links, etc The FBI secretly created an Ethereum token to investigate crypto fraud - The Verge chef’s kiss… 200 Years Later, Still Trying to Define the Midwest - The New York Times oh, fuck off nyt.

notes bookshop link there’s been no shortage of press on this book. i suspect i’ve ingested a fair amount of what’s surrounded it. given the hype around the book you’d be forgiven for glossing over the trip to dakar and to a school board meeting. i’m not sure that i parse the dakar bits, i’m not meta/cerebral enough to grok what’s going on here. but it doesn’t feel like much. the school board stuff i thoroughly got, but that’s not why i bought the book....

links, etc The Truth About Hurricane Geoengineering - The Atlantic it’s absolutely bonkers to me that this is something that requires discussion.

for posterity … dear future generations, google search used to be so good that you could find primary or secondary source information quickly and reliably with a modicum of effort. failure to exert this teensy bit of effort to poke at something that needed an answer which could reasonably be expected to be found online would be met with snark and some level of disposable derision. “let me google that for you” (online, LMGTFY) was often the snark of choice....

numbers don’t lie (vaclav smil) there’s a lot of “elite” love for vaclav smil. bill gates and steven pinker wax poetic about smil. i guess i get it. he provides a dispassionate comparison of various things and stands back all neutral-ish like. this was a quick read and the follow-up elements are well laid out if you’re keen to dig into something further. the whole book is laid out as a series of brief essays on whatever the topic du jour was a weriting....