How many books? In how many days?

So, 20 books in 20 days it is!

Scanning LinkedIn, I came across a post by Jeremy Connell-Waite

"Fancy a reading challenge? How about 20 books in 20 days?"

Mmmmmnn, interesting. Jeremy was highlighting the Penguin GREEN IDEAS series of short stories which cover the environmental movement. 20 authors ranging from Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Bill McKibben, Edward O. Wilson, James Lovelock to name a few. Books are in and around 100 pages each.

The challenge started on the 2nd of April and will finish by landing on Earth Day on the 22nd of April.

Mmmmmnnn, maybe I might take part, then I see the rather gorgeous box set itself

Ok, now I'm sold on it. These will look great on bookshelf no 1 at home, oh that's full. These will look great on bookshelf no 2, ah, full too. These will look great on the floor!

Then the fabulously talented Valentina D'Efilippo suggested people create infographices, art or graphic design related to each book under the hashtag #20GreenIdeas. I'll be keeping a keen eye out for what inspiration comes out of this.

It's not too late to take part or join in slightly later, check it out :)

Full list of the Penguin 20

Day 1: Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

Day 2: Naomi Klein, Hot Money

Day 3: Timothy Morton, All Art is Ecological

Day 4: George Monbiot, This Can’t Be Happening

Day 5: Bill McKibben, An Idea Can Go Extinct

Day 6: Amitav Ghosh, Uncanny and Improbable Events

Day 7: Tim Flannery, A Warning from the Golden Toad

Day 8: Terry Tempest Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women

Day 9: Michael Pollan, Food Rules

Day 10: Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Democracy of Species

Day 11: Dai Qing, The Most Dammed Country in the World

Day 12: Wangari Maathai, The World We Once Lived In

Day 13: Jared Diamond, The Last Tree on Easter Island

Day 14: Wendell Berry, What I Stand for Is What I Stand On

Day 15: Edward O Wilson, Every Species is a Masterpiece

Day 16: James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

Day 17: Masanobu Fukuoka, The Dragonfly Will Be the Messiah

Day 18: Arne Naess, There is No Point of No Return

Day 19: Rachel Carson, Man’s War Against Nature

Day 20: Aldo Leopold, Think Like a Mountain

#ShowYourStripes

With the environmental theme running through my head it made me think of Ed Hawkins famous Warming Stripes visual which depicts the average annual temperatures for the planet.

The Warming Stripes go against a lot of "data viz rules" or "accepted best practices" but then the "rules" are really guidelines and not laws. This visual gets its point across brilliantly and it is instantly recognisable.

You can check out your own locations Warming Stripes here.

Couple of great LinkedIn recommendations

Craig Taylor posts his magical geospatial & transport creations regularly on his profile. Check this one out. Crazy good!

Another Linkedin profile I follow and recommend is Robin Hawkes who posts regularly on renewables, energy etc.

Books, Books, Books

Continuing my attempts to create a thread through TILTW, discussing the Warming Stripes takes me onto a fabulous book by Alberto Cairo called The Art of Insight.

Alberto talks with other visualisation designers about their work, stories, motivations and first up is Ed Hawkins. See, I got the linkage there in the end!

Four main sections split the book into Pragmatists, Eccentrics, Ambassadors, and Narrators.

Some of those featured are, apart from the aforementioned Mr Hawkins, Nadieh Bremer, Sonja Kuijpers, Federica Fragapane, Amanda Makulec, Alli Torban, Allen Hillery.

An all star cast, for a book I'd highly recommend.

The Bad Ass Bookshelf

The Bad Ass Bookshelf have chosen No Rule Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention as their book for April.

CEO Reed Hastings shares Netflix's unconventional culture and philosophy while business school professor and author Erin Meyer critiques it, an interesting set up.

Feel free to sign up here Linky Link

AI, E-I-E-I-O

A week has gone by with our feeds being inundated by Studio Ghibli images of, well, everything really, so wanted to highlight this article by Maxwell Zeff which discusses some of the nuance and grey areas of AI copyright.

Stuff for your ears 🐘

The Rest is Entertainment is part of the Goalhanger stable of podcasts, The Rest is History, Classified, Football, Money, Politics, Politics (US). Not much left to cover really!

The recent Rest is Entertainment episode, entitled Did Mark Zuckerberg steal Richard's Books? highlights the recently published search tool from The Atlantic where you can check to see if your book, or any other book, has been illegally pirated by LibGen. All of Richard's books were on LibGen.

They then discuss how this site was then used by Meta to train Llama 3, interesting discussion.

The episode is here for Apple Podcast | Spotify

Other Stuff

With the world being a pretty serious place, I always try to seek out something to lighten the mood and The Rest is Entertainment gave me a beauty.

LOL: Last One Laughing gathers 10 UK comedians and they have to make each other laugh but laughing is not allowed. Make someone laugh and they get a yellow card, if they laugh again, red card and they're gone. I've loved watching very funny people trying their hardest not to laugh at the silliest things or the most mundane of things, genius.

A really simple idea, but very funny.

I'm not sure if the UK version is available outside of the UK but I hope it is.

Power Toys is now my new favourite little computer gadget type thing with lots of features like an image resizer, bulk file renamer, a text extractor which pulls text from an image so you can copy to your clipboard.

That's all folks

I'm off to check to see if any further books I bring into my home are gonna be subject to tariffs

Have a great week and weekend.

DJ