NESTED! The brakes don't work, social cooling, the Bitch Wars, bootleg video vans

Hi everyone,

It's Victor. Hope you're all coping with the early nights, the death around us, and the colder weather! Here's some links I wanted to share this month:

Wikipedia is the best website

• The Mariko Aoki phenomenon names the “urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores”. (The article is extremely complete about reasons why this may or may not really happen.)
• The Skylab controversy was a fairly unique strike in 1973, when the astronauts aboard Skylab 4 single-handedly decided to turn off radio communications with NASA ground control, and “spent time relaxing and looking at the Earth” for about 90 minutes before resuming communications.
  • Space related, here's a free metal band name: Crater of Eternal Darkness.
• The windshield phenomenon is the observation that over the last few decades, fewer insects have crashed on cars' windshields than before, which can be used as an index to observe the decline in insect populations.
• A topical list of non-human electoral candidates, including a list of animals which have successfully been elected to office. Turns out the jokes about “my dog would do a better job than Trump” have some grounding.
• Pepsi Number Fever was a promotion held by PepsiCo in the Philippines in 1992, which led to riots and the deaths of at least five people.
• I'd heard before the trivia fact that Iceland is Europe's largest producer of bananas thanks to its very cheap geothermal power, usable in greenhouses. Turns out it's an urban legend — they still produce a small quantity, but they're not the largest in Europe.
• The Paris syndrome is a form of culture shock experienced by some people who visit Paris for the first time, and feel let down when they realise it's not as beautiful as they had expected it to be.
• Lisztomania isn't just a song from Phoenix: it describes the excitement from fans of Franz Liszt at his concerts, at a time when stanning artists wasn't exactly a thing.
• The Bitch Wars occured in soviet gulags between 1945 and 1953.

Werk

Mildly interesting

• The word “set” holds the Guinness World Record for having the most definitions.
• Grapefruit is one of the weirdest fruits on the planet, from its name to its unexpected drug interactions.
• Lyndon B. Johnson was the only US president to own a presidential amphibious car. Rumour has it he liked to surprise guests at his ranch by driving into the water while yelling “The brakes don’t work! The brakes don’t work!”.
• That amazing time when a group of American libertarians all moved into a town, ditched their local government and taxes as an experiment, and then found out it doesn't work. Partly because bears (yes, bears) started to move in.
• The economics of vending machines as a side hustle. Vending “requires so many moving parts and brings in such slim profits per machine” that it's not profitable for a few large companies to dominate the market; so machines are owned by many individual operators. They invest in old vending machines, find a spot, refill them, and can make some profit with the huge markup.
• Some recent research finds new explanations for the brain's elastic sense of time, with evidence of a connection between time perception and the mechanism that helps us learn through rewards and punishments.

Everything is depressing

• The NYT made an excellent overview of how brain fog plagues survivors of Covid-19. This Reddit thread recounting experiences is also essential reading for better understanding what the virus really does, beyond the respiratory problems.
• As more and more people start to understand the effects of big data and the consequences of oversharing, we start to change our behaviour online and offline as we realise we're being watched. This phenomenon is now called Social Cooling.
• To understand how Facebook came to be the mess it is today, you need to read its earliest critics, says Joanne McNeil.
• The Media Manipulation Casebook documents how the new far-right movements exploit social media to amplify its messages.

Good to look at

• A nice list of the 100 most influential sequences in animation history.
• The incredible bootleg video vans of the Soviet Union, illegally showing film tapes from the West — with equally illegal and dodgy voiceovers. (Once again via Martin).
• I really enjoyed this portrait of Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal. Taking lots of experience from growing up in anarchist societies, he ended up passionate about making something that truly benefits communities: “Most people who use social networks and chat services, he argues, assume that their digital communications are private; they want to share their thoughts and photographs with their friends—not with Facebook and Google, not with advertisers, and certainly not on the dark Web. ‘In a sense, I feel like Signal is just trying to bring normality to the Internet […] A lot of what we’re trying to do is just square the actual technology with people’s intent.’”
• What football will look like in the future is a fun web-based science fiction story. (It's not really about football.)

In my ears

• Ólafur Arnalds & Bonobo - Loom (downtempo / iceland / 2020)
• X-Ray Spec - Oh Bondage Up Yours! (punk rock / uk / 1977)
• Nubya Garcia - Tiny Desk concert (soul-jazz / uk / 2020)
• Hot Chip feat. Jarvis Cocker - Straight To The Morning (dance pop / uk / 2020)
• La Femme - Paradigme (synth-pop / france / 2020)
• Bicep - Apricots (techno / uk / 2020)
• Kiosk - Mona Call (soul-jazz / belgium / 1970)

Work! Design! Tech!

• Being Smart is Not Enough: when hiring, we “favour the geniuses who hatch innovative ideas, but overlook the butterflies, the crucial ones who share and implement them.” Really liked the analogy, and how accurate it is — sometimes competency really isn't the most important.
  • On hiring, another good piece from Jared Spool for hiring UX designers through one screener question.
  • On being hired: this guide on how to negotiate for your salary has taught me many things — if I ever have to go back to a place without open salaries.
• Discipline doesn't scale: instead of relying on discipline, find and invest in tools that prevent you from making errors and enforce best practices.
• People expect technology to suck. (Because it actually sucks.)
• When fonts fall: a super interesting explanation of how font fallback works when rendering text in a font that doesn't include some characters.
• How to code with your voice using Talon Voice.
• Blokdots seems like a very fun project for planning hardware and Arduino projects.

Yours in soap, isolation and solidarity,

Victor