Today I tried to do some studying, I really did, but sentences like this make my brain shut down:
I find it hard to absorb complex information from a screen - nothing really sinks in. Thus it took me about four hours to slog through one 20-page pdf (I include in the timings two naps).
Shame I can't sleep at night the way I sleep when I'm meant to be working.
Despite it being a lovely sunny day, I stayed inside again. Isn't that what everybody's meant to be doing?
I watched a documentary about the artist Stephen Wiltshire:
He's such an amazing talent and I love his gentleness.
Apart from the jaw-dropping art, the best bit is a boy's reaction to Stephen telling him he doesn't like sport. The face pulled at 36:44 is hilarious. The worst bit is the patronising tone certain professionals use when talking about autism. Don't start me.
I learned two new words: emic and democide.
I read about Sergei Krikalev - the cosmonaut who was left behind in space. What an extraordinary story. I wondered what happened to Sergei and turned to Wikipedia expecting to find a broken man with alcohol problems and severe trust issues - especially in light of the lemon and horseradish incident - but no, seems he turned out all right.
His Wiki page mentions a woman called Margaret Iaquinto:
"Throughout his various missions aboard Mir, Krikalev regularly communicated with various amateur radio operators (hams) across the globe. A particularly lengthy relationship was formed between Krikalev and amateur radio operator Margaret Iaquinto. At one point during one of his stays in space, he contacted her once a day for an entire year. Krikalev and Iaquinto successfully communicated via packet radio for the first time in history between an orbiting space station, and an amateur radio operator. They communicated about personal matters, as well as political ones. Iaquinto set up a makeshift digital bulletin board that the Mir cosmonauts would often use to obtain uncensored western news and information regarding the state of the collapsing Soviet Union."
Her link led nowhere and I wondered why her page had been deleted, because that's pretty interesting.
There was more info on Wiki's deletion log, which you can read here. Further digging found the missing page on Deletionpedia.
Turns out an American teacher fluent in Russian who moved to Australia and befriended passing cosmonauts via ham radio, who subsequently won awards for outstanding tech achievements, and who was invited to Houston Space Centre by NASA, was deemed "non-notable" by the Wikipedia lot. Okay.
By now I wanted to see Maggie's face. Here she is:
Her obituary says she was respected, admired, and widely loved which is not a surprise if you go by that smile.
In Twitter news, so there was this thing that happened the other day. It's summarised neatly in this meme posted by @topntran:
"What are we doing here? Who is making us do this?" asks Dan."...I used to love being online but it now feels like any positive byproducts of social media were just misunderstood early symptoms of something much darker. All the fun memes and Wife Guys trained us to come when called, to reliably provide daily discourse so that the content mill could continue to churn at the cost of our time and sanity.
We logged on because chemically simulated fun on demand sounded too good to pass up and we stayed because we were right. Like teens sharing cigarettes behind the bleachers who’ve become middle aged smokers cursing the cold, we’re no longer in a position to easily divorce ourselves from our habit despite the fact that the deal became one sided long ago.
We’re all like Bean Dad’s poor daughter, being promised that if we work hard enough for long enough, eventually we will get this broken machine to do what we want it to do. And we don’t even like baked beans. But what’re we going to do, leave? In the tenth month of a seemingly infinite pandemic, these digital spaces are all most of us have. We count ourselves lucky that hell at least has group chats."
I hear you buddy.
Photo of the day:
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