NESTED! Illegal numbers, plants in space, the Zone of Death, lost property, how to smell

Hello, it's Victor. (Hey, I should probably have called this a Newslettor).

Here's things I've read and wanted to share with you this month. Hope you're all dealing with the cold!

Wikipedia is the best website

• Illegal numbers are numbers which you cannot legally possess or propagate. Nothing to do with bizarre mathematical properties: since any copyrighted digital file or DRM decryption key can be, technically, represented as a very large number, this means by extension that this number may be copyrighted and protected. This has obviously created controversy (you can't just ban numbers!), and digital rights protesters started circumventing it by generating flags corresponding to the decryption keys. Because a colour can be represented as a triple of red-green-blue values, then you can make a flag with stripes of colours representing a large number, and by extension that flag should also be banned.
• Piggly Wiggly was the first self-service supermarket to open, in 1916. Prior to that, grocery stores functioned Argos-style where you had to give your shopping list to the clerk who would fetch your order. This dramatically reduced costs — and “losses due to easier shoplifting were more than offset by profits from increased impulse purchasing.”
• Located in in the Shetland Islands, the Unst Bus Shelter is a bus stop which became furnished (sofa and TV included!) for schoolchildren to wait for the bus. It is periodically redecorated by local residents to fit a new theme.
• The Euthanasia Coaster is an hypothetical rollercoaster designed to kill its riders, “with elegance and euphoria”. Its 7 inversions after the drop would inflict 10 g of force, causing riders to progressively pass out.
• There is a Museum of Bad Art (MoBA) in Boston, which only accepts the worst of all art.
• In science, the half-life of knowledge is the “amount of time that has to elapse before half of the knowledge or facts in a particular area is superseded, or shown to be untrue”. It highlights the constantly evolving nature of science and facts as we make more progress, and how professional development is required in many fields to keep this knowledge accurate.
• The clear craze was/is a fad that tried to make everything transparent, from water-like Pepsi, to a plexiglas car, to tomato soup, to the GameBoy and plastic iMacs.
• The Zone of Death is an area of the Yellowstone National Park where you could, theoretically (though it has never been tested), get away with murder. A loophole in the US constitution means it would not be possible to legally hold a fair trial there.
• A list of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents. Most fatalities occurred on Earth than in space, and some were really bad luck (struck by lightning, “struck by camera”, spacesuit puncture).
  • A comprehensive article about the attempts to grow plants in space (no succulents on the ISS windowsills yet)
  • Great related longread: All dressed up for Mars and nowhere to go is a portrait of the Mars One project and its feasibility
• Gross time: the Holy Prepuce is, yes, “a product of the circumcision of Jesus”. At a certain moment in time, up to 18 different churches claimed to hold the real one.
  • If this body mutilation revolts you, you may add an item to this list of lawsuits against God.
• A list of unexplained sounds, primarily from the depths of our oceans.
• The Rhinoceros Party of Canada is a satirical party with pretty outstanding policies.
  • They came to my attention after the elections that just happened there. The founder of a right-wing populist party, Maxime Bernier, was beat in his own seat of the Beauce district by another Conservative candidate. Although the winning margin was quite wide, he may have lost up to 2% of votes because of the Rhinoceros Party's candidate, which was… also called Maxime Bernier. (Who isn't even from Beauce: the RP just found a guy with the same name and got him to run there just to fuck with people).
    • It's not even the first time they've pulled this. In 1988 they ran a candidate called John Turner, apparently a skateboarding punk rocker, against the Liberal leader John Turner.

HONK

Mundanely interesting

• Auto-brewery syndrome is a rare condition which causes the body to produce its own alcohol due to fermenting bacteria in the guts. People suffering from it show symptoms of alcohol intoxication after consuming sugar or high carbs, and can function with high alcohol levels — when the average person would be comatose or dying — sometimes without even being aware that they have the condition.
• A playbook about plurality, the “state of having more than one person/consciousness sharing a body”. It explains how people having dissociative identity disorders work, and how to best work with them.
  • Plurality may be the result of trauma or mental disorders as defined in the DSM-V, but in recent years the tulpamancy community has attempted to “induce plurality by creating a ‘sentient imaginary friend’”, through meditation and lucid dreaming. “Many tulpamancers have no trauma history and instead become plural as adults.”
• Should hospitals make their own medicine? Against huge cost increases of some specific medicines that social security have stopped reimbursing, rebel pharmacists are preparing their own 'generic' versions, under the eye of Big Pharma.
• Grindr is trash, episode 374: a chemsex advisor registered on the app to help people with their addiction, got contacted by tons of people who sent cries for helps, and they kept banning him without offering a real, working solution. Chemsex (sessions of group sex on hard drugs) is a growing problem with the community and has a growing number of deaths to attribute to it, on top of the social cost.
• The superfood of the future may or may not be cockroach milk.
• US Military will stop using floppy disks to operate its nuclear weapons system. (This is really two stories in one single headline.)

Good to look at

• Cymatics is the process of making sounds visible by looking at the shapes created when vibrating air reacts with fluids and particles on flat surfaces. It's all very pretty and geometric — but researchers are also investigating its use for understanding more properties of suboceanic or seismic waves.
• Why we should probably pay more for “ethnic” food, often costing (or expected to cost) much less than European restaurants for equal skills and work.
  • Enjoyed via this in-depth, intelligent longread about the complicated topic of chefs appropriating different cuisines.
• Children are better at recognising Pokémon than wildlife, and this is making scientists sad, so David Ng created a card game to learn about the natural world, with rules and competitive play.
• A guide on how to smell. “Scent is so neglected in human experience. […] If I ask someone about their day, people will tell me what they saw, and maybe what they heard, but almost nobody tells me what they smelled.”
• Aerial photographer Tom Hegen traveled to the Netherlands to capture the light pollution of LED greenhouses.

Happy Halloween!

In my ears

• Jan Hammer Group - Don't You Know (electronic + jazz / US / 1977)
• Cub Sport / Billie Eilish - When The Party's Over (chamber pop / australia / 2019)
• Emmsjé Gauti - Reykjavík (hip-hop / iceland / 2016)
• The National Jazz Trio of Scotland - Quick to Judge (Don't Be So) (synth-pop folk / scotland + germany / 2018)
  • (“It's kind of a double bluff calling it the National Jazz Trio Of Scotland," says Bill Wells of his group that is famously neither a jazz band or a trio.)
• Les Gordon ft. Lenparrot - These Dreams (electronic / france / 2018)
• Danny L Harle & Paweł Siwczak - Heaven (harpsichordcore / england / 2017)
• Caribou - Home (house / canada / 2019)

Work! Design! Tech!

• A good Twitter thread about great workplaces, including turpentine, writing, principles and an API metaphor.
  • Another valuable thread on public speaking at events.
• Someone who works on text rendering tells you everything about why text rendering is a nightmare. (It's very approachable, concise and understandable though, worth reading.)
• A great writeup on accessible practices when using motion in designs.
• Big fan of the US Digital Service's Plain Language guidelines for administrations. (via this great introductory talk to plain language writing.)
• India's huge new biometric welfare system can be lethal, with claimants refused food when there are IT glitches.
• uxframeworks.design is another cheatsheet full of frameworks and processes to try out.
• Navigation apps are great at finding the shortest ways, but increasingly users are interested in other options like the safest route back home. As the article points out, it's a difficult challenge to do this without using crowdfunded data that quickly shows its racism and classism.

Peace!