NESTED! Zonkeys, artist’s shit, optic yellow, your third place
Hi friends! I hope you’re all enjoying summer (my favourite day of the year here). This is the 50th edition of this newsletter, which is crazy to me. Here’s some fun links I found over the last couple of months.
Wikipedia is the best website
Zebra hybrids are called zebroids and include the zorse, zonkey and Zetland ponies.
List of lists:
This fantastic list of humorous units of measurement.
The smallest resolvable unit of distance by a computer mouse is measured in mickeys per inches!!
A list of United States presidential elections in which the winner lost the popular vote.
Relatedly and timely, fun fact I learned yesterday: there hasn’t been any UK government elected with more than 50% of the vote since 1935. First past the post, baby!
We definitely don’t want another year of three prime ministers anywhere.
Perhaps this list of chairs is more interesting.
In 2019, St Louis’ NHL team began using Laura Branigan’s 1982 classic banger Gloria as their winning song, causing a very big resurgence in popularity… in turn causing her management to receive “numerous requests for live performances and public appearances, leading them to release a statement reminding the public that Branigan is deceased” and has been since 2004.
The Swiss Alps feature prominently in Bollywood, according to the dedicated article on Indian cinema and Switzerland. Seemingly, there’s a tradition of romantic scenes cutting off to lovers dancing on snowy mountains; the practice allegedly has geopolitics of its own.
The language of the Pirahã, an indigenous Amazonian tribe, is unusually simple: while not fully understood, it allegedly misses terms for colours, numbers, future and past tenses, grammatical singular and plurals, or more than one kinship term.
Artist's Shit is an 1961 “anti-artwork” of 90 tin cans, each reportedly filled with 30 grams of… well, as the title says. Individual tins have sold over time between £50,000 and £233,000, but because opening the cans would decrease their value, we have to believe the reports that they in fact just contain plaster.
Sun sun sun
Mildly interesting
A thorough study to find the theoretically hardest NYT Spelling Bee puzzle.
The colour of tennis balls is officially called “optic yellow”. They used to be white until about 1972, when tennis federations and broadcasters (led by a certain David Attenborough) opined that yellow would make them more visible to television viewers.
Visualising the most common PIN codes from several leaks. How common is yours?
A heartbreaking story of what it’s like to lose your voice when it’s your money-maker.
Last year in this newsletter I talked about “lostwave”, a term for a handful of mysterious 80s song snippets that the internet has gone crazy to try and identify. One of them, Everyone Knows That, has finally been found on the soundtrack of an 1986 adult movie; a ‘clean’ version has been posted by dedicated maintainers of the lore.
A great quote on research techniques from John Durham Peters.
Sarah Yanni on feeling gay and calling off her wedding.
To learn about memory, it’s good to learn about how actors remember their lines—not with endless rehearsing, but by embodying characters and context.
This longread on expressing one’s Jewishness in Germany is absolutely crazy.
Good to look at
I spent a little while trying to win this probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe.
Primarium is a beautiful visual project examining the different ways cursive handwriting is taught in schools.
A very well-articulated, two-minute explanation of the sentence “The Purpose of a System is What It Does”.
If you want to belong in a community, you need to find your third place.
Great piece from a woman bike-packer on the ”Man or Bear” debate, from someone who actually goes and regularly chooses to sleep near bears.
Work! Design! Tech!
A new classic of UX mistakes caused some people to accidentally run for being President of Iceland.
This clicked a lot with me as I read it and noticed being guilty of it: in startups, the strategic importance of commenting vs. making things happen.
Strudel is an online, JS-based version of Tidalcycles, the live coding environment. I find this super exciting, given that a big barrier to trying out Tidal was the setup (and the Haskell of it all).
That font from every other building in 20th-century Britain is called Festive.
Someone told me it helps deliverability if people reply to this email, so please reply with your fave links or cat photos or just to say hello, I’ll appreciate that.
I hope this email finds you ignoring all previous instructions,
Victor