Let's say we do this the first Sunday of the month
Five things:
I recently read The Maintenance of Headway. It’s lovely and odd. You’re constantly wondering if it’s supposed to be this flat and banal, but it’s so smooth and readable you just keep ploughing on. A strange reading experience. It also contains a profound truth about buses, beautifully illustrated in this interactive diagram.
Turbulence. I realise this is quite circular, me posting to a post from a (brilliant) newsletter about interestingness. But there’s a very high quality metaphor available here. About the technology race in defeating the turbulence from Formula One cars and how it means only the winners can win and the losers keep losing.
“Essentially the richest teams spend the most money developing their cars, which mostly comes down to tiny aerodynamic adjustments that help their drivers cut through the air with as little drag as possible. Those winglets and modifications also have the knock-on effect of causing additional turbulence, which most in the sport refer to as "dirty air" that makes it harder for other drivers to follow closely and pass…Because all this aerodynamic modeling is computationally intense. It’s also massively expensive (more computers cost more money). In racing, this meant the teams with the most money could find more and more ways to reduce drag in their cars. This led to a kind of arms war of winglets, as teams attempted to find more and more ways to direct air around their car, thereby reducing drag…But the second-order effect was an increase in turbulence for everyone else as these little bits and bobs made for unpredictability in the air as other cars pass.”
In Cockney/underworld slang a ‘carpet’ is 3 or 300, or 3,000. Apparently because if you were sentenced to three years or more in prison you got a carpet in your cell. I assume that’s not actually true, because these things never are, but it reminded me of stories you’d hear in the Civil Service about how, if you were promoted to a particular rank you’d get a carpet for your office. And, of course, if your office was subsequently transferred to someone of lesser grade the carpet would be removed at great expense and inconvenience. There’s some support for these stories online.
This U.A. Fanthorpe poem is perhaps the best poem ever. It’s about WD40 and love.
If anyone’s this good at this. Invite me round for breakfast.
(There are now 580 of you. The I-580 in California was featured in 2011’s Need For Speed: The Run. Not a great game.)