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Taylor Goodridge died in agony at the Diamond Ranch Academy in Utah while staff at the "troubled teen" camp allegedly told her to 'suck it up' as the easily-treated intestinal infection she endured there killed her. There will be no charges for those responsible, say local prosecutors. — Read the rest
Camp counselors leading a group of youth campers on a wilderness excursion had to fight off a bobcat attack on Selden Neck Island in Connecticut on Friday. The New York Times writes that three adults were hospitalized and the animal was killed. — Read the rest
If names like Yeti, Tundra, and RTIC strike a chord, you’ve likely gone through the sticker shock associated with deliberating between very large rectangular blocks of insulated plastic. Ice coolers fall under the product category of “you wouldn’t believe how much these things cost,” at least when considering options amongst a top performing tier of coolers attached to price tags of hundreds of dollars. Oyster, a new Norwegian brand will still set you back $500, but it introduces a uniquely smaller and more efficient design aiming to suck out the air from its larger and bulkier competition.
Typically thermal energy is circulated within a cooler very slowly, affecting the overall temperature within. The Tempo thermal circulation is 380x faster than a comparable hard cooler, the equivalent of 190 watts/meter Kelvin versus 0.5 watts/meter Kelvin.
The Tempo is the most engineered ice cooler, inside and out, with an intelligently designed accessories system allowing easy and fast switches from a metal carrying handle to the included shoulder strap with only a couple turns of a dial. This assembly/disassembly construction also makes cleaning the cooler simpler and more thorough.
Even the best hard cooler requires pouring large amounts of ice to retain a cold drink temperature for hours, making for a laborious haul, ironically heating the carrier while attempting to keep the contents cool. The Tempo proposes something a bit wild: subtracting ice out of the equation. That is, if you start off by throwing in cold drinks or food to begin with. The Tempo’s patented double-wall vacuum insulation technology is so efficient in preventing heat transfer from occurring – keeping cold temps within from escaping and warmer ambient air from intruding. The cooler can keep cold foods or drinks chill for hours without ice… or for much longer aided by two included ice packs.
Two ice packs designed to fit perfectly into the Tempo are included, helping keep food and drinks cold(er) for longer periods. The precise fit of the two accessory packs into the aluminum lined interior illustrates the level of detail the Oyster team put into developing the Tempo over the span of six years. \\\ Photo: Gregory Han
The sleek extruded aluminum cooler essentially works just like those popular double-walled metal flasks you might already carry around everywhere to keep your coffee hot or water cold throughout the day, creating an insulated and vacuumed sealed interior large enough to fit 36 cans of beverages within. The only caveat of the design is if you dent it, it’s going to wear the signs of your mishaps forever (but that’s what strategically placed stickers are for).
The cooler’s rectangular shape is in itself an innovation; previous attempts to manufacture anything beyond a cylindrical vacuum-insulated shape would fail to retain their shape over an extended span of time. Oyster stands by their design so confidently, not only will they replace any broken parts, they claim their replacement policy even extends out to damage if your cooler is “mauled by a bear.”
The lid locks into a vacuum seal by securing two long handle hinges on both sides. Leave one in place and the lid levers open in a clamshell configuration. \\\ Photo: Gregory Han
Photo: Gregory Han
A strap or handle can be switched out quickly and easily thanks to the Tempo’s twist dial securing system. \\\ Photo: Gregory Han
A red nylon shoulder strap attaches easily to the Tempo for longer, heavier hauls after loading the 12.3-lbs (empty) cooler for outdoor destinations. \\\ Photo: Gregory Han
Outward appearances may give off the impression the Tempo is designed only for modest loads. But because of the thin-walled design, the Tempo offers three times the capacity compared to other rotomolded coolers of similar size.
Photo: Gregory Han
As the owner of an enormous and unwieldy rotomolded cooler, the Tempo’s manageable size is revelatory, and to be frank, suitable for more than 80% of our typical hiking, camping, or picnicking adventures. Pair that with the Tempo’s extraordinary ability to keep contents cold without bagfuls of ice, the quick-switch handle or strap carrying system, superior portability, and its subjectively standout industrial good looks, and the Tempo is arguably the coolest cooler on the market.
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Recent philosophy-related news.*
1. A new journal, Passion: the Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions, has just published its inaugural issue. The journal is a peer-reviewed (double blind), open-access, biannual publication. Its editors-in-chief are Alfred Archer (Tilburg University) and Heidi Maibom (University of the Basque Country, University of Cincinnati). The first issue is here.
2. The popular nationally-syndicated radio program Philosophy Talk, co-hosted by Ray Briggs and Josh Landy (Stanford University), has been awarded a media production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create “Wise Women,” a 16-episode series about women philosophers through the ages. The series, which will feature different guest scholars in conversation with the show’s hosts, begins on July 23rd with an episode on Hypatia.
3. Butler University just wrapped up its first ever philosophy camp for high school students. You can learn more about it here.
4. PhilVideos (previously), a project from researchers at the University of Genoa that aims to sift through the abundance of philosophy videos online and present an expert-curated and searchable selection of them, is now online (in beta). You can try it out here and read more about its features (including a more specific search interface) here. If you’re interested in becoming a reviewer for the site, you can find out about doing so here.
* Over the summer, many news items will be consolidated in posts like this.
The post Philosophy News Summary first appeared on Daily Nous.
I boiled snow for the first time this morning. Last night, I wild camped somewhere in The Cheviots as the clocks ‘sprang’ forward. Waking up before dawn, I put my iPod on shuffle, skipped one track and listened to Surprise Ice by Kings of Convenience. The song couldn’t have been more apt, given that my tent was covered in snow and ice!
The overnight camp was in preparation for walking at least half of The Pennine Way in a few weeks’ time. I’ve got all the kit I need, so I was just testing the new stuff out and making sure the existing stuff was still in good working order. The good news is that it’s very unlikely to get colder during my walk than it did last night, and I was warm enough to sleep!
This week, I’ve been helping WAO finish off our work (for now) with Passbolt and Sport England, continuing some digital strategy stuff for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, doing some work around Greenpeace and KBW. I updated a resource I’d drafted on open working for Catalyst, and put together a proposal for some badges work under the auspices of Dynamic Skillset.
We had a co-op half day on Tuesday in which we ran, and eventually passed, a proposal about experimenting with a ‘drip release’ model for our content. Essentially, this would mean that we would have patrons (platform TBD) who would get our stuff first, and then everything would be open a few weeks later. This emerged from an activity of us individually coming up with a roadmap for WAO for the next few years. We were amazingly well-aligned, as you’d hope and expect!
This week, I published:
I also helped a little with this post from Laura, and she helped me with one that I’ve written but has yet to be published. I’ve also drafted another couple of posts and an email-based course. I also (with a little help) created a weather app using the OpenWeatherMap API. Which brings us onto…
I’ve continued to find ChatGPT 4 really useful in my work this week. It’s like having a willing assistant always ready. And just like an assistant, it sometimes gets things wrong, makes things up, and a lot of the time you have domain expertise that they don’t. AI-related stuff is all over the place at the moment, especially LinkedIn, and I share the following links mainly for future me looking back.
While I got access to Google Bard a few days ago, the experience Google currently provides feels light years behind OpenAI’s offering. This week there were almost too many AI announcements to keep up with, so I’ll just note that ChatGPT was connected to internet this week. Previously it just relied on a training model that cut off in 2021. Also, OpenAI have announced plugins which look useful, although I don’t seem to have access to them yet.
There are lots of ways to be productive with ChatGPT, and this Hacker News thread gives some examples. I notice that there’s quite a few people giving very personal information to it, with a few using it as a therapist. As Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin point out in the most recent episode of their podcast Your Undivided Attention, AI companies encourage this level of intimacy, as it means more data. However, what are we unleashing? Where are the checks and balances?
Writing in Jacobin, Nathan J. Robinson explains that the problem with AI is the problem with capitalism. Robinson’s attitude reflects my own:
It’s interesting that we talk about jobs being “at risk” of being automated. Under a socialist economic system, automating many jobs would be a good thing: another step down the road to a world in which robots do the hard work and everyone enjoys abundance. We should be able to be excited if legal documents can be written by a computer. Who wants to spend all day writing legal documents? But we can’t be excited about it, because we live under capitalism, and we know that if paralegal work is automated, that’s over three hundred thousand people who face the prospect of trying to find work knowing their years of experience and training are economically useless.
We shouldn’t have to fear AI. Frankly, I’d love it if a machine could edit magazine articles for me and I could sit on the beach. But I’m afraid of it, because I make a living editing magazine articles and need to keep a roof over my head. If someone could make and sell an equally good rival magazine for close to free, I wouldn’t be able to support myself through what I do. The same is true of everyone who works for a living in the present economic system. They have to be terrified by automation, because the value of labor matters a lot, and huge fluctuations in its value put all of one’s hopes and dreams in peril.
If ChatGPT is going to revolutionise the economy, we should probably decide what that should look like. Otherwise, we’re running the risk of Feudalism 2.0. We’ve heard the hyperbole before, but if AI systems are exhibiting ‘sparks’ of artificial general intelligence (AGI) then we shouldn’t be experimenting on the general population. Perhaps Nick Cave is correct and that the problems with the world are “certitude and indifference”.
Next week is my last before taking three weeks off. I’m very much looking forward to a family holiday and am psyching myself up for my long walk. Ideally, I’d like to do the whole 268 miles in one go over a two-week period. But I don’t think my family (or my body!) would be up for that…
The post Weeknote 12/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.A Black Lives Matter banner hanging on the outside wall of the Degenstein Campus Center on the campus of Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, was vandalized.
Campus police identified the person responsible for the vandalism. He was a Pennsylvania State University student who was visiting friends at Susquehanna. The student admitted to being intoxicated when the vandalism occurred.
Susquehanna President Jonathan D. Green condemned the vandalism saying the “hateful act violates our university values and is hurtful to everyone, and especially to our students, colleagues, neighbors, and friends within the Black community. The timing of this targeted destruction follows recent social-media commentary opposing our principled efforts to foster an inclusive and welcoming community.”
Took House was one of the first books of poems I’d read since the start of the pandemic. One of the first and only poetry books I could read, for months. In the middle of the night, anxious and insomniac, I read one poem, read it again, read another. The poems knew something about me, something I myself didn’t know, or couldn’t articulate. The poems did the saying, the impossible saying, for me.
That fall I walked the dirt road between the house in upstate New York where we were staying and the larger, paved road that led to the post office and to an old cemetery. Evenings, we often heard coyotes call from the narrow valley between two mountains, as clear and close as I had ever heard them before. I read that coyotes call to their packs after hunting alone. I felt the poems in Took House calling me. There, in the words and the silence surrounding them, a kindred wildness. The way they said, You do not have to be alone.
I’d never met these particular poems before but immediately felt, Oh, I’ve missed you.
“Set the dark to hushing,” the poem “A Brief History of Coyotes” begins. This oddness of diction—strange but somehow familiar, startling, touching a truth that feels unsayable otherwise—is a hallmark of Camp’s poems, one of the first things I loved about her work. “Set the dark to hushing”: in my mind, a dial, tuning the night to a frequency only just audible to humans, turning our ears toward the mysterious beings near and within us. In conversation with Camp, she said, “It’s where I want to live in a poem, where the language makes sense but isn’t predictable.”
The poem “Beyond our house, their muzzles” contains the gather and surround of wildness, the way the humans, “listening through the wall” to the coyotes’ howls, feel both protected and not by those walls, and seem to long for the world outside, even with its violence, as inside they have “knuckled back to silence.”
I wanted to read the poems in Took House in two opposing ways. I wanted to read and keep reading, to read the book like a novel, turning page after page in the small light of my lamp in the middle of the night. And I wanted to read slowly, to read each poem over and over, to take into my lungs the richness of their language and imagery, their capacious selves.
Among the many things I love about this book: its focus on a heart in extremity, and the way—though the circumstances are different—the poems bring me closer to my own interior life, show me something necessary and hidden about myself in their startling language.
Took House is composed of three braided strands: poems centered on a relationship, compelling and un-refusable and doomed; poems speaking with and to pieces of visual art (in a former career, Lauren Camp worked as an artist, and her knowledge of visual art is wide and deep); and poems responding to the more-than-human world of the southwestern U.S., raptors in particular. The poems comprising the different strands stand next to each other without overt explanation of their relationships, allowing those relationships to be intuited.
Another of the many things I love about this book: the way the poems question the relationship of art to suffering help me to ask that question myself in a new and urgent way. A question without an answer, or maybe as many answers as there are poems. “Find the Color of Survival” begins
I want to talk about what I believe
is beautiful, and this is complicated by all the oilof that year.
What is, or can be, beautiful in the midst of anguish? How does art help us to hold our brokenness, the brokenness of the world? The poems of Took House use art—making it, being with it—to think and feel toward a way to contain, absorb, and make meaning of the overwhelming feelings the speaker’s relationship calls up in her. From “Find the Color of Survival”:
… at home I lifted a broad brush to each sorrow.
One day soon every form will be transparent—
but first, with you I’m lookingat even what I cannot stand to see.
Another of the many things I love about this book: the wild beings that inhabit it. Of course the humans, who bring their own wildness, but also the birds and trees and huge sky of the desert Southwest. The raptors of the poems, like the pieces of visual art the speaker loves, are real and true, dimensional, alive. And, too, they hold up the speaker’s inner being, her wildness, to herself. The raptor poems seem to ask, how do we understand desire, the sometimes-violence of it? What is “natural” to us, in terms of want, and how can it be honored? Where are its limits? In “Golden Eagle,” the bird’s
narrow awful face
quickens on perishable landscape,
everything in the open—In the very next lines, the poem swerves, much like an eagle tilting suddenly toward prey:
At the table, was I greedy?
I hardly ate. Only what I needed.
This vertiginous shifting, present in so many poems, also feels wild to me, and thrilling, and disconcerting, and real. The elements of Took House’s world—sky, wine, paint, desert, desire—exist in such proximity, sometimes colliding, their connections inexplicable but revealed in the way Camp places them as they are: side by side, appearing and disappearing and returning.
From the restraint—conscious, willed—of “I hardly ate,” to the next poem, “Flavor,” which begins “I’d been careful all my life” and then shows us what happens when care and restraint can no longer be maintained:
the taste
of punishment
as strong and sweet as pardon.
Wildness both compels and repels. The speaker doesn’t always want to look but can’t help seeing. She wants and doesn’t want the wildness that overtakes her.
One last thing, for now, that I love about this book: its willingness to dwell, despite everything, in beauty. And beauty in the widest, deepest sense: beauty that encompasses desperation and need as well as “the bones of roses” and the desert sky. Perhaps this is joy rather than beauty, a desire to open to all of life. Or not a desire: the speaker cannot help herself. She can’t not look, can’t refuse immersion. But the wild world, the capaciousness of art, the poems themselves—all these help in their ways. From “Perennials”:
Because I was opened
by another, I will always carry these remnants of pouring light
in my body.
The first time I read this poem, I read “another” as the lover, but now I read it as all the beings that inhabit this pulsing, expansive, and wildly alive book: the lover, the coyotes, the hawks and eagles, the paintings and sculptures, the mountains, and the moon and sun.
***
In time, infrastructure supporting the electrification of vehicles will become robust, reliable, and a wonderfully mundane reality, an evolution that will undoubtedly coincide with everyday vehicle range that will not only match, but exceed internal combustion engines. But even the most confident long range battery-equipped EV owner today has occasionally felt the twinge of range anxiety while roadtripping beyond your normal routine roads. That is, unless you set beyond city limits equipped with your very own EV-charging batteries doubling up as a teardrop 4-person camper to call your own.
The Boulder by Colorado Teardrops sports an attractive design, one evocative of the offspring of a Tesla paired with a retro teardrop camper your grandparents might have once explored the highways with in tow. The softly angular, Cybertruck-ish design is evidently designed to complement the most popular EV today, down to gull-wing doors and aerodynamic wheels.
The Boulder’s skateboard platform and powder-coated steel trailer design sits on top of a 3500 lb. rated suspension, holding a 75 kWh bank of EV batteries, allowing wanderers of the road to recharge their EV batteries with nary a charging station in site.
Other than being a sizable charging station on wheels, The Boulder offers cozy accommodations for a family of four, equipped with a fully insulated cabin with a seating arrangement during the day that easily converts into a queen-size bed with two additional bunk beds. The rear of the trailer reveals space for all of the necessities of the road camping lifestyle, with the option to upgrade to “glamping” grade accoutrements such as air conditioning, propane heater, patio umbrella mounts, awnings, side counters, espresso machine, and an assortment of optional colors.
The Boulder’s compact size belies its price, which will set you back $67,000, more than the starting price of a Tesla Model Y. But considering the double-duty capabilities of a trailer that can comfortably house four people and offer Level 3 or Combined Charging Standard (CCS1) to add an additional 100 miles of range in just ten minutes, those with electrified hearts stricken with wanderlust might find the price justifiable.
Next in the series of Kokuyo Campus notebooks, today we take a look at another High Grade notebook. This particular notebook has Kokuyo’s MIO paper in it. An acronym for Mobile Ideal Original, MIO paper is thin, lightweight and portable. Although it says it is ideal for use with gel ballpoint pens, something tells me it will also work great ...
We teased a peek of this unique collaboration last week when we shared February’s Designer Desktop, but today we’re excited to introduce Sea Galaxy, a mural wallpaper and fabric collaboration between Shanan Campanaro, founder of Eskayel, and Jaime Derringer, founder of Design Milk!
Jaime recently tapped Shanan to help her design custom drapes for her living room using her own artwork, which is instantly recognizable by their graphic, defined shapes and intricate details. Shanan, however, is known for her fluid watercolor style which creates more organic forms. The process of reinterpreting Jaime’s drawings in Shanan’s own medium and signature style led to the creation of Sea Galaxy, a painterly collage of elements found throughout Jaime’s sketchbook.
How did the collaboration come together, especially when it involved two vastly different artistic styles? Jaime and Shanan share more in this Q&A:
What was this unique collaboration process like for you?
Shanan Campanaro: This was kind of the most fun collaboration because Jaime has so many cool elements in her art, it was super fun to work with them. The brief was really clear because jaime’s art is super high resolution and detailed and my style is super loose and watery – so all I had to do was paint her elements in my style. I took favorite elements from several of her paintings and collaged them together to make something completely new but that still had the spirit of her original world. It was so much fun!
Why did you want to work with Shanan/Eskayel to create this mural?
Jaime Derringer: I have known Shanan and Eskayel for a long time but I hadn’t considered working with her because our work is so different. I was collaborating on my living room design with Olivia Stutz Design and I told her that I wanted something custom and personal for my own space. She recommended working with Eskayel to create a design for custom drapes and shades. I hadn’t thought of it before because our work is so different, but I love the idea of pushing my art into new territory. I was excited to see how Shanan could soften my hard edges and create a more liquified, ethereal world. After we created the design, we fell so in love with it that we wanted to expand it to a collection.
What inspired the artwork that was used to design Sea Galaxy?
JD: I have been keeping a regular sketchbook drawing practice since 2006 and the imagery created was based on a handful of my sketchbook entries that Shanan was drawn to. My work is inspired by so many things, but undersea creatures and sci-fi are two that have been key inspirations for my art practice, and that’s how we ended up with the name!
JD: I gave Shanan carte blanche to take my drawings and come up with something that she could make her own, too. I had never done anything like this before, but I was surprised and delighted by the end result – I had no idea that my work could be interpreted in such a unique – and vastly different – way.
How did you originally envision the mural and are you happy with the final result?
JD: Once we determined the final color and composition that we used for my own space, I worked with the Eskayel team to determine the final product designs and colorways. It was truly a collaborative process. It was such a great experience to have Shanan come and see the curtains in my space.
How would you describe Sea Galaxy?
SC: It’s kind of like an imaginary world under the sea or out in the galaxy.
JD: Ethereal, soft, flowing, but energetic.
Shanan Campanaro and Jaime Derringer
For more information on Sea Galaxy, visit eskayel.com.
Kokuyo has an impressive lineup of Campus notebooks, the most popular of which is their inexpensive notebook aimed at students. Look beyond that basic Campus notebook, though, and you’ll find a variety of notebooks with higher-quality paper options. Today we’re going to take a look at one of those notebooks, the Kokuyo Campus High Grade notebook with CYO-BO paper. First ... 
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