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.

Hello internet friends,

at some point in August the internet – or at least the filter bubble I have created for myself – was happily sharing articles about a script that managed to predict depression in people based on the Instagram filters they like to use. (Strangely enough I did not mention it in these emails back then – maybe because it was too everywhere? Slightly overcado?)
Most of us just read these little nuggets of pop science, wonder how they fit into our view of the world (“I don’t use Inkwell, so that means I’m probably not depressed.”) and then forget about them. So it took quite a while until someone noticed something a bit off with the raw data – the depression rate of the people who “volunteered” for the study was much, much higher than the norm.

(I used to put these little lines here back in the days to let you know that one topic is over and the next one begins. Is that something you’d want back? Does it help? I always assumed you were all trained by the internet to jump from topic to topic anyway, but maybe not?)

Nowadays it is shockingly simple and inexpensive to get good high quality aerial photos. The hurdles are usually administrative and not technical – but that hasn’t always been the case: people used to put film cameras on pigeons.

If there is one thing that’s inevitable near airports, it is noise complaints. Turns out that these usually come from a very small number of very vocal people. (Turns out turns out: this is the case in the US, nobody really checked how it is globally. But hey, it is a better narrative and makes for easier headlines to just generalise it, right?)

While this article didn’t quite cause the “whiplash-inducing paradigm shift” it promised, it was very interesting indeed: many plants that we know today got their current shape back when megafauna roamed the earth. One of those big animals might even have been the “Higgs bison.”

Back in the 80s a flight crashed on a remote mountain in Bolivia – and there’s still no real explanation or background on what happened. Two dudes decided – more or less for fun – to climb that mountain and see for themselves what’s going on.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends!

Did you know that being rich is boring when nobody sees you? Yeah, well, me neither. It’s the slogan of a new app called Rich Kids which is exactly as terrible as it sounds.
I don’t know. For some reason I prefer our little gathering of Smart Kids right here.

I watched Being George Clooney this weekend, a documentary about dubbing movies and featuring a whole lot of people from all over the world who are the voice of George Clooney and his female co-stars. (They could have just called it “Being Julia Roberts” – wtf?) I have linked to this article about dubbing Seinfeld before but I did not know that the Italians are crazy about their dubbers.

At some point I want to visit Shenzen. You wonder why? Wonder no more.

Before I write these emails I really need a healthy amount of the healing power of crystals. Maybe that would help Rinna as well? If not, there’s always Molly.

This story somehow gets weirder and weirder. (Warning: it’s a podcast episode, so you’ll probably have to listen to it. They do have a full transcript, but I found that a bit hard to read.)

So, these daydreams – it’s not just me?
This poor lady in the interview sounds like she’s having these a lot more than I ever did, though.

The trolley problem used to be a pretty theoretical thing to ponder – how often are we in situations where we get to decide where a trolley will roll, anyway? But these days, designers and developers of self-driving cars will have to think about that. A lot. There’s this webpage where you do a couple of decisions and see for yourself. (I have my own kind of result…)
If you’re working at Mercedes Benz, the answer to these questions is a little bit easier.

Wow. This is already a long mail. Do you still have the energy for more? Weeeell, let’s do this, in a quickfire way:

This dude has a fascinating life.

This dude is fed up with startups.

This fictional dude is a blueprint for many modern real-life villains.

This dude seems alright.

This dude did not know when to stop.

These dudes need a good slapping.

See, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Enough content for the next week to enjoy.

Until then: toodles! Be safe and maybe do some yoga.

Hello internet friends,

I’m a bit late today, but in exchange you’re getting an email filled with all the dread and rage that only an eight-hour non stop meeting can provide. Soooo… onwards!

I went to an high school where Latin was the first language and all the classics were really important. So, obviously my understanding of the rough timeframe between the death of the dinosaurs and 500AD is more or less this: First there was a group of monkeys, who got domesticated by dogs. A bunch of them moved between the two big streams, where they wore Hammer pants and rubbed bottles to release snarky ghosts. Another bunch of them were visited by aliens and learned how to build big stone things in the desert. The remaining people sort of spread around the globe to provide something for Tomb Raider level designers to copy.
Out of nowhere the Greek decided to be democratic, smacked the Persians around a bit, got lazy and disrupted by a bunch of Italian upstarts. Now after those stopped killing everybody and started to sing in their bathtub while their city burned down, they were overrun by people who were barely done interbreeding with Neanderthals. At this point, everybody went into crazy religious barbarism.

You can see, that very long and proper education was really successful in teaching me about history. Turns out that this is all absolutely wrong and crazy euro-centric. Oh, well.

Fun fact frid… monday! Guess which medium the youngs like to use for getting their news!

Someone like me for whom English is the second language (actually, did you read that long “history” paragraph carefully enough to notice that it’s my third one?) has to learn this crap really carefully. And I am pretty sure I still mess up all the time.
On the other hand, it could always be worse. (And yes, ha-ha, same state as where I am from, but very different people. Obviously. Just listen to them talk.)

If you have Netflix, you probably binge-watched Luke Cage. (And if you didn’t, call in sick for the next two days and do so.) The next Marvel/Netflix thing is going to be the Iron Fist and oh boy, will they have to work hard to make that one not suck. On the other hand, they have Jessica Henwick, who then managed to be cast in Star Wars, Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not bad.

Here we are now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cheers!

Hello internet friends,

I used to think I was able to write these emails almost everywhere. Turns out almost everywhere in this case means almost everywhere with an okay internet connection and a proper computer.
Right now, for example I can’t really do that – my sister is staying in the living-turned-guest room and in my infinite wisdom I left my MacBook there. Based on the fact that nothing drains my will to exist as much as being woken up for no good reason and Luke 6:13 I’ll just let her sleep and experiment with how well I can write these on my phone. Turns out I ramble even more than usual.

I’ve linked to Maciej Cegłowski’s talks a couple of times before – they are pretty much always good. The one he held at the Library of Congress sounds weirdly positive. I really hope he’s alright.

Talking about weirdly positive – science realised that alcohol is an antidepressant and The Awl is ON IT.

Someone at the New Yorker finally figured out how to use Netflix and watched Ali Wong’s “Baby Cobra” comedy special. And they’re right – she is in fact really good.

It’s German Unity day today, so it’s a day off for me. But then for a whole bunch of reasons I do not understand not everybody is allowed to form that other important kind of union here. I mean, wtf?
But at least it’s possible to travel to almost every country where it’s better without having to get a visa, so… yay?

If you have a lot of time – and since you’re willing to let me fill up your inbox, I figure you do – why not look through almost all 3900 scanned pages of Paul Klee’s notebooks?

After a long search that left me broken and drifting, I think I have finally found my people on the internet.

Did you kill someone of your own species recently? (Oh wow, I sure hope you didn’t just nod and thought “yeah, sure.”) Turns out if you did, you might be a fluffy little desert animal.
Either that or one of those creepy clowns.

Remember Ello? Yeah, me neither. But someone did.

If you’re not bummed out enough yet, here, have something fun to read while you cry over your salad at your office desk.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

have you taken a selfie today, yet? It might be a good idea to do so, though.
Find your angle, work your angle. (Obviously the “study” is a bit baloney, but since I am pro-selfie in general, I will proudly link to it, saying: a-ha! confirmation!)

While we slowly adapt to the idea of self-driving cars, Amsterdam takes the whole idea a step further and develops small self-driving canal barges that can either be used as boats or form a pontoon bridge.

There are two airline commercials which I rather like. One is actually really good – the “Campari Soda” one for Swiss – while the other is a bit silly in its new-agey vibe. And of course, because it’s 2016, it is not only a bit silly but problematic.

You know what’s getting cheaper and cheaper? Solar energy, that’s what. Especially in very sunny countries like Abu Dhabi. But, you know, it is not like we’ll have the same conditions soon anywhere else, too.

It seems like there are not many cryptozoologists left – I didn’t really see anyone celebrating in the streets after we now finally have legitimate photographic proof of the Loch Ness monster.

The whole internet – well, those people who spend their time commenting New York Times opinion pieces on Twitter, which might be an indicator why this article struck a nerve – discussed this question over the weekend: Am I Introverted, or Just Rude?
I don’t know… do I have to pick?

Hm.

Toodles!

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Let’s do some housekeeping, we have a few new faces around the table, so why not. The archive for these emails is here, all 180something issues. It also is on medium dot com, if that’s more your thing. I’ve been known to engage with replies there, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Almost every week there are links that just didn’t make it into the email, for some reason or another. I collect those over here. It has a full feed, too – so if you’re into RSS, then that’s something for you. I think that’s it for now, there is a Twitter feed and a Facebook page, too – both are there, because why not. If you get this by email, you already get it in the format it was intended to be.

Hello internet friends,

you might remember that stunning timelapse of Singapore which I linked to in June. Insider TV has a nice little video portrait of Keith Loutit, the photographer who shot that timelapse.

Back in the year 2000 (am I the only one who immediately has that Silverchair song playing in their head when someone mentions “in the year 2000”?) I actually was one of the few-ish people who went to the ill-fated Expo 2000 world’s fair. There is now a new book by Jade Doskow who travelled the sites of past world’s fairs to look at what’s left of them. Atlas Obscura has a few of her photos.

I really have no idea how books happen. Somehow they just manifest themselves in a library or bookstore, to be enjoyed by readers. Just like milk comes from a box and electricity just appears in my walls. At least the first of those mysteries is now solved by internet friend Sarah Cooper, who is in the process of turning her blog post 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings into a book with 10x more tricks and was kind enough to give us a behind the scenes look.

In the late 90s a lot of people boxed air while being yelled at. Turns out Billy Blanks is still around and still doing his Tae Bo thing. Pretty fascinating dude.

Ants are very prolific farmers. How prolific, you ask? Well, they pick the aphids they use for their honeydew farming in a way that ensures the optimal ressource extraction from each plant.

Toodles!