Notices by allan (allan@mastodon.club), page 14

#Edmonton pride week starts tomorrow. Which means...not much? 🤷

That the parade was cancelled this year just underlines how hollowed-out pride has become, recently.

What are everyone's thoughts on Swamp Thing? I watched the pilot and it gets very John Carpenter in places, which I v. much appreciate. The world needs more writhing tentacled body horror.

My favourite element is on today's Compound Interest (as part of an international year of the periodic table year-long thing): https://www.compoundchem.com/2019/06/05/iypt034-selenium/

I love how no discussion of Se is complete without mentioning the many and truly horrendous smelling organoselenium compounds.

@ink_slinger Not to be sexist, but most of the mid-day sunbathers are women anyways.

@ink_slinger no, that's when I read at Ezio Faraone park. Nobody really jogs down amongst the trees, for some reason.

Everyone who wants to be seen running does the stairs at Ezio Faraone park. Shirtless.

I don't make the rules, I just sneak peeks over my novel.

I spent some time laying under a tree reading on the legislature grounds today. It is my favourite summer activity.

The south lawn has the best big trees to read under, including some real gnarly ones that are pretty good for sitting in or leaning on.

@erinbee Happy Birthday! 🎉

@kai and periodically sneaking in and vandalizing the library copy, so they are forced to buy new editions over and over.

@kai yeah, I do buy books from smaller publishers just because I feel like they need it more? Also buying friends chapbooks as a sign of support things like that 🤷

But you can also request that the library buy books and that probably goes further. The books get more use, for one.

@kai I switched to the library for all my book needs a while ago mostly because when I buy a book I feel obligated to give it a home, whereas with the library it's 🌈 not my problem ✨

But also I probably save ~$1000/yr just not buying books this way (I read ~50 books per year at an average $20/book it adds up) so yeah, frugality too!

@kai a lot of modern thrillers are downright weird to watch at times because the writers make a point of having the characters not use their cell phones, to follow those old plot conventions, but it is increasingly bizarre that people *wouldn't* communicate constantly with everyone.

@kai I find it vaguely amazing that any engineering work happened with large teams prior to email. But maybe that just says something about how email has taken over everything?

I don't need to work closely, in person, with anyone because I can fire off emails whenever. Or if they're a hip millennial I can use a corporate IM thingie.

@kai I can see that working.

That NYT article talks about the design team on the 737 being highly segregated, so the engineers weren't really talking to one another, relying I suppose on management to make sure it was all working correctly. Which apparently didn't work out so well 😟

This NYT article on the 737Max essentially describes one big failure of change management https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/business/boeing-737-max-crash.html

Not to be glib, but isn't it always? It seems like most of the failures I've been involved with professionally and a large majority of case studies boil down to bad MOC.

I learned most of what I know of post-confederation Canadian history through a series of VHS tapes produced by CTV (I think?).

The worlds oldest colour TV would be wheeled in front of my class and a famous news anchor who had retired long before I was old enough to watch TV would tell us all about the Meech Lake accords (or whatever) along with clips from relevant CTV news broadcasts.

It was like looking into a window of the past.

It's funny but if I was to make a list of life changing television kids should watch, a lot of those series are from the 70s and 80s. e.g. Connections, Cosmos, The Ascent of Man

I wasn't even alive when they were made but the have a certain authority that only dusty old VHS tapes from the library carry. Watching these used to require unearthing ancient technology and wiring together whirring machinery and cathode ray tubes.