Still chirpin’

Hello internet friends,

week two of this year is behind us, what do we think of it so far? I can’t even really say, I haven’t paid much attention, to be quite honest.


Britney Spears’s …Baby One More Time Is Weirder Than You Remember – unlike so many things that make me think: “Wow, has it been really that long?” the twenty years of Britney Spears’s career surprised me in another way. Even though I never followed her closely it seems that so many things happened with her name attached since then. So… twenty years, uh.
Leave Britney alone!


Sometimes I wonder if people don’t realise that their ideas are not particularly bright. I ordered a box of crickets from the Internet, and it went about as well as you’d expect sounds like one of those ideas.
But hey, crickets!


I find technology that helps us humans understand the physical world really fascinating. I’m a big fan of geo gazetteers and maps and databases and latitudes and longitudes. So I pretty much knew what this article was about before I started reading it and yet, I did and it doesn’t make anyone looking particularly good: How Cartographers for the U.S. Military Inadvertently Created a House of Horrors in South Africa


“He does his own stunts.” – just a small part of The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan
I have to admit – I can’t watch his blooper reels at the end of his movies.


Keep hydrated!
Toodles!

Firebird

Hello internet friends,

why not have a tea and read an interesting slice of internet?
For example – how the word tea and the word cha traveled the world.


Instagram

No, we’re not bitching about their image sorting algorithm today. We’re talking brands. And especially Instagram brands: The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed. Lovely, isn’t it? And it seems to work rather well: Instagram Ads Are Basically Infomercials for Millennials

Viral

These days we’re very used to stuff turning into (usually very short-lived) memes and “go viral” – but back when we were all young and the internet was fun, this was a new thing: The Strange History of One of the Internet’s First Viral Videos

Space News

These stories don’t have anything in common except “space,” but here we go:

Bird News

Is there anything more badass than hawks starting bush fires to feast on the small animals that run from the flames? Why These Birds Carry Flames In Their Beaks


That’s all, enjoy your tea!
Toodles

Diminishing Returns

Hello internet friends,

as so many of us I quite enjoy the idea of a shower beer. I mean, this brewer here even created a beer that is specifically made for shower consumption.
But after some serious experimentation I realised that this is yet another thing where I like the idea of something a lot more than the actual experience. I’m probably a slow drinker, so beer is getting luke-warm for me even in normal conditions. But in a hot shower? How’s that supposed to work?
Onwards.

Remember that alien megastructure that wasn’t a megastructure at all but we don’t quite know what it is? Turns out it might actually be a star eating a planet!
This is all pretty exciting stuff. Would you like to know more?

It’s not all stars and planets up there in space. There is also a lot of space junk that we humans left there. And sometimes that stuff falls back to earth and somehow survives that fall. And that’s what amateur space debris enthusiasts are looking for.

CES seems to be a weird, weird place to visit while being sober. I’d rather not imagine what it would be like on LSD. Luckily I don’t have to imagine, because that’s how it is.

Toodles!

Game. Set. Match

Hello internet friends,

Mondays, uh?

~

Bet you didn’t see this coming:

Betting worth billions. Elite players. Violent threats. Covert messages with Sicilian gamblers. And suspicious matches at Wimbledon. Leaked files expose match-fixing evidence that tennis authorities have kept secret for years.

Besides the story itself I find it pretty fascinating to see the BBC work with Buzzfeed on this one.

~

Sometimes – tbh all the time – computers are acting up and even those of us who know a bit about these things are not always sure what happens.
So maybe they are cursed and need a witch who casts a bunch of spells to make them work again?

~

Why are people popular on social networks? Anil Dash says that the trick is mostly to be early.
I’m not sure how much that is true. I was (am) the second Twitter user from Germany and I’m still about as irrelevant as you can imagine. On the other hand, this makes the people who follow me a self-selected club of great people and spam bots.

~

Netflix News! They want to block VPNs and they have many, many genres.

~

Now, go forth and have a good week.

The Orange of Everything

Hello, internet friends!

I signed up here – the dangers of it becoming a Tamagotchi are pretty small, though. I mean, after all: this. Onwards!

Always good to know: What caused Gandhi’s insatiable bloodlust. Well, in the first Civilization game at least.

Talking about numbers that don’t add up – here is Ev Williams’ take on website statistics.
In case you wonder: I measure “greatness of readers” for this newsletter and the numbers are through the roof. (And now I also raised the kiss-ass metrics, so all is well.)

How Lego Became The Apple of Toys – worth reading even with that cringe-worthy title. Can we just stop calling anything the “Apple of X” this year? Or basically the “X of Y”?

Scroll Slow. Have Fun.

Damn.

Take care, people.