Flushed with the feeling of success that comes from having cleaned my office to such a degree that the rugs are now visible, I thought today that I would take on the problem of excess books. Surely there are some I don't actually need. So I chose a shelf at near-random (it was one of those actually accessible without moving the boxes of books stacked before it to another location), and started going through both rows (the shelves are double-stacked, of course) to see what they contained.

Only to discover that the shelf was stocked with books placed there at seeming random. Mr. Evelyn's diary lies cheek-to-jowl with Gertrude Stein's Picasso. Jeff Danziger's Teed Tales abuts, appropriately enough, a history of Vermont. There is a collection of stories by T. Corgahesson Boyle, Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, a novel by Sean Stewart, and a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin. These last two, by the way, are misfiled since I have a science fiction section arranged almost alphabetically by author and a designated place for stacks of SF criticism and related essays. Which is where Gwyneth Jones' Joanna Russ should be as well.

Here's T. H. White's wonderful collection of mythical animals from medieval bestiaries, The Book of Beasts. The Return of Fursey! Mosses from an Old Manse. Flann O'Brien's The Best of Myles reappears from hiding; after I've obsessively reread it a few times,  I'll have to hide it somewhere else among my books, if I'm ever to read anything else. Oh, but there's also John McPhee's The Pine Barrens, which some of us persist in thinking his best book. Though it has competition. And here is a battered but charming old hardcover of Charles Fort's The Book of the Damned. I have a biography of Fort around here somewhere, though I doubt I'll find it today. Some few of these I haven't read--Fishing from Earliest Times is one example, though I'm sure I'll get to it soon. But I've read every story in The Corrector of Destinies, Melville Davidson Post's extremely odd collection of detective fiction (sort of), and I'll have to blog about it here someday.

There are thirty shelves of books on one wall of my office and my first attack upon the one provided me with nothing to cull,  And I've put aside a short stack of books to read or reacquaint myself with. Not have I done much to organize it--but wait! Here, just one shelf below is Damon Knight's Charles Fort. Up it goes, alongside The Book of the Damned, so nobody could say the last hour was wasted. Though it came close.

Nor was I able to impose a theme upon the shelf, other than Books I Am Delighted to Possess. But maybe that's enough.

In any case, it will have to do.


Above: For technical reasons, I'm having difficulty uploading a picture of the wall of books in my office. So here's a pic of part of the wall of books in my bedroom. 

Frank Lee designed this gigantic version of Tetris for Philly Tech Week 2014 in Pennsylvania.

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BASW is the largest professional association for social work in the UK, with offices in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. BASW promote the best possible social work services for all people who may need them, while also securing the well being of social workers.

1. Tips for slowing livestock growth due to plant closures. 2. “The Arizona Department of Health Services told a team of university experts working on COVID-19 modeling to “pause” its work, an email from a department leader shows.” 3. Florian Schneider has passed away. 4. Source code for the Imperial College model.  And Sue Denim […]

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

1, “New York acted as Grand Central Station for this virus…”  (NYT) 2. An “economics of epidemiology” paper incorporating Lucas-like mechanisms. 3. Who is at most risk from Covid?  A new study based on very good NHS data. 4. Further new data on transmission.  And useful overview of how Covid-19 “works.” Maybe it seems a […]

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

1. How to ration access to scarce, reopening resources. 2. Will Australia do best?  And America’s coronavirus report card (my Bloomberg column).  And the correct Dan Wang link from yesterday (Bloomberg). 3. Derek Lowe on antibody approaches. 4. Crude empirical work suggesting non-essential businesses can be reopened without bringing big problems on net. 5. Yemeni […]

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Fire chiefs from France, the United Kingdom, and the United States gathered in Quincy, Massachusetts at the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Urban Fire Forum (UFF) to listen to first-hand accounts of some of the biggest emergency response incidents over the past 15 months, including hurricane response in Texas and Florida, the Grenfell Tower fire in London, and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando.

One of the greatest teachers around is life. Through life, we experience all kinds of things. But more importantly, these experiences come with very important, inspirational life lessons. The beauty of these life lessons though is that you do not need to experience all of them first hand. Many people have already gone through various [...]Read More...

Last week I received a very long email with instructions for Zeder. This year millions of Jews around the world will log into Zoom, and try to continue a 2000-year tradition of not changing the tradition. We will recall plagues of past like infestation of locusts and raining frogs and we’ll silently scoff that Egypt […]

The post It’s time for Seder, which is Zeder, in our modern-day-plague ravaged Passover appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers.

On Sunday, May 3rd, the body of 28-year-old transgender woman Nina Pop was found in her apartment in Sikestown, Missouri. She had been stabbed multiple times, according to police. While police have not determined a motive, they are looking into the possibility of a hate crime. The LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign reported that Pop’s murder is at least the 10th violent death of a transgender or gender nonconforming person this year, and the fifth in the past month. All five of the recent victims were transgender women of color. Tori Cooper, director of community engagement for HRC’s Transgender Justice Initiative, wrote in a blog post, “for the past four weeks, we have seen the deaths of five transgender women of color in this country. We are seeing an epidemic of violence that can no longer be ignored. Transgender and gender-nonconforming people, especially trans women of color, risk our lives by living as our true selves — and we are being violently killed for doing so”. Transgender and gender nonconforming people lack expansive, explicit federal legal protections to safeguard against the vast discrimination they receive. While they are covered under the state’s hate crimes legislation, they are not explicitly […]

There’s a lot of financial advice out there – and some of it is really, really good. We like to think that we publish some of it. We like to think that some of it finds its way home to readers like you and is found helpful. But today, members of our contributing staff (who...

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Maggie used to be the barmaid at the Victoria, but she no longer rules the roost. “Wasson” means “how’s it going”, or so my regional sensitivity consultant tells me.

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From today’s email list:

My approach to writing these comics is to make pages that are a hybrid between a print edition and a straight-up strip. So you get a little punchline payoff and some good panel density (“no splashes” is the rule), but also, they’re designed in two-page spreads to be printed, maybe, one day (if anyone ever wants to). There is a conflict between advancing the plot and telling a joke; you can’t throw away a page on a scene transition in the same way you can in print, with the next page just seconds away. That sucker is up when fresh for, as currently, forty-eight hours. And at the same time, you can’t crash from scene to scene too much between pages because it won’t make sense in print, and if you stick an extra page in for print to make things a bit clearer, it throws off the balance of all your double-page spreads and big-reveal (haha) page turns. So you have to put two boring pages in. Mind you, I think this email I’m currently writing might be a considered a boring page so perhaps I know nothing.

Today’s page is an unavoidable scene transition. I did my best within the constraints of the format. I jazzed it up with the following:
1. Picture of Queen Victoria with little devil horns
2. Carefully designed new character (see fig 1)
3. Magus Tom Pendennis reading very interesting-looking book
4. Under-table angle worthy of The Magnificent Ambersons
5. Person in fedora. TRAY mysterious?

FIG 1

Now a page that could have been, and let me put this plainly, dull as ditchwater, is instead as rich as fruitcake. My gift… to you.

Princeton professors Anne Case, Jennifer Rexford, Suzanne Staggs and Elke Weber have been named members of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Environmental News FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Environmental News FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Environmental News  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Environmental News  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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As the flames shot out of the roof of Notre Dame de Paris on Monday evening, a global community of concern quickly formed. It shows that the idea of cultural heritage is much more than just a UNESCO list.

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Conservative firebrand Dennis Prager has taken a break from pushing hydroxychloroquine and calling lockdowns “the greatest mistake” in history to rail against the loss of racist language.

What are the characteristics of workers in jobs likely to be initially affected by broad social distancing and later by narrower policy tailored to jobs with low risk of disease transmission? We use O NET to construct a measure of the likelihood that jobs can be conducted from home (a variant of Dingel and Neiman, 2020) and a measure of low physical proximity to others at work. We validate the measures by showing how they relate to similar measures constructed using time use data from ATUS. Our main finding is that workers in low-work-from-home or high-physical- proximity jobs are more economically vulnerable across various measures constructed from the CPS and PSID: they are less educated, of lower income, have fewer liquid assets relative to income, and are more likely renters. We further substantiate the measures with behavior during the epidemic. First, we show that MSAs with less pre-virus employment in work-from-home jobs experienced smaller declines in the incidence of `staying-at-home', as measured using SafeGraph cell phone data. Second, we show that both occupations and types of workers predicted to be employed in low work-from-home jobs experienced greater declines in employment according to the March 2020 CPS. For example, non-college educated workers experienced a 4ppt larger decline in employment relative to those with a college degree.

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Coronavirus has changed the way we celebrate Passover and Easter but not the traditions that bind us. If anything, the pandemic has brought us closer, figuratively speaking.

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