NESTED! Human mail, being alone, the vocabulary of smell, violence in blue

Summer is repairing me, which is needed with everything that's going on. Here's what I've wanted to share this month:

Wikipedia is the best website

• Umarell is a term popular in Bologna referring to the retired men “who pass the time watching construction sites, especially roadworks — stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back and offering unwanted advice.”
• First list of the month: classical music concerts with an unruly audience response.
  • See also: claqueurs, people hired to clap (or laugh) during a theatre or opera performance to encourage a reaction from the rest of the audience.
• Human mail is the transportation of humans through the postal system. There have been a few real, successful cases of people self-mailing themselves, for an array of reasons (a slave escaping to a free state, saving on air fares, suffragettes mailing themselves to the Prime Minister, escaping prison, or making a prank.)
• A list of close election results around the world. It's surprisingly long and full of details — and yes, some ties are settled with a coin toss.
  • I found this after watching the new season of The Politician. The show writers must have read that Wikipedia article too, because one of the scenes they've added turned out not to be a joke: in 1891, a tied election for a county treasurer in Indiana was actually settled with a 200-yard footrace. When rewatching, I noticed they even hinted to a Looney Tunes-esque detail of the real event: the fastest candidate “tripped and fell within three yards from the goal. [The other candidate] fell over him, but crawling over the line, won the race amid the howls and cheers of the crowd”.
• In 2011, nature photographer David Slater spent weeks befriending macaques and setting up equipment so that they would play with the camera, which resulted in a few “macaque selfies”. The selfies were then redistributed by some websites (including Wikipedia) under the claim it's under public domain — since the “creators” of the photo are, after all, monkeys, who can't own copyright.
  This spiralled into the monkey selfie copyright dispute, over legal rights of animals, copyright, PETA's self-interest, and the role of Slater in the making of the pictures. Because of the missed income, Slater claims he's since stopped photography and become bankrupt over the legal costs of the affair.
• This list of map projections is a great reminder that Greenland isn't that big and that colonialism is making us think the Global North to be bigger.
  • Also a good time to take out The True Size Of… again.
• The Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas regroups men who look like Santa Claus, and make a vow to promote a positive image of Santa.
  • Alas, some financial disputes led members to “engage in Un-Santa like dialogue". These disagreements led to the splintering of the organisation into other groups, like the Amalgamated Order of Real-Bearded Santas, Red Suit Society, and the International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas.

Stay cool this summer

Mundanely interesting

• It seems like the story is actually fake, but it's still a good story: how a mysterious ghost ship brought cosmic disco to Cape Verde. (The compilation album can be listened to here and it's great; alas the story has been debunked because the chronology of synthesisers does not match the years in the press release, which has been taken a bit too literally by the Guardian writer. They're not new songs though!)
• An essay on being alone by Ankit Shah. We all feel lonely at times, and the solution is mostly to learn how to be more comfortable with yourself. (And reducing idle screen time.)
• Jahai and Aslian, aboriginal languages spoken in Malaysia and the Philippines by about 1,300 people in total, are peculiar for having an extremely rich vocabulary for odours. Most humans compare smells to something smelling similar, but these groups have developed words to describe a particular odour; the study also shows speakers of these languages excel in naming and recognising smells, a traditionally difficult task.
  • The same happens with colours. Languages don't all have the same categories for colours, and there is a debate over whether this defines how we can think and describe things. For example, Russian doesn't have a direct equivalent of the word "blue", but two distinct words for light and dark blues; which impacts how they discriminate these colours. Ancient Greek likely did not have words for orange and blue, and the sea was called purple. English itself didn't have the “pink” category until the 17th century, where it was just a light red before.
• A great longread on why books (or articles, or lectures) don't work that well to memorise information.
  • And why, maybe, video games are the future of education.
• A review of peer review by an experienced academic: “Those who think that peer review is inherently fair and accurate are wrong. Those who think that peer review necessarily suppresses their brilliant new ideas are wrong.”
• A/B Street is a traffic simulation game that lets you A/B test changes of design in a street, and see how it would affect the movement in the city. It's not a perfect simulator, but it's rather designed to encourage people to crowd-contribute to city planning actively and submit their own proposals, rather than passively react to options laid out to them.
• The artist Gianluca Gimini asked people to draw bicycles from memory, then made models from the drawings. In most cases, like below: “this bicycle is missing a very important part of its frame and it would immediately break if it actually existed and someone tried to ride it”; a similar test is used in psychology to show us how our brain tricks us into thinking we know how something is done, but we don't really.
  • Bonus link for amateur cycle fixers: a glossary of terms for bicycle geometry.

Everything is depressing

• It doesn’t look like the George Floyd protests are causing a COVID-19 spike, surprisingly. It might still be early to say this with certainty, but the reason might be because protesters wore masks — and because most of them were young.
• Incredibly radical from the Guardian, but correct: if violence isn't the way to end racism in America, then what is?
• How do you sign Black Lives Matter in ASL? It's more complicated than it seems.
• Violence in Blue explains just how difficult it is to even measure the scale of police brutality.
• Good reading list of 10 books about race, to read instead of asking a person of colour to explain things to you. (Bonus: a collection of various race-related texts as PDF here.)
• A somewhat comprehensive listing of Trump's atrocities so far.
• Two years after Uber bought JUMP, they destroyed thousands of the bikes (and the company) in the process. Yet another example of Capitalism's Efficiency™ — excellent article though, talking about the rise (and similar death) of Ofo and Mobike.

In my ears

• CHAVALES - Las Plantas De La Terraza (indie pop / spain / 2020)
• Jorja Smith - Rose Rouge (jazz cover / US / 2020)
• 340ml - Fairy Tales (dub / mozambique / 2008)
• Seth Bogart - Boys Who Don't Wanna Be Boys (gaypunk / US / 2020)
• Protomartyr - Processed By The Boys (post-punk / US / 2020)
• Paradis - Paradis (Alain Chamfort cover) (house / france / 2015)
• The Streets - Where The Fuck Did April Go (hip-hop / UK / 2020)
• Lenparrot & Sarah Maison - Paladines (indie pop / france / 2020)
• Dur-Dur Band - Hayeelin (funk / somalia / 1987)

Work! Design! Tech!

• Why Figma wins: it's not just the tool, it's the platform for interacting with those who aren't designers.
• Deep JavaScript is a great reference book on the in-depths of JS.
• The CNIL, the French equivalent of the ICO, has published a GDPR guide for developers that seems quite comprehensive and readable!
• Hiring and the market for lemons is a great essay by Dan Luu about hiring for developers in tech
• If you have to do keynote slides — or are faced with people who do bad ones — these presentation rules are an excellent, quick summary of how to make them better. Less fluff, more digestible information.
  • If you've got to do a talk and you're nervous about it, speaking.io is an invaluable resource. Main takeaway: practice! Multiple times!
• Most tech content is bullshit: to developers, a gentle reminder to take everything with a pinch of salt, and question why you do things this way.
• I've talked before about the principles of good service design from Lou Downe (my design icon). They've now been expanded into a book, and the website comes with a useful services scale that lets you evaluate how good your service is.
• And a last minute addition: graphic designer Milton Glaser passed away today, so here's a good time to re-read ten things that he's learned [pdf].

Stop touching your face, Black Lives Matter, ACAB,

Victor