• Out of the wild. [The New Atlantis] “The ideal of nature as it used to be before human intervention is one that Western urbanites created in the late nineteenth century, chiefly as a foil for their own modernity… This vision still permeates much of environmentalism and stands in the way of responsible action toward nature, particularly in the places where we actually live.”
• Minds on Fire: Cognitive Aspects of Early Firemaking and the Possible Inventors of Firemaking Kits. [Cambridge Archaeological Journal] “We analyse aspects of the two main hunter-gatherer firemaking techniques—the strike-a-light and the manual fire-drill—in terms of causal, social and prospective reasoning.”
• The Kayak’s Cultural Journey. [Craftsmanship Quarterly] “For millennia, Indigenous peoples across the world have built and used skin boats to fish and hunt, for sport and travel, even for warfare. Now non-Indigenous admirers of the craft are making them, too.”
• Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Design Constraints in Computational Culture. [LIMITS 2023] “Permacomputing is a nascent concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in digital technology. At the heart of permacomputing are design principles that embrace limits and constraints as a positive thing, as well as being creative with available computational resources.”
• Building and Monitoring a SolarPowered Web Server. [ETH zürich] “In this thesis we focus on building a solar-powered web server. We present existing websites which are fully or partially solar powered, introduce some background about battery state of charge estimation and how to determine the right solar panel and battery size. Reusing components from older projects, we host a static website on an exemplary setup, which is solely solar powered.

• I’ve rented DVDs from Netflix for half my life – streaming is a poor substitute. [The Guardian]
• The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature. “Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touch screens. Buttons are back!” [Slate]
• Agriculture in the Ancient Maya Lowlands (Part 2): Landesque Capital and Long-term Resource Management Strategies. [Journal of Archaeological Research] “We demonstrate long-lasting agricultural investments by Maya people, in social capital including multigenerational land tenure, in cultivated capital including long-lived trees, and in landesque capital including soil amendments and landscape engineering projects, such as terracing and wetland modification.”
• Archaeologists are unlocking the secrets of Maya lime plasters and mortars. [ars technica]
• When innovation goes south: The tech that never quite worked out. [ars technica] “We don’t need new gadgets; we need to use antibiotics more sparingly.”
• “RAIN was planting the seeds”: An Interview with Tom Bender, co-editor of RAIN: Journal of Appropriate Technology. [Open Edition Journals]

• I Made My Blog Solar-Powered, Then Things Escalated [Louwrentius] What happens when you try to run a solar powered website from your balcony in the Netherlands? “Only with a 740 Watt rated solar panel setup was I able to power my Raspberry Pi through the winter.”
• The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics [The Tyee] “The current prescription for stopping climate change with a mining boom to support an industrial production of renewable technologies is a dangerous course.”
• Half-farming, half-anything: Japan’s rural lifestyle revolution [Japan Times] “An increasing number of people from all age brackets are leaving behind their lives in Japan’s cramped megacities in favor of growing their own food sources, combined with a vocation that reflects their own unique interests and talents.” [Via Wrath of Gnon]
• The age of average [Alex Murrell] “Whether you’re in film or fashion, media or marketing, architecture, automotive or advertising, it doesn’t matter. Our visual culture is flatlining and the only cure is creativity.” [Via Ran Prieur]
• Nick Cave on Christ and the Devil [Unherd] “The idea that you can offend people, or that your songs can be dangerous enough for people to be scared of them, is exciting for me.”
• In an isolated world, humans need to dance together more than ever – but we’re running out of places to do it [The Guardian]
• A Humanism of the Abyss [The New Atlantis] “Illich and Sacks had in common a desire to reform the medical system — a desire that today still remains unfulfilled.”

• These scientists lugged logs on their heads to resolve Chaco Canyon mystery. [Ars Tecnica] “Tumplines allow one to carry heavier weights over larger distances without getting fatigued.” Thanks to Matthew McNatt.
• Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together. [Atlas Obscura] “In some cases, as many as 20 telephones were wired together—all of which would ring simultaneously with each call, regardless of who was making it and who they were trying to reach. Agreed-upon codes—three short rings for you, two long rings for me—helped people know if the call was for them.”
• The vertical farming bubble is finally popping. [Fast Company] “In a typical cold climate, you would need about five acres of solar panels to grow one acre of lettuce”.
• Seaweed as a resilient food solution after a nuclear war. [ResearchGate] “We find seaweed can be grown in tropical oceans, even after nuclear war. The simulated growth is high enough to allow a scale up to an equivalent of 70 % of the global human caloric demand (spread among food, animal feed, and biofuels) in around 7 to 16 months, while only using a small fraction of the global ocean area. The results also show that the growth of seaweed increases with the severity of the nuclear war, as more nutrients become available due to increased vertical mixing. This means that seaweed has the potential to be a viable resilient food source for abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios.”
• Traditional Fishing Gears and Methods of the Bodo Tribes of Kokrajhar, Assam. [Fishery Technology] “The popularity and usage of some of the gears like Sahera, Baga, Borom Je and Dura Je were found declining, which may be attributed to increasing popularity of destructive fishing techniques like electric fishing, blast fishing and poisoning.”
• Low-tech approaches for sustainability: key principles from the literature and practice. [Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy] ” This article develops a seven-principle framework to categorize low-tech concepts based on an abductive approach which included a literature review and interviews with low-tech actors.”
• Ministry of Truth: The secretive government units spying on your speech. [Big Brother Watch] “The internet contains masses of incorrect information – but this is a defining feature of an open forum, not a flaw.”
• We’ve lost the plot. [The Atlantic] “Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”

Some low-tech computing links:

• How to Start Your Blog in 2023.
• Small Technology Foundation.
• Noгma Design.
• Degrowth and strategy.
• The small web is beautiful.

• Your stuff is actually worse now. [Vox] How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products.
• The Automation Charade. [Logic] The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve?
• How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test. [Tablet] For America’s new clerisy, scientific debate is a danger to be suppressed.
• Minimal Computing. [Digital Humanities Climate Coalition] Minimal computing is a set of principles and practices that aim to reduce both environmental impact and barriers to access and engagement.
• Open hardware: From DIY trend to global transformation in access to laboratory equipment. [PLOS Biology] This Essay examines the global spread of open hardware and discusses which kinds of open-source technologies are the most beneficial in scientific environments with economic and infrastructural constraints.
• Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? [MIT News]
• Speeding up. Prehistoric animal traction and the revolute joint. [Eva Rosenstock] The revolute joint, an innovation of the late fourth and the early third millennia BCE, brought about wheelsets and wheels for carts and wagons along with other applications such as pivoted doors, the potter’s wheel, and levers. In terms of acceleration, these innovations were as significant as the acceleration period we currently encounter that started with industrialization.
• The candle clock. [Wikipedia] While no longer used today, candle clocks provided an effective way to tell time indoors, at night, or on a cloudy day. Previously: Human alarm clocks.
• Brandalism. A revolt against the corporate control of our culture and space.
• Pickup Trucks: From Workhorse to Joyride. [Axios] In the 1980s, about half of pickup trucks were categorized as small or midsize, but by the 2010s small pickups had nearly vanished and fullsize trucks dominated.

• A hundred and nineteen things a punkist should know. [http://www.punk.ist]
• Firewood will save the West. [Unherd] “Our dysfunctional society must return to the hearth.”
• ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes. [NYT] “When the only thing better than a flip phone is no phone at all.”
• Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. [Nature] “We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.”
• Assessing the effectiveness of energy efficiency measures in the residential sector gas consumption through dynamic treatment effects: Evidence from England and Wales. [Energy Economics] “This paper disentangles the long-lasting effects of energy efficiency technical improvements in UK residential buildings. The installation of energy efficiency measures is associated with short-term reductions in residential gas consumption. Energy savings disappear between two and four years after retrofitting by loft insulation and cavity wall insulation, respectively. The disappearance of energy savings in the longer run could be explained by the energy performance gap, the rebound effect and/or by concurrent residential construction projects and renovations associated with increases in energy consumption. Notably, for households in deprived areas, the installation of these efficiency measures does not deliver energy savings.”
• Mapping Four Decades of Appropriate Technology Research: A Bibliometric Analysis from 1973 to 2021. [Sains Humanika] “The purpose of the study is to examine the publication trends, collaborative structures, and central themes in appropriate technology studies.”
• Life in the Slow Lane. [Longreads] “Cooking all day while the cook is away. How the slow cooker changed the world.”
• Can a Robot Shoot an Olympic Recurve Bow? A preliminary study. [National Taiwan Normal University]
• Amnesty, Yes—And Here is the Price. [Charles Eisenstein] “The invisible workings of the Covid machine must be laid bare if we are to prevent something similar from happening again.”
• Reduce, re-use, re-ride: Bike waste and moving towards a circular economy for sporting goods. [International Review for the Sociology of Sport] “This study focuses on the bike and its role in global waste accumulation through various forms of planned obsolescence.”
• Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System. [International Center on Nonviolent Conflict]
• Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 °C ambitions. [Cleaner Production Letters]
• Radical online collections and archives. [New Historical Express]