May 29, 2021

NESTED! Library cats, discorectangle, the origin of butts, radiator drawers

Hi beautiful people, it's Victor! I hope you're doing great.

Some personal news: I'm moving to Bristol next month! It's an exciting (but slightly scary) change, and I'm looking forward to having a new city to explore. Also it's hard to realise it's already been six years in London; I'll sorely miss the people I've met here. Say hi if you want to grab a pint outside before I go!

Here's some things I wanted to share — it's a bit shorter than usual, but that's less effort for you:

Wikipedia is the best website

• Anthropodermic bibliopegy (bless you) is the practice of binding books with human skin. It is estimated about 18 such books still exist in the world.
• In the US military, SWAG stands for Scientific Wild-Ass Guess, an estimation sitting one level below back-of-the-envelope (BOTE) and one level above a guesstimate.
• Truth or Consequences is the name of a small town in New Mexico. It was renamed after the eponymous 1950s radio show, who announced they would air the programme from the first town who would do so.
  • It is not near the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Lake.
• The random ballot voting system, mainly a thought experiment, decides the result of an election by picking the ballot of a single voter at random. Unlike choosing a candidate at random (where each option would have an even chance of winning), this method means candidates can win with a probability exactly equal to the fraction of the electorate who voted for them.
• Wiktionary has a category for some delightful Antarctic English slang like gomble, hoosh, or greenout.
• Library cats have their own article 🐱
• The pill shape used for buttons in UI design is called a stadium in geometry, but is also known as “discorectangle”, “obround” or “sausage body”.
• Bananadine is a fictional psychoactive substance extracted from bananas: it was a hoax made up by hippies in the late 60s to confuse media and the FDA about new drugs.
• In 1967, residents of Basel voted in a public referendum to decide whether the city should buy two Picasso paintings for its Kunstmuseum. (They did!)

Woop doop

Mildly interesting

• In Sweden, Gothenburg is planning to be the world's best rainy city. Instead of looking at rain as an annoyance, it asks: what if we can turn it into an asset?
• Some Victorian radiators had a built-in drawer to keep your food warm and honestly I feel cheated that we no longer have this.
• Try this one weird trick Russian hackers hate: to avoid accidentally infecting allies, it seems their exploits simply check if your computer has a Russian keyboard layout set up, and abort installation if you do. Who needs an antivirus?
• A great portrait of the women's group that fought against life-changing algorithms in the UK.
• Ever wondered where do butts come from? It's a good question: they're an evolutionary marvel.
• European cuisine has a reputation for lacking spices, but it wasn't always true historically. Rather, snobbery and higher classes took the spices out.

Everything is depressing

• Excellent read: the experts can stay wrong longer than you can stay alive. Not closing borders earlier on was a choice based on no evidence, but the experts believed their own in-group.
• The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth. (amen!)
• A mental health care specialist in Finland had its database hacked, and hackers asked patients to pay up, or they'd leak the deepest secrets they gave to their therapist. Ransomware is getting bleaker and bleaker.
• Cryptocurrencies, ranked by energy efficiency.

Good to look at

• Than Average asks you if you think you're above or below average about certain things — and then shows you what others also voted. Good to learn that for many things, the average is probably not what you think it is.
• Trassel is the very simple but fun intersection of drawing and scrolling.
• The New Aesthetic, reposted with 10 years of hindsight.
• In films, what colour is the future?
• Fabian Oefner's “Heisenberg Objekt” series are scupltures of exploded and reconstructed objects, that initially look like 3D renders until you realise they're actually sliced.
• A new post in that series of interactive explainers I've shared before, explaining internal combustion engines.
• How Many Plants is a great centralised resource for knowing and keeping care of your plants!

In my ears

• Astra King - Silver (pop cover / US / 2021)
• Ecco2k - AAA Powerline (cloud rap / sweden / 2019)
• umru & Banoffee - Heat Death (hyperpop / UK / 2018)
• The Who - Eminence Front (pop rock / UK / 1982)
• GusGus & Bjarki - Chernobyl (electronic / iceland / 2021)

Work! Design! Tech!

• Efficiency is the Enemy: you need to leave some slack for interesting things and real work to happen.
• Graphic designers have always loved minimalism, but at what cost?
• Deque has published a great guide for auditing design systems for accessibility.
• How to give a great product design portfolio presentation.
• A calculator for fluid typography.
• A great reminder of how tiny features can be big wins.
• How to manage a budget for creative departments.

And that's it for this month.

Iceland should have won Eurovision,

Victor