Most Recent Bookmarks

🔗 Cycling in Cairo: Just use your head

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On the smaller streets riding a bike is a breeze, since you avoid the kind of traffic that bogs down cars. On the bigger streets it is more challenging but general rules apply; take the right side of the road (but leave some space), deal with the other traffic as if you are a slower, smaller car and above all be mindful of your surroundings.

🔗 Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom

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![img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320486621l/9227270.jpg]]

Take a lively look at women's history from aboard a bicycle, which granted females the freedom of mobility and helped empower women's liberation. Through vintage photographs, advertisements, cartoons, and songs, Wheels of Change transports young readers to bygone eras to see how women used the bicycle to improve their lives. Witty in tone and scrapbook-like in presentation, the book deftly covers early (and comical) objections, influence on fashion, and impact on social change inspired by the bicycle, which, according to Susan B. Anthony, "has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."

🔗 "Bicycle face": a 19th-century health problem made up to scare women away from biking

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In 1890s Europe and America, bicycles were seen by many as an instrument of feminism: they gave women a measure of increased mobility, began to redefine Victorian ideas about femininity, and were eagerly taken up by many women active in the suffrage movement. Bikes helped stoke dress reform movements, which aimed to reduce Victorian restrictions on clothes and undergarments so women could wear clothes that allowed them to engage in physical activities.

As Munsey’s Magazine put it 1896: "To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world."

All this triggered a backlash from many …

🔗 How the bicycle became a symbol of women's emancipation

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The American civil rights leader, Susan B Anthony, wrote in 1896:

"I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood."

🔗 a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally as important to one in a $30,000 car

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Since 1998, Bogotá, Colombia has built more than 300 kilometers of protected bikeways. Streetfilms recently had the chance to explore the city's bike network with the man responsible for building it, former mayor Enrique Peñalosa.

"When we build very high quality bicycle infrastructure, besides protecting cyclists, it shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally as important to one in a $30,000 car," said Peñalosa. And as mayor, he walked the walk, extending the network of protected bikeways to every community.

"He spent all of the money that he had developing public space for pedestrians and bicycles," said Carlos Felipe Pardo from SlowResearch.org. "If you go to other places, you have people in the mud walking but the cars on a perfect road and …

🔗 Mayavoz

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mayavoz is a Pytorch-based opensource toolkit for speech enhancement. It is designed to save time for audio practioners & researchers. It provides easy to use pretrained speech enhancement models and facilitates highly customisable model training.

🔗 The Dangers of Elite Projection

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Elite projection is the belief, among relatively fortunate and influential people, that what those people find convenient or attractive is good for the society as a whole. Once you learn to recognize this simple mistake, you see it everywhere. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive barrier to prosperous, just, and liberating cities.

This is not a call to bash elites. I am making no claim about the proper distribution of wealth and opportunity, or about anyone’s entitlement to influence. But I am pointing out a mistake that elites are constantly at risk of making. The mistake is to forget that elites are always a minority, and that planning a city or transport network around the preferences of a minority routinely yields an outcome that doesn’t …

🔗 The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent

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My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.

I have Asian heritage, and that seems to be the only thing the AI model picked up on from my selfies. I got images of generic Asian women clearly modeled on anime or video-game characters. Or most likely porn, considering the sizable chunk of my avatars that were nude or showed a lot of skin. A couple of my avatars appeared to be crying. My white female colleague got significantly fewer sexualized images, with only a couple of nudes and hints of cleavage. Another colleague with Chinese heritage got results similar to mine: reams and reams of pornified avatars.

🔗 Sankey Diagram Builder

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A Sankey diagram depicts flows of any kind, where the width of each flow pictured is based on its quantity.

Sankey diagrams are very good at showing particular kinds of complex information --

  • Where money came from & went to (budgets, contributions)
  • Flows of energy from source to destination
  • Flows of goods from place to place
  • ...and potentially many more.

Sankey diagrams can be difficult to produce without specialized software. SankeyMATIC aims to change that.

![img[https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/monthly-budget-thumb.png]]

🔗 Best Climate Change Books

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![img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1372677697i/17910054.SY75.jpg]] [img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1418103804i/21913812.SY75.jpg]] [img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1316131273i/7799004.SY75.jpg]] [img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1603323079i/41552709.SY75.jpg]] [img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1608723131i/53916142.SY75.jpg]] [img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1639303577i/59806419.SY75.jpg]] [img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474537075i/31624481.SX50.jpg]] [img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317066485i/7099898.SY75.jpg …

🔗 WebTorrent

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WebTorrent is a streaming torrent client for the web browser and the desktop.

WebTorrent is written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for peer-to-peer transport whenever possible. No browser plugins, extensions, or installation is required to use WebTorrent in your browser.