Trivial links

Morning!

If your week went anything like mine did, there was a lot of refreshing Twitter, scrolling, doing something else, refreshing Twitter, scrolling, etc etc. (I did productively channel some of that by repeatedly running through music theory exercises.)

There hasn’t been a lot of brain space for thinking, so it’ll be a bit quieter today. While I have various thoughts on the U.S. election, I won’t use this space for those—I’ll just reiterate what I said last week, that freedom, justice, and democracy require constant vigilance.

A few links did catch my attention this week, fun bits of trivia:

• Okay, two links on the American election… This brief story of Heather Zink, Pennsylvania election judge, is a delight. Also, did you know that the American national archives has a key role in facilitating the Electoral College?
• Tuesday was the birthday of the National Research Council’s time signal. Though not as significant as it once was, it represents for me the values of so much public infrastructure—humble, invisible, and essential.
• Telegraph operators used to maintain codebooks of numeric sequences that stood in for longer phrases (e.g., 9846 meant “Order has been placed for shipment”). Librarian Kathleen Monahan shares some examples of these codebooks and speaks to the potential of such sources to illuminate what was most important for a given set of telegraph operators. So neat. (via the ever enlightening John Overholt)

This morning, I’m listening to Elton John’s Live in Australia (“Burn Down the Mission” is a favourite of mine from this album). I’m looking forward to going on a long walk (I just got back to Ottawa and already ran into some friends last evening while out and about—what a city!), followed by who knows what. It’s sunny, the skies are blue—on with the day!

I hope you have similarly joyful plans. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas