iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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How do you show a whole digitized book in one thumbnail? Modern books have illustrated covers, but in research collections the cover is often a plain library binding. So I made Flipbook: hover over a book from any #IIIF source and flip through its pages. hadro.github.io/flipbook/ #GLAMsky 📚📜

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Jenny Holzer @jennyholzer.bsky.social · 2h

DEVIANTS ARE SACRIFICED TO INCREASE GROUP SOLIDARITY

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 17h

This is a photograph of the edge of one of Saturn's rings, looking down from above. Those spiky dark shapes are shadows. Shadows of giant towers of ice and dust grains clumped together that rise up to three *kilometres* above the 10-m thick rings.

A series of bands cross the image from left to right, brighter at the bottom and darkening towards the top. A band of empty space is at the top of the image. About a quarter down from the top is a complex pattern of jagged, spiky shadows cast onto the rings. The icy towers casting the shadows are seen here at a highly oblique angle.

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Tom Larkin @tomlarkin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

We’ve spent many, many hours over the past few months searching the rock pools of Cornwall for a rainbow sea slug. Today, we finally found one! Absolutely worth all the time we’ve spent - it was truly breathtaking.

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Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social · 18h

The thing about having a radiologist friend like @gammacounter.bsky.social is that you will learn, in incredibly well-documented detail, how dangerously life-threatening swallowing button batteries are to kids. [link via @pazsays.bsky.social, who also got to hear about it]

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Stacey Mason @stcymsn.bsky.social · 15/10/2024

Formal affordances are the elements that pull a player toward certain actions, they “cry out” for the player to take those actions. Material affordances are the actions a system actually allows the player to take. Agency occurs when the two are in balance. (Mateas 2001)

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Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Second-screening the Katmai Falls bearcam today reminds me: Q: How do you weigh bears for Fat Bear Week? A:. By using LIDAR — laser-scanning bears to quantify the chonk volumetrically, and then using estimates of ursine density to convert it to approximate mass. www.geoweeknews.com/articles/sup...

geoweeknews.com

Supporting Fat Bear Week With Laser Scanning | Geo Week News

“Fat Bear Week celebrates fatness. That’s what you want to do before you go into your den.” Each year as summer begins to fade and wildlife

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Melissa Johnson, PhD @ladyhistorian.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

We should let people dream of something besides labor

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Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Some news: I’m (officially!) writing another book, tentatively titled TACTILE: MATTER, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE WORLD WE MAKE, working again my brilliant editor @armadilloproxy.bsky.social at @riverheadbooks.bsky.social. I wrote a bit more about it at my newsletter: buttondown.com/metafoundry/...

Publishers Marketplace
Deal Report

TACTILE
By Deb Chachra
Imprint: Riverhead

Materials scientist, design educator, and author of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS Deb Chachra's TACTILE, an articulation of the irreplaceable value of the material world and why the ways we interact with physical objects matter more than ever in a digital age, to Courtney Young at Riverhead, in an exclusive submission, by Zoe Pagnamenta at Calligraph (world).

Rights: tdussel@penguinrandomhouse.com

Non-fiction: Science/Technology

September 22, 2026

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Foz Meadows @fozmeadows.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Like. I have said it before and I'll say it again: when your industry's founding pitch is "what if there was a tool with human-level intelligence that didn't have human rights," then regardless of whether the tech is actually sentient (which it isn't), nothing downstream of that will be ethical.

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Mikell Taylor @mikell.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This is extremely true! But also, it’s why no engineering problem is purely a technology problem, it is also a social problem, and why the humanities must be co-taught with engineering.

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Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

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Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

geoweeknews.com

Supporting Fat Bear Week With Laser Scanning | Geo Week News

“Fat Bear Week celebrates fatness. That’s what you want to do before you go into your den.” Each year as summer begins to fade and wildlife

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Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

We've stolen a lot of young people's lives by telling them they have to be planning A Great Career when they're like 19

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 26/09/2026

I keep this on my wall where I see it every day but god we have so much work to do and these fucks keep making more (Artist is radicistudios.com/pages/about)

A print of a felled tree with a sucker growing out of its stump. The stylized sun shines down. It reads “May we grow back, not to what was, but instead towards what we can become.”

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Goth Rat Summer [6'7"] @sciencehippies.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Hope bats slightly better at 1.

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 25/09/2026

I know they say courage is contagious and it is, but the R0 is probably like 0.5. Or less.

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Maryn McKenna @marynmck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If you were transfixed by THE HOT ZONE when you were young, or then read SPILLOVER and trusted it, then as a career scary diseases reporter, I urge you to read this thread. Science moves on. People discover fresh stuff. The work careers were built on becomes outdated. Be open to the new. Please.

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Jessie🌈 @atropius.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I caught the cutest thing ever on the Katmai bear cams

A photo of a large brown bear, taken from behind, laying on the ground with her back legs splayed out. Her two cubs are laying against her right side, both using her butt as a pillow. They're laying next to a river

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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 24/09/2026

Talked about heat pumps today with a bunch of awesome home energy auditors/consultants who help Indiana rural electric co-op members save money on bills. Here's my TL;DR slide on household HVAC economics.

Summary of household HVAC economics

Heat pumps generally beat heating oil, electric resistance, and propane.

Heat pumps generally don’t beat natural gas *for heating only.*

But heat pumps generally do beat natural gas (and all other fuels) when
the household *also needs a new AC.*

⇒ Heat pumps generally win in new construction.
⇒ Heat pumps are coming, whether you want them or not.

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The PS1 startup sound as a lesbian @janus.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

the tech industry builds wearable recording devices like this to shift the burden of privacy from a corporate / collective responsibility to an individual one. no meaningful definition of "consent" is possible under this model, and they know it. @hypervisible.blacksky.app

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Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon. many more here: www.newscientist.com/author/tom-gauld/

Image: A graph with lots of red dots clustered together in a curve. The are all looking upwards at a single red dot wearing sunglasses.

Caption: Mike was an outlier and would probably be excluded from the study, but all the other data points secretly thought he was really cool.

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Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

As someone who literally has a WPA forearm tattoo (adapted from a Lester Beall poster for the Rural Electrification Administration), co-signing on a 21st-century WPA, one that includes the arts as well as infrastructure.

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Jer Thorp @jerthorp.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

germainekoh.com/works/fair-w...

germainekoh.com

Germaine Koh work

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Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Vancouver/UBC friends, a reminder that this is weekly, free and open to everyone, bring whatever handwork project you’re working on. Tomorrow I’ll be talking and reading about synthetic and natural fibres.* *expect to see my wrist/foream tattoo of collagen structure used as a visual aid

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Gordon Ross 🇨🇦 @gordonr.ca · 23/09/2026

Love your local bike mechanic

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Cliff Pervocracy @pervocracy.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

This is a canary resuscitator, which miners would use to revive canaries that had passed out from toxic gas, because ideally not only do you care, you don't even leave the bird behind. just a little mining history and not at all a furious scream

A canary in a sealed box attached to an oxygen tank

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Simple Sabotage Field Manual @simple-sabotage.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This type of activity, sometimes referred to as the 'human element,' is frequently responsible for accidents, delays, and general obstruction even under normal condi tions.

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every usps @everylot-usps.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

WHITEFIELD: 32 JEFFERSON RD, WHITEFIELD ME 04353-9998

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Bread and Rosie @rosiemund.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

For truly, what is a bicycle but the means through which bread achieves its kinetic potential.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

When the powerful playact powerlessness it is always a ploy to avoid accountability.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 19/09/2026

The RNLI is the closest you will ever get to actual Batman. When rescue is visibly, viscerally, obviously impossible; when the water is a smothering, thundering black wall and the wind is screaming straight from Hell; when you are absolutely going to die: someone’s hand pulls you out and you don’t.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 19/09/2026

The other day someone warned me not to wear that cap because it might be misunderstood. No, I don’t think it would be.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 19/09/2026

I’ve worn a grubby RNLI cap for decades. I sound London, but I was born in Truro and I was a basically feral (Gen X) kid wandering the coast path with a dog until sunset for a lot of my early life. The lifeboats are in the fabric like trawlers and farms and pasties and fish and chips.

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Amy Hoy @amyhoy.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

when you interact with an object or environment produced by people, every single part of it is downstream of active human choices. and that means they can be legislated. for example: we can make it illegal for chatbots to call themselves "i" and pretend to be a person. that is a deliberate trick.

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James Harbeck @sesquiotic.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Just had the thought that effective altruism and evolutionary psychology are functionally chronological mirrors, in that each confects fantasies over states across the passage of time to justify whatever thing the person wants to be true in the present, just with opposite arrows of causality.

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Dilek Sayedahmed @dileksayedahmed.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I truly, deeply, sincerely do think the guy flipping burgers at McDonalds should be able to afford rent, bills, and groceries with his paycheck alone. That's kind of the whole point of having a job and I can't believe this is considered a radical position.🤷🏽‍♀️

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Lake Superior! Live! @lake-superior.live · 19/09/2026

Current* conditions near Bayfield, WI:

View looking SSE from Port Superior Marina overlooking Pikes Bay in Lake Superior. // Image captured at (local time): 2026-09-18 21:14:01 CDT (about 5 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: windy.com // Current Temp in Bayfield: 59 F | 15 C // Precip: few clouds // Wind: ESE at 2 mph | 3 kph // Humidity: 93%

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Ken McLeod @kenmcld.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Data from the Federal Highway Administration's 2022 National Household Travel Survey says that 38.4% of vehicle trips are 3 miles or less nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips The first car trip I remember replacing was a 1.5 mile trip to the gym while at law school Two years later I sold my car

Data on vehicle trip distances from the National Household Travel Survey https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips

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Robinson Meyer @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

he is really going for it

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Joel Pinckney @jpinckney.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is the message: yes, shop early, but also, be ready and willing to trust the expertise of booksellers. There's a way of shopping at bookstores that acts as if the booksellers are just there to stock the shelves with product. I guarantee you, bookselling is not that kind of job.

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Nicolas Hénin @nicolashenin.net · 17/09/2026

Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!

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Mary Lewis @profmarylewis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Excellent oped in @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social by my @harvard.edu colleague Jill Lepore. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

But of course, the machine conversation is not free. It comes at the cost of our common life together as teachers, learners, and researchers, colleagues, mentors, and friends. Not to mention, supervising student researchers is our job.

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Max Fawcett @maxfawcett.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is the part many Americans -- including the Bezosites at the Washington Post -- don't understand. Canadians don't see this just as a Trump thing. It's that America elected him twice, and the second time with an even bigger mandate. The problem we're addressing is America, not Trump.

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Josephine Stewart @jostewart.myatproto.social · 16/09/2026

People who live in Vancouver, do you know how lucky you are? I assume you do, what with the gorgeous scenery and mild climate and sophisticated urban amenities (uh, sorry about your housing costs), but here's another perk. You can take your knitting or whatever and go listen to Deb Chachra! What!

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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 17/09/2026

The chapter where Caro mentions Niagara - extremely briefly! - is hilarious. After spending so many pages on so many nitty gritty NYC details, he's like, "Oh and Moses poured some concrete in a river near Canada or something. Now, back to 300 pages on bridge tolls and municipal finance mechanisms.."

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Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Honestly, still a little sad that’s there’s hardly anything in the book about Moses taking charge of crash-building a replacement New York Power Authority hydroelectricity plant at Niagara Falls after the old one fell off a cliff. It’s called ”The POWER Broker”, even!!!

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