Just Work: The Gig Economy, Platform Capitalism and the Battle for Worker Rights

 

A comic by Tom Humberstone about gig workers and the need to organise, with loads of local Edinburgh flavour.

Orwell was right

 

A short comic by Mike Dawson. Stick to the end for a valid point.

A Tale of Two Pandemics

A Tale of Two Pandemics: A graphic summary explaining how and why communities of colour suffer more from Covid. Spotted via BoingBoing.

The New New Yorker

Courtesy of Tom The Dancing Bug.

XKCD vs Coronavirus

Thank you, XKCD!

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Sydney Padua explores an alternate universe wherein Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage complete the Analytical Engine and use it to (at the order of Queen Victoria) fight crime. I've blogged before about the web comic, but the book is even better.

Padua's tome reconciles hilarity with accuracy. I am not normally a fan of footnotes: if it is worth saying, say it inline; don't force your poor reader to break the flow of thought and eye, and leap to the bottom of the page. But here is the glorious exception, where the footnotes supplement, argue with, and occasionally threaten to overflow the comic. Even the footnotes have footnotes: endnotes cite sources for the dialogue, present pocket biographies of Ada and Charles' contemporaries Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Dodgson, and George Boole, quote at length from original sources, and explain the workings of the Analytic Engine. In the midst of an illustrated fantasia riff on Alice in Wonderland, the footnotes pursue an academic war as to whether or not Babbage truly considered Lovelace to be the Empress of Number. Padua makes pursuit of Victorian arcana a thrilling adventure of its own. Highly recommended!

Joe Sacco: On Satire

Joe Sacco is my favourite graphic-novel journalist. All of us deplore the attack on Charlie Hebdo, but his response is the most thoughtful analysis I've seen.

A formative day for Georg Cantor

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The Truth About Numbers

From Tom the Dancing Bug. "That book is full of secular lies! Here's the only 'math' book you'll ever need!"

Blondie

And as if staring in XKCD wasn't enough (see previous entry), functional programming also features in Blondie, of all places. Does this mean FP has really gone mainstream? Spotted by Andrew Tolmach.

Functional

XKCD tackled functional programming last week. The title text nails it: ''Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.''

Was it a coincidence that this panel appeared on the last day of ICFP? ICFP was in Boston this year, and Munroe lives nearby in Somerville.

Yes is More

Yes is More is one of my favourite books. In the form of a comic, it describes a series of architectural projects by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). My son Adam accompanied me to ICFP last year, in Copenhagen, just so we could visit some of BIG's projects in person. We had a ball!