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Thank you for staying with me for so long.
And now, without further ado, the 100th edition.
Things I enjoyed reading
Even though I might come across as a rather asocial person to many, that's mostly a way to save time for both parties involved and avoid the chitchat. The same often applies to my attitude towards friends: we might hardly interact for years, but then eventually meet and spend hours or days talking, just because our paths intersected again.
Most friendships require a bit of courtship to get going. And even when they do seemingly fall in our lap—say, you get stuck on a sailboat in the Atlantic with nothing to do but socialize with your fellow sailors—they won’t grow without intention. This is the hardest part of friendship. It takes energy and thought, and our mental and physical resources are often spread thin. In other words, friendships take work. But I have never liked framing our friendships as labor. Showing up for our friends takes effort, yes, but it shouldn’t be drudgery. It should be a joy.
This is a very good take on the same topic: friendship shouldn't be a labour, and as it requires effort to create and maintain, we should choose very wisely.
Being blessed with work from home, I thought I forgot how bad is the Tube in summer. But then we hit the Central line in the middle of a weekend and I instantly remembered.
Over the years, the heat from the trains soaked into the clay to the point where it can no longer absorb any more heat. Tunnels that were a mere 14 degrees Celsius in the 1900s can now have air temperatures as high as 30 degrees Celsius on parts of the tube network.
What's odd is that a hundred years ago people used to go to the Tube to avoid the heat and that's reflected in the ads of that time. Nowadays buses are so much better.
If I were to choose one exciting topic to explain to someone far from engineering, I would probably go for the game theory or rant about pseudo random numbers.
This is about the latter but from the more positive perspective of how could we fix it ourselves:
The possible way using bananas is that of radioactive decay. Bananas in fact are known to contain a lot of potassium, and a small but significant percentage of the potassium present in nature is radioactive. Specifically we are talking about the 40K isotope, which makes up 0.01% of potassium in nature. Plus they’re delicious with lemon and sugar, which alone would be a great reason to always have one on hand.
Now I know that next time I need a true random number I need to ditch the Yarrow algorithm and grab a banana.
I never thought of it but it's hard to find a stainless steel fence here in the UK. Apparently across the pond this is way more common:
But the steel fence is not muted or uniform; it twists and turns to the taste of the maker, personalized with various ornaments, including lotus flowers, “om” symbols and geometric patterns. At night, street lamps and car headlights exaggerate the glimmer of stainless steel that does not, cannot disappear into the darkness like wrought iron. Whereas some people might be turned off by the flashiness, standing out is exactly its point — the stainless steel fence is an undeniable signal that the homeowner has arrived.
I wonder what are the status symbols here then, besides the honorific titles?
A story about the complexity of insurance business in the world where people could be kidnapped: if the insurance exists, that might prompt the kidnappers to act, but if it doesn't then there would definitely be a huge demand for it.
In 1986, the issue of K&R insurance was debated in parliament, which passed a motion expressing concern. There was even talk of working through European institutions to impose a ban on K&R insurance throughout the European Union. Recognising that its existence was under threat, the security industry rallied, arguing that since the policies were kept secret, it was clear that people were not being kidnapped because they had insurance. Rather, they were being taken hostage because they had resources – and banning insurance would not change this.
That probably means there are similar insurance policies for viruses and malware – I wonder how they find their audience.
The last time I did some proper woodworking was probably fifteen or so years ago at school, but the more I visit modern restaurants the more I learn to appreciate hand-made and rustic butter knives and what not.
Now I know that if I were decided to make my own, the software engineering experience will help me out.
Any limited resource needs to carefully doled out. With software, the budgets might cover hardware constraints (CPU/memory), networking bandwidth, latency targets, engineering man-hours, etc.
Turns out, there's one inflexible budget with woodworking: Physical space!
In that sense cooking is similar to software engineering as well. Once you get a vacuum chamber, you start looking for a space for a PacoJet and it keeps going down the rabbit hole.
And on the topic of kitchen space, I am quite used to taking kitchen cabinets for granted (maybe because that's one of the deal breakers when we are looking for a flat to rent). As it seems, they went through a plenty of changes over the years:
The history of postwar steel kitchen cabinets in fact starts decades before. I’ve spotted “hoosier cabinets” from as early as the 1920s that were made of steel. These were promoted as “vermin proof.” Cleanliness was a big concern for homemakers in earlier parts of American history. For example, the whole notion of “Sanitary Kitchens” was very important. Remember, we had no vaccine for polio, for example, until the mid-50s, and the flu epidemic in 1914-1918 killed 450,000 people in the U.S. and up to 70 million worldwide. Rats and mice could not eat through steel [...]
I wouldn't mind a steel cabinet though (and a walk-in freezer too) but that's a story for a separate rant.
I think I've seen one of these devices at a science museum in Manchester, but didn't really pay much attention to its history: this is a nice write up.
Mike was made a temporary Queen's messenger with two seats on a flight to Geneva - one for him and one for the machine. He was told he would be met with a man carrying a brown envelope on arrival.
As he arrived at the castle, he was offered a gun. He declined.
Reads like a chapter from a James Bond memoirs too (if there were any).
This is probably the first time I encounter a long read about hypnosis from the relatively academic point of view (altough "academic" is a word probably too powerful for a sequence of experiments).
The tests I responded to strongly (the heavy weight in my outstretched hand and the force pushing my hands apart) are the ones that will work for most people. In the heavy weight test, around 90% of the population will feel something, says Terhune – even he does, and he's a "low".
I wonder if these days there is a simple way to try those tests out remotely, maybe with a set of pre-recorded videos or using a VR headset (because if the latter works, it might a well open up a bunch of possibilities for a new generation of games).
This is an interesting research into traits and their correlation with income (mostly in the States). Obviously as with any attempt to correlate tomatoes and apples, take it with a pinch of salt:
The US evidence confirms this expectation. The 6 traits with the largest effect on income are all social. And social traits are the only ones to cross the one-to-one threshold in our signal-to-noise indicator. In other words, they’re the only traits that have a ‘large’ effect on income.
The social part of most traits (not age or gender, although they play a role too) circles us back to the very first article of the week: indeed, the majority of my most successful contracts were referrals from friends.
Things I didn't know last Tuesday
There is a beautiful way to define a state of mental confusion in Spanish:
cacao mental (informal)
mental confusion
In Russian it'd be "каша в голове" (porridge inside one's head) – I'd probably prefer the cacao any time of the day.
Someone mentioned that the queen's mother used to enjoy beer but to make it more appropriate for a monarch had to mix it with Champagne in some ridiculous ratio (like 1:9 or something).
I couldn't find a proof for it though, but came across another somehow related beer cocktail:
The drink was first made by a bartender of Brooks's Club in London in 1861 to mourn the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's Prince Consort. It is supposed to symbolize the black armbands worn by mourners. It was said that “even the champagne should be in mourning.”
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