Web Excursions 2021-09-17
How the Real Jane Roe Shaped the Abortion Wars
[Roe, a.k.a McCorvey’s] own lawyers had not much cared to know her.
She, in turn, had not much cared to know about their case;
when, months later, Norma listed in her red plastic datebook the important events of 1973, she included the Yom Kippur War, the Texas State Fair, and the closing of a local theater,
but not the lawsuit that bore her assumed name
In any case, regret is a dubious basis for policy.
People regret all kinds of decisions, large and small,
but we don’t proactively deprive them of their decision-making agency on the chance that they might.
McCorvey’s main qualification, too, was being in the right place in the right condition at the right time, and being willing to sign an affidavit.
Many feminist thinkers now argue for a more inclusive, and potentially sturdier, defense of abortion rights in what’s often called reproductive justice.
It embraces the freedom to have children,
with adequate social supports to raise them,
as well as the freedom to postpone or prevent childbearing.
What I Learned From a Year on Substack
Platformer is, thanks to your support, the best job I’ve ever had.
It affords me a good salary, covers my health care,
and pays for the various expenses that come with running a small business.
Twelve months later, there are 49,604 people subscribed to Platformer’s free list,
and you regularly open this newsletter at a rate that far exceeds in the industry average.
How did it grow that quickly? In short, by publishing journalism.
Some of the lessons I’ve learned in year one:
It’s a hits business.
Churn is real.
Platformer loses 3-4 percent of its paid customers per month.
I converted a smaller percentage of subscribers to paid than I thought I would.
Given that 24,000 people had been reading me four days a week when I launched — some for three years —
I thought that 10 percent would be a slam dunk.
Instead, it was closer to 5 percent.
That number has grown a bit over the past year, but it’s still well under 10.
A Discord is a superpower that journalists can give themselves.
In April I launched Sidechannel along with seven other independent journalists.
I regularly get tips from readers for stories; good-faith pushback on things I’ve written; links I should read; and good tweets for the end of the daily newsletter.
You hate interviews.
almost no one becomes a paid subscriber because they liked an interview.
Before I quit, I reached out to all my beat companies to see if they would still take my phone calls if I went independent.
To my great relief, they all said yes.
And as you can see from the list of the interviews above, executives are still engaging with me — in some cases, more than they did before.
There were some editor-in-chief type conversations I was never invited to before this year, because I had never been editor-in-chief of a tech publication before.
I continue to have a great backchannel with rank-and-file workers via replies to each day’s edition and the Discord server.
Being captured by the audience is probably my greatest fear about running a newsletter over the long term.
The good news is that Platformer also has plenty of paid subscribers who are outside the orbit of Big Tech:
they’re academics, policy makers, consultants, and concerned citizens, and
I regularly hear back from them when they think I’ve missed the mark.
Also: a good number of rank-and-file workers subscribe specifically because they want to empower journalism and analysis that pushes their companies to do better.
The general idea is to do at least one piece of high-quality reported journalism every week,
give it away for free to a mass audience, and
surround it with paid posts that are more relevant to people working in the industry.
One thing I struggle with is that if I decided to investigate something, it generally has to be something I can wrap up quickly
Reconciling those two things is going to be a focus for me in year two.
The only way a Substack grows is through tweets.
Usually when people unsubscribe and send a note, they don’t say they hated the publication.
One other thing folks have observed to me: no matter the Discord server, every channel seems to be dominated by the same few loud voices.
there hasn’t been the kind of regular interaction that I first envisioned.
I incorporated as an LLC using Stripe Atlas.
there are two things I know would make Platformer better.
One is developing a podcast that connects to the themes of the newsletter but delivers it through audio.
The other is hiring someone to help me put the newsletter together each day and free up more hours for reporting, thinking, and writing.
Why Smartwatch-Measured Blood Pressure Still Isn’t ‘Ready for Primetime’
Pressure measurements taken exclusively in a doctor’s office are often unreliable:
some people have higher blood pressure in-office because they’re anxious about the visit,
while other people have masked hypertension — high blood pressure at home, but normal blood pressure at the doctor.
Smartwatch companies like Samsung and Fitbit are taking another approach.
They are using light sensors on the smartwatches to calculate blood pressure.
Samsung’s approach is based on a measure called pulse transit time,
which is the time between the contraction of the heart and when the pulse arrives at a particular body part, like the wrist.
It’s correlated with blood pressure.
Fitbit is a few steps further back in the process
They’re focusing on a measure called pulse arrival time.
It’s similar to pulse transit time
but measures the pulse at a slightly different time than Samsung does
There’s a limitation to both of these strategies:
generally, they can only reliably measure relative blood pressure.
Apple’s blood pressure feature is still in development and has not been formally announced.
It would reportedly just give people information on trends in their blood pressure —
if it’s increasing or decreasing —
rather than a raw measure, which requires the calibration step used by Samsung
The sensors currently common in smartwatches probably won’t be able to measure blood pressure without calibration against an outside cuff
Even if companies can’t directly measure blood pressure through a watch,
they might be able to use metrics like pulse arrival time to give people information about swings in their blood pressure (like Apple is reportedly pursuing)
or their general fitness levels
An analysis, published in July, found that the blood pressures calculated by the Samsung device had “moderate to strong agreement” with pressures measured by an FDA-approved cuff.
if devices are giving you an inaccurate reading, you can get very false reassurance that your blood pressure is normal.
Clinicians will have to carefully examine any new device on the market
to make sure it’s working well enough to trust in different groups of people, including people with high or abnormal blood pressure
Language Log » "Classic Female Poison Earplugs"
a Chinese company that produces earbuds which they advertise as "Classic Female Poison Earplugs"
"Nǚ dú 女毒" (lit., "female toxin / poison") is a term used by audiophiles
who are especially enthusiastic about high-quality female vocals
when using earbuds, headphones, and other listening devices for playback.
It describes a quality of sound reproduction
that can reproduce dulcet female acoustic sounds
that are so bewitching they can almost “poison” listeners to be infatuated by what they're hearing.
"Nǚ dú sāi 女毒塞" thus refers to earbuds that can play (i.e., are specifically designed to reproduce) this kind of music with good acoustics.
So, a plausible, though bulky, translation of "jīngdiǎn nǚ dú sāi 經典女毒塞" would be: "classic earbuds [for reproducing] the intoxicating [sounds / quality] of the female [voice]".
Please Stop Closing Forums And Moving People To Discord
A few days ago Eurogamer closed their forums, bringing to an end over 20 years of community discussion.
Eurogamer’s decision explained as:
Sadly, times change and the way people communicate also has changed.
Traditional forums are no longer a popular place for people to come together to talk,
and have been replaced in popularity with more modern community platforms like Discord, Twitter, and Twitch.
Due to this, our forum community has declined over the years to the point where there are only a handful of people left actively using the forum.
Forums and Discord are apples and oranges.
Users aren’t being moved from one similar thing to another,
they’re being shifted to platforms with fundamentally different ways of approaching discussions.
Discord is great for talking in the moment.
It’s a place for real-time conversations
a fancy way to manage multiple chat rooms and voice comms
Forums are more deliberate, more considered, and
while they’re far from perfect, the point is that they’re more permanent.
Forums create a record, an archive we can search through
There’s a paper trail, providing an enormous help with technical issues or parts of a game you’re stuck on.
Hacker News
xlii
I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists.
Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations.
gamerDude
As someone who runs a discord server. The issue I had with a forum is that I hate all the off the shelf forums around. There doesn't seem to be any modern forums that I can just host.
bluetidepro
I think [Discord is] way better to use a system I am already signed up for.
I don't want to sign up again for a million different forums like the old days.
I also love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos more concise and isolated.