Hello mes amis ! It’s Victor. Here’s some links to wrap up this short month.

Wikipedia is the best website

• Cardea was the Ancient Roman goddess of… hinges? You do need someone to protect doorways.
• Ex-ex-gays are those who joined conversion therapy movements, then decided it’s bullshit.
• Talking about fruity fellows: did you know that Macaronis were the metrosexuals beta soy boys of 18th century Britain? (Yes, they’re named after the pasta.) (Also, this article contains impeccable wigs.)
• The “imperial boomerang” is the theory that imperialist government that use repressive techniques on their colonies will eventually employ these same techniques on their home citizens.
• Semantic satiation is the psychological feeling when a word stops making any sense after you read or hear it repeatedly.

We’re so de-icing

Mildly interesting

• We don’t really know how many people there are in the world, because a lot of countries actually have very unreliable population numbers. Not as in “2% confidence interval” wrong, but as in “numbers are flat out made up based on extrapolations of a census done 40 years ago, and could be wrong by a factor of two in either direction“.
• A biology paper on the “lateralised sleeping positions in domestic cats” found that more or less two-thirds of cats sleep leftwards, and the rest are rightwards (but it does NOT correlate with left-pawedness).
  • See also: Jeremy (snail).
• Peanuts allergies were once rare, but in the US and UK, rates have exploded by orders of magnitude in just a generation. It seems to all be because of inaccurate dogma from pediatricians who told parents to avoid all peanuts to avoid allergies, which did the exact opposite.
• Why do we find some things so rude? (And why do kids these days feel ruder than ever?)
• The conference dinner problem describes how groups of loosely connected people with differing preferences often struggle to make collective decisions, wasting time through endless negotiation and ultimately settling for a suboptimal outcome. It's a pattern that appears not just in social situations, but also in product design, policymaking, and family planning. (h/t Adrienne)
• A DNA study confirms that ‘Viking' was a job description, not a matter of heredity.

Everything is depressing

• A history of how blackletter, the medieval French handwriting, became “the Nazi font”. (I did not know Hitler tried to ban it and claim it was Jewish!)
• Oilwell is a wellness app to help you embrace climate chaos. Contains “Smog Breathing Exercises” and “Wildfire ASMR”.
• “Nuclear hog hybrids are breeding at breakneck speed in Japan” is certainly a headline. Escaped domestic pigs are interbreeding with wild boars, diluting pig DNA and giving scientists new, unexpected insights in invasive species dynamics. (h/t Meesha)

Good to look at

• Welcome to the Group Chat! There's a new member, whether you like it or not!
• This mischieviously ambiguous phonetic alphabet needs to replace the NATO one stat. Yes, NATO as in Night Aural Tsar Ours. No, not Knight Oral Czar Hours.
• If you ever want to feel like you have your life together, study this illustrated guide to folding fitted sheets.
• The Advocate, a LGBTQ magazine, published scans of their 1979 edition where they claim to have coined the term “bear” for gay men, alongside some other, thankfully-forgotten stereotypes like… gazelles, marmosets and owls. (tw: some writing is very ~of the time~.) (h/t Natalie)
• Beautiful essay from Kathryn Schulz on the sensation of loss, from misplacing your wallet to losing a loved one. [archive link]
• A good guide if you want to start lifting but you’re lazy: 80/20 Strength Training.

Work! Design! Tech!

• A very cool, visual deep dive into ASCII rendering to achieve sharp, high-quality 3D renderings with text.
  • And another cool step-by-step breakdown of how dithering works.
• L-o-v-e-d the essay Backseat Software, which touches on why so much software has become shitty even when teams have best intentions. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. […] When experimentation becomes the primary decision-making tool, a strong product vision becomes optional.”

Pay attention to what persists,

Victor