I hope you had a great Christmas! I certainly did, and now fully committed to the upcoming New Year, which is the "real" holiday in my culture.

A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growth

We have a complete coverage of Earth with satellite imagery. Which allows scientists to do interesting things. For one, they can find the correlation between the volume of light and GDP of a particular country.

Turns out, the signal is extremely strong with good predictive quality, but as long as you're looking at a democracy. Authoritarian countries seem to have less lights than their official GDP figures would suggest. China is a perfect example.

Several possible reasons come to mind. First, China’s official GDP figures are widely doubted and many underlying stats signal weaker growth.

Another, both less nefarious and more damning reason is that dictatorships create GDP through less productive things because of centralized control.

The famous comparison of North and South Korea here.

What if you could send an iPhone to any year in the past?

Where do you actually send it if you could? A fascinating problem for this Twitter mind experiment is that keeping this iPhone charged is an enormously difficult problem until 1940s.

Well, they are going to need to be able to charge the phone, else all that info is gone after the battery dies. Easy, especially for Bell Labs, right? Nope! It’s not about producing the physical connector of a USB cable. It’s about providing 5v at 500-1000mA that stays within 4.5-5.5v (and even that’s a very sloppy range). Not even Bell Labs or the military had the ability to do this in 1940s.

And now you can buy a $10 charger from Amazon that does this. Technology is amazing!

Is your Casio F-91W a fake?

The Casio F91‑W is a classic, ultra-cheap ($20) digital wristwatch released in 1989. The watch became infamous after declassified intelligence reports noted its prevalence among Al‑Qaeda terrorists and usage in bomb‑making training, particularly in 2000s.

Turns out, $20 is not cheap enough for China. Now, there are vast amounts of counterfeit F91-W watches sold for $5. This is a tutorial on how to distinguish the real thing.

Fake Rolexes? It's fake Casios out there.

The original Brexit

Doggerland was a now-submerged land bridge linking Britain to mainland Europe. By around 6,000 BCE most of Doggerland was underwater, leaving the Britain an island.

The impossible color of Olo

Olo is an imaginary color that can be seen by shooting lasers into the retina to isolate the response of M cone cells.

It is impossible to view olo under normal viewing conditions, due to the overlapping sensitivities of M cone cells and S and L cone cells in all wavelengths of visible light that evoke them.

Only the five subjects of the Berkeley experiment that discovered it have officially seen olo. The co-author of the study described olo as "more saturated than any color that you can see in the real world". The five subjects described it as a "blue-green of unprecedented saturation".

I want to see olo now.

This isn't Olo, this is the closest approximation.