Hello,

I hope you’re doing something nice with your weekend. Hopefully you might have room for one more email with a few things to read.

Here are ten things I enjoyed recently.

Last days of the loney interstellar space craft
An incredible story and piece of writing at the FT. You might need to register to read it but do find a way of reading it. How do you begin to repair a spacecraft that was designed in the 70s and millions of miles away? Fascinating in every way! Some earlier reporting from before it was fully fixed.

How to do great work
No idea where I found this one but it’s a gem of an article and too many good things to quote for now. Someone also took the article and mapped it out visually.

The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Exclusive Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined
This deep dive article shows the full extent of the utterly iresponsible decicsions that led to the failure of the vessel. It’s mindblowing what took place.

‘When I wear this shirt, I feel part of a tribe’: how running club merch became a marker of cool
How running clubs took over the world (sort of).

The uncompleted Northern Line extension, at the southern side of Elstree Hill.
The ultimate research from a “I wonder why that thing is there”. Amazing to read what was planned, why it didn’t materialise and how some of the elements remain visible today. There must be so many other stories like this.

Spreadsheet mistakes – news stories
From the EuSPRIG website (European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group), of course. A list of the various ways Excel has caused issues… some of them are real doozies. This one in particular about Norway's $1.5tn sovereign wealth fund losing roughly $92m through an Excel issue. Oops.

‘Dangerously misguided’: the glaring problem with Thomas Heatherwick’s architectural dreamworld
A wonderful reposte to Mr Heatherwick’s push to make the world less boring.

The book’s naivety and lack of self-awareness would be funny, but it is compounded by alarming pseudoscience that he wants to impose on the rest of us. Heatherwick reveals that his studio has developed a “boring-o-meter”, a software tool that analyses the visual complexity of a building from the point of view of a passerby, judging “how flat, plain, straight or monotonous it is”. He wants it to be used by planners and argues that “we need to move towards a time in which cities mandate that any new development meets a minimum complexity score”. Such logic would see every Georgian terrace in London (of the kind he praises elsewhere in the book) outlawed. Which raises the question: is simplicity and repetition really the villain he thinks it is? Or is he ultimately missing more important factors?

Let’s not forget his riddiculous job advert for a PA which was mocked widely and reported on as far as Australia.

John Oliver on Boeing
Quite possibly old news now, but still a wonderful summary of the shenanigans involved.

The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run
“MDZhB” has been broadcasting since 1982. No one knows why.
Something something Cold War.

Olivine weathering
Olivine is a green mineral that reacts with CO2 in the ocean to form a harmless silt. This reaction might be the key to slowing down climate change, or reversing it altogether.
Via Andy Waterman

That’s all for now.

Love as always,

Andy x
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