NESTED! The Ray Cat Solution, Normal for Norfolk, etaoin shrdlu, Wetherspoons carpets, make it boring

Happy September, everybody. (It's my birthday soon!)

I've got a particularly long newsletter this month for you — but I think it's all interesting, so I hope you'll find the time to come back to it.

Wikipedia is the best website

• Vesna Vulović holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute, from 10,160 metres high. Following the explosion of a bomb in the plane where she was a flight attendant, she was the sole survivor thanks to incredibly lucky circumstances: “Air safety investigators attributed [her survival] to being trapped by a food cart in the DC-9's fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground. When the cabin depressurised, the passengers and other flight crew were blown out of the aircraft and fell to their deaths. Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact. Vulović's physicians concluded that her history of low blood pressure caused her to pass out quickly after the cabin depressurised and kept her heart from bursting on impact.” She suffered a broken skull, 3 broken vertebrae and was in a coma for 27 days, but again, she may have survived with that bit of luck: the Czech villager who quickly found her happened to be a medic in WWII and managed to keep her alive until rescuers arrived.
  • Might have cackled at “Vulović said that she was aware of her low blood pressure before applying to become a flight attendant and knew that it would result in her failing her medical examination, but she drank an excessive amount of coffee beforehand and was accepted.”
• The alcohol belts of Europe cleanly separate the continent into three patterns of alcohol consumption: wine (western Europe and Mediterranean), beer (central Europe and British Isles), and vodka (eastern Europe and Nordic countries). They are no longer accurate by quantity, but instead feed on historical consumption, availability (grapes don't grow that well in Russia), and cultural associations (which extends to the concept of “geoalcoholism”).
• If you can't deal with the reply allpocalypse I mentioned last time, I now learned that it's possible to declare email bankruptcy.
• There's an official name for “bright light allergy”, which may affect from a fifth to a third of people: photic sneeze reflex. The condition is not well understood but causes multiple people (like me!) to sneeze during sudden changes of brightness, such as going outdoors on a sunny day. Some people may also experience different but consistent triggers, such as eating a filling meal, spicy food, or… sexual arousal.
• The FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is a trending lifestyle among some current millennials who combine frugal spending and simple living with investments, in order to retire much earlier than most people. Proponents say this is supposed to be doable on a median income, it is widely criticised for only really being a credible, safe plan while on a high income.
• The US Museum of the Bible is owned by an Evangelical Christian family who also own a chain of craft stores called Hobby Lobby. Naturally, there is a page called Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal which describes how the craft store decided to buy $1.6 million worth of clay tablets and artifacts, which were known before the sale to be probably stolen from archeological sites in Iraq. Turns out they were, and Hobby Lobby were forced to pay $3 million in fines and return the artifacts.
  • The museum still exists, with an otherwise [checks notes] totally perfect record (“In October of 2018 the museum revealed that five of its 16 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments are counterfeit”, and Hobby Lobby won a Supreme Court ruling to say that their employees' health plan would exempt contraceptives).
• How do you make a symbol that will be universally understood by any culture, forever? The Human Interference Task Force was a research group focused on answering this seemingly impossible question, because leaving it unanswered may seriously threaten the planet. Here's the problem: after using nuclear power, resulting radioactive waste needs to be put in terminal storage, well separated from the biosphere for over 10,000 years (some experts estimate it may be up to a million years) until it becomes inactive. If this storage were to be opened and exposed to the biosphere before then, it may seriously threaten the surrounding life forms and environment. So how do you tell future humans to definitely stay away from it? Keep in mind that in the grand scheme of things, human written language has only been around for 5,000 years, and we're currently not all that great at reading cuneiform and ancient languages. Symbols are never truly universal and timeless, including the skull and crossbones. And so the HITF (and other people in the hot field of nuclear semiotics) went to work and produced a series of options including: atomic priesthood, hostile architecture, warning signs updated over time, information plants containing custom DNA, a comic panel that shows what happens if you get near (…unless people start reading bottom to top), and, OBVIOUSLY: genetically engineering “radiation sensitive cats” which change colour when approaching radiation, while simultaneously developing enduring lore, folk tales and myths through the world which will warn 30,000 generations down about imminent danger if you ever see a cat changing colour.
  • More about this design problem: the always-excellent 99% Invisible podcast has introduced it to me in episode Ten Thousand Years; there is a short documentary called The Ray Cat Solution free to watch on Vimeo; and this interview on Vice with Jon Lomberg, the astronomy-inspired artist that suggested the comic strip.
  • By the way, the currently chosen solution for the WIPP in America is just a set of pillars that use languages, the ISO radiation symbol, and, very loosely, Edvard Munch's The Scream.
• In completely different feline news, there is a cute cat theory of digital activism which states that the more cute cats a social platform has, the more stable it is against censorship.
• Ever asked yourself how the concept of negligence entered modern law? Well, wonder no more: you have to thank the 1928 Donoghue v. Stevenson case in Paisley, which was one of a snail (allegedly) crawling into a bottle of ginger beer and died. Donoghue had consumed some of that ginger beer at a café, and after pouring the rest of the bottle, saw a decomposed snail coming out. She fell sick and had to go to a hospital, but liability laws only extended to direct physical injury, and negligence in cleaning bottles and causing illness could not have reasonably constituted a tort. Fast forward four years of legal battle, this case ended up in the House of Lords and created a new type of liability in law.
  • After the law changed, the owner of the ginger beer company died, and Donoghue remained unable to factually prove that there was actually a snail in the bottle. So that specific case was settled out of court, and for all we know, there was never a snail in the bottle (but she still received some compensation).
• Corn smut is a disease that affects corn plants, growing a certain type of fungi. It is edible, and in Mexico it is known as huitlacoche, a highly sought delicacy that has caused some farmers to purposely infect crops with the disease, as infected corn is more expensive than regular corn. A close cousin is U. esculenta which attacks wild rice in Asia, and where the stems of the host rice are also eaten.
• A list of dreams.
  • “This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.”
  • Not too unrelated to this dreamy list of unusual eBay listings which include a GIF, twigs, a weekend with a group of lads, New Zealand (just the land), Brussels sprouts leftovers, and the Egyptian president.

Mundanely interesting

• Fun party fact: every single one of the 950 Wetherspoons across the UK has its own unique, custom-made carpet. “These post-Blair Bayeux tapestries cost between £20,000 and £30,000 each. They’re partly hand-made – by the renowned firm Axminster, no less. Randall says carpets usually have just five or six colours in the mix; whereas those in Wetherspoon’s often have more, meaning they have to be produced on old-fashioned looms. […] He can’t think of a single other high-street chain that does the same.”
  • The blog Wetherspoons Carpets attempts to document all of them.
  • If there was someone to visit every Starbucks, then of course there is someone to visit every ‘spoons.
• No fancy carpets at Greggs, but this long interview at their headquarters is somewhat… interesting? Readable? These vegan sausage rolls are just booming the economy, man. The strategy is just to be cheap, good (because pastry?), and ubiquitous: “No one leaves the house looking for a Greggs. They leave the house and then they feel hungry.”
• I recently watched Wild Wild Country on Netflix, a multipart documentary on the Rajneeshee movement. It is indeed wild, and I would absolutely recommend watching it. The story itself just sounds too absurd to be real until you see the evidence: the more you progress into each episode, the more you wonder why you'd never heard of them before. It's also a compelling, well-produced piece of storytelling that attempts to navigate the blurred lines between good and evil.
  • Win McCormack, the Oregon Magazine investigative journalist interviewed in a couple of the episodes, has later published a piece called Outside the Limits of the Human Imagination. He actually criticises the final documentary for painting the Rajneesh as a reasonable side, but ultimately not truthfully representing the controlling and sheer evil aspect of the cult. It also reveals that the film completely omits certain lesser-known crimes and horror stories linked to the commune. A must read if you've watched the documentary.
• An excellent article revisiting everything wrong with shipping container housing projects. They keep popping up every few months, “often done with an humanitarian angle (building slum housing, housing for refugees etc) that promise a factory-built ‘solution’ to the housing ‘problem’”, always touted as cheap, easy to build and transport, and green. The reality is that to turn them into livable housing including insulation and structure, it is often just as cheap and technologically doable to build traditional housing. Which doesn't also happen to trap poor people in a 7 feet long room.
  • The green aspect is also overrated: most of these projects use brand new containers imported from China, since the paints and insecticides required to withstand international sea transport are so toxic it's almost impossible to upcycle used ones.
• What's wrong with how schools teach reading: how a disproven theory about how reading works remains widely used in classrooms and lead to abysmal reading skills — which, in turn, lead to poor comprehension results.

• That 2003 BBC article on doctor slang is now going to make me paranoid about what will be down on my medical record if I ever land in A&E. It includes the colourful NFN (Normal For Norfolk), the transparent UBI (Unexplained Beer Injury), LOBNH (Lights On But Nobody Home), and the grim GPO (Good for Parts Only). Some of them are funny (in a cruel way) and the article says that even at the time, this language was falling out of use. But some are less funny, and if these “unspeakable truths” remain unwritten yet quietly thought, it's little wonder people have a trust and respect problem with the medical profession when they pass you on to other staff with the note GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt), GLM (Good looking Mum) or assign you a DBI (Dirt Bag Index).
• Masterpiece Theatre is a fascinating long read starting with how a stolen Picasso was burnt, then found again in perfect condition… as a Jansens forgery. Great story around something so captivating: “The art world, with its exclusivity, money, and pretension, elicits strong, sometimes negative reactions. The idea of someone skilled enough with a paintbrush or pen to fool the rich and powerful can be tantalizing.”
• I like the work of Studio Swine exploring materials and reuse: a chair made of molten plastic debris found in the sea; a public foundry and casting of metal cans; an exploration of Fordlandia with furniture made from rubber and rainforest materials; a man-made aluminium pumice.
• Farewell, etaoin shrdlu is a 1979 documentary filmed at the New York Times headquarters, on the final day where they used Linotypes before switching to photocomposition. A rare insight in the manual labour and skill that came with printing techniques of that era.
• Why chess grandmasters physically train and control their diets like footballers: “a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience. […] It all combines to produce an average weight loss of 2 pounds a day, or about 10-12 pounds over the course of a 10-day tournament in which each grandmaster might play five or six times.”

Don't talk to me or my sons ever again

Everything is depressing

• (Yes I'm just going to put every climate and politics related link in this section now.)
• Researchers found (much like anyone on Twitter could have) that there is a link between misogynists and climate deniers. Which mostly concentrate on Greta Thunberg and AOC.
  • Also a good read: the case for climate rage, and why men downplay emotional response to the climate crisis.
• “And so I wonder what might happen if, instead of denying reality, we told ourselves the truth.” Jonathan Franzen asks us to stop pretending like we're going to stop global warming and get real with the political will of the current world. This resonates a lot with me, perhaps because the article is (refreshingly) not defeatist: even if we're just making tiny dents at it, we still need to do all the small acts we can to stop it.
• The Mute Button is an excellent detailed explainer of how ideas make their way around society, and the misconceptions around free speech. It's part of a series called The Story of Us which tries to uncover the big picture around how society got where it's at.
• Why we can't agree on what's true anymore.
• A Week With No Tear Gas recounts a day of protest in Hong Kong.
• Shawn Rosenberg, a political science professors, predicts the end of democratic governance.
• What happens if Donald Trump doesn't peacefully step down and pass on power in 2020, should he not be re-elected? At that point, we've probably seen enough to know that the idea isn't a far-fetched leftist fantasy. Josh Geltzer excellently sums up how this might pan out: in 2018, “Trump tweeted that he was ‘very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election,’ adding that the Russians ‘will be pushing very hard for the Democrats.’ That tweet just didn’t make sense. It was, of course, the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election specifically to help Trump against the Democratic candidate, among other goals. And there had been nothing […] suggesting that the Russians were poised to push for the Democrats in the 2018 elections. So what was Trump talking about? […] This notion that there might be foreign election interference in favor of the Democrats seemed to test Trump’s ability to call into question election results he didn’t like. So, if the Dems won big in a way that embarrassed Trump, he might say the results were inflated—and, at least conceivably, even contest them.” He optimistically says this can be countered, but it should be planned now.
  • Is he even likely to be reelected? The Atlantic says that the Republicans should be terrified of American migration patterns that may make them lose red states in the next decade. “Underrepresentation of the urban left in national legislatures and governments has been a basic feature of all industrialized countries that use winner-take-all elections”, says Jonathan Rodden, but the exodus of lefty millennials is likely to redistribute the popular vote and help win districts.

In my ears

• Blood Orange - Benzo (hip-hop / UK / 2019)
• Marcos Valle - Estrelar (funk / brazil / 1983)
• Donna Regina - Why Do You Ask? (downtempo / germany / 2002)
• Charli XCX & Christine and the Queens - Gone (pop / UK / 2019)
• Yuki Okazaki - Jamaica Affair (pop / japan / 1980)
• Júníus Meyvant - Ain't Gonna Let You Drown (folk rock / iceland / 2019)
• Frank & Tony - Call Me Rain (deep house / US / 2014)
• Richard Dawson - Jogging (folk and good singing / UK / 2019)

Design! Tech! Work!

• Delightfully simple and addictive little game: Little Alchemy 2. Play it online or as a phone app.
• There is no tech backlash. We'd all like to say a significant share of people object against Big Tech, but they are still, by far, growing and growing.
• A brilliant, playful and non-mathsy interactive introduction to Fourier transforms.
• The Perfect User is a well-articulated critique of the “tech humanism” and digital wellness movements: particularly, who gets to define the supposedly unique “human” category and their aspirations, and how we'll get to fix it. “For tech humanism, the same potent persuasive technology design that is pitched here as the solution was also the source of the problem, fomenting unintentional or unconscious phone use through its irresistible snares. The movement’s ostensible mission is to maintain and protect individual sovereignty and restore intentionality, yet it relies on the same sort of assumption about the conditioning powers of UX design to achieve it.”
• Poets, hackers, and makers are the three tribes of programming.
• Talk: Make the web boring, because “boring is fast, resilient, fault tolerant, and accessible. Boring is the essence of unobtrusive designs that facilitate interactions rather than hinder them.”

That's it! Thanks for reading.