Kimberly Hirsh

“She didn’t die. She was killed. Because she was a Jewish girl.” Hannah Pick-Goslar, a friend of Anne Frank’s 💔

🔖 Read Understanding Blogs by Tracy Durnell.

An excellent exploration of what makes blogging its own medium.

I guess I missed World Book Day & International Cat Rescue Day in Europe but it’s still March 2 back home, so happy both of those! As I like to say when beatboxing poorly, BooksAndCatsAndBooksAndCatsAndBooksAndCats. (Because boots are good but books are better.)

Haven’t listened to Worlds Beyond Number yet but Erika Ishii in this TechCrunch interview is making me cry so that’s cool:

“When you find people to create with, you gotta grab onto them and just keep doing that for the rest of your lives together.”

I’ve got a couple recent co-authored articles:

Description framework of makerspaces: Examining the relationship between spatial arrangement and diverse user populations in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

&

Makerspaces in Libraries at U.S. Public Colleges and Universities: A Census in portal: Libraries and the Academy.

My excellent co-authors are Dr. Maggie Melo, Dr. Laura March, & researcher Emily Arnsberg.

🎮 Playing Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe with my kid. Super fun. Couch co-op Kirby seems to be his gateway to playing instead of just watching. Might do Kirby Star Allies next.

Hi friends! It’s time for an Amsterdam Photo Dump! There are 8 photos here so if you’re viewing this on a timeline, be sure to click through to kimberlyhirsh.com to see them.

Here’s what you’re seeing:

1. A street lamp that has been decorated to look like Nijntje (known as Miffy in English).
2. The facade of the Royal Palace Amsterdam. (The word for “rabbit” in Dutch is “konijn” and the Dutch name for the Royal Palace is “Koninklijk Paleis,” so I keep trying to come up with a rabbit-palace pun.)
3. A detail of a relief on the front of Amsterdam Centraal Station featuring the patron deity of our household, Athena.
4. The clock tower at Amsterdam Centraal Station.
5. A pedimental sculpture on the National Maritime Museum featuring Neptune, whose image is used heavily in Amsterdam due to the importance of sailing to its history and economy.
6. and 8. Votive ships made of wax at the National Maritime Museum.
7. A house near the Vondelpark that I thought looked cool and haunted.

🔖 Read Sci-Fi Publishers Are Bracing for an AI Battle by Elizabeth Minkel (Wired).

I’m interested to see how this shakes out.

Finished reading: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers 📚

Happy to have read it. Turns out vibes are enough when you’ve got charming characters.

Austin Kleon blogs about pilers and filers, a dichotomy/spectrum he learned about reading Temple Grandin’s book, _Visual Thinking _, in which Grandin discusses Linda Silverman’s work:

In a presentation about the differences in learning styles, Silverman flashes a slide showing a person with a tidy file cabinet and a person surrounded by messy piles of paper. The “filer” and the “pilers,” to use her terms. You probably know which one you are. What does it say about the way you think?

Kleon says:

All of these “versus” type situations can be rethought as spectrums and/or creative tensions. There are times when I want to access that sequential part of my brain and bring order to things, and filing does that, but there are other times I want to access my visual brain, and piles help.

I am my father’s daughter, which means I’m a piler-filer.

Both my dad and I often have stacks that look like a mess to other people. But when I was a teacher, my colleagues marveled at my ability to run exactly what I needed from one of these piles within seconds.

I also had immaculate file cabinets full of things like student paperwork. I love a label maker.

For me and for my dad, piles are for current projects and files are for reference materials and archives. If something goes into a file before we’re done with it, it ceases to exist until an external event prompts us to track it down, by which point it may be too late for us to have done what we needed to do with it.

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This is a panorama of my desk when I was managing editor at LEARN NC. The stacks on the desk and in the standing file were projects in-progress. I filed finished projects in the drawers in the file cabinet/snack station on the left side of the desk.

So. We’re piler-filers. Are you one, the other, or a combination?