Archive

Hi friends, it’s Victor! I haven’t sent a letter in a while, but today I’m one year older, had the day off, and thought that besides spending the day eating I should share the many things I’ve chanced upon in the last couple months. It’s a busy one, but I tried to keep it concise. Happy autumn!

Wikipedia is the best website

• The Man of the Hole was a Brazilian indigenous man who lived on his own for almost 30 years, after the rest of his people were killed.

• Gruinard Island, in the Scottish Highlands, was covered in anthrax by the British military to test the feasibility of bioweapons during the Second World War. It remained contaminated until 1990.

• It’s a linguist’s wildest dream: there was a Basque–Icelandic pidgin in the 17th century.

• As part of a two-day promotion in 2021, a Taiwanese chain started to offer free sushi to people who had the (Chinese) word for ‘salmon’ in their name. Subsequently, at least 332 people changed their legal name to include “salmon”, thus inducing the salmon chaos incident.

• Shit life syndrome or SLS is a phrase used by doctors to describe the effect of poverty or abuse on some of their patients.

• There was a long-held misconception that California was an island.

• A couple of years ago, a Danish museum commissioned an artist to reproduce an artwork made out of banknotes, and supplied him with £62,000 to do so. He handed in two blank canvasses and called the artwork “Take the Money and Run”.

• A list of the deadliest animals to humans. (Sharks and bears don't make the cut.)

It’s getting cold

Hi friends! It’s Victor! Hope you’re thriving and have a lovely and dry (ish) summer. I’ve kept busy this month but still managed to read a few interesting things! Enjoy!

Wikipedia is the best website

• In 1991, a revisionist historian shared his phantom time conspiracy theory, which suggested that Otto III and Pope Sylvester II retroactively fabricated the Anno Domini dating system in order to place themselves in the year 1000 AD. History was fully rewritten, documents were forged, evidence was destroyed, in order to simply create three centuries of Early Middle Ages out of thin air (including Charlemagne).

• Ukraine had known an Alphabet War in the 19th century, when some ethnic groups tried to switch Ukrainian to use the Latin alphabet.

• Gay male speech is a real thing dahling.

• The Swedish Solar System is the largest representation of the solar system to scale, spanning across the entirety of Sweden.

• When ants lose the pheromone track of their colony, they begin following the ant in front of them: this works until there’s a slight deviation, which will eventually result in a centrifugal circle called an ant mill. It can reach hundreds of metres in diameter and ants will not stop until they die of exhaustion.

• In Britain, the “TV pickup” is a surge in demand on the electrical grid that happens when many people boil their kettle at the same time, to make a cup of tea during commercial breaks in popular television programmes. Having such a surge directly tied to TV schedules is a phenomenon that is unique to the United Kingdom: the National Grid has a team which studies previous patterns and schedules in advance to anticipate demand.

• Terminal lucidity is a well-documented return to mental clarity very shortly before death in patients that have severe psychiatric disorders.

• You’ve probably seen the Hitler teapot online, but it was a real product. That’s what happens when nobody in the marketing team says “uuuhhhm…”

(((quiet honk)))

Hi besties, it’s Victor! I hope you’re all photosynthesising well. Here’s some fun (and less fun) links to sip through this summer:

Wikipedia is the best website

• The bathing machine was a small hut on wheels used in England in the 18th and 19th century to allow people to change into their bathing suits and enter the ocean without being seen. They were eventually phased out with the rise of more liberal attitudes towards modesty and changing habits
  • Found through the article about Adamites, an early Christian group who did their religious services naked. (thanks Louise for sending this!)
• The helicopter hieroglyph is, well, a hieroglyph that our modern eyes interpret as looking like a helicopter. I’ve talked before about the delicious Wikipedia hole that are out-of-place artefacts, and this is one of them: ancient astronaut theorists pointed out this is proof that ancient Egyptians have been visited by aliens with spaceships
• Henneguya zschokkei is a multicellular parasite that lives inside salmon and is the only known eukaryote that does not use oxygen as part of its metabolism; the way in which it obtains its energy is still unknown. It’s theorised to have been a type of cancerous tumour growth in jellyfish, ultimately escaping and becoming a separate species now parasitising other animals.
• A list of last meals requested by prisoners sentenced to capital punishments.
• Erden Eruç is the first and only person to circumnavigate the World using his own muscle power — mostly on a rowboat and cycling. His trip lasted just over five years.
  • Colin Angus and Jason Lewis claimed a similar title before him but one wasn’t a _true circumnavigation and the other wasn’t solo for the entire journey.
• Beefsteak Nazis are socialists and communists who have joined the Nazi Parti — so named because they’re “red on the inside, brown on the outside”. (See also: watermelon for modern eco-socialists.)
• Romantic chess was a style of chess playing where it was important to win in style (!), popular in the 18th century and not dissimilar to the Romantic movement in other arts.
  • Insane bit somehow linking to the above: “During the 1930s, Nazi Germany co-opted chess as a political tool and to that end circulated propaganda alleging that the age of Romantic chess, dominated by dashing Aryan players such as Morphy and Anderssen, had been derailed by ‘cowardly, stingy’ positional chess exemplified by Jewish players like Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, and others.”
  • And talking of chess: there is a joke move called the Bongcloud Attack. (Yes, of course there is a Hotbox Variation). I do not know if that counts as romantic chess.
• Remember Boaty McBoatface? Get ready for Horsey Horseless, the 1899 prototype of an early automobile which had a wooden horse head on its front to avoid “frightening horses on the road”.

>:(

Hello friends, it’s Victor. Hope you’re all ready for the Coronation and the slow but sure return of the sun! Here’s a handful of things I read in the past month and wanted to share:

Wikipedia is the best website

• TIL that when it was originally proposed, the Celsius scale used to be reversed: 0º was boiling water, and 100º was ice melting. This lasted for a year, until Jean-Pierre Christin proposed a different scale.
• Frozen Dead Guy Days is… a festival… celebrating the cryogenic preservation of some old dude for 30 years? And these days it has coffin races, a polar plunge, live bands and a “frostbite fashion show”. Not sure how we got there, but it sounds fun.
• The Atari video game burial happened in 1983, interring hundreds of thousands of unsold very bad game cartridges in the ground of New Mexico.
• Sound-powered telephones are widely used on ships and ski lifts. They transform the sound pressure of a person’s voice into electric current, which is then transformed back into sound, and is therefore usable in places with limited power.
• The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet is an 80s song whose origin and artist have remained unknown for decades, leading to numerous theories and speculation about its creation. Its true origin remain a mystery to this day, despite major detective work from all corners of the Internet.
• A list of drugs known for off-label uses.

Ears international

Hi friends! Hope you’re all doing well and recovered from the lost hour. Here’s a few things I read this month and wanted to share.

Wikipedia is the best website

• In the early 20th century, couples in some US states (and in Sweden!) were legally required to test for syphilis and gonorrhea before they could get married.
• A posthumous marriage happens when one of the two parties is deceased (typically in war times to recognise a child born out of wedlock, but not always).
• Fan death is a belief in some cultures that leaving an electric fan on in a closed room can cause death by suffocation or hypothermia.
  • See also: Refrigerator death.
• When a Prime Minister takes office in Britain, they must write a letter of last resort. Copies of this letter are given to each of the UK’s four ballistic submarines; it contains instructions to follow if an enemy’s nuclear strike kills the prime minister and destroys the government. While their contents have always remained secret, they are rumoured to either be one of “retaliate”, “don’t retaliate”, “go under Australia’s command” or “use your own judgement”.
• Some winter resorts in Northern America have panty trees: it has become somewhat of a tradition to drop bras and knickers on trees below ski lifts.
• The Hawking Index of a book defines how far people will, on average, read through that book before stopping and giving up.
  • It’s named after A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which has a score in between Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow — incredibly, three books that I’ve tried to read before finding out later that the people who recommended them to me have never actually finished them either.
• In the early hours of a 2009 summer morning, a trader in London caused the oil futures drunk-trading incident after having had a bit too much to drink. The trades were worth half a billion dollars, causing “the price of […] crude oil to rise by more than $1.50 per barrel, which is generally only caused by major events with geopolitical significance”. At least I’ll feel better about my hangovers.

Scratch

Hey friends! I hope 2023 has treated you well so far. Here’s some things I’ve been reading lately:

Wikipedia is the best website

• The Fly Geyser is a particularly colourful man-made geyser, thanks to many species of algae that flourish in the extreme temperature around the rocks. It’s located in Nevada, on a ranch that has been bought by the Burning Man festival.
• Aluminium Christmas trees were all the rage in the 1960s.
• Learned from the history of AC power plugs and sockets that when electricity first arrived in homes, since it was mostly used for lighting, other appliances (vacuum cleaners, fans, irons) were plugged directly to light bulb sockets before the invention and standardisation of wall plugs.
• The Ranieri Filo della Torre literary prize is awarded for the best writing about extra virgin olive oil (from scientific theses to poetry and fiction).
• I’ve talked a few months ago about how the printing press caused the disappearance of the letter þ in English. TIL that this also happened to Welsh: “English printers, with type letter frequencies set for English and Latin, did not have enough k letters in their type cases to spell every /k/ sound as k, so the order went ‘C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth’”.
• There are a few twin films in existence: movies with a very similar plot or theme, released around the same time, but produced by completely different casts and studios.
• It is apparently common in the US to drop things for the new year, so here’s a list of objects dropped on New Year’s Eve.
• The concept of bootable business cards took me way back to a specific era of CDs. (Why the hell did we make them bootable?)

Chomp

Merry Christmas gorls, it’s Victor. Hope you’re all having a beautiful festive season and you’re appropriately overfed. Here’s a shorter-than-usual list of links I wanted to quickly share before I return to petting my parents’ cats:

Wikipedia is the best website

• A self-licking ice cream cone is a name for a system or organisation that only exists to perpetuate itself — such as government programs and charities who mostly raise budget and funds to keep existing and paying its salaries, without achieving their stated goals.
• The body transfer illusion is the perception of possessing and controlling body parts that aren’t your own, for example when using virtual reality, after the loss of a limb, or in controlled experiments.
• Heartless Bitches International was an early-web forum run by assertive and strong women to share their experience in a male-dominated world.
  • Via this article: Granny Peace Brigade and radical cheerleading.
• The potato paradox is an infamous name for calculations that have a counter-intuitive result. As always, I’m loving the “(being purely mathematical potatoes)” and “(being purely mathematical water)” in textbook problem descriptions.
• Around a thousand Quadro Trackers (“also known as Positive Molecular Locators”) were sold to US enforcement agencies and schools in the 90s. The device claimed to be able to find drugs, weapons, explosives and missing people based on a “signature” card of the object or even a Polaroid of the person’s face. The manufacturers were eventually charged with fraud after the FBI found the device was mostly empty.
• The Balloonomania was a fad interest in hot air balloons in the late 18th century.
  • See also: railway mania, canal mania, bike boom, tulip mania.
• You experience the doorway effect when going into another room and forget what you came here to do, or thinking about.

Seasons greetings

Hi babes, it’s Victor! I hope you’re having a meaningful day. We’ve moved into our new house a couple weeks ago! It’s been a journey and a half, but I’ve learned many things from it already (for example, that I’m much worse than I thought at DIY).

Here’s some of the things I read in the last couple of months and wanted to share with you:

Wikipedia is the best website

• The possibly first online webcam was looking at the Trojan Room coffee pot, as great innovations always come from… researchers needing to be caffeinated.

• Potato Parcel is a website that lets you send someone a potato with a custom message.

• A list of pizza varieties by country (with some truly… fascinating variants).

• I’m very excited by the prospect of a butter mountain, but the economic realities and waste involved are a bit less exciting. (“See also: wine lake”.)

• The Demon Cat was purported to haunt the US government buildings in Washington. Security guards have reported seeing it wandering around the Capitol in the nights before the assassinations of JFK and Abraham Lincoln.

• 2011 saw many things, including the birth of an Avril Lavigne replacement conspiracy theory. (“Lavigne herself has denied the theory on multiple occasions”, which is a bit suspicious if you ask me.)

  • “See also: Melania Trump replacement conspiracy theory”

Hi friends, it’s Victor! I hope you’re all doing well.

I turned 30 on Monday. Things right now don’t feel that different from earlier in life:

When I was younger, I once read that 30 is the best age to be because you’re still in your twenties mentally, but now you (hopefully) also have more money.

Happy summer, beautiful readers, it’s Victor. I hope you've found the nice cold spot in your homes. These newsletters have been few and far between this year — but rarity means it’s a nice treat when you get one, right?

Here’s some HTML documents I gazed over this summer and wanted to share with you:

Wikipedia is the best website

• Modern British food safety laws come to us from that time a market stall selling sweets accidentally replaced sugar with arsenic to save costs, killing 21 people and poisoning 200.
• The Wicked Bible is a 1631 edition of the Bible with an unfortunate typo, telling its readers “thou shalt commit adultery”.
• Cyclists of the 19th century had a problem: dogs loved to chase and attack bikes, which was a very perilous risk to take in a time before the rabies vaccine. In what now seems like a very 19th-century way of fixing the problem, gunsmiths started producing pocket pistols such as the Velo-Dog, that were designed to scare off or defend against these rabid canids.
• In a shipwreck, the custom of the sea defines the preferred order for cannibalism.
• The mean world syndrome is the common delusion of thinking the world is much more violent than it factually is, as a result of exposure to media that say otherwise.
• A comprehensive list of Barbie's careers. (Over 200 and counting!)
• A Jesus nut is engineer’s jargon for the piece connecting the rotor to the helicopter blades, so called because “if the Jesus nut were to fail in flight, the only thing left for the crew to do would be to pray to Jesus”. It has become by extension the name of mechanical pieces that are considered single points of failure.
• In computing, an embarrassingly parallel problem is one that can be safely turned into multiple tasks running at the same time.
• The article on placeholder names is rich, not least for mentioning the placeholder name for placeholder names (a cadigan).

Hello! It’s Victor! Long time no email. I’ve been very busy with work and the (definitely not stressful) process of trying to buy a house, but I’m still finding time to send you some links to keep you busy surfing the high waves of the web while the sun is playing hide and seek.

( 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿a note for Scotland pals: I’ll be up there at the end of June!! If you’re around reply to this email and let’s catch up!)

Wikipedia is the best website

• Elizabeth Line? Yes, she’s a gymnast.
• Unobtainium is a placeholder name in engineering and fiction, given to an ideal material that doesn’t actually exist (or exists, but is not practically obtainable).
• A list of games that Buddha would not play. (Includes an early version of blindfold chess.)
• Phosphene is the phenomenon of seeing light when there isn’t actually light coming into your eye — for example through pressure or electrical stimulations.
• Help I got lost on linguistics Wikipedia again and I found some good jargon:
  • 999, 420, 24/7, 411, and in France, 3615, are examples of numeronyms: they’re numbers that have become semantic words. Some of them are composed from a mix of letters and numbers to form abbreviations: K9, a11y, sk8r.
  • Fossil words are obsolete words that aren’t used by themselves anymore, but still live on through some idioms (much ado about nothing, lo and behold, eke out).
  • Many of those are part of a big family called irreversible binomials: two words forming an idiom which no longer “work” if you swap their order. You can say loud and clear, mac and cheese, rise and fall, in and out, first and foremost, wear and tear, but you will sound unhinged if you flip the two sides — even though it’s still syntactically and semantically correct.
    • See also: order force for adjectives.
  • Unpaired words aren’t the opposite: they’re orphaned from the counterpart you’d expect from their prefix or suffix. You can improvise, postpone, be innocent or ruthless, but you can’t provise, prepone, be nocent and ruthful.
• There is a Wikia about aesthetics, and they have a list of aesthetics, and yes I have also lost several hours learning about them.
• Clocky is an alarm clock on wheels that runs away when you try to grab it, forcing you to get out of bed.
• To help people with amputated limbs deal with phantom limb pain, some doctors use mirror therapy to regain a sense of control.
• Phallic architecture. Need I say more?
  • There’s a penis park in South Korea.

Hello, guys, gals and non-binary pals. Hope you’re having a lovely spring time and that it will last wherever you are 😎  Here’s some links I wanted to share with you this month.

Wikipedia is the best website

• Moustache cups were popular in Victorian times, when waxed moustaches were much more common; they have a small ledge inside that allow the drinker to sip tea without having wax melting into the cup.
• Euro English is a variant of English spoken in continental Europe, particularly around EU institutions. It’s characterised by using some false friends from Romance language (“actual” for “current”, “eventually” for “possibly”, “how is it called?”) and introduces the concept of clusivity.
• You can find a Rednaxela Terrace in Hong Kong, taking its name from a transliteration mistake of the name “Alexander” read backwards.
• Bertha Benz did the first cross-country journey in an automobile by herself and it was certainly… a JOURNEY.
• The cat gap is a period of about 7.5 million years during which there are very few fossils of cat species found in North America, with disputed explanations.
• Anywhere on Earth designates when a day has passed everywhere on Earth (in practical terms, that’s UTC-12).
• A list of people claimed to be (re)incarnations of Jesus (astonishingly, it does not include Jesus himself).
• The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free is an anarchist, pro-union parody of the original, noted for its accuracy of drawings.
• Coffee palaces were a type of alcohol-free hotel, popular in Australia in the 19th century.
• Some parts of England have gurning contests where you should show your ugliest mug.

Slurpp

Hello, beautiful reader! It’s Victor. I hope you’ve all had a lovely start to 2022. I’ve not sent a newsletter in a while so this one is pretty packed, I hope it’ll keep you busy to distract you from the war around us :)))

Wikipedia is the best website

• In 1912, Japan competed in the Olympics for the very first time and sent Shizō Kanakuri, a promising marathon runner, to Stockholm. Alas, the combination of a rough 18-day journey to Sweden, his coach catching tuberculosis on arrival, and the hot weather had all taken their toll: he started the race, but dropped out halfway through. Ashamed, he never reported back to the race judges, who officially listed him as “missing”, and quietly returned to Japan. In 1967, Swedish Television tracked him down and gave “the missing marathoner” a chance to finish his run. He gladly did, crossed the ribbon, and was given an official time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds.
• A bean-feast is not, in fact, another name for an English breakfast.
• In the late 19th century, New Jersey had a boroughitis problem. When commuters started to move there, they voted en masse to break up existing counties into many new boroughs and form their separate local governments.
• Some lists:
  • If you’re looking for cute way to re-do your kitchen, highly recommend this list of Euclidean uniform tilings. (I’ll be impressed if you do it with apeirogons.)
  • A list of fictional ducks that is way richer than the McDuck family.
  • And if you’re very bored from Netflix, why not have a look in this list of longest films. (My favourite might be this one made out of spite.)
• Songwriter and musician Matt Farley allegedly released over 22,000 songs under 80 different band names. He’s essentially brute-forcing the Spotify money-making algorithm by providing musical results for random words people search online: ”according to Farley, one song that contains only the word “poop” repeated over and over generates $500 in streaming revenue every month, likely in part because children request it from Alexa”. That, and thousands of versions of “happy birthday” sung with a different name in each.
• Jotto is an early version of Wordle.
• Free band name: Amplified Cactus.
• Found a new all-time classic of court cases names: United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls.

Back rubs

Good evening, it’s Victor! Hoping you’re all safe and Omicron-free. Here’s my last newsletter of the year to keep you busy this holiday season:

Wikipedia is the best website

• Wardian cases were the OG terrariums in the 19th century. For the first time, these miniature glasshouses allowed people to transport and keep plants that didn’t take well to long sea travels, when seeds or dry rhizomes didn’t work well. Victorian-era plant dads certainly found a use for them during the Fern Fever, but they were perhaps more crucial in helping the British colonies break global monopolies. Over 20,000 tea plants were smuggled out of China to grow in Assam, and rubber trees from Brazil were taken to what are now Sri Lanka and Malaysia, changing global trade forever. (via Martin)

• The largest heist in the history of the Canada was, obviously, a theft of maple syrup.

• There is a mountain called Halti that straddles Finland and Norway. It is notable because the highest point of Finland (1,324 m) sits right on that border: its actual peak, 41 metres higher, is just on the other side of the border, in Norway. For the 100th independence anniversary of Finland in 2017, Norwegians wanted to make them a little gift by moving the borders a little bit and gift them an actual peak as their highest point. (Alas, changing borders would have required a ¾ quorum in the Norwegian parliament, which didn’t go through.)

• A capitonym is a word whose meaning (and sometimes pronunciation) can change depending on whether the word is capitalised or not. For example Polish/polish, Turkey/turkey, May/may, Ionic/ionic…

• Timothy Dexter is an entrepreneur I can only describe as the Elon Musk of his day, who somehow became successful by sheer luck alone (shipping coal to Newcastle and selling bed warmers in the West Indies).

• Onfim was a six-year old boy from 13th century Russia. Some of his drawings and homework exercises survived until today: and it’s truly enlightening to see that kids’ drawings haven’t changed that much since the Middle Ages.

• A list of house types. So many house types!

• Some animals have better night vision thanks to a tissue called tapetum lucidum, which is also what gives them the eerie green laser eyes called “eyeshine” when using flash photography.

• Some Chinese people are running “egg fried rice protests”: posting recipes of the dish online as a jab to one of Mao Zedong’s sons, allegedly killed during the Korean War after cooking this during the day.

The Holy Trinity

Good evening, friends old and new! Here's another episode of this newsletter (after missing last month's issue), with some things I found interesting lately.

Wikipedia is the best website

• Morgan Island in South Carolina is perhaps the closest thing we have to Jurassic Park, except the island is only inhabited by about 4,000 rhesus monkeys.

• Neurocracy is a sci-fi story set on a clone of Wikipedia in 2049, which you can explore interactively. (Much more immersive than the one I sent a few months back!)

• Sunstones are a type of translucent mineral which may have been used as a navigation device in medieval Iceland, thanks to the way it reflects polarised light.

• An ice circle is a very rare phenomenon where a circular sheet of ice forms above a lake and rotates. There are human-made ice carousels that reproduce this effect.

• The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in Wales is the highest aqueduct in the world and offers a scary, scary view.

• Behold: skateboarding dogs. ("See also: skateboarding duck")

• That Guy… Who Was In That Thing is a documentary about the guys who were in these things — actors who were recognisable enough from a key role without ever having made it to star level. An actresses sequel also exists.

:þ

Good evening, it's Victor! Hope you're enjoying the last days of summer. This is the 30th edition of this newsletter already! Here's some things I read and wanted to share before closing this month.

Wikipedia is the best website

• The Anti-Flirt Club launched in the 1920s, to protect young women from unwelcome attention from men in the street and offer them a drive.

• Frenchville French is a dialect of French still spoken by only two people in 2007.

• The Chinese word for "crisis" has its own page, to cover the famous misinterpretation of the characters as “danger” + “opportunity”.

• In 1971 an American prisoner sued Satan and his servants for causing him misery and unwarranted threats, caused his downfall, and therefore "deprived him of his constitutional rights". (The lawsuit was dismissed on procedural grounds; I guess they couldn't find the Devil's advocate.)

• The Volkswagen currywurst isn't just some name coincidence: the German car maker has been producing sausage since 1973 (under the part number 199 398 500 A). Initially made for their workers, in the restaurants in its German factories, they are now also sold externally and given as a gift in dealerships to people purchasing a new car. In fact, in recent years the company has recently produced more sausages than cars.

  • They also produce Volkswagen ketchup to go with it.

  • If it's that good, it's not one you'd like to put in horsebread.

• Alice in Wonderland syndrome is a neuropsychological condition that distorts perception, meaning objects may appear bigger, smaller, farther or closer than they actually are.

• A shit flow diagram… actually does what it says on the tin. It is used as a tool in developing cities to identify easy-win areas of improvement in the sewage and waste systems.

• A sham surgery is used in clinical trials for new surgical interventions in order to neutralise the placebo effect, and identify incidental side effects of procedures around the surgery.

  • For example, I remember reading that some people who have been experiencing intense back pain have recovered after a sham orthopaedic operation: the mandated post-surgery rest of several weeks and physiotherapy exercises were enough on their own to let the body recover. Previously, doctors did not make patients take all that time off work and activities before considering a surgery.

• Being a faggot voter was a common form of electoral abuse in the UK. Back when landowners were the only people with a right to vote, it was possible for them to divide their property into subunits and transfer the title of each one to another person, hence creating new voters who could then vote for whoever the original landowner wished, “bundling” their ballots.

Chomp chomp

Good evening everyone! It’s Victor. I ended up taking a newsletter holiday last month — the move went well (and loving Bristol so far!) but I needed some downtime.

Here’s things I’ve seen over the last two months and wanted to share. They’ve added up so I tried to keep the description short.

Wikipedia is the best website

Hi beautiful people, it's Victor! I hope you're doing great.

Some personal news: I'm moving to Bristol next month! It's an exciting (but slightly scary) change, and I'm looking forward to having a new city to explore. Also it's hard to realise it's already been six years in London; I'll sorely miss the people I've met here. Say hi if you want to grab a pint outside before I go!

Here's some things I wanted to share — it's a bit shorter than usual, but that's less effort for you:

Wikipedia is the best website

Hello, it's Victor. Hoping your April vibes have been good, and may the sun remain where you are. Here's some good things I wanted to share with you this month:

Wikipedia is the best website

• Devil Eyes was the codename of a failed CIA project for the development and distribution of a lifelike action figure looking like Osama bin Laden, with a face that would turn demonic when heated. The goal of the program was to “scare children and their parents, in an effort to turn public opinion against Al-Qaeda”.
• As of 2017, there were 373 women in the United States called Abcde (pronounced ab-sah-dee).
• Chaos engineering is a reliability technique developed at Netflix, where “monkeys” periodically shut down random production servers, in order to force engineers to prepare for unexpected downtime, test how remaining systems respond to the outage, and automate recovery without anyone noticing.
• During the hyperinflation in the 1920s, a new disorder called zero stroke started affecting some German people — primarily cashiers, bookkeepers, and bankers. Exhausted by having to constantly run calculations running in the billions and trillions for mundane transactions, the patients wanted to “write endless rows of zeros”; some people reportedly "became confused when referring to numbers and would state that they were ten billion years old or had forty trillion children".
• John Harvey Kellogg, the creator of the infamous corn flakes, was also a Seventh-day Adventist with interesting views on sexuality, and an ardent campaigner against masturbation. His research around food and diet was heavily influenced by the idea that a plain and healthy meal, twice a day, would help prevent sexual arousal: and thus was born the breakfast staple.
  • He is, notably, also credited for inventing peanut butter, and one of the first meat substitutes (that he called “Nuttose”).
• Speaking of which, guess what the Nut Rage Incident, aka “nutgate”, is about. (Hint: it led to a 12 month prison sentence).
• Museum fatigue is a well-studied state of tiredness caused by visiting museums or exhibitions.

Peep peep

Hi friends, it’s Victor for another episode of Nested! I hope you’re all well. May the sun keep showing its face more often.

Wikipedia is the best website

• is the first executable image of a human brain, that was developed in 2031.

Good evening my squirrel friends, it's Victor, and this is the newsletter known as Nested. Hope you're well. Here's some fun things I've read this month and wanted to share.

(Hope the links work this time!)

Wikipedia is the best website

• The Lesbian Kiss Episode (free band name!) is a recurring trope of many 90s TV shows, where there is a single scene of two women kissing each other — typically one straight character, experimenting with a lesbian/bi woman, that's then never mentioned again for the rest of the series. And it's excellent for the ratings.
  • See also: LUG, or Lesbian Until Graduation.
• Baker-Miller pink is a shade of pink that has been allegedly observed to “reduce hostile, violent or aggressive behaviour”.
• Tonibler and Bler are male first names in Kosovo, given to a few babies around 1999 to honour Tony Blair's credited role in ending the conflict and massacre from Yugoslavia against Kosovar Albanians.
• Switzerland has an Anti-PowerPoint Party founded ahead of the 2011 federal elections, which aims to submit a referendum banning the use of PowerPoint in business presentations.
• A list of churches in the Antarctic (all very pretty)
  • And its counterpart: an article about crime in Antarctica. (Includes arson at one of the aforementioned churches).
• Dixie Longate is a drag queen who was dared by a friend to try to sell Tupperware boxes in drag, which led her to develop a solo act around it and led her to accidentally become the top sales representative of Tupperware in North America.
  • Also casually listed as a dancer in the Titanic movie.
• Most Wikipedian name: Disambiguation (disambiguation)
• Bialbero di Casorzo are two trees in Italy, notable for being epiphyte: it is a cherry tree happily growing on top of a mulberry tree. Some more pictures here, which also tell us that this likely happened through the sheer coincidence of a bird dropping a cherry seed on the right intersection of branches at the right time of growth, and the second developed roots through the first one's hollow trunk. Epiphyte plants are pretty common (think moss and orchids), but two trees managing to grow this big are very rare: a park in Croatia has the only other known instance of a double-decker tree in Europe.
• Shoe sizes in the UK are measured in barleycorns.

Happy new year, beautiful people! It's Victor. Here's some fun things I read and wanted to share in this first month:

Wikipedia is the best website (happy 20th birthday!)

• Mobile phone throwing is an international sport (with national championships and all) that started in Finland in 2000, to promote awareness about the recycling of obsolete mobile phones.
• Tsundoku is a word of Japanese slang that describes the habit of acquiring many books without reading them.
• The Great Michigan Pizza Funeral was held in 1973, after a manufacturer was forced to recall and dispose of 29,188 frozen pizzas which were (incorrectly) suspected to be contaminated with botulism. They were buried in a hole 5.5m deep, in front of onlookers (who were fed safe pizza).
• Mark and recapture is a statistical method used to estimate the population size of animals or of a certain demographic.
• Oscar bait is a term to describe movies that “appear to have been produced for the sole purpose of earning nominations for Oscars”, pinning hopes on qualities that have historically wowed judges. The hallmarks: dramas set against tragic historical events, characters with a disability, lavish productions, and including cast or directors with previous awards.
• If it looks a bit like the Conservatives have been channeling Beyoncé in the past few years, it's because they're asserting power and confidence through the Tory power stance.
• The article about tea in the UK raises the highly divisive question of whether milk should be poured before or after the tea. Arguments on both sides cover all grounds:
  • Scientific ("studies suggest that the heating of milk above 75º C (adding milk after the tea is poured, not before) does causes denaturation of the lactalbumin and lactoglobulin");
  • Practical ("By putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk, whereas one is likely to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round" says George Orwell);
  • And how rich you were ("The order of these steps is thought to have been, historically, an indication of class. Only those wealthy enough to afford good-quality porcelain would be confident of its being able to cope with being exposed to boiling water unadulterated with milk.")
• The Schiehallion experiment attempted to calculated the mean density of the Earth by placing a pendulum near a Scottish mountain.
• Jeremy is a snail that's known for having a shell that coils to the left instead of to the right, a one-in-a-million genetic mutation. It is named after Jeremy Corbyn, for being a “lefty” snail (and after Corbyn's famous love for gardening).
  • This short documentary retraces the story of Jeremy and the (successful) search for another left-coiled snail in the country, so that they could (unsuccessfully) mate.
• A list of the longest walks — something to beat next time you're out to the park doing your daily exercise allowance.
• Freedom Toasters are freely available kiosks that let you insert a blank CD or DVD, and burn upon them your choice of open source software (typically Linux distributions). They are intended to reduce the digital divide in poor or rural areas with limited access to high-speed internet, which makes downloading up-to-date software prohibitively expensive. The idea was more popular in the 2000s, but some kiosks still exist today in parts of South Africa and India.

Fluff basket

Good day beautiful people, it’s Victor!

Here’s my monthly compilation of links I found enjoyable this December. Wishing you all happy holidays — as bizarre and lonely as they are this year — and sending plenty of good vibes.

Wikipedia is the best website

Hello, hello, it’s Victor.

What a month, huh? Amid the good news and the chaos I’ve read a lot of cool things this month, and as usual here’s what I wanted to share this month.

Just so you know, I’ve changed the software hosting this newsletter from TinyLetter to Buttondown, which is why the email may look a tiny bit different. You don’t need to do anything to keep receiving it, but let me know if you have delivery or display issues!

• See also: naan bread, chai tea, queso cheese.
• If other pleonasms like “a free gift” leave most people indifferent, nothing truly annoys pedantic people more than using things like “PIN number”, “ATM machine”, “DC comics” or “LCD display”. I’ve learned that this is, very aptly, named the RAS syndrome.
• Talking of names, Hurricane Bawbag has perhaps one of the best short “Naming” sections in Wikipedia history.

Hello! It’s Victor! Thank you for reading me last month! Here’s more links to keep you busy!

Updates from last month

• I don’t miss social networks at all
• I still exercise a bit every day and it’s still killing me but I do feel a bit better
• I still do Duolingo every day and I now understand some Spanish memes, so there’s that
• So turns out having new year’s resolutions can actually work (but I’ll revisit that at the end of the year) (it’s never too late to make yours)
• The new part-time design job is great so far! The work culture is refreshing, and it's good to go back to some exploration in my work. Simultaneously, I've been promoted to senior in my other part-time consultancy job last month! There's a mix of exciting novelty and reassuring stability in my week now, and it's a great balance to have.

Wikipedia is the best website

• De Hogeweyk is a village in the Netherlands where all residents have dementia. Described as something between a closed nursing home and the hyperreality of The Truman Show, the residents can live and roam freely around the village but not leave it, and carers act as if they were regular neighbours, never wearing medical white gowns. CNN has a great documentary on it.
• The full standard of the Interplanetary Internet.
• Are you ever doing something and suddenly it feels like you’ve seen this exact scene already in the past, or in your dreams? I’m afraid you don’t have prophetic abilities, the déjà vu effect is just your memory malfunctioning sometimes, like two thirds of healthy people.
  • It’s not the same as a false memory, where you’re remembering something that has never actually happened. This is a super interesting page, purely for explaining how malleable memory can be under certain conditions; and how this has happened in multiple documented (and probably many undocumented) legal cases. Common biases in question wordings have dramatic effects: if you ask someone about “the” stop sign on the scene rather than “a” stop sign, they are more likely to recall (even falsely) that there was one.
  • Talking about biases, choice-supportive bias is a hell of a choice-supportive drug.
• List of lists:
  • List of inventors killed by their own inventions (my personal bravo to Franz Reichelt)
  • List of all Crayola crayon colours including rare releases like metallic and scented crayons (“In 1995, Crayola changed some of the scents because of complaints received from parents that some of the crayons smelled good enough to eat”.)
  • List of places where it is illegal to die, ranging from the absurdly political to the oddly sacred.
  • List of varieties of scorched rice around the world.
• This summary of The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks gives the key to cocktails that should be drunk before dinner: less sweet, more alcoholic.
• Sure, you shouldn’t trust everything on Wikipedia, and not treat it as a scientific source. But then… why is it still so accurate? Easy: Cunningham’s Law.

Long reads, sad stories

• Some Clinics in Canada, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands give heroin to people suffering from addiction, and it works. Much like the argument for other monitored drug-taking, the effects on public health and local safety remain largely positive. (The rest of that Vox series on the opioids epidemic is really good.)
• In the last two decades, Japan has started to see an unusual crime wave coming from the elderly. The state pension is so hard to live on that many are committing petty theft and assault attempts to go to jail, because jail means free food, accommodation, and less solitude. The phenomenon is becoming so widespread (and so costly to society) that officials are considering reworking the entire elderly care system.
• How to help someone who is suicidal? The answer could be postcards and text messages.
• Iceland knows how to stop teen substance abuse, but the rest of the world isn’t listening. Give teenagers things to do (sports, music, activities) and actually fund it, set rules like curfews so you can prevent “but the others can do it!”, and the abuse stops rather dramatically.
  • This shift in national culture and policy may be one of the more rational explanations for the unusually high rate of creative Icelanders, with so many residents writing books, being in bands, or in high-ranking sports teams, often juggling it with another job.
  • The first time I went there in 2014, someone told me that some of the most internationally famous pop and rock bands of Iceland grew up around the Reykjanes peninsula (25 miles south of the capital, where the main airport is). I found it vaguely surprising, considering that the area looks a bit like an industrial, sad desert with nothing particularly creative in there. But up until 2006 the region hosted an US military base next to the airport. The base broadcasted a radio station with contemporary American music for the soldiers off base, and that station could be picked up by the local residents; who for a long time, discovered music that was quite different from what was available in the rest of Iceland. This is where local kids got their musical inspiration, and ended up making some waves.
    How’s that, for a narrative of people just inspired by the nature around them?

Slap Slap Slap

In my ears

• Lizzo - Cuz I Love You (soul hip-hop / US / 2019)

• “It’s Just a Matter of Time Till Everybody Loves Lizzo”: if you don’t love her yet, add this fantastic, hilarious interview to your reading list.