Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

14 Dec 2018, 11:44 a.m.

Collection

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2018 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

A few deliverables!

At RubyConf Los Angeles 2018 last month, I co-presented "Code Review, Forwards and Back" with Jason Owen, and now video is up.

"Intersectional sustainable crop science, and GIFs" is my newest MetaFilter post -- it's an inventory of informative & funny Twitter threads by Dr. Sarah Taber, loosely grouped by topic (soil and ecologies, specific plants and animals, common misunderstandings about food/ag/econ, "family farms", organizing/politics and sexism, being an ex-Mormon, food safety, regulations, testing, and management systems, management skills and the economics of agriculture in the US, and oppressions therein, skill, culture, capitalism, land prices, slavery, white supremacy, and ag history in the US).

Taber explains: "My goal with this account is to beef up the "sustainable ag" info available for consumers w some science & general business mgmt info. The general public is incredibly frustrated with ag's slow rate of change. Someone should talk about the very real reasons change isn't instant....Some of the reasons won't reflect nicely on our ag institutions. Oh well. I'm not gonna tell folks it's all good, because it's not. We need to back up this "no BS" reputation by actually cutting the BS. If you feel weird about someone airing your dirty laundry, wash it." Also: "put info out there, see what kind of feedback it got, & thereby find out where the general knowledge level is at with ag these days". (Thread Reader)

When I want to read someone's old threads, I find it so difficult to dig through old tweets through the Twitter interface, so I thought this might be a useful resource to make and share.

Relatedly, I recently thought to look at some of my oldest microblog posts, and enjoyed a few from 2009:

Argued w/Leonard re Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" yesterday: if you're "going at the speed of light," can you *have* a temp? (200°, F implied)...I fear quibbling with the metaphor of an atom bomb satellite rocket ship to Mars constitutes stopping the singer now, despite express wishes

"Life's not a math textbook. The answers aren't gonna be in the back of the book." "But at least, unlike me, you're doing the problem sets."

"Indie 101, do stuff that defeats your own purpose. Reflexively, routinely." -John Darnielle -- quoting from about 3:00 to 3:15 in the "Leaving Home" track in this 2007 concert recording.