[109/365] links

[cosmolinguist]

• The people we wonder about who lived & died millennia ago also wondered about the people who lived & died millennia before them.
• Hygiene theater also muddles the public-health message. If you tell people, “This disease is on surfaces, on your clothes, on your hands, on your face, and also in the air,” they will react in a scattered and scared way. But if you tell people the truth—this virus doesn’t do very well on surfaces, so you should focus on ventilation—they can protect themselves against what matters.
• Anderson, whose work frequently grapples with the problem of whether instruments of colonial dispossession can be used to fix problems of their own making, wants the Penobscot people to retain cultural authority over their language, even if they cannot technically hold its copyright. To that end, she has collaborated with tribe members on a few extralegal initiatives, including a project that is being implemented jointly with the A.P.S.: attaching digital labels to the documents in the Siebert collection, to indicate cultural sensitivity, discourage commercial use, and request that the information be attributed to the Penobscot community moving forward. Indigenous rules around how knowledge is disseminated are often incompatible with copyright law. Some of the oral narratives in the A.P.S. archive, for example, are meant to be shared only by women, or only in winter, or only by elders. Behind the modest-sounding scope of the labels, Anderson told me, is a “radical proposition”: an explicit acknowledgment that “there’s something really serious here that the law can’t necessarily contain.”
• “It’s horrific, the pandemic is not over, where did anyone get that idea from? The whole thing is madness. I just look longingly at Taiwan, China, New Zealand, Australia [where cases are low or nonexistent], I wish we could just ship out there for a couple of years.”...Spoor is not alone in fearing a return to life after lockdown, with disability charity Scope estimating 75% of disabled people plan to continue shielding until after their second vaccine dose, and some for longer.
• Friends with ME shared this article about brain fog disapprovingly, saying that brain fog is a symptom of fatiguing illness and not to be trivialized or universalized. It's certainly true that a lot of us are experiencing a short-term version of what people with chronic pain or fatigue experience indefinitely. It's all well and good to say

  “It’s a common experience, but it’s very complex,” as a professor of biological psychiatry is quoted as saying in that article. “I think it is the cognitive equivalent of feeling emotionally distressed; it’s almost the way the brain expresses sadness, beyond the emotion.”...He believes we need to think about the mind, the brain, the immune and the hormonal systems to understand the various mental and physical processes that might underlie this lockdown haze.

  but we should understand that haze for the people for whom features of lockdown started before the pandemic and who cannot expect those symptoms to end, too. Like so many things, this time has highlighted the experiences disabled people were already having, and they shouldn't be ignored again as the rest of go "back to normal" -- this article ends "advice to us all is to get out into the world, to have as rich and varied experiences and interactions as we can...These things are mercifully temporary, and we do recover" and that's going to be so difficult to read for disabled peopel for whom they aren't temporary, who won't recover.
  
  (On a personal note, I was also interested in that article saying "Our alternative to face-to-face communication – platforms such as Zoom – could have an impact on concentration and attention.

  [A professor of cognitive neuroscience] theorises – and is conducting a study to explore this – that the lower audio-visual quality could “create a bigger cognitive load for the brain, which has to fill in the gaps, so you have to concentrate much harder.”

  The idea that low-quality audio-visual information can be exhausting to process should be kept in mind when considering what every visually-impaired or hard of hearing person has to deal with in every interaction. Because while I do find Zoom exhausting,
  
  I know intellectually that I work harder to function in a sighted world than sighted people do. I do also find zoom tiring. But because of the lag so someone starts speaking at the same time as someone else, not because of my brain having to concentrate more to fill in visual gaps. I was apparently always concentrating on a level that's exhausting the sighted people now. I have heard a lot about struggles to go without non-verbal cues to determine things like conversational turn-taking or how people are responding to what you say. And I've just...never had those things. Only a few years ago did I realize that some of my obnoxious tendency to interrupt or talk over other people isn't (just) the self-centeredness or arrogance I always assumed it to be, it's that I can't tell things like "is this person done speaking or just pushing for a breath?" I forget that other people can do this, so far is it beyond me. I just have to plow on and hope people either don't mind or can forgive me.
• Finally, I'm so excited about the new Mars rover Perseverance (and its helicopter Ingenuity which today was the first controlled powered flight on another planet!) and I'm utterly charmed by this page explaining all the markings on the rover, from the code in its parachute to the functional calibration targets for the various cameras and other instruments to the silly things like that "Mars family bumper sticker" with all the successful Mars NASA missions. My favorite thing about this page is the "Can the rover see this on Mars?" question asked of each thing, which tells us which if any of the cameras it's visible to (most things are!).

Comments

[silveradept]

A good set of links, thank you, and the continuing lack of attention to how disability continues to be ignored in favor of getting "back to normal" is definitely getting the side-eye.

[cosmolinguist]

It is so inevitable -- I literally saw disabled people predicting this last March -- and still so exhausting.

[silveradept]

Yes. I continue to see a lot of "now that we've all proven we can accommodate people when there's no other choice and all the abled people are demanding it, let's not lie and say we can't or it's too expensive or nobody will use it when we're asked to accommodate someone in the future" pieces being written, and almost all of them with heavy cynicism about whether that will actually happen, even though all the infrastructure for such things has already been laid out and bought.