Joy generator, iPod.js, and link rot (Spam Mail #27)

💩 Cool Shit

Joy Generator - Exactly what it says. Thank you, NPR.

Eunoia - Words that don’t translate.

iPod.js - Miss your old clickwheel iPod? Relive it with this browser based iPod to listen to your Spotify.

Seismic Explorer - A map of seismic activity.

Snk - A snake game generated by Github user contributions.

Cyber Spa - A virtual, mental retreat.

808 Cube - Combine a Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer and a Rubik's Cube and you get this.

💎 Word gems

The Fundamental Question of the Pandemic is Shifting (The Atlantic / Ed Yong)

The Atlantic has consistently produced excellent analysis of the pandemic. This is another, warning that the pandemic is not entirely over yet, and how the tension of individualism conflicts with the very notion of public health - collectivism.

From its founding, the United States has cultivated a national mythos around the capacity of individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, ostensibly by their own merits. This particular strain of individualism, which valorizes independence and prizes personal freedom, transcends administrations. It has also repeatedly hamstrung America’s pandemic response. It explains why the U.S. focused so intensely on preserving its hospital capacity instead of on measures that would have saved people from even needing a hospital. It explains why so many Americans refused to act for the collective good, whether by masking up or isolating themselves. And it explains why the CDC, despite being the nation’s top public-health agency, issued guidelines that focused on the freedoms that vaccinated people might enjoy.

The Internet Is Rotting (The Atlantic / Jonathan Zittrain)

Every day I come across links that are broken, and usually don’t give it much thought. This article weighs in on link rot, and the broader impacts of the web’s lack of permanence.

Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web.

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