Archive

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

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

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

• 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”.

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

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!)

• 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.

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!