Have a great Friday! Here are some links to kill the end of it.
This guy cloned his winning horse
Remember Dolly? Turns out cloning is accessible right now, albeit expensive, so this guy from Argentina cloned his winning polo horse over a dozen times. He then won the 2016 Argentine Open riding six clones.
They came up with a beautiful model: only sell the offspring the clones but preserve the bloodline. But his partner secretly sold three clones to Russian billionaire Andrey Borodin for $2.4 million, which led to a huge legal battle.
Climate Caused the US Civil War (And Determined)
Uncharted Territories is a fantastic newsletter that looks at geography from unusual angles. This story is a particularly good example because I've never seen a similar exploration of hardcore details — turns out cotton and tobacco were too complicated to automate right away unlike wheat, and by the time people could do this, the southern landowners had too much of their capital in slaves. And the cultures themselves are defined by the climate.
The Dangerous World of Saturation Divers
Divers' job include putting oil and gas pipelines on the ocean floor several hundred meters underwater. You have to go down slowly and back up even slower, otherwise nitrogen dissolved in your blood will suddenly become gas and destroy the tissues.
So divers end up just staying on the ocean floor for a week instead. No pressure changes means no issues. If you discount they have to spend this week in a tiny pressurized capsule (it’s almost 13 atmospheres in there!). And instead of nitrogen, they use helium as a neutral gas.
Jony Ive's Leica
Jony Ive and Marc Newson designed a one-off camera for Leica that was bought for almost 2 million dollars at an auction.
It looks quite similar to the original, but the attention to detail and focus on simplicity are unmistakably Apple-like.
Japan doesn't waste food for TV
In Japan, when food is shown on TV, networks add captions indicating that the food was not thrown away.
"the staff ate it later"
I love this idea so much! Watching people on YouTube making copious amounts of food just for a short video with a celebrity that is probably thrown away right after makes me feel uneasy.
Bonus: Why Evernote Failed
This issue was practically ready when I saw the news that Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo for $1.3Bn. Vimeo was considered a YouTube competitor once, but turned into a proprietary video hosting platform for cases where you want to have full control over the player.
Bending Spoons is a very curious company — a private-equity style software firm that buys once-famous brands, fires everyone and rebuilds them from the ground. Earlier, they acquired Evernote (and did the same thing). I used Evernote. Most people I knew used Evernote back then. So why did we stop? This article is the best retelling of this story.