No.136 Asides

🔥 Incredible women living incredible lives:
Caresse Crosby “was the first recipient of a patent for the modern bra, an American patron of the arts, publisher, and the ‘literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris.’”
Marion ‘Joe’ Carstairs “was the speedboat racer, doll-toting heiress and ‘sexy, flat-chested’ eccentric who responded to rejection by occupying the margins of society, until she had built a Bahamian kingdom…” (!!!) (Both via Jay.)
Elsie Reford Created the Metis Gardens, “fished for salmon on the Mitis River, went on winter caribou hunting expeditions, rode horses, gardened, traveled overseas, managed an estate, and was involved in politics, particularly women’s health and foreign affairs.”
🇪🇹 🇪🇬 🇸🇩 This issue is/will be one to watch. Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan face new Grand Renaissance Dam hurdles, Grand Renaissance Dam tensions rise, and As Seasonal Rains Fall, Dispute Over Nile Dam Rushes Toward a Reckoning.
- 😍 🇪🇬 Virtually Visit King Ramesses VI’s Tomb in Egypt. “The free virtual tour might not be quite as thrilling as being there, but it’s an impressive tour nonetheless, traveling down the long corridor, covered with incredible hieroglyphics, on the way to Ramesses VI’s tomb.”
Great long 🧵 by Cory Doctorow: In a major new paper, just released as a preprint, the eminent UK computer scientist and digital rights campaigner @1Br0wn makes the case for “Interoperability as a tool for competition regulation.”
🇳🇱 Dutch city redraws its layout to prepare for global heating effects. “The council has decided that 10% of the asphalt must make way for grasses and other plants to better dissipate heat and improve the city’s absorption of rainfall. A goal has been set for 90% of rainwater to be absorbed into the soil rather than running off into the city’s sewers.”
🤯 This Moss Uses Quartz as a Parasol. “[T]he researchers placed sensors underneath the pebbles to measure how the microclimate changed with the seasons. … the quartzite underbellies preserved approximately twice the humidity of the surrounding area and buffered the temperature swings by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit. “It’s a little quartz house,” Ms. Ekwealor said.”
✨ This is our first direct look at a multiplanet system around a Sun-like star. “The snapshot will help astronomers learn how planetary systems evolve. TYC 8998-760-1, at only 17 million years, is a baby version of our 4.5-billion-year-old Sun, but their orbiting planets couldn’t be more different. The two newly discovered exoplanets are 14 and six times the mass of Jupiter, our heftiest planet, and orbit 16 and 32 times farther out than Saturn. If this system is going to evolve into something like ours over the next several billion years, astronomers have got some explaining to do.”
📚 Some good advice in there. In 1984, the great Yugoslav/Serbian author Danilo Kiš (who Sontag called a ‘prince of indignation’) published an essay called ‘Advice to a Young Writer’, consisting of about 140 literary-political maxims. I’m going to add them to this thread in tranches over the next few days.