Hello, my darlings. Hope you’re not melting too badly. Here’s links to some things I’ve read recently!

Wikipedia is the best website

• Heptadecaphobia is a superstitious fear of the number 17, particularly common in Greece and Italy. “In Ancient Greece, the number 17 was despised by followers of Pythagoras, as the number was between 16 and 18, which were perfect representations of 4×4 and 3×6 quadrilaterals, respectively.”

• Bir Tawil is a section of land on the Egypt-Sudan border. Due to Complex Geopolitics™ (= effects of British colonisation), neither country is claiming it, making it the only habitable area on Earth that no sovereign nation wants to own.

  • Some others have tried to claim it as a micronation with no recognised success, But at least one of the attempts has apparently led to “the most insane documentary” of 2021 which I’m looking forward to watching.

• The use of punctuation symbols to replace profanity in comics is called grawlix (or "obscenicon").

• Fakelore is a term for “inauthentic, manufactured folklore presented as if it were genuinely traditional”.

  • See also: Invented tradition, highlighting many recent things incorrectly perceived as millennia-old traditions (like tartans in Scotland, neopaganism, martial arts in Japan)

Patrick Stewart

Mildly interesting

• The surprisingly fascinating history of the spreadsheet and how it reshaped the modern world.

• Propaganda is wild: the CIA secretly funded abstract expressionism during the Cold War, unbeknownst to the artists.

• Heather Cox Richardson says the real history behind Mother’s Day is not the one most of us have been taught. To my surprise, it isn’t cynically commercial!

• The colour theory behind why so many industrial control rooms were painted in seafoam green.

• Where Are We, And What Are We Doing Here? A beautiful and fascinating presentation by Liz Cook on the taste and aesthetic of restaurants (it’s culturally about the US, but I think a lot of it applies to the UK)

Everything is depressing

• Hamilton Nolan’s report of an anti-Zionist protest and counter-protest in Brooklyn. Very worth your time for the second to final paragraph, observing what they represent amid history: “Some causes are righteous and some are not, but if you know the exhilarating, giddy feeling of standing in a big group of your friends and feeling collectively ready to beat someone’s ass, together, then you can understand much about why it is so difficult to achieve peace on earth.”

• Thousands of contract workers in Nigeria, India and Argentina are recording themselves doing chores to train humanoid robots.

• Some of the left-wing cases for AI.

  • However the “chronic illness” section hit a bit different after reading this account of someone’s father refusing to take a life-saving treatment after “doing his own research” with an AI that was, predictably, making stuff up.

• Pardon me for linking to Sam Kriss but this one was exceedingly funny: If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you.

Good to look at

• The unique beauty and diversity of sand under a microscope.

• So many people who are technically “middle class” now feel left out of the future that was promised to them. This piece is a great explanation of the shift between an actually useful economic label and policy project, and the current reality.

• Nice review of the UK’s new smoking ban: apparently we can just end smoking.

• The Emotion Explorer plots 100 emotions across different categories to help you name how you may feel.

• Notes on pleasure and viscerality from Simon Sarris.

• Researchers have built a “vintage” large language model that’s trained only on pre-1931 historical content, to assess whether such models can invent things that are past their knowledge cutoffs.

Work! Design! Tech!

• “There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands.”

• Kill Yr Substack is a browser extension that intercepts links to Substack articles and redirects you to an archived version. It’s a mini-protest to avoid giving Substack your traffic, in view of their persistent, continued platforming of literal nazis and other bigots.

• An interesting idea for remote teams: personal ramble channels.

Attached to you,

Victor