As Far From Civilization As Possible

March 25, 2019

Hello internet friends,

after I’ve given you so much to read last week, this week it’s a whole different story. Or… well, three stories.

Turns out Your Drunk Self May Actually Be the Real You
Sleepy, slightly sad and just wanting to go home? Yeah, sounds about right.

E-scooters – even near me they suddenly creep up, those nasty little buggers. Because riding them is just slightly above vaping on the scale of obnoxious things to do in public, these things mostly stand around and are not being used. Which for me is a data point for the fact that there is still hope for humanity. But I guess if you had to use one of them for something, this is a pretty good idea: I Rode an E-Scooter as Far From Civilization as Its Batteries Could Take Me

The new Formula 1 season is upon us. And while I really don’t follow the sport really all that much anymore, I had a chuckle at this: Who has the fastest website in F1?
(And talking about F1 – the Netflix documentary series on the 2018 season is actually pretty compelling to watch, even if you’re not into the sport itself.)

That’s all for today,

toodles!

Fish Zapping

March 18, 2019

Hello internet friends,

I hope this letter finds you well, after it travelled back and forth underneath the oceans.

We stay underwater and have a lot into the past. Apparently Herodotus described a type of boat that nobody else whose words made it through the millenia ever mentioned, so people most thought: eh, old Herodotus. A world-class historian, not much of a nautical engineer.
Turns out if you look at the right place, you actually find more proof that this kind of boat exists – and where, if not the river Nile, would you find an old boat? Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right – after 2,469 years. Nice.

More underwater news? This interview is pretty bonkers: Latest Generation of Lionfish-Hunting Robot Can Find and Zap More Fish Than Ever
It sounds like a great idea to release an army of app-controlled fish-zapping robots. What could possibly go wrong?

Okay, enough underwater now, let’s go up in the sky!
Apparently a huge meteor hit the earth some time in December and nobody really noticed: Meteor blast over Bering Sea was 10 times size of Hiroshima
What’s even more interesting: a Japanese satellite took a picture of the entry event – and you’ll have to zoom it quite a bit to see it.

Okay, some more bits and pieces:

Toodles!

Two Identical Puffs

March 11, 2019

Hello internet friends,

have you ever been so generic that you saw a stock photo and thought it was you?

“Dominik, this could be something for your newsletter!” That wasn’t a wrong assumption at all.
Stone Age Cave Symbols May All Be Part of a Single Prehistoric Proto-Writing System – fascinating. Even more fascinating that we’re slowly moving back to that system these days. 🥳

This is very much my kind of humor: I commissioned an oil painting of Barbra Streisand’s cloned dogs
Just look at it.

I’ll share a secret with you – I, too, forget most of the articles I mention here in my emails. I do hope that every one of them is of interest to some of you, but like so many things most of these links are ephemeral, interesting for a moment, gone the next.
But some of them stay in my mind, often just under the surface and just once in a while they poke their head out to ask: “Hey, remember me?” And one of them is this pretty incredible story: I fell in love with a female assassin
That article is eleven years old now, did anyone of you ever watch the “major Hollywood film” that they wanted to make out of the story?

Toodles!

A Thief And A Skier

March 4, 2019

Hello internet friends,

do you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, heart beating and with just one question in your mind: “How do you spell that person’s name?”
Yeah, me neither.
But still, this is pretty fun: The Gyllenhaal Experiment – the visualisation is probably the best thing about it, right next to the crushing feeling that maybe one isn’t so good at spelling the last names of random American celebrities.

Now this is fascinating: The Secrets of the World’s Greatest Art Thief – and no, it’s not an Ocean’s [insert number here] story – turns out you don’t need all that many people for a successful heist. Or 200 of them.

I have the western approach corridor for the Zurich airport right over my head, a small-ish but busy airport nearby and a whole bunch of the big international air routes within viewing distance. There is also a lot of sky to see from here, so the chances that I see at least one plane when looking up at a clear day are pretty high. And of course I want to know what plane it is, where it goes and where it comes from. Obviously I have Flightradar24 running a lot. (Just now an Edelweiss Air A330 from Tampa to Zurich would be right in my view, if it weren’t so cloudy. And I could see the Enter Air 737 from Poznan to Fuerteventure as well, somewhere in the distance.)
So obviously I’m not really learning Flightradar24 — how it works? from this article, but you might. (And it reminds me that I should get my little Raspberry running again. I’m missing a lot of potentially interesting data.)

Number one sign I’m not an adventurer: When I hear “Many have died attempting to…” my first instinct is to then not try it.
Not this guy, though: Meet the skier who made the ‘impossible’ first solo descent of K2 Just the very first GIF/Movie is absolutely amazing.

I’m not an archaeologist, so my opinion doesn’t quite matter, but I somehow guess there was still some juvenile humor involved in this: Ancient Romans etched penis graffiti as a symbol of luck and domination

Toodles!