Best Friend Forever

Kemal.
He is a wily old geezer. A Kurd from Ağrı who has been around the block a few times. He owns a tiny tea counter in the marketplace. And he is a very special friend. When the marketplace closed down I heard that he had gone back to Ağrı where he still has a small place. I didn't call him. I couldn't bring myself to even do that. I was completely devastated anyway and anything to add to that... Somehow it was too much. I didn't call a special friend. And for this may I never be forgiven.

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Isn't it my job to fret?

My nearest and dearest appear to be worried about me. "What difference does it make if you fret like this?" "You cannot change anything, so why not try to be 'more normal' about all of this?" These are the kinds of things that I am getting asked. This was the gist of a long phone conversation that I had with someone especially close to me last night. And others have asked me as well.

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Taking out yesterday's trash

I saw this a little while ago:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/12/why-are-some-alt-media-embracing-a-permanent-police-state/
I wasn't going to post anything for a while. I was all written out, after the last one. But now I think I will anyway. Because I asked this question too, and pretty much at the start of all this. And then very shortly after I asked it (gave them the benefit of the doubt for a week or so) I got rid of the lot of them: One fine morning, before I even finished my coffee I went on youtube and unsubscribed from something like 35 channels. Mixed bag of Turkish alt media and international. Gone.

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Dumbing Down. Part 2

A while ago I wrote a post in which I talked about the dumbing down of the world mind. It is a long one, I'm afraid, (and this one will probably end up being even longer). However since this is sort of a sequel to that one, you may want to read that one first.

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Infovis shenanigans

I have been wanting to do this for days. It is my profession, after all. Or rather, it is a very important part of my profession - information visualization. And I haven't pored over my Edward Tufte and my Chaomei Chen for nothing for all these years. Only reason I left it so long was that I needed a substantial number of days of both covid 19 test numbers as well as test results to be able to show what I want to show. So, here without further ado, it is:

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