NESTED! Forbidden blackcurrants, TempleOS, the abandoned diggers, disrespectful design

Good evening, it's Victor!

Hope you've been having a great month. I've been having a few days off again, went to the wildlife centre to see some animals, it's my birthday on Saturday, and I'm dreading the return of the cold weather. Here's some things I liked reading this month.

Wikipedia is the best website

• A Fata Morgana is a type of mirage seen above the horizon at sea, which can distort ships and islands in multiple directions.
• Some info about toilet-related injuries and deaths. (“In the past, this number would have been much higher; […] a 1935 Northern Tissue advertisement depicted splinter-free toilet paper.”)
• A crinkle crankle wall is a garden wall built in a serpentine pattern. Beyond the aesthetics, its wavy shape provides greater stability: it can be made with less bricks than a straight wall of the same length, because it doesn't need to be as thick.
• Temperance bars are bars that do not serve alcohol. In the UK, they're relics of the temperance movement in the 19th century.
  • Related, a fascinating history revisit: Why Do We Blame Women For Prohibition? Today, American prohibition is largely remembered as an anti-democratic, evangelical women's affair against The Drink™, but this is a very incomplete picture of that time. At their core, prohibitionists “aimed at a predatory liquor traffic of wealthy capitalists and saloonkeepers who—together with a state that, before the income tax, relied disproportionately on liquor revenues—got rich from the drunken misery of the poor. […] It was no fluke that the ultimate victory of prohibition came at the high point of the Progressive Era: like other reforms of its day, prohibition was fundamentally progressive.”
• Lesser known than the alcohol prohibition: the prohibition of blackcurrants in the United States. Blackcurrant crops can carry a disease that affect the white pine, so to protect the timber industry, in 1911, the Federal government banned their cultivation, sale and transport. The ban was lifted at the federal level in 1966, fifty-five years later, but remained in place until 2003 in some states. Because of this, the flavour remains exceedingly rare there: it is estimated that less than 0.1% of Americans have likely ever eaten a blackcurrant. There, purple Skittles have a grape flavour.
  • The United Kingdom has experienced the opposite effect: during World War II, when importing oranges was not exactly reliable, local blackcurrants were a prime source of vitamin C, and the government encouraged its cultivation. From 1942, Ribena was distributed to children, and this can explain the everlasting popularity of the flavour in Britain compared to other countries.
  • On the back of the beehive heists from last month, couldn't miss the related article California nut crimes. (No, nothing to do with Hollywood porn regulations.)
• No context parentheses in the title: British scientists (meme).
• After Lady Gaga's epic performance at the VMAs this year, let us remember the MTV Video Music Award for Ringtone of the Year — which was only handed out once, in 2006.
• TempleOS is a fully functional operating system for PC that was coded by Terry A. Davis over the course of a decade, after a series of manic episodes that he later described as a vision from God. (“According to Davis, many of these specifications—such as the 640x480 resolution, 16-color display and single audio voice—were instructed to him by God. He explained that the limited resolution was to make it easier for children to draw illustrations for Him.”) It is written in its own programming language, a hybrid of C and C++, “originally called C+, later renamed to HolyC”.
  • The OS was well received in tech circles. An editor of OSNews said "it actually boggles my mind that one man wrote all that" and that “it was hard for a layperson to understand what a phenomenal achievement it is to write an entire operating system alone.” […] “Davis could have been a ‘Steve Jobs’ or a ‘Steve Wozniak’ were it not for his illness.” Another engineer noted TempleOS “contained innovations that no other developer had accomplished”.
• Affect labelling is the psychology term for “putting feelings into words”. Expressing your feelings (in speech or writing, whether it's shared with others or not) can help regulate your own emotions; new studies suggest that we do this, potentially unknowingly, all the time on social media.

• The long list of flags with blue, red and white stripes, which I'm only really serving to accompany this meme:
  

Mildly interesting

• Austin Kleon on why he keeps blogging: “This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say.” (Maybe it's affect labelling again.)
• Writing and talking are just throwing fictional worlds at one another, in an excellent interview with a linguist at QMUL.
• David Graeber passed away at the start of the month. I really liked his essays What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? and Bullshit Jobs — they're great, digestible reads to understand systems around us. I've finally started digging into his books (the full version of Bullshit Jobs, and Debt: The First 5000 years, which is also available as a video talk.)
• The boring machines that dug tunnels below New York's new stations and the multi-level basement extensions of London houses are left buried at the end of the excavation process, effectively digging their own grave. The cost of getting them back up, out and re-selling them is often higher than abandoning them underground after they're done drilling. (via Martin & Baptiste)

Slurppp

Good to look at

• tfw you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number. Probably the funniest security disclosure story I've ever read.
• Oliver Burkeman's eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life are a joy to read and I'm trying to remember them more often. (The first one the most: “There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating.”)
  • See also: ‘Ugh Fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task.
• The Winamp Skin Museum is the kind of design history we all need (and it's interactive!)
• One coronavirus post for good measure: what we know about the virus six months on, and the most likely ways you'd get infected.

In my ears

• Hot Chip - Candy Says (Velvet Underground cover / soft house / UK / 2020)
• The Jones Girls - Nights Over Egypt (disco funk / US / 1981)
• YELLE - J'veux un chien (synth pop / france / 2020)
• Molly Nilsson - Hey Moon! (indie pop / sweden / 2008)
• Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou - A Young Girl's Complaint (blues / ethiopia / 1967)
• A.G. Cook - Today (Smashing Pumpkins cover / hyperpop / UK / 2020)
• Tristesse Contemporaine - Fire (Daniel Maloso Fuego Mix) (house new wave / france / 2013)

Work! Design! Tech!

• Communicating with Interactive Articles: a synthesis of interactive pieces in journalism, education and academic papers, from distill.pub, who want to help re-shape the PDF hell we still live in.
• Disrespectful Design: users aren’t stupid or lazy. I've seen a few people with this mindset in the tech industry, and it boggles my mind that these people are anywhere near product decisions.
• Goodhart’s Law, and Why Measurement is Hard: an excellent post summarising the difficulty of decision-making and using metrics while making fast progress in product decisions.
• Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy: the new privacy features in iOS 14 might create issues for the tracking industry, and that's a good thing.
• Design Thinking is a Rebrand for White Supremacy. The title of the essay feels clickbaity, but it's worth a read — it makes very good points on the 'default' user, the Eurocentrism of many “correct” design decisions, and most importantly, how design is often weaponised to justify projects and problems that aren't moral. (Or as Erika Hall says, “design is only as human-centred as the underlying business model”.)
• If management isn’t a promotion, then engineering isn’t a demotion. I really like the viewpoint this post is adopting, which is very sensible but seems ignored at so many companies: “management is not a promotion, it’s a change of career”, and that new career is an internal support position, not (just) a higher seniority level.
• The Hidden Costs of Constantly Shipping New Things, or what happens when you don't leave space for forward planning and managing tech debt.

That's all folks. A bit less than usual but maybe I'm just keeping some links for the upcoming winter!

Distantly yours,

Victor