January 29, 2024

NESTED! 6174, Chernobyl necklace, tyromancy, being a zoo

Happy flu season, my darlings! It’s been a very busy few months for me, but I finally have some time to share some of the things I managed to read and explore recently. Enjoy!

Wikipedia is the best website

• The cooperative eye hypothesis suggests that humans eyes evolved to look the way they do in order to be highly visible and help with communication.
• 6174 is Kaprekar's constant, a number with a built-in magic trick.
• Heroin chic describes the cynical trend in the 90s of supermodels with traits linked to drug addiction (pale skin, emaciated features, angular bones, eye bags) - Via the list of chics (see also: Communist chic, prairie chic, hick chic.)
• The concept of male as norm looks at how different languages use the masculine as the default/norm, and feminine variations reflect (and create) perceptions that women are less important.
• “China's final warning” is a Russian proverb to signify a warning that carries no consequence, originating from China’s 900 “final warnings” issued during the 1950s disputes over Taiwan’s status.
• Crosswordese are words that are regularly used by cruciverbalists (crossword constructors) to tie up difficult parts of a grid, but rarely used in everyday speech. - As someone doing the NYT crosswords daily: Iwo, ere, egads, Otoe, nene and oleo are now part of my daily vocabulary, thank you very much.
• And for something more grim: a Chernobyl necklace is the name given to a horizontal scar at the base of the throat, which results from surgery to remove a thyroid cancer caused by fallout from the Chernobyl disaster. It is “worn” by many civilians from Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and Russia.

Mood

Mildly interesting

• Why rich people don’t use curtains: not having privacy is a status symbol, apparently.
• Some bit of forgotten computer history, via absolument tout: in 2003, an engineer stole a trade secret formula for capacitors from his former employer, and took it to a new country and company. But there was a mistake in the copied formula which wasn’t noticed immediately before production, and it’s been estimated that the power supplies of millions of computers, TVs and hi-fi components began to burn out or explode much earlier than they should have.
• The un-Brie-lievable history of tyromancy, aka fortune-telling with cheese.
• On cats in medieval manuscripts is just a wonderful article. (No, they were not feared and did not cause the Black Death.)
• Real investigative journalism going deep into one of the very few companies that create the flavouring blends for most of the world’s crisps. With so many regional variations!
• How to graciously say no to more work (or “say yes until you have enough work that you can say no.”)
• RIP David Kirke, the founder of the “Dangerous Sports Club” and world’s first bungee jumper — which I learned happened from the Clifton Suspension Bridge here in Bristol!

Everything is depressing

• I’ve read and learned so much about the current genocide of Palestinians, but there’s only one piece I really wanted to share about it here: “No Human Being Can Exist” by Saree Makdisi. It compellingly puts everything that’s happened (including the response of media and governments) in a wider historical context: “To point these things out is not to justify them; it is to understand them. Every single one of these massacres was the result of decades or centuries of colonial violence and oppression.”
• Breaking news: a paper suggests the root of climate breakdown is human’s ‘behavioural crisis’ and continued demand for resources, and many of the other climate innovations are just a sticking plaster until we reduce this demand! Slowly starting to believe we won’t get there by producing more electric cars.
• Great essay coining the tyranny of obviousness: “how many people refuse to ‘get’ any form of art that is not obvious and forthright in its point”, and how this greatly affects what art is being produced & marketed.
• A striking photographic story about how the opioid crisis is hitting Native reservations in the US.
• The violence of lighting in Khayelitsha in South Africa, with tall floodlights used to surveil its one million inhabitants.
• Dozens of states are suing Meta and building a legal case against beauty filters, following the 2021 revelations that they knew of Instagram’s detrimental effects on the mental health of young girls.

Good to look at

• Delighted to discover there’s such a thing as financial therapists to uncover some of our learned behaviours about how to think and speak about money.
• An argument to spend more time talking to strangers (as a grade-A shy introvert this petrifies me, but I appreciate the sentiment)
• Loved, loved this short perspective: being human means being a zoo.
• An old goodie from David Graeber: "We Are All Socialists in Our Private Lives" (so why aren’t we in our work and political lives?)
• And from Adam Phillips, a solid argument against self-criticism.
• This little book for self-promoting your work without social media sounds amazing.
• The best thing to text a friend in this indirect world: “I say this genuinely and with no subtext.”
• On convenience that's used to sell us automation: tech doesn’t make our lives easier, it makes them faster.

Work! Design! Tech!

• I quite liked this “eulogy” for what programming will be like in a post-GPT world: it’s hopeful and (I think) accurate on how it will change. “Programming by typing C++ or Python yourself might eventually seem as ridiculous as issuing instructions in binary onto a punch card”: the way we interact with computers will evolve, but there will always be a need for skilful human decision making, collaboration and design. (Just as I would argue that these are already, and have always been, a software engineer’s most valuable skills; learning to code is not that hard, building the right thing efficiently by talking to other humans is what’s rocket science). - Talking of which, yet another article on the importance of good writing when working remotely.
• The best way to motivate people with creative things (at work and otherwise) is to keep having small wins.
• Wokwi is an amazing web-browser simulator for electronics and embedded systems like Arduinos and ESP32s. Without needing to wire anything, or wait for an upload to test your code; it’s quite magical for physical prototyping.
• A very comprehensive article on designing better target sizes on the web for improved accessibility and usability.
• How to survive the “traffic cop” role on Slack (too real).

Excited to get the ball rolling,

Victor