Adactio: Links—Tagged with matter

Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond | The MIT Press

A new biography of Vera Rubin by Ashley Jean Yeager. One for the wishlist!

There Has Never Been a Better Time to Read Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” Books - Electric Literature

Well, this is timely! Cassie mentioned recently that she was reading—and enjoying—the Earthsea books, which I had never got around to reading. So I’m reading them now. Then Craig mentioned in one of his newsletters that he’s also reading them. Now there’s this article…

To white protestors and accomplices, who say that they want to listen but are fearful of giving up some power so that we can all heal, I suggest you read the Earthsea cycle. You will need to learn to step away from the center to build a new world, and the Black majority in this fantasy series offers a better model than any white history.

Web Matters

An organisation has formed here in the UK as a response to the increasing threats to the web:

We are called to come together in response to growing political and social uncertainty, direct threats to the profession, and a lack of vocal and proactive representation to organise as a representative, independent, and politically responsible industry body.

The inaugural AGM is happening in Edinburgh tomorrow. Get along to that if you can. Otherwise, there’s always Slack.

I like their manifesto; let’s put it to the test-o.

Is Dark Matter Hiding Aliens?

Here’s a fun cosmic hypothesis on the scale of an Olaf Stapeldon story. There are even implications for data storage:

By storing its essential data in photons, life could give itself a distributed backup system. And it could go further, manipulating new photons emitted by stars to dictate how they interact with matter. Fronts of electromagnetic radiation could be reaching across the cosmos to set in motion chains of interstellar or planetary chemistry with exquisite timing, exploiting wave interference and excitation energies in atoms and molecules.

Shane Becker - Dark Matter and the #IndieWeb

Shane gave a talk recently where he outlined his reasons for publishing on the indie web:

Most people reading this will probably have an account at most or all of these sites: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Wordpress. Many also had accounts at Friendster, Tribe, MySpace, Delicious, Magnolia, Gowalla, Geocities. But no one has an account at any of those (on the second list) anymore. And all of the content that we created on those sites is gone.

All of those super emo feeling you posted to MySpace, they’re all gone. Some of the great web designers of our generation got started on Geocities. That stuff is gone forever. And sure, it was sparkling animated GIFs and neon colors. But that’s important history. Yahoo bought it, left it alone for a while, and then decided one day to turn it off.