Noisy colors

The Washington Post looks at — listens to different colors of noise: “Beyond white noise: How different ‘color’ sounds help or hurt” (gift link).

I often used brown or pink noise in my office to cut sound from the hallway and a nearby classroom. I never fell asleep, but gosh, could I concentrate. From a 2012 post about a now-defunct Mac app: “Without pink noise, I’d get nothing done in my office.”

Today there are many apps and websites generating noisy colors. Here’s a free site I just discovered: noisetool.

Recently updated

Drugs, groceries, books Now with a second bookstore, Djuna Books.

“In conclusion”

Today’s Zits: yes, just a mild exaggeration of how some students think about writing. It’s what they call “fluff.”

Jeremy, you need to read How to unstuff a sentence.

OCA, immobile again

After a brief effort using mobile view with this blog, I’ve switched back to desktop view. I have my reasons:

~ No personality. Mobile view makes one blog look exactly like some other blog.

~ To my eye, the typography and lineation look clumsy. The dateline is squashed to an unreadable white on grey; post titles are sometimes broken across two lines when they would easily fit on one. On the main page, the handful of lines that display for each post ignore italics and line breaks.

~ No widgets. No Creative Commons statement, no archive links, no links for favorite posts, no nothing. I know that it’s possible, in theory, to add widgets, but from everything I’ve read, it’s a doubtful venture. And anyway, where would they go? I know that it’s also possible, at least in theory, to edit numerous chunks of Blogger code to create what’s called responsive view, with the page enlarging or shrinking to fit a device’s display, but here too, from everything I’ve read, the prospect of getting things right is doubtful. And anyway, a smaller version of OCA-as-it-is is exactly what Google declares unusable on a mobile device.

~ I dropped the URL of an exceedingly well-known tech website into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test page. The result: “Page isn’t usable on mobile.” But it’s perfectly usable. Enlarge the page so that the sidebar slides off the screen and everything’s readable.

~ Statcounter tells me that about 40% of visits to Orange Crate Art are by way of mobile devices. No one has ever complained that a page is unusable or suggested that I use mobile view. So if it isn’t ain’t broke —

Drugs, groceries, books

[154 W. 10th Street, West Village, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Since 1978 this corner has been home to the great bookstore Three Lives & Company. In recent years Elaine and I have bought books there (many books) every time we’ve visited Manhattan. One of these days or years we’ll get there again.

Before no. 154 was a bookstore or a grocery-delicatessen (with payphone, as per the Bell Telephone sign), it was a drugstore, or drug store, the subject of a 1927 Edward Hopper painting.

Here’s a New York Times article with much more about the history of no. 154 and Three Lives.

*

A reader notes that there was once another bookstore in the rear of the building: Djuna Books, named, of course, for Djuna Barnes.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Illinois-15 in The Washington Post

“Political scientists and analysts said that when state Democrats packed so many conservatives into a single district, they created the environment for [Mary] Miller to win despite holding views that are out of step with most general-election voters in Illinois and even with most GOP House members”: The Washington Post takes a long look at Illinois’s gerrymandered fifteenth congressional district.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

[Gift link, no subscription needed.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, constructing as Anna Stiga. Which means, I think, that the puzzle will be tougher than one by Lester Ruff but not as tough as one by S.N. himself. I found today’s puzzle challenging. I got it done, but I don’t think I was ever on its wavelength.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

7-D, fifteen letters, “Since lots wanted it.” Broke open much of the puzzle for me.

14-D, eight letters, “Nutcracker participants.” Oops — SQUIRRELS is off by one letter.

15-A, six letters, “One of British rock’s ‘holy trinity.’” Okay, I guess so, but I’ve never thought of such a thing.

19-A, eight letters, “Really eager.” One of at least two clues that made me think I was in a time warp.

20-D, five letters, “Maxim’s scratch.” Stumper-y.

31-A, six letters, “Track participant.” A little sneaky.

44-A, seven letters, “Parting word.” See 19-A.

54-D, four letters, “Square one.” Groan.

My favorite in this puzzle: 55-A, nine letters, “Dashboard setting.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

OCA mobile

I was poking around in the Google Search Console this afternoon — idle curiosity — and discovered that Google disapproves of my use of the same OCA layout for desktop and mobile views. That layout seems to me to work just fine: on a phone, I just embiggen the main column of text and the sidebar sails off to the right. And it’s over there if I want it back. The sidebar has some wonderful stuff. It also has a picture of me.

But the lack of a layout for mobile devices makes these pages less attractive to the overlords who scan the Internets and put URLs in search results. So after holding out for many years, I’ve added a sidebar-less mobile view. Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.

If you’re on a mobile device and would like to see things in the old-fashioned way, just choose View web version from the bottom of any page.

Reading in Massachusetts

“Lost in a world of words” is the first in a series of articles about the state of reading instruction in the state of Massachusetts (The Boston Globe ). An excerpt:

Before the pandemic, only about half of public school third-graders had adequate reading skills. Post-pandemic, the story is even worse.

Scores for all third-graders have slipped below the 50 percent mark, and the most vulnerable kids are in serious trouble; 75 percent of low-income third-graders could not pass the reading comprehension test on last spring’s MCAS [Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System] exam. Roughly 70 percent of Black third-graders, 80 percent of Latino students, and 85 percent of children with disabilities couldn’t understand grade-level reading passages well enough to answer questions about them accurately.

It bears repeating: The vast majority of Black and Latino children and kids with disabilities are being sent off to the fourth grade — where students start reading to learn instead of learning to read — hobbled by this major deficit, which has cascading effects on spelling and writing as well. Some can’t sound out words on the page. Others can’t understand what they’re reading. Many never catch up; they drop out of high school or fail to finish college. The social and economic rifts in our society widen.

Just wait for Skippy the Frog.

The podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong is a great introduction to what’s at stake.

“I think he was in the chess club”

Steven Millhauser, “Kafka in High School, 1959,” in Disruptions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)