Swipe Swipe Swipe

Hello internet friends!

I’m sitting here in the setting sun, listening to Pitbull. Which is exactly the reason why I didn’t add Spotify to my Tinder profile, I mean – I don’t need yet another reason to hardly ever have a match there.

Oh, no, it’s Dave again.

Confession corner: I quite like the whole idea of late night talk shows. A bit of mediocre stand-up, some banter with a sidekick while sitting at a desk, an interview or two with some random celebrity that might or might not be scripted in advance, some music – what else would you need on television before going to bed? (Actually I hardly ever watch these before going to bed. I watch them randomly on YouTube during my lunch break. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
One of the all time great hosts of these kinds of shows is David Letterman. And while he’s not doing that anymore, he did give this really good interview.

Uncle Licky

It seems like everybody loves the new Nintendo Switch and even I ponder if it’s something I might want to have. It’s the first Nintendo thing since the Wii that actually seems interesting – but maybe that’s just the hype talking. And because everybody is also a bit of an idiot it is now a thing to lick the Switch cartridges. Because they intentionally made them that way to keep people from eating them.
(This section title is stolen from this episode of Roderick on the Line.)

The dangers of wearing no pants at work

Yes, yes, we have all seen the BBC video with the intruding children by now. But do we know exactly why everybody shared it? To learn more, a proper analyst breaks it down for us step by step.

Evil dog news

Not evil news about dogs. News that dogs are evil.
Or that dogs are at least very good at manipulating humans into doing their biding. Which, as the lady in the article says, should come as no surprise to anyone who was ever in the vicinity of a dog.

I’d tap that island

Turns out you can learn a lot about people if you work at the same place for twenty years, especially if you have a lot and very passionate customers. Mark Rosewater, the head designer of Magic: the Gathering, sure did. And he shared twenty lessons in this talk. (Warning: long video.)
And because he knows that some people rather don’t watch a long video, here it is as an article for actual reading. (Well… in three parts. The second and third parts are available, too. So now you get to read three long articles.)

Humans need not apply

We’ve already managed to create embryos without any male involvement, but now some scientists managed to create one without an egg, just using stem cells. I’m pretty sure we’re heading towards a future where life isn’t really needed to create life anymore.
(Section title from this video. Don’t watch it if you’re easily scared by robots taking our jobs.)


Hello to the new readers! And thanks to those of you who gave me feedback on the new-ish format, that was very nice.

Toodles!

Monkey See, Monkey Drink

Hello internet friends!

Good news! We’ve reached the fourth year of this newsletter and just to warn you – I have decided to change things up for a little bit.
First things first: This email will now reach you from a different email address than before. I’ll actually be using my proper newsletter domain for the email instead of my personal email address. (This might help you to filter these emails, too – if email from dominik@irregularity.co set priority to high would be my idea for a good filter.)
I’ll also try to structure the links a bit more. While I enjoyed writing prose and just throwing links in whenever I felt like it, the most common feedback I got was: “Hey, have you seen this awesome article that you linked to last week but I didn’t see because I didn’t click all your links?” Sooo… here we go.
I hope you don’t hate these changes too much and if so, please be gentle when letting me know.

Toodles!


Cheers!

Turns out alcohol consumption is such a basic fact of human life that it actually precedes humans. Scientists have been working hard to go all scientific method on the “Drunken Monkey Hypothesis” by Robert Dudley and so far it looks good for our drunk ancestors.

Meme!

If you’re not smart enough to avoid Twitter you might have seen the “white guy blinking” meme. Unlike other people who suddenly turned into a meme Drew Scanlon is in on it – as he should be, given that his job is to create internet content.

Bees!

Bees are even smarter than we realized – they are even able to learn how to play football.

Bots!

More or less all of the new voice interface bot services these days have a female voice. The good people at Quartz decided to sexually harrass these bots to see how they react.

Colors!

Well, this is pretty: this guy in the 17th century decided the world needs a book with all the colors. Or at least the 271 watercolors he managed to mix together.


Well, does that help? 🤔
Either way: to those of you who have been around for a while, thank you very much. It sounds like a cliche (because it is one, but whatevs) but without you it’d not be fun to write these.

Comment, like and subscribe!

Toodles.