Hi pals, happy July! I’ve had a blast this summer at EMF. Here’s some things I’ve read this month:

Wikipedia is the best website

• The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is a research facility in Alaska that analyses and “has the capacity to excite a limited area” of the ionosphere. This also made it the target of many conspiracy theorists, who claim this is a government facility capable of weather manipulation and mind control.
• New Zealand is so frequently missing from world maps that there’s an article about it.
• There are important things in New Zealand! For example, Thomas the bisexual goose lived there. He spent almost 30 years in a gay relationship with a black swan named Henry, and the last 6 years as part of a throuple with Henrietta, another black swan. They all raised cygnets together. He died in 2018, but has been remembered by the BBC as an "icon of the LGBT community".
  • Elsewhere in “long bird lives”: the Hollywood Freeway chickens are a feral colony of chickens who have lived under an on-ramp of the motorway for about 56 years.
• The Queen's Latin is a trope in media depicting historical drama or fiction with characters speaking with a Received Pronunciation accent — despite not being British. This trope is partially what built the association of RP with prestige, sophistication, and historical drama.

Hitting the gym

Mildly interesting

• Google Maps has started purposefully and quietly putting drivers onto different routes to balance congestion in cities.
• Mexico is the only country with a constitution that bans vapes. But Ricardo López Cordero says this is yet another case of “magical constitutionalism” there: officials have amended it 871 times this century, every time they want to claim a “historic reform”. But this never achieve anything if there are no real policies behind.
• A history of the vacuum-formed signs that defined the aesthetic of American cities in the 50s and 60s.
• A study finds that nearly everyone naturally veers left when walking — across all cultures, hemispheres, and regardless of their dominant hand. (It feels a bit bonkers that we’re only finding out about this kind of stuff now?)
• Abigail Disney, heiress to the Disney fortune, has more money than she’ll ever spend but tries extremely hard to be a normal person and give most of it away.

Everything isn’t so depressing

• Oliver Burkeman puts some perspective on our collective extreme anxiety over AI and climate change: the end isn't nigh. “We’re probably living through times that future historians will think of as broadly normal. Dangerous and consequential, yes, but still normal. […] it’s incredibly hard, and maybe impossible, to escape the distorted perspective that’s been labelled ‘temporal chauvinism’: the feeling that the time you’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever – simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience.”
• We’ll adapt to new normals, but they’ll be shittier. As heatwaves are becoming more normal, The Guardian explores what the UK could look like in 2052, and it’s not the sci-fi you wanna read.
• Inventor Adam Root is building a filter for washing machines that hopes to trap microplastics at the source.
• This month in AI: a good paper that explains quite clearly how “roles” work in LLMs, and how they can be exploited to do prompt injection.

Good to look at

• P. E. Moskowitz: maybe you are the asshole (and that's OK). A solidly built argument that much of the modern, online tendency to pathologise normal human emotions and relationships — and the metamorphosis of many therapy terms (ADHD, anxiety, depression, trauma) into an identity — is stripping individuals of their agency, and removing the things they can change.
• A great write-up of all the little details that go into a museum exhibition, many of which I just never noticed.
• Metazooa is a nerdy game that makes you find an animal (or plant) from its evolutionary lineage. (h/t Poppy and Bridie!)
• Uncovered.ink is like “TikTok for reading”: it’s a feed that lets you read the first few pages of a book blindly — without judging a book by its cover (or name, or author). If you’re not interested, you swipe to the next book; if you fall for that writing, you can reveal the full name of the book.
• Mind-blowing little game experiment: “Print gallery of an artist” is a recursive 2D game.

Work! Design! Tech!

• Cool assistive technology: a startup called MouthPad makes a touchpad worn on the roof of your mouth, that can be controlled with the tongue.
• A tool for getting better at work (or life in general): stop arguing with people. “That’s not cynicism, and it’s not giving up on people. It’s the opposite. […] Every hour spent trying to change someone who didn’t ask is an hour stolen from the one person (yourself) you can change.”
• Charcuterie is a cute visual explorer for Unicode glyphs and scripts.
• What is queer typography? (it’s giving art school pothead take, but I enjoyed the essay nonetheless)

Stay dangerous,

Victor