Things I Have Enjoyed & Learnt 001
(This is my first attempt at a newsletter, so please bear with me.)
Things I Have Enjoyed
Staying in for New Year's Eve. I love Christmas but New Year's Eve sucks.
Music by Emapea. Really good background lofi beats, with none of the added vinyl hiss that a lot of this sort of stuff seems to feature.
Croatian Euro coins. The 1€ coin features a marten, which is called a kuna in Croatian. At one point marten pelts were used as currency, which is why the Croatian currency was called the kuna.
The Black List 2022, Hollywood's "most-liked" unproduced screenplays. I enjoy the screenplay as literature, and I've just bought an Amazon Scribe to have a larger-format reader for reading them on. I found a link to most of this year's screeplays via reddit.
The Pixel Watch. The battery life is terrible, but it really comes into its own doing walking navigation on holiday, and the media control and smart home features are useful.
The incredible level of detail in Google Maps' 3D renderings of big cities. Surprisingly useful for holiday planning.
This video of a huge magnet pulling nails out of a beach after a bonfire.
Programming Alexa to announce when the Sun sets, and adding a sunset tile to my Pixel Watch. I like knowing what the Sun is up to.
The new ONS census maps. Somebody's going to make a fortune on Etsy.
King's Disease III by Nas.
The OED's quarterly update of new words. Includes "obvs", obvs.
Perfect Unison by Jon Lefkovitz.
The Menu. First ★★★★★ movie of the year.
The flag of Magnitogorsk Industrial City.
Muppets Take Fallujah. AKA The Bert Locker.
Things I Have Learnt
Every New Year's Eve at at its airport hotels the Nordic Choice Hotels chain runs an event for dogs who are frightened by fireworks. The airport hotels are particularly well soundproofed and away from any firework displays so pets are guaranteed a night of peace.
You can disable the floating "Sign-in with Google" prompts across all websites in your Google Account settings under "Google Account sign-in prompts".
You can get double-wide dual rapid antigen tests which test for both COVID-19 and/or flu and/or RSV.
Aeroplanes use AC which alternates at 400 Hz rather than the usual 50 or 60 Hz. Transformers/motors can be made much lighter, and the power loss over distance isn't much of an issue over the length of an aeroplane.
A fascinating paper which looks at the portrayal of psychopaths in entertainment and how realistic that portrayal is. Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men is singled out as "among ... the most realistic":
[He] is a well-designed prototypical idiopathic/primary psychopath. ... [T]here are sufficient arguments and detailed information about his behavior in the film to obtain a diagnosis of active, primary, idiopathic psychopathy, incapacity for love, absence of shame or remorse, lack of psychological insight, inability to learn from past experience, cold-blooded attitude, ruthlessness, total determination, and lack of empathy. He seems to be affectively invulnerable and resistant to any form of emotion or humanity.
Leistedt, Samuel J., and Paul Linkowski. 2013. “Psychopathy and the Cinema: Fact or Fiction?” Journal of Forensic Sciences 59 (1): 167–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.12359. PDF
Bitcoin consumed around 150 terawatt hours of electricity in 2022. That's equivalent to about 52 million times the average UK household consumption.
Some screen readers will automatically try to describe the content of an image. They're not great though.
The sample from Fatboy Slim's Right Here, Right Now is Angela Basset from the outstanding Kathryn Bigelow movie Strange Days.
You can buy a spherical chalkboard for teaching non-Euclidean geometry.
The most remade film is probably Perfetti Sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers) which has been remade at least twenty-four times since its release in 2016.
agrivoltaics, n. The simultaneous use of an area of land for farming and for electricity generation using photovoltaic solar panels; a system or technology that enables this.
The UK has a Space Accidents Investigation Authority. (It's the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.)
This explanation of a new lawsuit against Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and others contains an interesting introduction to how these systems work. (Also I love Matthew Butterick for his work on typography and for releasing my House serif typeface Charter.)
Why the Super Rich are Inevitable.
The End
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Alby