Oct. 25, 2023, 7:28 p.m.
NESTED! Portable soup, Roman dentistry, Antarctic banking, second brains
Nested!
Hi friends, it’s Victor! Here are some things I wanted to share this month:
Wikipedia is the best website
- On the brink of the Second World War, the British government urged people in cities to humanely kill their pets amid a fear of food rationing and shortages. This led to the British pet massacre, where an estimated 750,000 cats and dogs were euthanised. This was, in retrospect, unnecessary; many owners regretted it and blamed the government for starting the hysteria.
- Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Dalston Lane
- “The idea that I dig tunnels under people’s houses is rubbish. I just have a big basement.” Power move.
- The Lloyds Bank coprolite is the largest fossilised human poop ever found, on the site of what is now a Lloyds branch in York. When appraising the relic for insurance purposes, a paleoscatologist (real job) called it "the most exciting piece of excrement I've ever seen… In its own way, it's as irreplaceable as the Crown Jewels".
- More fluids: if you ever wanted to learn about dentistry in ancient Rome, there is an article about it. Cosmetic dentistry existed, but people “whitened their teeth using toothpaste made from human urine and goat milk.”
- List of lists: a list of software bugs with significant consequences, a list of non-standard dates, and a list of gestures.
- Portable soup (”also known as pocket soup”) are blocks of dehydrated broth, precursors of modern bouillon. It was a staple for seamen and the military.
- The General Motors streetcar conspiracy alleges that GM took over the public transport infrastructure in several US cities, to dismantle streetcar systems as part of a strategy to push the US into car dependency. (How we got to that is a little more complicated than that, of course, but there is agreement that this was a partial — if minor — cause for the decline of streetcars.)
Hup
Mildly interesting
- Why are standing ovations suddenly necessary?
- New absolute classic Ask A Manager question: “My new manager is someone I slept with years ago… and he doesn't know we have a child.”
- Some photos of the mundane and less-mundane signage on the South Pole. (Did you know there’s ATMs on McMurdo? And of course a wastewater plant?)
- There’s a website that has tools and cooking directions for blind and vision impaired people, like how to cook ground meat correctly by just relying on sounds and smells.
- For more involved cooking, Recursive Recipes explains how to make ingredients that go into a recipe, to truly make everything from scratch. (You can set a time limit if you really don’t want to grow olives for 10 years to make oil).
- Dazed said we were never supposed to see our faces this much: from making mirrors affordable to the permanent self-view in video calls, our relationship to ourselves has radically changed (probably for the worst).
Good to look at
- A spot on review of the TED Talk as a cultural thing — looking back at this “graveyard of ideas” trying to make research entertaining or moving at all costs, but overall failing to have an actual impact onto the world.
- The Internet Archive put up copies of the Whole Earth Catalog online! A wacky pre-internet index of counterculture, about “what is worth getting and where to do the getting”. Excellent way to lose some time.
- Fun game: Antidepressants or Tolkien character?
- Other fun game: can you name every London tube station?
- What every app that adds AI looks like.
- This page identifies the many chairs found on Star Trek sets, in case you have a lot of money and want your living room to be really rad.
- Star Trek + Design has similar databases with glassware, lighting and so on.
Work! Design! Tech!
- An intro guide to building a “second brain” to face how overwhelming the Internet is.
- Security researchers found yet more reasons CSAM scanning databases are terrible for privacy and human rights.
- A useful summary of what engineers (and designers!) should know about Unicode in 2023.
- Ed Zitron’s excellent critique of Andreessen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ is worth a read, if you’ve had the bad luck to see it going around tech circles.
Follow your heart,
Victor