June 27, 2023

NESTED! Helicopter hieroglyph, romantic chess, electrifying the Titanic, air is expensive

Hi besties, it’s Victor! I hope you’re all photosynthesising well. Here’s some fun (and less fun) links to sip through this summer:

Wikipedia is the best website

• The bathing machine was a small hut on wheels used in England in the 18th and 19th century to allow people to change into their bathing suits and enter the ocean without being seen. They were eventually phased out with the rise of more liberal attitudes towards modesty and changing habits - Found through the article about Adamites, an early Christian group who did their religious services naked. (thanks Louise for sending this!)
• The helicopter hieroglyph is, well, a hieroglyph that our modern eyes interpret as looking like a helicopter. I’ve talked before about the delicious Wikipedia hole that are out-of-place artefacts, and this is one of them: ancient astronaut theorists pointed out this is proof that ancient Egyptians have been visited by aliens with spaceships
• Henneguya zschokkei is a multicellular parasite that lives inside salmon and is the only known eukaryote that does not use oxygen as part of its metabolism; the way in which it obtains its energy is still unknown. It’s theorised to have been a type of cancerous tumour growth in jellyfish, ultimately escaping and becoming a separate species now parasitising other animals.
• A list of last meals requested by prisoners sentenced to capital punishments.
• Erden Eruç is the first and only person to circumnavigate the World using his own muscle power — mostly on a rowboat and cycling. His trip lasted just over five years. - Colin Angus and Jason Lewis claimed a similar title before him but one wasn’t a _true circumnavigation and the other wasn’t solo for the entire journey.
• Beefsteak Nazis are socialists and communists who have joined the Nazi Parti — so named because they’re “red on the inside, brown on the outside”. (See also: watermelon for modern eco-socialists.)
• Romantic chess was a style of chess playing where it was important to win in style (!), popular in the 18th century and not dissimilar to the Romantic movement in other arts. - Insane bit somehow linking to the above: “During the 1930s, Nazi Germany co-opted chess as a political tool and to that end circulated propaganda alleging that the age of Romantic chess, dominated by dashing Aryan players such as Morphy and Anderssen, had been derailed by ‘cowardly, stingy’ positional chess exemplified by Jewish players like Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, and others.” - And talking of chess: there is a joke move called the Bongcloud Attack. (Yes, of course there is a Hotbox Variation). I do not know if that counts as romantic chess.
• Remember Boaty McBoatface? Get ready for Horsey Horseless, the 1899 prototype of an early automobile which had a wooden horse head on its front to avoid “frightening horses on the road”.

>:(

Mildly interesting

• Did you know you can learn how to walk better? Not just to go faster, but also to improve your posture, technique and reduce back pain. - (…though as a fast walker, I’d prefer if the first thing that most people learned about walking is that you shouldn’t walk right in the middle of the pavement)
• The long but fascinating story of VaccinateCA, a small project ran by techies to put more vaccines in arms when it first became available, in spite of the American healthcare system and very poorly managed government logistics.
• Why do pirates talk like that? Our associations of pirates with thick accent and “arrr matey” come from film, not reality: and these were largely influenced by the native West Country dialect of Robert Newton, who played the main characters in several early pirate movies.
• An ode to the unappreciated grind challenges of all the engineering that surround us: testing, standards, inspections, negotiation, compliance.

Everything is depressing

• Just trust me and go pay attention to the rising chorus of renewable energy skeptics: it’s been a truly eye-opening read for me. The one sentence to summarise it: “In other words, electrifying the Titanic won’t melt the icebergs in its path.” - While we should of course stop dependence on fossil fuels, there is a violently destructive cost to the mining of minerals and rare metals required to build renewable power stations, electric vehicles, and batteries. I vaguely knew that this was an issue, but I hadn’t quite grasped the sheer scale of ecological (and human) destruction that’s actually planned to mitigate the other ecological catastrophe: “Current copper reserves stand at 880 million tonnes. That’s equal to approximately 30 years of production. But industry will need 4.5 billion tonnes of copper to manufacture just one generation of renewable technologies, estimates Michaux. That’s six times the volume of copper mined throughout history. After that generation comes many more, and sooner than you might imagine. On average a windmill and solar panel has to be replaced every 25 years.” And that’s for copper alone; other ores have worse problems. - So, what’s next? Is there no hope of avoiding greenwishing? This amplified the case for degrowth to dramatically reduce our reliance on energy altogether. And I also enjoyed “How does degrowth apply to our minds”, a great essay exploring how we can recognise and unpick growth mental mindsets in ourselves, as well as the wider economy, to unlock a culture of sufficiency. (all the above via Dense Discovery)
• A leaked document from Google engineers suggests that Google Bard and ChatGPT will be very quickly outcompeted by Open Source AI. - IMO this would both be a good and a terrible development, because open-sourced LLMs make it straightforward to remove the safeguards implemented in proprietary products to generate harmful content while being competitive in quality. - What is the alternative to AI further concentrating wealth? - Or maybe there is no AI.
• We’re not good alone! - Quoted in there but worth reading in full: Less TikTok, more screaming, a splendid essay on Therapy™ as peddled on social media.

Good to look at

• Thirty maps with different projections to rethink what the world looks like.
• Tabletopia lets you play a bunch of licensed board games online!
• Eycndy is an excellent library of visual technique in films.
• A very well argued longread on cancel culture in universities and free speech debates. (via Maria)

Work! Design! Tech!

• The perfect programming language has landed, and it’s called DreamBerd.
• There are some great development principles to be learnt from IKEA. (Air is expensive, include the Allen keys, make things feel disposable.)
• I learned a lot from this talk on the art and science of asking questions.
• A very well summarised guide to iOS navigation patterns, giving me some terminology for concepts I didn’t know how to name.

Stay hydrated,

Victor