February 17, 2023

NESTED! Oil fiction, uWu-ification, fanfic tags, insulate your body

Hey friends! I hope 2023 has treated you well so far. Here’s some things I’ve been reading lately:

Wikipedia is the best website

• The Fly Geyser is a particularly colourful man-made geyser, thanks to many species of algae that flourish in the extreme temperature around the rocks. It’s located in Nevada, on a ranch that has been bought by the Burning Man festival.
• Aluminium Christmas trees were all the rage in the 1960s.
• Learned from the history of AC power plugs and sockets that when electricity first arrived in homes, since it was mostly used for lighting, other appliances (vacuum cleaners, fans, irons) were plugged directly to light bulb sockets before the invention and standardisation of wall plugs.
• The Ranieri Filo della Torre literary prize is awarded for the best writing about extra virgin olive oil (from scientific theses to poetry and fiction).
• I’ve talked a few months ago about how the printing press caused the disappearance of the letter þ in English. TIL that this also happened to Welsh: “English printers, with type letter frequencies set for English and Latin, did not have enough k letters in their type cases to spell every /k/ sound as k, so the order went ‘C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth’”.
• There are a few twin films in existence: movies with a very similar plot or theme, released around the same time, but produced by completely different casts and studios.
• It is apparently common in the US to drop things for the new year, so here’s a list of objects dropped on New Year’s Eve.
• The concept of bootable business cards took me way back to a specific era of CDs. (Why the hell did we make them bootable?)

Chomp

Mildly interesting

• The average body temperature of humans has been on a steady decline since the Industrial Revolution, from 37º to 36.5º, and nobody really knows why yet. Evolution, baby!
• Our first close-up image of Mars, in 1965, was a paint-by-numbers pastel drawing because we didn’t have the computing technology to process the images and colours.
• …and since one of the global priorities of the coming decade is checks notes lunar exploration again, scientists are trying to agree on how to define the time it is on the Moon.
• A great review and arguments over why we’re obsessed with bike helmets when they don’t really protect us that much.
  • I think it missed one element of why the Dutch or Danish overwhelmingly don’t wear helmets: it’s not just that they have a quality network of segregated bike infrastructure that improves their safety (real and perceived) against crashes with cars. It’s also that almost everyone ride utility bicycles, or “omafiets”. Their geometry makes your chest stand upright rather than leaning forward: by design, this makes you slower, and more stable at slower speeds (which is great for riding in cities, where you regularly need to adjust your speed at intersections!). In comparison, countries like the UK or the US continue to exclusively see cycling as a sport or leisure activity rather than a serious way of commuting, and so most of the bicycles available for sale are road, hybrid and mountain bikes, which are better at holding speed. Arguably, combined with the lack of infrastructure that pushes you to ride faster to earn your space amongst cars, this can increase the severity of accidents.
• Bioweapons could get very specific: if a lab got hold of a person’s DNA, like a Head of State, they could theoretically develop a virus that only targeted that specific person.
• What airports do to catch illicit radioactive cargo (which arrive more regularly than you think, apparently and worryingly).

Everything is depressing

• How the US army is using E-girl influencers to recruit Gen Z. (I, for one, am very excited that the rest of Gen Z is taking over journalism, because I need more analyses of propaganda to contain sentences like “She poses to camera, ahegao-style, with freshly manicured nails wrapped neatly around a glock, the uWu-ification of military functioning as a cutesy distraction from the shadowy colonial context”.)
• Yet more evidence the Effective Altruism/longtermism movement is just a bunch of guys who believe in eugenics! Who’d have thought.
• OpenAI outsourced Kenyan workers on less than $2/hour to read some of the most horrid and disturbing stuff humanity has ever written on the Internet and label it. It has a real human cost to hide and avoid the plagued Tay fate in ChatGPT-like systems.
• Security researchers have come up with a technique to make a 3D map of humans in their home by analysing the Wi-Fi radio signals from their routers. I hate it here.

Good to look at

• It’s an absolute joy to read the 2022 winners of the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, which invites people to come up with the worst possible opening sentences to really bad novels.
• Terrific piece on the roughness of nature: ‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed’.
• The always-excellent Low←Tech Magazine proposed that before insulating your house, you should insulate your body first: “modern thermal underclothing offers the possibility to turn the thermostat much lower without sacrificing comfort or sex appeal. The potential energy savings are huge; the costs are almost nil.”
• An enjoyable delve into the radical and impeccable design of PizzaExpress, and how it’s changed many chains in the UK.
• Some really interesting ideas on the behaviours behind how we spend money. (The beginning is a bit cheesy, and it’s all from the point of view of someone with clearly lots of money, but I found myself agreeing with and learning from most of the points below.) (See also: On becoming rich-ish.)
• There’s a Twitter bot that posts random tags of fanfictions on Archive Of Our Own, and it’s delightful.

In my ears

• Calamine - Mona Lise (extremely lesbian hip-hop / québec / 2021)
• Björk ft. Shygirl - ovule (Sega Bodega remix) (bassdrum / iceland + uk / 2023)
• Lichen Slow - Hobbies (indie rock / scotland / 2023)
• Masayoshi Takanaka - Breezin’ (funk / japan / 1994)
• Hector Gachan - Better (indie rock / france / 2022)
• The Blaze - Dreamer (electro house / france / 2023)
• Southstar - Miss You (dance / germany / 2022)
• Cloth - Pigeon (indie rock / scotland / 2023)

Work! Design! Tech!

• Excellent round-up of how to write for the way your coworkers actually read.
• An excellent reference of visual design rules you can follow pretty much every time.
  • And as it mentions colours: I’m loving Poline, which “draws lines between anchors over polar coordinates to generate pleasing colour palettes”.
• The excellent UX of Banking project has re-done a benchmark of 12 banks after 900 days to assess progress. It hasn’t changed much (but it probably says much about our weird relationship to finance that I’m not willing to change my “legacy” bank to another on the grounds of better UX, even though I’d readily do that for many tools)
• Shopify is trying, but you can’t just cancel 76,500 hours of meetings without significantly improving async processes.

Stay in your lane,

Victor