Find Finds: Your Plane Flies on French Fries Oil

Good day to you, and hope you’ll have a great weekend shortly!

Here are the most interesting things I read about this week.

The iconic watches that inspired Apple Watch faces

Many of the classic watch faces available on Apple Watch are directly inspired by famous watches of the past or at least specific styles of mechanical watches. Arun's blog covers industrial design, history, technology trends, and travel, and is worth subscribing to. And there's an additional article about one more face.

Malaysian Fryer Oil Arbitrage

European regulations make used cooking oil highly valuable for “sustainable” aviation fuel. Because of this, the price gap between subsidized fresh oil and used oil in Malaysia led to a new type of fraud: fresh oil is often falsely declared as “used” and sold to refiners, because it's more profitable.

If you want the best fried food, go to Malaysia because they only fry in it once!

Two centuries when English made words differently

Firefighter. Pickpocket. Swashbuckler (ok, what is this?..)

For some unknown reason, the English language combined nouns in this particular way only between 1550 and 1700. In all other periods, the nouns derived from verbs were almost always constructed using -er and -or (founder or programmer)

Why? Nobody knows. Languages get weird sometimes.

Human-made gem that has become a rarity

We can apply 60,000 times atmospheric pressure at 1,500°C to create artificial diamonds, but did you know humans have created an entirely new gem?

Fordite is a man-made gemstone created at car factories. The hardened enamel paint built up as cars were spray-painted by hand. If you cut it and polished it, you’d end up with a beautiful stone representing the bright colors used for cars back then.

But here’s the kicker: after the 1970s, manufacturers switched to an electrostatic process that produces almost no residue. No fordite will ever be created, making existing gems valuable (just like it happened with natural gems).

P.S. Why is this interesting is a great newsletter to subscribe to.

Things.in: Discover things to do

A simple platform to find the best attractions and restaurants in cities around the world from a curated list.

Google Maps, TripAdvisor, and Instagram offer too many options. In the end, you have to spend time figuring out what’s really good. Sometimes, I just want somebody to show me the best places, even if it’s their subjective view.

This is why, a few years ago, I started keeping lists for each city and country I spent enough time in.

Nothing better than getting a good list of restaurants and coffee shops from a trusted friend. So if you ever need Google Maps lists for Lisbon, Barcelona or Berlin — hit me up.