theTangentSpace

Weekly digest 18

It's been half-term week this week, and I didn't do much work for school at all. While future-me would probably benefit from getting a bit ahead with work, a rest with the kids was very much needed.

Links

• A great links page on Varve's site
• I was talking with my father yesterday about extreme poverty and Jason Hickel's work. Coincidentally on the same day Hickel published new data on global poverty. Hickel is a long-time critic of the World Bank's extreme poverty line of $1.90/day (PPP), which has been used to generate time-series graphs that show extreme poverty declining sharply in recent years (Unlearning Economics also has a good video essay on this topic). New research presented here by Hickel using poverty lines accounting for the cost of basic needs tells quite a different story, with poverty increasing during the 90s — exactly the time World Bank was forcing liberalism on the developing world.
• This page is under construction and Blogging is not always about traffic, two defenses of blogging and webweaving as personal expression rather than marketing and branding. If I'd have found posts like these when I was put off blogging by how corporate it all seemed, I'd have started sooner.
• Inspired by everyone backing up their Kindle books lately, I found this tool to back up my Audible library. It took about half an hour to download and decrypt 160 audiobooks.
• The Art of Organizing (things that don't need to be organized). I can relate to this so much. In fact, I've been doing some of that this week, sorting email and files into better folders and so on.

Cool website tip

There are many possible solutions for making your email address public without inviting spambots while maintaining accessibility. A neat one was suggested to me by Varve. Break your address up with any html elements you like, then hit them with a display: none in the stylesheet. I had heard of using html comments for this purpose, but this option seems better, as while screenreaders do tend to process the CSS on a page, spam crawlers generally do not.

Life

So, it was my week off, so I managed to

• Get some more DIY work done on the house. I put down some more flooring, my wife managed to fix the very creeky staircase using some pockethole joinery, which I was very impressed by.
• Took Mr. Two to a "toddler takeover" session at an indoor trampolining park; it was an absolute joy and great exercise.
• Launched thetangent.space.
• Mr. Zero has been teething, and had a cold, and had conjunctivitis this week. He's recovered now, but he didn't sleep well. This week I've most been taking him downstairs at 5am or so so my wife can get a bit more sleep. After a bottle of milk he usually settles back down — which has enabled me to make a bit of progress on The Talos Principle. A sedate puzzle game on a PlayStation controller works well with a baby asleep on you, much more so than trying to use a keyboard or hold a book comfortably.
• Now I have the usual return-to-school anxiety... I doubt I'll sleep well tonight.