulldozer. It was a team of archaeologists (and, of course, the media). Weather models currently use data from the 1960s to the present, largely because not enough is digitized.| thisisimportant.net
It’s Thursday! Not Friday. Go to work tomorrow. When you don’t have to work, though, you can go outdoors! Because July is Park and Recreation month. So. If you’re not working, and it is nice outside, go outside. Weekend, planned. Just for you. National parks are a great place to go outdoors. The National Parks Conservation Association is taking care to recognize people who identify as LGBT+ by doing more to preserve historical locations important to the legacy of LGBT+ life in the Uni...| thisisimportant.net
The world is depressing. Let’s not talk about the plane that was shot down over Ukraine, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, or ISIS, or climate change. (those are all links to vox explainers I haven’t read, so beware maybe). Let’s instead talk about reading, writing, and gifs! Read books. Read as many books as you want. Read as few books as you want. Read. And remember: “If someone reads fewer books than you do, it does not make them less intelligent than you.| thisisimportant.net
I completely forgot to send a newsletter last week, and for that I’m sorry. It was sunny, so I was actually outdoors. It has rained this entire week, so I have tabs for you now. Now, this evening, because I watched Return of the Jedi instead of writing this yesterday. So there’s that. On to important things… [Don’t do what you love](broken link removed). Instead, [do what you do](broken link removed).| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… If you have a child abroad, and you’re a U.S. citizen, you can get your child U.S. citizenship as well. However, as Tori Marlan investigates “the rules that determine what babies can become citizens seem to be butting up against the modern circumstances under which Americans are having babies.” Most notably, modern practices that involve children being born before marriage, or through fertility treatments, or to same-sex couples.| thisisimportant.net
A lot has happened since last week. As a heads up, the first portion of this post is about misogyny and the UCSB shootings last weekend. If you’d rather not read about it, skip below the comic! Last weekend, a man murdered 6 people and injured 13 more. Misogyny is largely being credited (not much in mainstream media, however) as the primary driver behind his violence. The killer left behind several youtube videos and more than a hundred pages of a violent manifesto.| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… The museum memorializing the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks opened this week. Steve Kandell wrote about visiting it: The Worst Day of My Life is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction. The photographer and people-person-extraordinaire behind Humans of New York spoke to someone who also went through the museum. It opened early for survivors and family members of victims. Everyone agreed that the gift shop was in bad taste.| thisisimportant.net
Every so often the Oxford English Dictionary adds new words. It adds them to its online dictionary with far more frequency than its physical tome, given that a physical dictionary is quite a bit more difficult to update. It [released a list of new words yesterday](broken link removed), and while a few are new words entirely (bikeable) others are new definitions of familiar words. The “tumblr definition” of ship is recognized (and [boy is the tumblr community excited about it](broken link ...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… Software is everywhere lately. My boyfriend asked me what I thought the next big website would be (after the success of Google, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and I realized it’s just as likely (if not more likely) to be a software application rather than a website. Paul Ford took some time to enshrine some works of software in a “software canon” – Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Pacman, the Unix operating system, and eMacs (which I’d never ...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week…. Felix Salmon, a formers Reuters journalist, wrote a screed about why publishing news with the readers in mind is more valuable than breaking news. As he puts it, “when journalists start caring about scoops and exclusives, that’s a clear sign that they’re publishing mainly for the benefit of other journalists, rather than for their readers. “ Even more clearly, and something that I can relate to easily, is the idea that:| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… I treated myself to ice cream last night (from the freezer, not a lonely ice cream shop date with myself) and it was delicious. While I gained weight from starting an office job after college, I still have the privilege of avoiding most body policing placed on women. However, men suffer their own share of body policing. In Hollywood, this manifests itself as an obsession with fit bodies, and fitness.| thisisimportant.net
I am privileged enough to know a second language (although as the years pass, my proficiency is faltering…). The government and the military have a great need for foreign language proficiency for its employees (though apparently that isn’t much of a requirement for U.S. diplomats…). Given their need, they coordinated with the University of Maryland to develop a cognitive test that is supposed to determine how proficient someone can become in a foreign language.| thisisimportant.net
HEARTBLEED heartbleed my heart is bleeding about heartbleed…. How soon until someone writes a country ballad about heartbleed? Knowing the Internet, probably before all the [currently vulnerable sites](broken link removed) are patched. Researchers at University of Michigan previously produced a tool which was capable of scanning large swaths of the Internet at incredibly fast speeds. They took advantage of this tool to regularly scan the top 1 million sites on the Internet ([as categorize...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… I went home sick yesterday. Even though it is a good decision for my health, I still felt bad leaving work. Often I feel like I might be more productive though, working different hours, or even less hours. Other countries allow for leisure time throughout the work day, like a two hour long extended lunch. America, despite the increasing efficiencies produced by a continuing offloading of human work to machines (computers, robots, mechanization), seems ...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… More than you probably ever wanted to know about refrigerators and refrigeration: “Refrigeration is the invisible backbone on which the world’s food supply depends — and given our climate-changed forecast of more extreme weather events, it may yet prove to be its Achilles’ heel.” Oh how I wish this had come true: “All mechanical fridges work by controlling the vaporisation and condensation of a liquid called a refrigerant.| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… A discovery was made at the South Pole BICEP2 research lab that, if accurate, confirms the theory of cosmic inflation. Cosmic inflation explains the big bang, as an article in Symmetry Magazine details: “Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the big bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of tod...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… Today is Pi day. Here is more than you probably ever wanted to know about pi day. Last Saturday, March 8 was International Women’s Day. Started as a revolutionary holiday to honor the achievements of women, International Women’s Day is recognized in many countries. However, in Nepal it is recognized by women only, rather than as a day where men pay tribute to the women.| thisisimportant.net
nananananananananananana BITCOINNNN I had to talk about it eventually, and Thursday’s news was a good impetus. Newsweek had a big “scoop” potentially unmasking the founder of Bitcoin. The magazine saved this story for the cover of their return-to-print issue. The story features stalking masquerading as investigative journalism, as the author tracked down this man through national records, then tracked his interests to a model train forum, where she emailed him purporting to be interes...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… I spend a lot of time writing, but it never seems like enough. Partially because I spend so much time reading the writing of others, and partially because a lot of the writing that I do is IT documentation for my job. I feel truly accomplished when I manage to finish a blog post (there are at least 11 partially completed, with an entire doc full of more ideas).| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… Are women being [infantilized](link removed) or [endangered](link removed) in the Olympics? Also, the Olympic medal count gets more interesting depending on whether you look at it in terms of [total medals](broken link removed), [number of gold medals](link removed), or [medals per capita](broken link removed). In world news, protests in Ukraine that have been [going on for a few months](link removed) have escalated as the government ramps up ...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… Facebook now allows you to choose a “custom” gender option and fill in your own gender on your profile–to a point. Rather than being a free-text field, Facebook instead offers options which autocomplete. Slate went through the effort of tabulating all 58 of them. Facebook is likely avoiding a free-text field because it wants to avoid trolling, but more likely they want to maintain the purity of their data about users.| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… The Super Bowl was this past weekend, as you probably know. With the Olympics starting it’s old news, but one of the big topics in journalism in the lead-up to the event was how football (both the sport and the NFL) handles concussions. Football isn’t the only sport with a concussion problem– hockey and soccer are two other notables, and many more can be assumed (rugby, anyone?| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… Former University of Michigan kicker Brendan Gibbons has been expelled from U-M for a sexual misconduct case dating back to 2009. The Michigan Daily has more information about the expulsion, while Washtenaw Watchdogs posted about the entire case in 2011. Both The Michigan Daily and the Ann Arbor News are attempting to gain more information about both the disciplinary action and why Gibbons is only being expelled now, after having spent the last f...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… As the web and technology become ever more ingrained in our day to day lives, the role of designers becomes more apparent. Designers have been around since things began to be created, and according to one man, they’ve destroyed the world. It’s a bold statement. But designers (architects, if you’re a designer of buildings and structures) have designed prisons, and even the [solitary housing units (SHUs)](broken link removed) that unconstitutiona...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… An article in the Guardian makes the case for choosing OpenStreetMap over Google Maps: “Place is a shared resource, and when you give all that power to a single entity, you are giving them the power not only to tell you about your location, but to shape it.” There isn’t just a responsibility in the users of maps to be conscious of the power that maps hold, but those who create maps, the cartographers, must also be aware that:| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… We’re all in recovery from the snow and frigid cold that gripped most of the United States this week. It’s been too cold in much of my city to properly use salt–the city has just had to spread sand and efficiently clear the snow, and hope for the best until it got warm enough yesterday to start spreading some salt. This might be a good thing, because the salt used to de-ice roads in winter has damaging effects on the environment, largely due to t...| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week I wrote a really long link round-up piece about how technology and our memory interact in potentially damaging ways. And then I realized it was a blog post. So you can read that here:Transactive Memory and the Machines. It’s something I find endlessly fascinating, and will be interesting to see how it progresses as technology becomes ingrained in even more aspects of our day to day life and becomes more visible (or not).| thisisimportant.net
Here’s what was important this week… I killed a six day old tamagotchi today. I wasn’t attentive enough, and the next time I checked on him there was just an angel floating on the screen, instead of an adorable duck waddling back and forth. The experience reminded me that I’m too busy for a pet, and as my coworkers tell me often, that children are even more work than a pet.| thisisimportant.net
The surge to eradicate polio is on, and one polio survivor is determined to help any way she can, because “an outbreak of polio anywhere in the world is a danger everywhere.” And while antibiotic resistant infections are on the rise, a new treatment is in the works for Hepatitis C. What is life, for an amoeba? Working at a university, the amount of money spent on academics versus sports is a touchy subject, especially at a big ten school.| thisisimportant.net
Thinking lately How do you decide to make a big change in life? How do you rediscover what’s important to you? How many concerts in a week is too many? I’m struggling with the first one, working on the second, and am pretty sure the answer to the third one is “three”. Reading lately The very white ways of the top 40 The American Top 40 chart includes more dance songs, more songs performed by DJs, and significantly more white artists than its counterpart, the Billboard charts.| thisisimportant.net
It’s been awhile. I’ve spent the last four months applying for new jobs, interviewing, getting hired, and moving from the midwest to the bay area. It’s been a long ride (drive, really). I’ve been out here three weeks now, and it still feels strange to call it my new home (new license plates on my car notwithstanding). I’m a tech writer by trade, as I’ve alluded to/mentioned in the past with my post on Prescriptive Design and the Decline of Manuals, and I’ve so far enjoyed being...| thisisimportant.net