Things I Have Enjoyed & Learnt 011
Bumper edition below. I think I've turned the "Archive" feature on in Buttondown so that now you can go back and look at previous newsletters if you're a latecomer.
Things I Have Enjoyed
Use CSS crimes to test your animation refresh rate.
This "photostory" about repairing a leak at CERN's LHC.
Rolling Stone's 50 Worst TV Network Decisions. Cancelling American Vandal should be on there.
Zach Klein's sidewalk garden.
The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge. You probably already read this.
"Meanwhile, somewhere in the background of this whole noisy paradigm shift, an entire cycle of American movies has come and gone without anybody really noticing." Did You Even Know This Movie Exists?
Manchester. As good as any other large European city I've been to and better than a lot of them.
Looking at the Wikipedia page of unsolved problems in linguistics and wondering if there are any solved problems in linguistics.
The Digital Voice telephone switchover is actually kind of convenient. I don't like that I don't have the ability to make phone calls in a power cut, but now that everyone has a mobile this is less of a concern.
The portal heist scene from Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves.
The soundtrack to Air. (I did not realise how many f-slurs are in the full version of Dire Strait's Money For Nothing.)
Americana Pipedream on TikTok. Now I really want a Serbian Military Trucker Cap.
Fernet branca. I'd forgotten how good it is.
Things I Have Learnt
Kind Charles III technically owns about 17% of the world's land.
Unlike most similar insects horseflies don't anaesthetise those that they bite, because their main prey can't brush them off when they feel the bite.
You can write a paragraph that's equally intelligible to Dutch, German, English, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish speakers.
How they make Twist lollies. Absolutely hateful stick placement; actually made me angry.
The name of Pakistan is a pseudo-acronym of Panjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan.
"The Martians" was György Marx's name for a group of Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the US at the start of the 20th Century. It includes Paul Erdős, John von Neumann, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner and Theodore von Kármán.
If you are allergic to Brazil nuts you can get an allergic reaction from having sex with someone who recently consumed Brazil nuts.
About "The Onion in the Varnish".
For 20 years visitors to an exhibit at a Grand Canyon museum were exposed to elevated levels of radiation from some buckets of uranium ore which were left sitting next to a taxidermy exhibit. Pretty sure I've actually been to the museum in question.
In order to lift weights in space astronauts can't use springs or rubber bands because of how the tension in them increases with extension, which would mean that the weight you're lifting increases with how high you lift it. Instead they move a piston against a vacuum which produces a constant force.
The End
Nearly time to go back to school. :(
Alby