July 20, 2021

NESTED! Sexy primes, tenderness and attention, fold locks, always be quitting

Good evening everyone! It’s Victor. I ended up taking a newsletter holiday last month — the move went well (and loving Bristol so far!) but I needed some downtime.

Here’s things I’ve seen over the last two months and wanted to share. They’ve added up so I tried to keep the description short.

Wikipedia is the best website

• The pizza principle is an economic “law” that notes the historic correlation between a slice of pizza and the cost of a ticket in the New York subway.
• Sexy primes are prime numbers that differ from each other by exactly 6.
• Let’s trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle was a 2004 North Korean TV programme. About trimming hair in accordance with socialist values.
• In Belgium and the Netherlands, a Veterstrikdiploma is a diploma received by children when they can tie their own laces.
• Tupper’s self-referential formula is a formula that draws itself when graphed with a specific constant.
  • More math: the potato paradox (but assume “purely mathematical potatoes”).
• Talossa is one of the earliest micronations, and also has one of the most widely developed constructed languages, at over 35,000 base words.
• The record of the longest personal name in the world is held by Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. (This is the abridged, everyday version which does not contain all 26 first names and the 666-letter last name).

:þ

Mildly interesting

• On its shelves, the Brautigan Library exclusively stores unpublished, unreleased book manuscripts that will never see the light of day anywhere else.
• An excellent essay on attention (and language).
• The truth behind the mysterious Amazon seeds from China in the US and UK.
• A list of special modes in lifts (from the… lift fandom wiki.)
• Before envelopes, the clever folds that kept letters secret.
• With a lack of bookable international DJs, the pandemic connected China’s underground club scene.
• A wild new book claims the Third Reich was addicted to drugs.
• Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy — and what the world might look like in a few years when all the investor-backed services will collapse or show their real pricing.

Everything is depressing

• Every year, Weibo and WeChat remove certain emoji from their keyboard and will refuse to display them, to dissuade commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
  • Also learnt that the Taiwanese country flag emoji isn’t displayed by iPhones when the region is set to China.
• Loved this long story about the impact of COVID and climate change on Inupit people.
• Boris Johnson knows exactly what he’s doing (and it’s terrifying).
• I thought about this a lot when I shared articles about this before: a tsunami of disability is coming as a result of ‘Long COVID’. Younger people who may not die from getting it still risk lifetime consequences from it.
  • And remember that double vaccination is still not immunity, it’s just a much lower risk of dying.
• The impermanence of the internet is a collective hallucination.
• German voters’ view of personal wealth causes problems for the left: poorer people think they’re richer than they are, the rich think they’re not that rich, so everyone thinks they’re middle class.
• A paper looking at how amplified social networks like Twitter can create networked harassment for normative reinforcement.

Good to look at

• Drawing pictures of cities — “we need to visualise the kinds of urban environments we want to live in”.
• Some feelings English doesn’t have.
• Austin Kleon sharing his reading pet peeve: if you write “don’t get me wrong”, just rewrite to avoid chances of being misunderstood.
• The Shortcut is a fascinating little toy to stare at.
• A very cool (and terrifying) visualisation of things in low Earth orbit.
• The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute tries to map a visual lexicon of The Aesthetics, 1970 to now.

In my ears

• Ginger Root - Mahjong Room (soul / US / 2018)
• Shygirl ft. Slowthai - BDE (pop / UK / 2021)
• Pino D’Angiò - Ma quale idea (funk / italy / 1981)
• Sente - Medusa (dnb / UK / 2017)
• Honest Doc. & Mr Driver - The Spell (house / UK / 1987)
• Le Makeup - Sit Down in Reflection (cloud rap + electronic / japan / 2020)

Work! Design! Tech!

• How to achieve sustainable remote work by trusting ROWE.
  • Also enjoyed GitLab’s open communication guide, and how to run good meetings.
• Product design thoughts:
  • Find its elements;
  • Treat it as a joke;
  • Become more opinionated;
  • Don’t spit on personas;
  • And split the career paths.
• Smart advice for joining hypergrowth startups.
• Mise-en-place for knowledge workers gives some tips to work clean.
• An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding. (Also helpful: always be quitting).

And that’s it for this month.

May you return softly to the rest of your day,

Victor