NESTED! Methods of divination, the beard tax, (), light and shadows, futures without cars

Hey everyone, this is NESTED, Victor's newsletter. Here's a (pretty long, this time) list of things that made me laugh and think this month.

Wikipedia is the best website

• Before the 15th century and the spread of base ten, the word “hundred” in Germanic languages (including English) referred to the number 120 and not 100; it is now referred to as the long hundred. (We also have the long thousand, which is 1200. "A hundred and eighty" meant 200. Get it? It's also referred to as ‘twelfty’.) Thank god for the metric hundred.
• A fairly complete list of methods of divination. Honestly would love to learn more about my future through plumbomancy (observing shapes molten lead makes when poured in water), Shufflemancy (skipping a certain number of songs on shuffle, and the lyrics and/or tune of the song is the answer to the divinatory question), styramancy (observing patterns produced by chewing gum) or tyromancy ("by cheese" (??))
• The Kardashian Index is a measure of the discrepancy between an academic's popularity on Twitter, and the citations they have for their peer-reviewed papers. Although it's somewhat jocular, it is meant to help understand if a scientific has over-blown fame or if they are undervalued.
• Peak German cuisine: the Toast Hawaii, a slice of toast covered with ham, pineapple, cheese and a maraschino cherry. (It is actually believed to be adapted from a recipe brought by American G.I.s, the ham replacing Spam which wasn't available in West Germany then.)
  • Unlike in South Korea, where Spam introduced during the war became a premium product, central to the most favourite stew of the country.
• The poor man's copyright is the practice of mailing yourself your own work using recorded delivery and then not opening it, in order to have an "officially" stamp proving that your work was yours at a certain time. (It is, surprisingly, not very valid as a form of copyright registration.)
• The cool "S" that probably adorned your school diary has its own article, and all of the questions it asks (what does it mean, why has it spread, where does it come from) are mostly answered by "we just don't know". (Here's a video researching the subject a bit more.)
• Chernoff faces are my new favourite way of visualising data.
• Tired of city life? Enter cottagecore (or “grandmacore”), a visual trend on Instagram and TikTok glorifying the rural living aesthetic.
  • Not to be confused with conservative tradwife/tradlife: “Tradlife wants people to return to the past, where Cottagecore wants people to evolve into a new future”. Indeed, it is in fact heavily adopted by queer and lesbian communities, who fantasise to reclaim a rurality that rejected us: “Unfortunately, my hometown, like many rural areas, is very anti-LGBTQ+. Even now when I go back I can't help but feel watched and judged all the time for how I look or dress. It especially makes me feel like the things I loved in childhood, like having farm animals and picking blackberries in the fields and getting lost in the woods, are cis- and hetero-coded. So for me, cottagecore is an ideal where I can be visibly queer in rural spaces.”
• A nice collection of goat towers, which are… as the name suggests.
• Between 40 and 125 ultra-evangelical churches in the US practice venomous snake handling as part of their services, to demonstrate their belief that faith will protect them. ("Those who die from snakebites are never criticized for lack of adequate faith; it is believed that it was simply the deceased's time to die. […] If you go to any serpent-handling church, you'll see people with atrophied hands, and missing fingers. All the serpent-handling families have suffered such things."). The Church of God with Signs Following is one of them, and also practice poison drinking and speaking in tongues.
  • That faith in protection to something dangerous feels somewhat like Covid parties, where people deliberately try to catch the coronavirus, and seem to truly believe they'll be lucky enough to not be affected much. The hope there is a bit deeper: acquiring immunity after catching it once, to allow them to quickly return to their communities and jobs and “be safe” from spreading it. There are debates over whether these parties actually happen, or if they're just a creation of the media based on unverified rumours, but it's absolutely not outside the realm of possibility. Flu and chickenpox parties have long happened before vaccines for those existed, and are still promoted by antivaxxers. In the US, where a third of the polled population would refuse to get a vaccine if it were available, the dream of herd immunity lives on.
    • (Obviously, there is still not enough data to suggest catching it once makes you immune; in fact anecdotal evidence and early studies so far say that repeat infection is possible.)
• England and Russia once used to have a tax on beards in order to align themselves with western standards.
  • Talking about hair, TIL that the common guard sizes for hair clippers are multiples of ⅛ of an inch, which is approximately the length at which hair grows within a week. So a #2 guard leaves you with the length of hair on your scalp that you would have 2 weeks after a clean shave; a #3 is 3 weeks, and so on.
• All great debates of history have their own dedicated articles, including the interpretations of homosexuality in the Batman franchise. (I thought it was hardly controversial, but maybe it's just me).

Flat boi

Interesting reads

• How the police took over EncroChat, specially hacked models of Android devices for criminals and drug dealers with specific encryption features and other physical changes (GPS and cameras removed).
• The last few years keep bringing an infinitely fast, recurrent pile of shit news and our ability to process information is reaching a critical limit.
  • After all, “flooding the zone with shit” is Steve Bannon's strategy on purpose.
• A great article on how racism exists on dating communities like Grindr. At the onset of the BLM movement, Grindr and Scruff suddenly committed to removing ethnicity filters, as they could be used to discriminate against (or fetishise) certain races. However, this also has a negative effect for some non-white people: those living in very white areas were able to use these filters to find people that look and could relate more to them, rather than being surrounded alone in oceans of whiteness. From that perspective, ignoring these uses really make the deletion of filters a performative reaction, and only tackling a surface racism without resolving the much bigger issues of racism remaining on the platforms.
• Excellent read about understanding things; key takeaways, “looking stupid takes courage”, and nothing beats direct experience.
• Loved this op-ed: Let us out of this clause, a love letter to parenthetical asides, aka the Fleabag-looking-at-the camera of writing.
  • I've just finished reading The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell, a short “novel” that's composed entirely of questions. It's not actually a novel in that it doesn't have any plot, but it's still a fun (and somewhat insightful) read that reminded me of that article: good writing can have a playful conversation with the reader, without being gimmicky.
• Beautiful essay: How essential is my facial feminization surgery?, asks a trans woman in the middle of the pandemic.
• Again with the pandemic, we've started to see futures without cars out of necessity to provide more space to pedestrians and cyclists, which we've always been told is impossible. Now, we need to make this a permanent reality.
  • If you're wondering “how”: I've recently been exploring the excellent blogs and videos of BicycleDutch and A view from the cycle path to understand how high shares of cycling in the Netherlands did not happen by accident at all.

Everything is depressing

• Spending our time shaming people for going to parks and beaches is counter-productive, says Zeynep Tüfekçi: the evidence tells us that hanging out outdoors is significantly safer than indoors, and “when authorities close parks and beaches without strong scientific evidence, socializing may well move out of sight to more dangerous settings indoors.” (After all, that's the same harm reduction principles that are effective with drugs usage and safe sex.) This is doubled down, she says, by the media who insists on always illustrating stories about Covid infections with photos of busy beaches, even when the infections points are busy bars, restaurants and workplaces.
• More evidence that coronavirus is not just a respiratory infection. Researchers in China and France report that a large share of patients admitted to hospitals experienced nervous system symptoms like seizure, impaired consciousness, neurological problems, and acting confused and disoriented even as they were discharged.
• The Trump administration is cutting funding on critical internet privacy tools like Tor or Signal.
• Why "civic" tech tools don't work for reforming democracy, from someone who's been in it 15 years.
• You might have heard of "The Letter" in Harper's Magazine, a very vague open letter to condemn Cancel Culture™ and commit to free speech, co-signing by a big groups of writers (including notably JK Rowling). Which, really, translates to “how dare we get criticism or repercussion for writing right-wing transphobic or racist trash?”. Here's two excellent analyses of this: Social media and the end of discourse, and the rebuttal A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate.
• As nearly 70,000 tech startup employees lost their jobs since the start of the pandemic, some countries are running their largest experiments yet on Universal Basic Income.
• Money buys even more happiness than it used to a few decades ago, due to the ever-increasing income inequality. (It's maybe fairer to say that having less money now buys less “happiness” than it used to: without higher education, it is nigh impossible to buy a house or support a family.)
• A look into the politics of Facebook's fact-checking system, and how a scientifically inaccurate of climate change denial from the Daily Wire got its “partly false” label quietly removed last month.

Good to look at

• Amazing interactive article to play with the physics of lights and shadows.
• A look into the incredible PlayStation factory, going almost human-free.

• Via La vie matérielle, I loved this anecdote on place names from researcher Béatrice Collignon, who worked on the Inuinnait toponyms. Translated:

  “Kaksakar designates a small island on the North-West coast of Kangiryuaq. I remembered this name very well, because it is funny. Kaksakar is indeed an Inuinnait corruption of the English swearword “cock sucker”. It is the nickname bestowed upon a white trapper whose main camp was installed on that island in the 1930-40s, because he swore a lot when inspecting his traps. His favourite swearword became his moniker. Following a fairly common practice by the Inuinnait, at least during the 20th century, since the isle did not have a name it took the one of its primary inhabitant. He was not forgotten, and during our reunion his memory was still brought up with a lot of joy.”

  • However, you will still not find this name on most maps of the area. The author notes that although this island's name was reported as early as 1992, it was not included on purpose, because the federal politics in terms of toponymy is to erase obscene or insulting place names. Official recognition of Native toponyms “is carried by a political will to make other discourses about territories more visible and heard, but it is framed under rules and norms that exist outside those discourses. This attitude is paradoxical in that, in the name of some ‘Other’ that must not be offended, we impose to these Others a reading of their toponymies that aren't theirs, and this reading is what takes over when it comes to deciding which recognition will be acceptable. […] We are hitting the limits of a ‘politically correct’ posture; whatever we say of it, these Others remain subservient to the moral values of the dominant society (here, Euro-Canadian).”

  • Naming places after people is sometimes an infuriating idea: in Australia, the Lake Mountain has no lake at all, but was named after George Lake who was the Surveyor-General of the area. In San Francisco, Main Street is named after… Charles Main.
• Via cailloux*: since January, knitter Josie George adds a row to her scarf every day, picking the colour and material on the external temperature and conditions to make a unique garment reflecting local climate for that year.

In my ears

• Kamaal Williams & Lauren Faith - Hold On (jazz / UK / 2020)
• Finnmark! - Through A Glass Darkly (indie pop / UK / 2013)
• Extra Golden - It's Not Easy (funk rock / kenya / 2006)
• SOPHIE - Livestream H3aven Suspended (future pop / UK / 2020)
• Arca - Mequetrefe (avant-pop / venezuela / 2020)
• The Quiets - Valoa Ikkunassa (jazz x surf rock / finland / 1990)
• Dorian Electra - Sorry Bro (I Love You) (future pop / US / 2020)

Work! Design! Tech!

• A list of nice CLI tools (big fan of exa, bat, z and fzf)
  • Also maxgoedjen/secretive is an interesting tool to store SSH keys into your Mac's Secure Enclave.
• Pretty useful summary of how to write great microcopy.
• If you actively and clearly ask people whether they consent to be tracked, rather than through opt-in-by-default, you may find that only 9% of people will agree to it. (This number is likely biased because it was ran on a tech blog with likely more privacy-minded individuals, but honestly it's more than the 0.1% found by an earlier study analysing dark patterns on consent popups.)
• The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal. Why? It forces you to take time to reflect on things, learn, and lets you look at the past in a less biased way than through recalling.
  • (But really, there's no need to be senior to starting doing that) (I say, as I keep no journal at all)
• Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel, a clickbaity title that invites us to dream of code editors that use colour highlighting for so much more than just syntax.
• Job interviews (alone) don't work to get the best people, both in thought diversity and competency.
  • Very related, a study from NCSU and Microsoft recently found that tech job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills. (cue “uh did you need to fund a study to know this, cause we could've just told you”)
• A mint collection of pixel-perfect remakes of old school PC fonts.

That's all for this month. I'm about to take a week off work, go see some nature, and disconnect a bit. If you like this newsletter, please forward it to someone who might like it, or reply — I love to hear back from you.

With affection not infection,

Victor