Hello internet friends,

this weekend I didn’t do anything but watch a digger digging a hole. Thanks a lot.
(Well, not quite: for those of you who understand German and listen to podcasts – I did that again, after quite a while.)

Nothing sounds like a better idea like “Uber for Mental Health” – especially not when it’s from a bunch of dudes who
“intend to do a lot of neat things with the collected data.”

Meanwhile in the department of rich people being rich: Virgin’s Richard Branson Unveils a Plane That Travels from London to NYC in 3.5 Hours
As a big fan of the Concorde this is something I’ll keep watching – let’s see if they manage to get around the problems the Concorde had.

This is rather awesome: Two Teenage Girls Built Africa’s First-Ever Private Satellite
Go for it, young space girls!

If you have a bit of time – and you probably do, given that this email is a bit short – you might want to learn about Sima Qian, the first proper Chinese historian.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

apparently this is a commercial, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it is also great content.

Sometimes things that used to be there are suddenly not there anymore. These things usually are not sunk warships, though. Well – it might be time to learn about low-background steel to understand why these things are probably pretty valuable scrap material.
It still boggles my mind a bit how the market for stuff like that works.

We covered robot sex here before. (Which was disturbing, apparently. At least it wasn’t muppets.) Now we are watching Westworld and go :thinking_face: – how ethical is it really to do things to appliances?
And maybe, while we’re at it – what about VR?

Uh-oh, you’re old! And so is ICQ, which is still around. idk, somehow things were a lot better when that one was still the thing to use. After all we didn’t have that crap on there.

Oh man, I certainly did not miss the cold war. And at the moment it seems like the propaganda – or as we call it these days: post-truth – is winning on all fronts.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

this is probably my fourth or fifth attempt of writing that first paragraph and nothing really works. Just imagine a whole bunch of confused anger right here. You probably don’t have to – I’m almost sure you feel it too.
And if you don’t? Well, good for you.

And here are some new things for you to learn! Because learning new things is always a good thing. Broaden your horizon.

A bunch of archaeologists sent a submarine to the bottom of the Black Sea and what they found might surpr… Sorry.
What they found were the remains of more than 40 sunk ships from the last thousand years. That worked because apparently there’s not much oxygen down there, which helps to preserve the wrecks for such a long time. The more you know!

The Nebra Sky Disc is another artifact from a time long gone. (Or so we hope.) It was found by a bunch of looters and turned out to be not such a lucky thing for them. (Seriously, read this rather short article. It’s funny and almost as exciting as a fictional thriller.)

Evolution is a funny thing. We can all agree that it is a thing – I hope. But we still haven’t quite figured out how it works exactly. Turns out it might not be all in the genes.

There are a lot of interesting museums all around the world. One of the better ones might be the Museum of Rocks That Look Like Faces. I’m not too sure what we can learn from it but it does seem like something worth looking into.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

this comes a bit later than usual, but it took a long sleep, a lot of soup and a coffee to keep both a cold and the demon dogs at bay.
Let’s get to it, then.

Another clear sign we are in fact living in a cyberpunk future is that we now have people who can fly a drone around to take control of lightbulbs. This is both slightly terrifying and slightly amazing. (Unrelated sidenote: does anyone need some used Hue lights?)

If you aren’t watching Westworld, yet, you do miss out on some quality TV. (Which is something that can be said about so much these days. I say it about Westworld because that’s what I’m watching right now. I’m probably not watching so many other great series, but, you know… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) Anyway, a good way to measure a series’ cultural impact is to look at the quality of fan fiction that appears around it.

First they came for our headphone jacks and I didn’t speak up, because meh. Then they came for our other ports and I only grumbled a bit, because first world problem. But what Apple is doing now is too much.

Warning! If you don’t like tentacled monsters from the deep, don’t follow the next link. If you do, have a look into the weird ways Humboldt squids communicate.

Toodles.