NESTED! The sweater curse, debigulation, the smell of space, COVID-19

Hey everyone, it's Victor. Here's some things I've read this month and wanted to share to help you stay distracted during your social isolation!

Wikipedia is the best website

• The pizza effect is the phenomenon where cultural elements are exported to other countries, and then change popularity and meaning when they are 're-imported' in their home country. Named after the pizza, which is thought to have been looked down upon in Italy until its immigrants developed modern toppings in the rest of the world, and progressively came back to Italy which recreated its "authentic" pizzerias delighting locals and tourists. The concept can be applied to chicken tikka masala, the Day of the Dead parade in Mexico, some hinduism practices and yoga, jack-o-lanterns that were originally made from turnips, Puerto Rican salsa music, and so on.
• Ethnomathematics is the study of the relationship between mathematics and cultures: from the naming and notation to the education, politics, history and development of mathematics across the world.
  • Found via the page for Kaktovik Inupiaq numerals, a writing system to represent the base-20 counting system used in Inuit languages.
• The sweater curse is a popular belief that if a knitter gives a hand-knit sweater to a significant other, it will lead to the recipient breaking up with the knitter. It is not treated as a supernatural superstition, but has several plausible causes: the knit started to rescue an already broken relationship, there is insufficient gratitude from the recipient, it causes the other to reevaluate the reciprocity of the relationship…
  • “Many knitters wait until marriage before making a sweater for a significant other, or ask their affianced to sign a ‘pre-knitual agreement’.”
• Ken Allen was an orangutan at the San Diego zoo, famous for having managed to escape from its enclosure three times. (The naming story is also great).
• The Yahoo! Time Capsule was 2006 project that attempted to create a digital time capsule of the digital world at that point (with an absolutely wild real world installation). The capsule was reopened earlier this month, on the company’s 25th anniversary (but in typical Yahoo fashion, the page seems impossible to access).
• Eel Pie Island is a small island on the River Thames near Twickenham, famous for its jazz and blues venue in the 1960s.
• Zilwaukee is a small town in Michigan, named so “purposely to cause people to confuse it with the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in hopes of luring settlers there to work.”
• The scaly-foot snail or sea pangolin is one of the only known animal that has metal (iron sulfides) on its shell. It looks like a Pokémon.
• On Wiktionary, there is a category for English terms derived from The Simpsons. Outside the classics d'oh and yoink, you may remind yourself of useful words like malparkage, debigulate or Flanderization.

Me getting beach ready

Mildly interesting

• The novel Wired Love tells a catfishing-based online dating love story, with the slight twist that it was written in 1880 and took place on telegraphs.
• If you ever wondered what outer space smells like, the answer is burnt steak.
  • “The smell of space is so distinct that, three years ago, NASA reached out to Steven Pearce of the fragrance maker Omega Ingredients to re-create the odor for its training simulations. ‘Recently we did the smell of the moon,’ Pearce says. ‘Astronauts compared it to spent gunpowder.’”
• A good article on why the US suck at building public transit, to read alongside the excellent episode of 99% Invisible on why buses are amazing (even when really they don't look like they are).
• The Octo-Bouncer is a DIY machine that can juggle with a ping-pong ball forever. (It's open sourced, if you have lots of time on your hands.)
• Some news from the startup boss who set the minimum salary to $70k/year instead of paying himself $1.1 million per year: it's still going extremely well for his company and his employees.
• It's illegal to fly with a standard thermometer, because just a tiny leak of mercury can rip a jet plane apart.

Everything is depressing

• Bees are becoming so rare and valued that beehive theft is becoming a huge problem.
• A new example of the Google privacy nightmare: this man just cycled past a home that had been burglarised, and weeks later he became the primary suspect for that burglary. The cops had no leads, so they asked Google to release the identity of anyone who was into a certain geofenced area around the house, during the time it might have happened. This will catch anyone with Google's location services on, and is likely to create more and more cases of people being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
  • Facebook finally released an Off Facebook Activity page, which shows you what information they get from you even when you're not actively using it. It's an advance, but it's still difficult to track how purchases you've made elsewhere or making a reservation by phone got on that page.
• I've read a lot about COVID-19, because we can't just avoid thinking about it. It's difficult to constantly try to figure out whether everyone is overreacting or underreacting, when we don't have any clear sense of what's the appropriate reaction to have anymore. These articles have helped me make a bit more sense of how the pandemic can be controlled, how it really works, and what we need to do at our level.
  • Flatten the Curve is an incredibly comprehensive, easy-to-read reference about what is happening, what we need to do with ourselves and others. If you don't have a clear vision of what this mess is, this is the starting point to help you keep up with the narrative. Great to share with others.
  • Cancel Everything explains why social distancing is an important tactic to help slow down the pandemic, and why you should stop any non-essential meets or travel, and reduce those who you think are essential.
    • But unlike the article suggests, it's not the only way. It needs to be done on top of other measures, like containing cases and washing hands. (But not necessarily wearing masks).
    • As a longer version, the article Why You Must Act Now explains more about the exponential growth of cases, and the difference between known tested cases and real cases. This is particularly important to process: you will have no symptoms at all for days after being infected, and this may be the time when you're at your most contagious. This is exactly the reason why HIV is still a pandemic today.
  • The NYT has a very humane story of two 29-year old women that fell sick from the coronavirus in Wuhan, and only one survived. This article drove the point home of what isolation can mean, feeling safe, and the physical damages of the virus, even for those who aren't worried about getting it.
  • BuzzFeed lists some tactics that millennials (you) can do to talk to your boomer (at risk) relatives about the coronavirus if they're taking it lightly.
  • On government responses, it may be helpful to read why your government isn't acting on the COVID-19 threat to understand another way of looking at "the curve": it needs to be tied with economics so that we can maintain basic supply chains of services (food, medicine, delivery, utilities…) to avoid knock-on effects.
    • This doesn't stop the UK's herd immunity tactic to be incredibly bad (“We talk about vaccines generating herd immunity, so why is this different? Because this is not a vaccine. This is an actual pandemic that will make a very large number of people sick, and some of them will die.”), and incredibly Tory.
    • Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump's strategy is still worse.
      
    • Taiwan has been exceptionally good at containing the epidemic and there are many things we could learn from it. Better educating the public to reduce fear, discrimination, and improving buy-in on hygiene measures; placing hand sanitisers everywhere; monitoring people's temperature in public spaces; reporting symptoms and forced quarantine (with heavy fines if you fail to do it). They started proactively, and got better.
  • A couple of good longer reads on how humanity's interpreting this in the internet age: Zero Trust Information talks about (mis)information with technology security analogies; and Plot Economics on how humanity is losing the plot because there isn't any other plot to find.
  • For lighter, nicer reading, JP Brammer's latest (excellent) newsletter reminisces previous tragedies, and how we all feel when things aren't normal.

In my ears

• LA Priest - What Moves (space-pop / UK / 2020)
• 100 gecs feat. Charli XCX, Rico Nasty, Kero Kero Bonito - ringtone (remix) (experimental / US / 2020)
• Owen Pallett - Island acoustic session on FM4 (chamber pop / canada / 2020)
• Christine and the Queens ft. Caroline Polachek - La vita nuova (pop / france / 2020)
• Four Tet - Baby (minimal / UK / 2020)
• Perfume Genius - Describe (art rock / US / 2020)
• Johnny Cash & John Frusciante - Heart of Gold (classic rock / US / 2003)

Work! Design! Tech!

• An excellent article on cross-cultural design when designing for different type systems and cultures.
• The birth of CLUI, a hybrid between a command line and a graphical user interface. Some fascinating comparisons and examples of how, in many ways, command line interfaces are returning in new forms for advanced software.
• principles.design is a great repository of design principles by some companies, which guide the team towards making better decisions.
• Forget the Myers-Briggs astrology, this impostor test is all we need to test for.
  • I've finally read Design is a Job by Mike Monteiro recently, and what a wonderful book. It'll make you a better designer no matter what's your trade, give you heaps of confidence for working with other designers and clients, plus it's funny and short.
• Google Developers have launched a free course for technical writing, which would be a well spent 1-2 hours for many people.
• A list of nice product design portfolios.
• If you're applying for jobs, this is a great thread of questions to ask the employer during interviews. I've been on the other end of the interview process a few times recently, people that come up with interesting questions can really make a difference.

Wash your hands,

Victor