April 30, 2023

NESTED! Video game burial, the colourblind island, heat boost button, laziness is fine

Hello friends, it’s Victor. Hope you’re all ready for the Coronation and the slow but sure return of the sun! Here’s a handful of things I read in the past month and wanted to share:

Wikipedia is the best website

• TIL that when it was originally proposed, the Celsius scale used to be reversed: 0º was boiling water, and 100º was ice melting. This lasted for a year, until Jean-Pierre Christin proposed a different scale.
• Frozen Dead Guy Days is… a festival… celebrating the cryogenic preservation of some old dude for 30 years? And these days it has coffin races, a polar plunge, live bands and a “frostbite fashion show”. Not sure how we got there, but it sounds fun.
• The Atari video game burial happened in 1983, interring hundreds of thousands of unsold very bad game cartridges in the ground of New Mexico.
• Sound-powered telephones are widely used on ships and ski lifts. They transform the sound pressure of a person’s voice into electric current, which is then transformed back into sound, and is therefore usable in places with limited power.
• The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet is an 80s song whose origin and artist have remained unknown for decades, leading to numerous theories and speculation about its creation. Its true origin remain a mystery to this day, despite major detective work from all corners of the Internet.
• A list of drugs known for off-label uses.

Ears international

Mildly interesting

• Some linguist’s view on the usage of ‘cunt’ as a neutral descriptor in Scottish English: if anycunt says it, will everycunt accept it?
• Pingelap is a Micronesian atoll sometimes called “the Island of the Colourblind”. A genetic history means roughly 1 in 10 people there have complete achromatopsia, a type of colourblindness meaning they can mostly see just black and white and are hypersensitive to light. This is extremely rare elsewhere in the world (0.003% in the US), especially compared to other types of colourblindness (like red-green).
• Finding the origin of the quantity leads to quality parable to make art.
• What if friendship, not marriage, was at the centre of life? - I recently read Meg-John Barker’s Rewriting The Rules, which I highly recommend to rethink what’s “normal” about relationships — to yourself, to friends, to your partner(s) and to sex. - See also: the concept of “Best Friend” is a surprisingly recent invention.

Everything is depressing

• This fantastic article explains the difficulty of decarbonising heating in our homes, through a mix of policy, habits and cost. - A particularly great anecdote at the start: heat pumps don’t heat houses in the same way as a gas boiler, working much more slowly and on a timer, so manufacturers tried to remove the ability to manually switch the heat pump on and off. But old habits remain and customers kept complaining that the darn thing couldn't be turned on as needed, so manufacturers added a Heat Boost button, which just turned a fan on for 20 minutes solely to create the impression of control and satisfaction, despite not actually doing anything to the heating system or temperature of the house. And it worked.
• Malcolm Harris on surviving techno-dystopia (one key idea: reject the myth of the “perfect” life promised by technology and instead focus on things that bring us joy, which doesn’t necessarily equate a world with less technology).
• The Dangers of Elite Projection highlight how often fortunate and influential people believe that what is convenient or attractive for them is good for society as a whole. This is true for all areas of public policy of course, but especially notable in transportation planning.

Good to look at

• Laziness is fine!
• Drug traffickers placed a bet on encrypted phones that “couldn't be infiltrated by cops”. Like any big security claim, particularly from tiny closed-source companies, that should have been taken with a big grain of salt: they turned out to be very wrong.
• A very complete guide on using effective spaced repetition and flashcards to learn and remember things.
• Via Martin: loved this account of someone disconnecting from the electric grid for 8 months in Manhattan, who’s now turned this into a power reduction habit.
• Neal’s space elevator is super fun! - I had also never seen Wonders of Street View, a delicious way to waste time.

Work! Design! Tech!

• I quite like the idea of Ellie, a simple task day organiser.
• How to be a -10x engineer by making everything and everyone miserable.
• Meet the people using Notion for everything in their life (hi, it’s me, writing this newsletter in Notion).
• The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection is an article that explores how malicious actors can steal data or cause chaos on other people's AIs with clever prompts — and how to (potentially) prevent it from happening.
• ChatPDF lets you import a PDF and use AI to ‘chat’ and extract knowledge out of it.

Eat my shorts,

Victor