A stutter does not get worse as a person ages, but trying to keep it at bay can take immense physical and mental energy. Biden talks all day to audiences both small and large. In addition to periodically stuttering or blocking on certain sounds, he appears to intentionally not stutter by switching to an alternative word-a technique called ‘circumlocution’-�which can yield mangled syntax. I’ve been following practically everything he’s said for months now, and sometimes what is quickly characterized as a memory lapse is indeed a stutter. As Eric Jackson, the speech pathologist, pointed out to me, during a town hall in August Biden briefly blocked on Obama, before quickly subbing in my boss. The headlines after the event? ‘Biden Forgets Obama’s Name.’ Other times when Biden fudges a detail or loses his train of thought, it seems unrelated to stuttering, like he’s just making a mistake. The kind of mistake other candidates make too, though less frequently than he does.

— What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself To Say, John Hendrickson in The Atlantic

Perhaps this is the archivist in me, but this process of creating files and flinging them into an unsorted pot and then searching or hoping that the newest one is the one we want gives me the collywobbles. It seems like a rejection of our past work, to just sling all the files into a heap, immediately devaluing them as soon as something newer comes along.

— Computer Files Are Going Extinct, Simon Pitt in OneZero

Willard’s devotion to visual mnemonics shaped much of her work. In the 1840s, she published another elaborate visual device, named the ‘Temple of Time’. Here, she attempted to integrate chronology with geography: the stream of time she had charted in the previous decade now occupied the floor of the temple, whose architecture she used to magnify perspective through a visual convention.

— Emma Willard&amp’s Maps of Time, Susan Schulten in The Public Domain Review

Basically, we should be begging for the most analog election technology possible.

— The Only Safe Election Is a Low-Tech Election, Kevin Roose in The New York Times

In fact, Roman cuisine wasn’t at all like Italian food. It was all about contrasting sweet with salty and sour foods (they liked to eat fishgut sauce, garum, with melon). Instead Rowan compares it to modern Chinese food. ‘If it was edible, they were eating it nothing was off the table,’ she says.

— The mystery of the lost Roman herb, Zaria Gorvett in BBC Future

There is the online reality, the reality portrayed by state media, and the reality I’m living. On the seventh day after the lockdown, a university classmate called my friend Ningning, and told her about another: hospitals do not have enough beds for the infected in Wuhan. They go home, they die, they never enter the official count as they were not diagnosed.

— Stuck in Central China on Coronavirus Lockdown, Lavender Au in The New York Review of Books

99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic.

— Google Maps Hacks, Simon Weckert

I keep a notebook next to me at all times, like Linus van Pelt clinging to his blanket. When I get an idea, I put it down. I’ve had to stop on the side of the road to do this. I’ve put off eating to get notes down and write things, and I never put off eating for ANYTHING. Sometimes I get annoyed when I can’t get the thought down quick enough, when I’m not writing at the speed of my brain. When I’m somewhere without access to a pen and paper, like in the shower, that impatience grows even more pronounced. I gotta make sure to catalog the notes I wanna make in my brain so that I can get them down the second that shower is over. I mentally repeat the thoughts to myself, like I’m reciting some kind of really dull mantra. Then, once the thoughts are down, they’re safe. I don’t need a lot of words to note what I need. Just a couple of scribbles act as a keyword search and brings me directly to the original thought.

— How to Make Writing a Lot Easier, Drew Magary in Forge

Part of the problem here is metadata is hard. Someone has to sit there and fill out the author, title, subtitle, summary, page count - and they’re probably not going to do it for free. Amazon is a good at it but is hostile to publishers. Goodreads has much potential but seems to have stagnated. Linking to the book’s Wikipedia entry would be my preference but very few books have an entry.

— Digital Tools I Wish Existed by Jonathan Borichevskiy

The officer tried to reach the command center for authorization to shoot but couldn’t get through. So he fired an antiaircraft missile. Then another.

The plane, which turned out to be a Ukrainian jetliner with 176 people on board, crashed and exploded in a ball of fire.

— How Iran Covered Up the Downing of an Airliner, Farnaz Fassihi in The New York Times