Hi friends! Still just in time to send you a plethora of links for this month, after a day live on the very windy but beautiful Welsh coast:
Wikipedia is the best website
- A whale fall (not to be confused with fail whale, RIP) happens when the carcass of a dead whale falls down to the deep ocean, below 1,000 metres. Complex localised ecosystems are formed and are able to sustain on that carcass for several decade — which may not be possible under normal conditions.
- Surtsey is an island off the coast of Iceland which was formed in 1963 after an underwater volcanic eruption. Because it is so new, it is notable for allowing scientists to observe “primary ecological succession”, and understand how plants and other life forms came to colonise the island. (Except for a couple of accidents.)
- An aptronym is when a name particularly suit its owner. For example: lawyer Sue Yoo, judge John Law, meteorologists Amy Freeze and Sara Blizzard, president of Nintendo Doug Bowser, neurologist Russell Brain, Usain Bolt, etc.
- Not necessarily the same as nominative determinism.
- Yu-Mex is a fascinating hybrid of cultures. Following the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, and due to Tito’s revolutionary communist tendencies, Yugoslavia stopped importing films from both the Soviet Union and the United States. Not having a cinema industry of its own, they started importing many Mexican films; in turn, much of Mexico culture and music slowly began permeating Yugoslavian culture, with many musicians donning sombreros while singing in Serbo-Croatian. [via absolument tout]
- The source is old and dodgy, but I'm loving this potential misinformation factoid: in the article on Friday the 13th, one learns that some people are “so paralysed by fear that they avoid their normal routines in doing business, taking flights or even getting out of bed. It's been estimated that 800–900 million dollars is lost in business on [a Friday 13th].”
- There is a small but persistent group of firefighters who are arsonists, a contradiction that sometimes stem from “hero syndrome” where they can quickly intervene.
- Bobcats and lynxes can hybridise to create a blynx. (It’s a pointy boi.)
- See also: wallaroo, pictured below, who is not a hybrid!
Dummy thicc
Mildly interesting
- Lots of scientists have been trying to train crows to pick up our trash. They’re smart enough to do it, but refuse to.
- In other animal research news: cicadas piss is useful for understanding physics and advancing technology.
- The techno scene in Berlin has been added to Unesco’s cultural heritage list.
- A new schism within Wikipedia editors has spawned a separate wiki that’s focused on over 15,000 US roads and highways.
- Absolutely fascinating history of the bus from “Into the Wild”, from its early days in Alaska to being a pilgrimage site to being part of a museum.
- There’s some TikTok-induced drama in the fountain pen community about a new colour, and I love to learn about this. (Did you know there’s fountain pen meme pages?)
- This story about squatters throwing parties in Beverly Hills is going in all the directions. Fun read!
- In math news: we’ve proven paper is Turing-complete, and so you can theoretically build a computer with origami (in practice, you'll need a lot of paper).
- Other math news: got mesmerised by some of these mathematical and puzzle fonts. Special shout out to the tiling font!
- Video: Huawei has been doing some corporate espionage in Denmark and it’s wild.
- A short list of things and places unexpectedly (and infuriatingly) named after people. (Includes: MySQL, Taco Bell, Brown noise, Shrapnel, and the Main Street in San Francisco named after Charles Main).
- Matt Levine explaining anything is always an entertaining and enlightening read, so I can only recommend his column on how Elon Musk is overpaid (alongside this one with more recent developments, which also gives unrelated insights about Slerf, another cryptocurrency going well).
- An immunoengineer tackling long-haul diseases is finding that long Covid is effectively identical to chronic Lyme disease.
Everything is depressing
- There’s a looming cheese crisis in France because of a collapse in microbe diversity.
- How come most new sofas are so bad.
- Back to the futch. (”Talking about the future of music strictly in terms of compression rates and headphones is wasted breath. And yet I see this all the time. And it’s so rare that the people talking about the future of space travel talk to the people talking about the future of music, and so few of them seem to talk to the people involved in political futures except as lobbyists.” *snaps*)
- In 2024 furniture designers are rebranding toilets and making them fun again.
- I’m so sold on this $10,000 Alexa-connected smart toilet, I think it’s really what humanity needs right now.
- TfL has been running an AI tube station experiment and it’s kinda terrifying (but hey, fun infrastructure data.)
Good to look at
- To end the UK housing crisis we may need to end landlords (…among other things, but I stan this initiative.)
- To feel happy, make time to pursue things that can’t scale.
- How to get public support for cutting the use of cars in cities.
- Anil Dash says that in the modern Internet, still being able to hear “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement.
- My new favourite type of food satire is saying “just as Cadbury Crème Egg season was drawing to a close”.
Work! Design! Tech!
- Trying to figure out what is a design engineer (dream job).
- An excellent and thoughtful criticism of Jakob Nielsen’s last take on using AI in accessibility (which I recommend reading more than the take).
- It was written before, but I also liked this more pragmatic and realistic view in A List Apart about opportunities for AI in accessibility, by Microsoft’s accessibility innovation strategist.
- We need to talk about digital ownership and its many meanings.
- Someone looked at the PDF specs a bit too hard and generated a PDF file that’s larger than Germany. (”Please don’t try to print it.”)
To the moon and back,
Victor