Excited! 12: 🐇🕳️ (Rabbit holes.)
This time: it's down the warren. Bald eagles! Quadrotor drones! ZIP files! Dust jackets! Cockroach milk?!
If it isn't already obvious, I tend to get! curious! about things in the world around me and fall down
down,
down,
down,
until that curiosity has eaten up a solid chunk of time, enough time that I'm a sliiiightly embarrassed about it.
Sometimes, it's a half-hour intellectual dalliance on the internet. Other times, it's an extended obsession involving losing an evening at the keyboard, venturing into the empty wing of the library, digging up academic research papers, trekking to an obscure museum, or even detouring a jog to (oh heyyy what's that?!) read a historical marker.
Usually,
...it's something tiny 🔍 that piques your curiosity, like an offhanded reference in a news article.
-
What is ...insect milk? 🐞🥛
(If you're squeamish, skip this one.)
Some species of insects/arachnids are viviparous; instead of laying eggs, they give. live. birth.One such insect is the Pacific Beetle Cockroach, Diploptera punctata, and it produces a crystalline "milk" for its young; the crystals are so high in protein and nutrients that scientists in India are trying to replicate them in a lab as the next great superfood.
Or your experience doesn't match what you've seen in popular culture.
- What does a bald eagle really sound like? 🦅💬
It sounds like a squeaky wheel on a shopping cart, as I learned firsthand earlier this year in Alaska. On television, they're dubbed with the cries of hawks to seem fiercer.
Or you notice something that doesn't add up, that makes you ask …wait, why is it that way?
- Why do all drones look like quadcopters? 🚁🚁
In 2014, Google was looking into package delivery with drones that looked like flying wings. A year later, the drones didn't look like that.
Something happened. Digging further, the ubiquity of the multirotor drone form factor boils down to both aerodynamic stability and straightforward economics—the mass production and dropping price/weight of lithium-polymer batteries + small brushless motors + mainstream microcontrollers. Furrrrrrrrrrthermore: modern multirotors can be traced back (at least from their formative years in university research labs) to one particular remote control UFO toy.
Or you realize that you take something for granted, but never thought about it.
- When you compress a file into a .zip archive, how does the filesize get smaller without losing data? 🗜📁
There are many different ways to compress files, and some are better for text than for binary (photos, audio, video). One common algorithm walks through the contents of a file, making a dictionary (unique to that file!) of character sequences that appear multiple times in a file, then using a shorthand code every time that text occurs. (The Pudding uses this compression algorithm to determine how repetitive song lyrics are ...and it's an excellent animated visualization of how it all works.)
While algorithms like these are lossless, some algorithms are lossy, and lose data: they strip out frequencies we can't hear or color combinations our eyes and brains won't miss.
(And then there are times when programmers do even wiiiiilder things, like that time, yeeears ago, when Apple exploited the very way in which JPEGs are encoded to create an autoplay video on a new iPhone 4, ...well before videos even could autoplay video, inline on a webpage, on your smartphone.)
And sometimes, the information you find online isn't well-cited, so it makes you want to dig further.
- Why do hardcover books have dust jackets? 📚📃
You would think that this question would be easily answered with a quick internet search—and it is, in an oft-republished article from a rare books dealer in South Carolina:
Early, bound hardcover books were wrapped in plain paper to preserve and protect the embossing on the spines; by the 1830s, savvy booksellers started printing on the paper jackets.
HOWEVER, the article quotes researchers, but doesn't cite the source materials, which leads you to divagate to a Centre for Children's Book Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, back to a book on Victorian publishers' book-binding techniques, then to the story of the discovery of the oldest(?) known dust jacket, and—ultimately—to scholar George Thomas Tanselle, who spent 42 years obsessing about the history of book jackets.
Eventually, of course, you wonder why we use "rabbit hole" to refer to an insatiable information bender.
- Why do we call them "rabbit holes"? 🕵️♀️🕳
The New Yorker's Kathryn Schulz already went down a rabbit hole on the very topic of rabbit holes three years ago.
But then, in the process of reading about that, you fall into Wikipedia ...and learn about the differences between hares and rabbits, and that jackrabbits are (in fact) hares, and that rabbits were once used by people as a (rather grim) pregnancy test...?!? (Thanks to an urban legend, telling someone that "the rabbit died" became a way to announce a positive pregnancy.)
Since I dig rabbit holes, and YOU dig rabbit holes—I mean, you've read this far, you knew the risks when you signed up for an email from meeee about enthuuuuusiaaasm—here are two dependable rabbit hole delivery services, one for your inbox, and one for your earbuds.
One:
📧📲
Quartz's Obsession Newsletter is a daily rumination on rabbit holes of allllll shapes and sizes, from the humble zipper to fountain pens; from Chinese typography to pop supergroup ABBA; from traffic lights to the scam that is cigarette filters. Be forewarned that you're subscribing to a massive deep dive delivered to your inbox every. dang. day.
It's like subscribing to The Economist. 😵
(Unless you already read it dutifully—don't worry, your secret is safe with me—have YOU ever tried keeping up with that magazine?! It's a month of reading, delivered every. week. without fail...)
Sip from the firehose with care, y'all.
Two:
🎧📱
Every Little Thing, hosted by Science Friday alum Flora Lichtman, is probably at the top of the list of podcasts I've shamelessly foisted with full MUPPET INTENSITY towards friends and family in the past year.
OH HELLO WHAT'S THAT DO YOU NEED PODCAST RECOMMENDATIONS LET'S TALK YES
The show started out, simply enough, as a celebration of the ✨wonders of the mundane✨—from the NASA-inspired industry of office plants, to the fearsome biology of the flamingo, to the people on C-SPAN whispering into the ears of congresspeople telling them what to say,—but then THEN then! they morphed the show into a "factual answering service" and introduced the Fact Emergency Hotline (833-RING-ELT) Now, with the help of experts across the globe, they track down callers' curiosities to return answers that aren't (always) easily googlable. How old is Winnie the Pooh? Where does that ubiquitous harrowing sound used in ALL reality television shows come from?
(They've even fully leaned into it and changed the show's logo to a 🐇🕳—here's before, and after.)
Every Little Thing is delightful. You should listen! Makes for engrossing listening on cross-country road trips.
Speaking of, how about...
one more for the road:
Sometimes,... when you resolve one rabbit hole, it... just ain't enough, and you need to chase it with another.
-
What was the first television "clip show"? ✂️📺
In television series, when writers run low on budget (as before a finale, or when they want to pad the episode count), they do what's called a clip show. Characters reminisce about past adventures, and the episode reruns clips of previous episodes to fill time so that they don't need to shoot a lot of new footage to fill the full timeslot.💬 Curses! Well, since we're trapped in this collapsed mineshaft, remember that time when...
🎬 [roll clips of earlier episodes as character flashbacks]While the precise origins are hard to pin down, clip shows began in the days of theatrical serials, as a precursor of the "Previously on..." recap used in every long-running drama on television today.
(Insert here another divagation: from Barry Shipman's 1938 Republic serial, to wonder horses! ✨🐴✨ and archetypes of old serials, to a silent film historian who quit it all to write about auto and boat repair. ANYHOW.)
Occasionally, screenwriters play with form—as in this second season episode of Community—and make a clip show of episodes they never got the chance to write.
Instead of being an exercise in economy, it becomes an exercise in overachieving.
What rabbit holes have you been falling down lately?
Thanks, Elissa, for The Pudding explainer link!
Illustrations from the British Library, the NYPL (1926), Animal Biography (1841), and Little Folks Natural History (1902), and photos by Emily Jennings Morgan and Dave Vichich.
(Still here? Please have a somewhat gross and goopy and fascinating fact.)
Check-in time on the CODE-NAMED PROJECTS:
- [✓] Went to the Museum Computer Network conference!
- [✓] Co-taught a workshop on empathy-building exercises (code-named BETAZED, yes, grooooan 🤓) with an all-star crew, and we made a zine(!!) [PDF, 12MB] which you can assemble at home. Huuuuuuuuge thanks to Mimosa & Beck & Rachel & Liz ...and everyone who attended and participated in the workshop.
- [✓] Got tape for a second episode of DIASPORA with C. and some absolutely wonderful guests.
- [→] Helped facilitate a session (UNTRAMMEL) on burnout and how to decide when to quit your job, which should be online in some form, soon.
- [⋯] Coding on STRAYLIGHT. JavaScript JavaScript JavaScript. Working on spreadsheets, too.
- [⋯] Working on the next bit of functionality for KIMON.
- [⋯] Noodling more with CHRYSAOR, including some of the usual holiday mischief.
- [⋯] Making time for EJECTA.
- [→] No news yet on CALAFIA or any of the rest.