July 27, 2023

NESTED! Phantom time, terminal lucidity, Barbenheimer, performative positivity

Hi friends! It’s Victor! Hope you’re thriving and have a lovely and dry (ish) summer. I’ve kept busy this month but still managed to read a few interesting things! Enjoy!

Wikipedia is the best website

• In 1991, a revisionist historian shared his phantom time conspiracy theory, which suggested that Otto III and Pope Sylvester II retroactively fabricated the Anno Domini dating system in order to place themselves in the year 1000 AD. History was fully rewritten, documents were forged, evidence was destroyed, in order to simply create three centuries of Early Middle Ages out of thin air (including Charlemagne).

• Ukraine had known an Alphabet War in the 19th century, when some ethnic groups tried to switch Ukrainian to use the Latin alphabet.

• Gay male speech is a real thing dahling.

• The Swedish Solar System is the largest representation of the solar system to scale, spanning across the entirety of Sweden.

• When ants lose the pheromone track of their colony, they begin following the ant in front of them: this works until there’s a slight deviation, which will eventually result in a centrifugal circle called an ant mill. It can reach hundreds of metres in diameter and ants will not stop until they die of exhaustion.

• In Britain, the “TV pickup” is a surge in demand on the electrical grid that happens when many people boil their kettle at the same time, to make a cup of tea during commercial breaks in popular television programmes. Having such a surge directly tied to TV schedules is a phenomenon that is unique to the United Kingdom: the National Grid has a team which studies previous patterns and schedules in advance to anticipate demand.

• Terminal lucidity is a well-documented return to mental clarity very shortly before death in patients that have severe psychiatric disorders.

• You’ve probably seen the Hitler teapot online, but it was a real product. That’s what happens when nobody in the marketing team says “uuuhhhm…”

(((quiet honk)))

Mildly interesting

• People in the Balkans have built up an alternative postal system of volunteer couriers to get things moving.

• Medieval peasants had way more time off than you do now. (Probably seasonally.)

• A great piece on affordances in the Internet and on Mastodon.

• Hundreds of thousands of sensitive emails from the US military are regularly sent by accident to Mali because of a typo — the top-level domain .mil is often typed .ml . The US is considering this to be a slight problem, because the administration of the .ml domain is about to shift to Malian officials who are allied with Russia.

Everything is depressing

• Not an article I wanted to highly recommend, but unfortunately The Perils and Promises of Penis-Enlargement Surgery is a good (and chilling) read.

• Actors from Orange Is the New Black say they were never fairly compensated for their roles, and say it’s symptomatic of the streaming economy.

• How digital nomads reshape cities around the world with their money.

Good to look at

• People cleverer than me have good nuanced critiques on the Barbie movie — and I also really liked the analyses of Today in Tabs and Culture Study.

  - It was not that subversive, unsurprisingly, but at least more original than the yearly release of a sequel of existing IP, and that originality proved very successful for both Barbie and Oppenheimer. As Today in Tabs put it, “I can’t wait to see if our Davids Zaslav and Bobs Iger embrace this new paradigm of making original movies instead of hiring Harrison Ford to put on a fedora and risk breaking his hip.”

• Workout.lol is a small web app that generates workout routines based on the equipment you have (if any), and small videos describing what to do. 💪

• Maybe the next big social media app is… nothing? (Praying for you all to log off.)

• A fun, super interesting, brief history of computers!

• Some good AI: lalal.ai is a pretty effective splitter of different instrumental parts and vocals from a music track. This will probably make remixes and mashups a lot more interestings when stems aren’t available.

Work! Design! Tech!

• Why designers should stop performative positivity and try to bring more change in the world.

• A great reference for all the user-facing states in UI design.

• I guess mathematicians have been hiding this from visual designers: there are formulas for computing optical adjustments.

• It’s a tired work motto, but it’s true: done is better than perfect, and you can get it done by asking for help.

See you online,

Victor