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!

Interlude

March 5, 2018

Hello internet friends,

no proper newsletter this week – the fourth year of this thing just ended and I’m taking a week off.

Enjoy this picture of a dog that I took a while ago

See you next week, toodles!

Monkey See, Monkey Drink

March 6, 2017

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.

Onwards

March 7, 2016

Hello internet friends!

I have been doing this for two years now and it is still fun – I sincerely hope it is for you, too. Thanks for reading my little zine! And… onwards!

If you have a bit of time and want to know about the Millennium Falcon, here is something for you.
Actually it might be a good idea to take a day off and read through all of Kitbashed. Probably the best Star Wars page out there.

I have mentioned before that I use Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist on random as one of my three alarms.[1]
I hardly ever use their “Fresh Finds” playlists, though, but apparently they are pretty good, too. And fuelled by an army of hipsters. Probably they are better at the whole music thing than the Army of Lovers.

Remember last week’s cyborg rats? Turns out they might be our own future when it comes to navigating the increasingly complex transit systems out there.
Most people I know use Google Maps or some other transit app for those by now, so we’re already halfway there.

We have all seen that video/gif[2] of some dude with VR goggles while a young lady looks disinterested into the camera. We all had a bit of a giggle and moved one. Turns out the young lady – Eva Hoerth – is a VR researcher and was pretty surprised by suddenly becoming a meme. She also seems to be smart and funny, so that’s an entertaining article to read.

New section alert!

One Year Follow-Up[3]

Last year around this time, we were all thinking about the colors of a dress. While we all just rolled our eyes and forgot about it again, actual scientists kept thinking about it.

Be safe out there.

  1. And yes, I am a three alarms person. I am also a snooze person and a person who likes to sleep. Because sleep – that’s where I’m a viking.  ↩

  2. Isn’t it all the same these days?  ↩

  3. I’ll rename this.  ↩

Llama

March 2, 2015

Hello, internet friends.

I’m not too sure if it is genetics or an upbringing with a lot of moving around outside or maybe just the last remnants of youth, but I tend to be pretty robust when it comes to colds or becoming sick in general.
So of course when a light fever hit me last week, I decided immediately that these are probably my last few days on earth. Once I made peace with that fact – it took me a surprisingly short time – I did, what every sane person would do in my situation:

Binge-watch season three of House of Cards.

Now I’m alive and well, so:

Onwards.

By now everybody is so over that color-changing dress – it’s such old news that even Saturday Night Live made their jokes about it. Which probably means that I’ll get a picture of it through WhatsApp by my relatives in about two weeks.
I still did not manage to see it in blue and black, though, but then: who really cares anymore?

Brands

Brands care. For some reason, I still see white-and-gold-blue-and-black tweets from brands retweeted by people who I (held in higher esteem)used to?) hold in high esteem. I mean, I get it – haha, you’re some poor, tortured, over-paid Social Media Manager, who needs to entertain the masses and promote a brand – but why do grown-up, smart people retweet these things? Because virality.

Help?

Is anyone of your folks playing Alto’s Adventure? It’s very pretty and just slightly frustrating. Which is probably a sign that I am Doing It Wrong.

Oh well.

Take care, eat some fruit, stay healthy.

Where it all begins

March 7, 2014

1.0 Hello

If there is one thing more old-school than a newsletter, it might be a fax machine. And while it is tempting to combine these two, it would probably break my budget to fax what I write to the three people who actually want to read it.
Given that I have not one, not two, but at least three blogs (And countless of half-forgotten zombie blogs that I started some day and forgot.) in which I don’t write anything, one might wonder why I would want to write a newsletter.
If you only know email newsletters the way corporate entities write them, you probably hate them. Usually written by the PR or marketing department, they include a wealth of useless information – unless you are looking for information about that entities’ good and services. But in the last couple of months I started to see some actually interesting newsletters come out, written by people who actually have something to say and/or the knack of finding interesting things to talk about and link to.
And then there is me, who is neither.

1.1 Interesting newsletters

At the moment I am subscribed to only a few of them:

  • NextDraft
    Probably the most well-known and most consistent of the bunch. If you need to know what is happening in the world and don’t have the time or nerves for getting the kind of watercooler news through social media, this is the newsletter to subscribe to. If you do have the time and nerves to do so, still read it – there are often a whole bunch of gems in there that didn’t get into my filter bubble in other ways.
  • Things That Have Caught My Attention
    A pretty recent subscription which I have found by chance. Very smart, very well written. I blatantly stole the numbering system from him.
  • The Quartz Morning Edition
    Unlike the other two entries, this is not written by a single person but seems to be semi-automated by their CMS. It’s probably the most grown-up of the three and is a nice concise way of catching up with world news first thing in the morning.

How about you? Any interesting newsletters you like to receive? I am always open to new sources for my strange addiction to good internet content.
See what I did there? That’s Social Media skills. Driving reader engagement through open questions.

2.0 The curious case of a strange “security” feature

Playing around with newsletters I discovered a strange feature of the mail system at my current workplace. For some reason that is not clear to me, a sub-system of the mail server – and I do suspect the spam filter – follows every url in an email. This of course wreaks havoc with double-opt-in mails and even more havoc with one click unsubscribe links. Like the one below, in case I already bore you.
I can not think of any scenario where auto-following the links in an email would be a good idea.

3.0 App of the Week

This section is very much named this way because there is a section like this on The Frequency. I don’t think I will send out a newsletter weekly and I even less think I will talk about an app every time. Still.
The app of the week is Jawbone’s UP Coffee.
I have been toying with a coffee counter app since way before there were even apps. Or decent smart phones. I have a web app prototype for one (completely with a domain and everything) since at least 2002 – and the chances that I will ever finish and release it are slim to none. But despair not – the people behind the weird Jawbone UP fitness bracelet just release a free and very pretty app that does exactly that: you enter your coffee consumption and there will be a nice graph of your caffeine intake. They even try to guess if you’ll be able to sleep at night. The only thing missing is a data export.
Interestingly enough just while I was writing this newsletter, Dan Hon sent out a new Things That Have Caught My Attention where he talks about the same app in a way smarter way than I could do. So read it there, too.

4.0 Thanks

Thank you for reading. This will be back.
Dominik