After a few week without any serious reading, I decided to finally finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Part 4 is about hunting, gathering and gardening food, the least middlemen between you and your food.

Right away I found some points worth discussing, one of the earliest being a remark made that it took ancient hunter-gatherers only about 17 hours a week to hunt and gather enough food for them and their families, compared with the now seemingly universal 40 hour work week it seems that the modern life gives us more things to do and leave us with less time to do them.

Later in that same chapter Michael talks about why eat meat, that something that a lot of animal rights thinkers ask is the following: “Is it all right to allow animals to suffer just because they are animals? Isn’t that a kind of discrimination?”. Followed by this paragraph:

Singer says we have a simple choice to make. We have to choose between our desire to eat meat and allowing the suffering of animals to continue. Put it that way and it seems you have no choice.

It is true that put that way it seems everything is black or white, but as Michael says later in the chapter it doesn’t take into consideration the domestication of animals, that if we don’t raise and eat cattle and chickens they will go extinct as they have evolved to live with us. It is only in the world of imagination that cows and chickens can live in nature without human intervention, if suddenly all people stopped eating meat and all farms released their livestock into the wild those poor animals would die shortly after as would any group of people born and raised in the city without any experience in the wilderness if suddenly dropped into the amazonian forest without guidance.

But that doesn’t mean that animals deserve to suffer so much, even if the suffering associated with the death of an animal is inevitable the one associated with the living conditions isn’t; if we stopped treating animals like commodities and products in an industrialized food chain and started treating them like the living thing they are the animal suffering can be greatly reduced at the expense of a small decrease in animal produce supply. (Unnecessary supply, as the demand for animal products is sustained by marketing driven consumption patterns instilled by corporations that only seek profit, not even the well-being of their consumers).

[blog-post] Choosing Fonts for Your Data Visualization

A post about what makes a font fit for use in charts.

I had never given fonts any thought, I didn’t really understand why there are so many and why would one spend any time comparing fonts looking for the “perfect one”. It seems I just was ignorant about what can be different between fonts, this post talks about x-heights, serifs, counters and spacing between numbers.

Seeing those differences so clearly and explained in such detail gave me a new apreciation for fonts, even if I’m still not passionate about them now I can understand why some people are.

[video] Are Western and Japanese RPGs so Different? | Design Icons

A quick (~15 minutes long) story about RPGs, the best genre of videogames, and how some games influenced the distinction between Japanese and western RPGs.

[video] The Past We Can Never Return To – The Anthropocene Reviewed

An animation of a section of a podcast. The story of the discovery of the Lascaux cavern and some thoughts about humans in general, a very good video that gets to you in unexpected ways. One of the better things I have seen recently.

[music] [youtube [bancamp] 猫 シ Corp. : Palm Mall

This album is a must listen, using music to create the feeling of being in a mall full of people, the first 22 minutes of the album are something to experience.

Vaporwave has something for everyone, it’s funny how I started listening to it ironically and ended up discovering gems like this, pieces that challenge what you think is possible through music. To think that listening to some recordings of malls with a faint music playing in the background could make you feel like you are there, immersed in a shopping mall experience striped off of anything unpleasant associated with being actually there is incredible.

Maybe I haven’t being exposed to those kind of sounds prior to listening to this, but this being my first encounter with this kind of music gave it a very special place in my heart. A marvel of digital media, and I insist, a must listen.