NESTED! Anti-Flirt club, the Conflict Kitchen, Volkswagen currywurst, huge doors
Good evening, it's Victor! Hope you're enjoying the last days of summer. This is the 30th edition of this newsletter already! Here's some things I read and wanted to share before closing this month.
Wikipedia is the best website
The Anti-Flirt Club launched in the 1920s, to protect young women from unwelcome attention from men in the street and offer them a drive.
Frenchville French is a dialect of French still spoken by only two people in 2007.
The Chinese word for "crisis" has its own page, to cover the famous misinterpretation of the characters as “danger” + “opportunity”.
In 1971 an American prisoner sued Satan and his servants for causing him misery and unwarranted threats, caused his downfall, and therefore "deprived him of his constitutional rights". (The lawsuit was dismissed on procedural grounds; I guess they couldn't find the Devil's advocate.)
The Volkswagen currywurst isn't just some name coincidence: the German car maker has been producing sausage since 1973 (under the part number 199 398 500 A). Initially made for their workers, in the restaurants in its German factories, they are now also sold externally and given as a gift in dealerships to people purchasing a new car. In fact, in recent years the company has recently produced more sausages than cars.
They also produce Volkswagen ketchup to go with it.
If it's that good, it's not one you'd like to put in horsebread.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome is a neuropsychological condition that distorts perception, meaning objects may appear bigger, smaller, farther or closer than they actually are.
A shit flow diagram… actually does what it says on the tin. It is used as a tool in developing cities to identify easy-win areas of improvement in the sewage and waste systems.
A sham surgery is used in clinical trials for new surgical interventions in order to neutralise the placebo effect, and identify incidental side effects of procedures around the surgery.
For example, I remember reading that some people who have been experiencing intense back pain have recovered after a sham orthopaedic operation: the mandated post-surgery rest of several weeks and physiotherapy exercises were enough on their own to let the body recover. Previously, doctors did not make patients take all that time off work and activities before considering a surgery.
Being a faggot voter was a common form of electoral abuse in the UK. Back when landowners were the only people with a right to vote, it was possible for them to divide their property into subunits and transfer the title of each one to another person, hence creating new voters who could then vote for whoever the original landowner wished, “bundling” their ballots.
Chomp chomp
Mildly interesting
Cartographers purposely make sunlight come from the north in shaded relief maps even though the real sun comes from the south, to account for a visual perception quirk.
Why doors are so big in video games: because you need to fit a third person camera through it without making it awkward.
Did you know that every time you're eating a fig, you're also eating a little bit of dead wasp? Bon appétit.
Everything is depressing
On the dangerous ideas of “longtermism” and “existential risk”, and justifying the social preferences of elites.
Breaking: male feminists who are like “I'm not like the other guys” are exactly like the other guys.
True crime podcasts are cathartic for women; they're also cop propaganda.
How a Capitol Hill rioter was identified on Bumble with “comically minimal ego-stroking”.
The end of Uber is near.
Good to look at
A fascinating look behind the scenes of the poppers industry and history.
The Conflict Kitchen is a restaurant in Pittsburgh that only serves food from countries with which the US is currently in conflict. Food comes with educational brochures and occasional events: it was described as "an experimental public art project—and the medium is the sandwich wrap."
There's hundreds of ways and productivity techniques to get shit done, here's why we still don't.
Technology is making it harder to be a moral person.
In my ears
honestly nothing new just been listening to charli xcx again
Work! Design! Tech!
Kinopio is a fun new tool to connect related ideas visually.
An interesting typeface exploring gender stereotypes and connotations in type design.
Really like these values and principles from the co-founder of Heroku, both for product and engineering.
Including a good way to spell out how I also work: strong opinions, weakly held.
Quick tips to review and annotate a design for accessibility.
An argument that technical debt is neither debt, nor technical.
Chrome decided to remove all
alert()-type dialogs from Javascript, and this will break a ton of things on the Internet.
And that's it for this month. Forward this newsletter to someone you care about, if you like it! (that's the new "please like and subscribe")
Walk in the rain sometime,
Victor