March 26, 2023

NESTED! Fan death, the Hawking Index, critical ignoring, design juice

Hi friends! Hope you’re all doing well and recovered from the lost hour. Here’s a few things I read this month and wanted to share.

Wikipedia is the best website

• In the early 20th century, couples in some US states (and in Sweden!) were legally required to test for syphilis and gonorrhea before they could get married.
• A posthumous marriage happens when one of the two parties is deceased (typically in war times to recognise a child born out of wedlock, but not always).
• Fan death is a belief in some cultures that leaving an electric fan on in a closed room can cause death by suffocation or hypothermia.
  • See also: Refrigerator death.
• When a Prime Minister takes office in Britain, they must write a letter of last resort. Copies of this letter are given to each of the UK’s four ballistic submarines; it contains instructions to follow if an enemy’s nuclear strike kills the prime minister and destroys the government. While their contents have always remained secret, they are rumoured to either be one of “retaliate”, “don’t retaliate”, “go under Australia’s command” or “use your own judgement”.
• Some winter resorts in Northern America have panty trees: it has become somewhat of a tradition to drop bras and knickers on trees below ski lifts.
• The Hawking Index of a book defines how far people will, on average, read through that book before stopping and giving up.
  • It’s named after A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which has a score in between Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow — incredibly, three books that I’ve tried to read before finding out later that the people who recommended them to me have never actually finished them either.
• In the early hours of a 2009 summer morning, a trader in London caused the oil futures drunk-trading incident after having had a bit too much to drink. The trades were worth half a billion dollars, causing “the price of […] crude oil to rise by more than $1.50 per barrel, which is generally only caused by major events with geopolitical significance”. At least I’ll feel better about my hangovers.

Scratch

Mildly interesting

• The case for making low-tech, dumb cities rather than “smart” ones to be more sustainable and equitable.
• An explanation of how 18th-century scientists knew that space was a vacuum, centuries before we actually went there to verify it.
• It’s likely that much of Italy’s food culture lore is based on ahistorical lies, which is fun for a country famed for its attachment to tradition.
• A guide to Response Shaping when writing prompts for AIs like ChatGPT, to get the answer you really desire. (I sort of hate the sentence “Interacting with AI just became a critical skill” because it feels true).
  • About AIs: I really liked Kevin Kelly’s idea to see them as an intern. You can delegate some boring, repetitive tasks to it, but you’ll always need to check their work, and they’re far from evolving into replacing your whole job.
  • Josh W. Comeau argues a similar point in The End of Frontend Development: they make it easier now to automate some tasks… that we could already automate for a long time, but they don’t provide truly intelligent thinking. (Great point too: ”If I'm wrong, and it turns out that LLMs can totally replace software developers? If that's the case, I suspect LLMs will replace a huge majority of knowledge workers. This isn't the sort of tsunami you'll be able to avoid by switching to a different discipline. There is no higher ground.”)
  • Jaron Lanier thinks that at its worst, it will just drive us insane.

Everything is depressing

• A solid analysis on why treating housing as an investment was a colossal, society-shattering mistake (surprise surprise).
• We’re learning more about long Covid, and the truth doesn’t seem like it’s what we thought.
• There’s truly nothing scientific about “Backed by Science” skincare.

Good to look at

• Loving this concept: beyond critical thinking, in the current state of information we need to learn “critical ignoring”.
• A visualisation of every possible Wordle solution!
• There’s a new bridge on the River Lea in London which is rolled in place by hand: the Cody Dock Rolling Bridge. (via Absolument Tout)
• Great story from Wired touring a TSMC semiconductor factory in Taiwan, which produces around a third of the world’s chips. (”The semiconductor industry churns out more objects in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the other industries in the history of the world.”)

Work! Design! Tech!

• An excellent, interactive introduction to “juice” in game design (aka “unnecessary but fun and satisfying feedback”) and how it can be used in other media like web and apps.
• A great overview of the complexity of spacing units in design systems.
• How the Shape Up methodology delegates projects, not tasks.
• textra is a CLI tool to use Apple’s new VisionKit features and extract text from audio, images or PDFs easily.

Keep it real,

Victor