March 22, 2021

NESTED! Telling the bees, electric juice, aloneliness, your one job

Hi friends, it’s Victor for another episode of Nested! I hope you’re all well. May the sun keep showing its face more often.

Wikipedia is the best website

• MMAcevedo is the first executable image of a human brain, that was developed in 2031.
  • (This is a dystopian sci-fi story written like a Wikipedia article, which is my new favourite literary genre.)
• North Ronaldsay sheep are a breed from the northernmost island of Orkney. Back in the 19th century, the inhabitants built a wall around the edge of the island to keep their sheep from grazing the pasture inlands. Ever since then, the sheep evolved eating nothing but seaweed on the shoreline; they are now one of the only two land mammals to do so. This diet changed their sensitivity to copper, the taste of their meat, and more interestingly, reduced the amount of methane they produced. Scientists elsewhere have now started to develop seaweed supplements to try and reduce the greenhouse gas effects of livestock farming. [via Martin/99pi]
• Having “death by misadventure” on your death certificate sounds a lot more eccentric than “passed out drunk on train tracks”.
• Dord was a synonym for “density” in physics. It was listed by mistake as an entry in the New International Dictionary: the chemistry editor noted it “D or d.”, meaning that the abbreviation should be added as a definition to the entry for the letter D, uppercase or lowercase. But someone read it as a single word, and nobody in the chain of editors to proofreaders noticed it for years.
• In law, the Shaggy defense is a strategy where the defendant decides to claim “it wasn’t me”.
• Panda pornography exists and does what it says on the tin: it is shown to pandas captive in zoos to try and stop their species from going extinct.
• Telling the bees is a custom of some countries in Europe, where the keepers tell their bees about important events in their lives (births, marriages, departures from the household); if you fail to do so, it is believed, the bees would leave or stop producing honey.
• Some head-spinning stat about transistors: “it has been estimated that 13 sextillion (1.3×10^22) MOSFETs have been manufactured worldwide between 1960 and 2018 … the transistor count doubles approximately every two years.” This is a few orders of magnitude higher than the estimated number of grains of sand on Earth, and very close to the the estimated number of stars in the observable universe.
• Revenge bedtime procrastination is when people (yes, especially you) stay up late and don’t do much even when they’re tired, “in an attempt to have control over the night, because they don’t have as much control during the day.”

Screwscrewscrew

Mildly interesting

• The city of Seville is turning leftover oranges into electricity, by using the methane produced by fermenting rotten fruit. With 48,000 trees in the city, this could power up around a tenth of its homes as well as the water sanitation system.
• In China, the future of electric cars isn’t Tesla, it’s electric tiny cars.
  • In Amsterdam too, there are many microcars roaming the cycle lanes.
  • And a city in Georgia famously has a parallel road network for golf carts, proving again that a car-centric culture is only the result of infrastructure decisions.
• Why we’re so bad at daydreaming, and how to fix it to improve how we imagine and think.
• Ever had a small conversation full of small talk, and desperately wanted it to end quickly? A study found that when this happens, most of the time the other person also wishes that chat was shorter — so you can probably end conversations sooner than you think.
• “I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it”.
• The bizarre story of the last lost tourist in 1977, who mistakenly visited Maine instead of San Francisco.
• When we don’t get enough time by ourselves, we feel “aloneliness”.

Everything is depressing

• Must-read angry essay: cryptocurrencies and NFTs are an absolute disaster not only for the ecology, but also for society at large.
• One US state finally managed to write rules on facial recognition.
• In the UK, the COVID-19 Test and Trace app failed to actually log restaurant and pub data at an astonishing scale, leaving thousands of people at risk of being unnecessarily infected.
  • The government is investing an additional £15 billion into the system, in the new budget. (Nurses still only getting a 1% pay raise). :)))))
• A longread looking inside the ‘Covid Triangle’ in London, revealing again the brutal impact of the pandemic on deprived areas and certain minority groups.
  • In definitely unrelated news, an inquiry recently found “dozens of Conservative regions were placed in the top tier for government assistance despite being relatively affluent” while Labour areas that desperately need it haven’t seen a penny.

Good to look at

• Good process: wonderful step by step photos from 1942 showing the making of the New York Times.
• Some rubbish collectors in Turkey have opened a library with books dumped in the bin.
• This Word Does Not Exist, a website generating infinite new words and definitions using neural networks.
• The Internet Archive has launched a Scholar site, collecting millions of research sources and papers that may one day become lost to digital rot.
  • Talking about preservation, the inventor of the cassette, Lou Otten, has died at age 94. The cassette was first released to the world in 1963; the Internet Archive obviously also has an incredible collection of digitised cassettes.

In my ears

• Nive Nielsen & The Deer Children - Aqqusernit (pop folk / greenland / 2009)
• Tim Maia - Nobody Can Live Forever (funk / brazil / 1976)
• Magnetic Fields - Alien Being (indie pop / US / 1992)
• Arab Strap - Here Comes Comus! (indie rock / scotland / 2021)
• Maxence Epson - On est tous dans la même galère (euro-disco / france / 1984)
• Perfume Genius - Describe (A. G. Cook remix) (future pop / US / 2021)
• Sun Araw - Heavy Deeds (psychedelic rock / US / 2009)

Work! Design! Tech!

• How to apologise remotely.
• Know what’s your “One Job” and do it first at work. I really liked this article and the followup because it made me realise I’m very guilty of doing this — always saying yes to ‘glue’ work, interviewing, extra jobs, that still provide value but don’t always match my main role.
• It’s time to stop telling people they have “impostor syndrome”.
• Finally, a definition of design debt.
• Some things your manager might not know and how you can help them by being more mindful of that.
• Why sponsorship is better than mentorship.
• Choose Boring Technology — a great talk with lessons learned from jumping on the shiny and new practices.
• How to make data visualisation more accessible (as is often the case: by looking at how Apple does it.)

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Bing bang bong, sing sang song,

Victor