February 20, 2021

NESTED! Tonibler, the double-decker trees, transparent wood, preferred futures

Good evening my squirrel friends, it's Victor, and this is the newsletter known as Nested. Hope you're well. Here's some fun things I've read this month and wanted to share.

(Hope the links work this time!)

Wikipedia is the best website

• The Lesbian Kiss Episode (free band name!) is a recurring trope of many 90s TV shows, where there is a single scene of two women kissing each other — typically one straight character, experimenting with a lesbian/bi woman, that's then never mentioned again for the rest of the series. And it's excellent for the ratings.
  • See also: LUG, or Lesbian Until Graduation.
• Baker-Miller pink is a shade of pink that has been allegedly observed to “reduce hostile, violent or aggressive behaviour”.
• Tonibler and Bler are male first names in Kosovo, given to a few babies around 1999 to honour Tony Blair's credited role in ending the conflict and massacre from Yugoslavia against Kosovar Albanians.
• Switzerland has an Anti-PowerPoint Party founded ahead of the 2011 federal elections, which aims to submit a referendum banning the use of PowerPoint in business presentations.
• A list of churches in the Antarctic (all very pretty)
  • And its counterpart: an article about crime in Antarctica. (Includes arson at one of the aforementioned churches).
• Dixie Longate is a drag queen who was dared by a friend to try to sell Tupperware boxes in drag, which led her to develop a solo act around it and led her to accidentally become the top sales representative of Tupperware in North America.
  • Also casually listed as a dancer in the Titanic movie.
• Most Wikipedian name: Disambiguation (disambiguation)
• Bialbero di Casorzo are two trees in Italy, notable for being epiphyte: it is a cherry tree happily growing on top of a mulberry tree. Some more pictures here, which also tell us that this likely happened through the sheer coincidence of a bird dropping a cherry seed on the right intersection of branches at the right time of growth, and the second developed roots through the first one's hollow trunk. Epiphyte plants are pretty common (think moss and orchids), but two trees managing to grow this big are very rare: a park in Croatia has the only other known instance of a double-decker tree in Europe.
• Shoe sizes in the UK are measured in barleycorns.

Slurp

Mildly interesting

• Japan holds an Original Kanji Contest every year, and last year's winner obviously reflected social distancing.
• Last month I said that we didn't know why and how wombats have cube-shaped poo, but right after I posted it, a new paper got us an answer. (It happens in the intestines, and likely because it prevents poop from rolling away on slopes, so they can leave smell markers that don't move.)
• Scientists have developed transparent wood that's stronger, lighter and could be cheaper to produce than glass.
  • In Kenya, a startup is making bricks from unrecyclable plastic that are 7 times stronger than concrete.
• The Miyawaki Method could be a better way to re-plant forests.
• It's possible to mine Bitcoin with pencil and paper (at 0.67 hashes per day, it may not be economical, but it certainly wouldn’t destroy the planet as much).
• A case against the peeping tom theory of privacy: tracking is wrong, but continuing to describe it as if some people at Facebook/Google/the NSA are looking at every single thing you do personally may be counter-productive.

Everything is depressing

• 1 in 5 deaths globally are caused by air pollution.
• How the fossil fuel industry convinced Americans to love gas stoves. Some details were very surprising to me — I like them for the control in cooking, but had no idea how bad ‘natural gas’ is for you and the environment!
• Beyond Burned Out: how chronic stress at work has multiplied and worsened since everyone started working from home.
• We've now known for months that Covid is primarily transmitted via aerosols not surfaces, so why are we still wasting time with the hygiene theatre?
• RaDVaC are a group of citizen scientists that developed an open-source nasal vaccine against COVID, which you can make yourself for about $1000, some biochemistry skills, a lot of confidence, and an insufferable rationalist mindset.

Good to look at

• These self-organising textures made using neural networks are very fun to play with.
• Sensory Maps talk to us about smellscapes, the geography of smell, the history of stink, and the effects of heat, wind patterns and moisture on odours.
• You can get a very, very close-up look at Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring: it's been photographed as a 10,000 megapixel panorama, which lets you look at the paint details like a microscope. Zoom in here (and you can even see details in 3D).
• How to read more books by building up a habit.

In my ears

• Denis & Denis - Program tvog kompjutera (pop synth / yugoslavia / 1984)
• Cecile Believe - Living My Life Over (pop / US / 2020)
• Las Rosas - 5000 Hits (garage rock / US / 2017)
• BABii - SHADOW (garage pop / UK / 2021)
• Rev. Harvey Gates - Price of Love (soul / US / 1978)
• Jónsi - Kórall (indie pop / iceland / 2020)

Work! Design! Tech!

• A brilliant documentation for documentation systems.
• archives.design goes through the depth of the Internet Archive and collects beautiful graphic design artefacts.
  • I also recently found the Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 1992, and looking back, found them surprisingly ahead of their time.
• Having the focus to say No, and being more intentional.
• “Why I'm losing faith in UX”: when UX is only sold as a means to support products and business models that exploit users.
• “Design is the process of materialising preferred futures”.
• All first drafts are bad drafts, and that’s what makes them good.
• TIL the cheap, ubiquitous coffee table LACK from IKEA is the perfect width for a switch or server (hence, LackRack).
  • And who knew there's a whole community of IKEA modders/hackers.

And that's all for February.

Enjoy your mistakes,

Victor