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Your weekly crème de la crème of the Internet is here!
11.06.2024 (read in browser)
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#201 on visiting London, where I come back to the English capital precisely a year after leaving it for good, contemplate the ICQ shutdown (farewell, 6566189!), and learn about big cats in British countrysides.
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#202 on Scottish BBQ, where I appreciate local produce: from grilled scallops to baked oysters, assess the moral aspects of cooking lobsters alive, and read sci-fi about retirees fighting with aliens suggested by my ex-boss.
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#203 on buying a car, where I narrow hundreds of car models down to one, find a link between George Orwell and Isle of Jura, and consider making a French toast out of cold Domino's pizza (sadly, I am not the one who invented it).
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On learning to drive
Last week I briefly shared the story of buying my first car, a classic convertible Mercedes SLK – the caveat being that I didn't have a driving license yet, but did have a very good understanding of what my perfect car is so couldn't miss the chance.
It was frustrating to have it sit idle on the driveway, but at least I could spend hours researching things I never thought I'd research: correct tyre pressure, must-have things for the trunk, nuances of playing music from the latest iPhone to the oldest AUX port, and so on.
Most importantly, I was also learning to drive, pretty much approaching it like the second job: waking up at half past six, making coffee, meeting with an instructor and driving for two hours pretty much every workday.
In the UK, getting a driving license requires passing both a theory test and a driving test. The theory test involves answering questions and completing a hazard perception challenge. I passed it the first time a few years ago, but it had likely expired.
After the road trip to the Isle of Skye, inspired by the chance to drive myself, I booked the earliest slot available and spent a few days doing mock tests. It took 59 days from re-sitting the theory test and taking my first lesson to passing with 2 minor faults (observations on joining a motorway and the front bay manoeuvre – watch out if you see me parking nearby), a total of 68 hours behind the wheel.
It was probably the most stressful exam I've had in the past decade, but it was worth it. Now, I try to get at least an hour on the roads every morning to maintain my skills.
I'm still learning every day, probably even more than with the instructor. But I can confirm that Scotland is even more beautiful when you can drive around.
Things I enjoyed reading
Before we start, an important disclaimer: I am in the "virtual popcorn" business, and the only reason you're here and reading this post is the upcoming satisfaction of feeling like you are becoming smarter.
The vast majority of the online content you consume today won't improve your understanding of the world. In fact, it may just do the opposite; recent research suggests that people browsing social media tend to experience “normative dissociation” in which they become less aware and less able to process information, to such an extent that they often can’t recall what they just read.
But despite being “empty calories,” junk info still tastes delicious. Since your dopamine pathways can't distinguish between useful and useless info, consuming junk info gives you the satisfaction of feeling like you're learning—it offers you the sensation of mental nourishment—even though all you're really doing is shoving virtual popcorn into your skull.
What should we do besides subscribing to four times more editions of this newsletter every month?
I tend to make notes, whether it's copying recipes from Instagram cooking videos, or saving tabs with books I want to read, or maintaining a collection of Obsidian notes with everything I learnt or wrote.
Imagine a recovery from a drug, while your brain decides to confirm a few hypothesis about its function: that's pretty much what happened to the author of the post.
In computer science, we say that an algorithm is deterministic if it’s not random: if it always behaves the same way when it’s in the same state. In this case, my “state” was my environment (lying drugged on a bed with my IV in and my girlfriend sitting next to me) plus the contents of my memory. Normally, I don’t ask the same question over and over again because the contents of my memory change when I ask the question the first time: after I get an answer, the answer is in my memory, so I don’t need to ask the question again. But for that hour, the information I processed came in one ear and out the other in a matter of minutes. And so it was a natural test of whether my memory is the only thing keeping me from saying the same things on loop forever, or whether I’m more random/spontaneous than that.
On that note, there are algorithms that were meant for computers with very small memory space, so developers had to come up with a way to pass through related chunks of data without storing them anywhere. I wonder if the author will give them a try if they ever end up getting these drugs again.
I usually stay away from self-help blogposts, but this one is an exception, as it's more of an essay about people's desire to look better, to be more generous, or to be more successful.
If I only have a fixed budget to spend, then by gifting you a scarf, even though I spent $10 less than I did on the coat, I get more social value from the scarf by being seen as more generous, without actually spending more money, so I can pretend to be rich while being a cheap asshole!1
Now when I’m doing the shopping, I see all of the options available to me. But when you receive a gift, you don’t see everything I considered but didn’t purchase.
It wouldn’t occur to you to compare your $45 scarf to things that I did not buy, like a $55 coat, or a $50 deodorant, or a $50 bicycle, or a $50 gold-plated toothpick.
There is also a great selection of advice one might need if they are to spend less money on physical goods.
Lisbon is quite high on my top destinations list for whenever I get to travel outside of the country, but seems like I shouldn't delay the trip any longer as the city only gets more and more popular.
Such was the impact of the so-called Cristas law, which liberalized rents without much consideration, that the board ended up developing the Faces of Evictions campaign, in which evicted residents told their story. Coelho believes that its repercussion served for the socialist government of António Costa to introduce some brakes and pursue real estate harassment. In 2018 it decreed a moratorium on saturated zones and a ban on opening more tourist apartments in Santa Maria Maior, although Coelho claims this is now being done illegally. In 2023, the government approved a series of restrictive measures for these businesses that will now be reversed in part by the new center-right administration.
But going to Portugal sounds like a long trip, as one also needs to surf there, and then ideally do a Camino de Santiago walk as well, so here I am, still in Scotland.
I wrote about kintsudi, a traditional Japanese art of repairing broken pottery, but never thought about doing it myself (partly because of ridiculous prices of those kits). It also seems way more complicated than it apparently is:
Black urushi is made by stirring a blob of raw urushi lacquer until it has evaporated much of its water content. During this process, it transitions from a dull beige color to deep wine red. To this, we can add black mica powder to color it jet black. I don't think its color matters much at this stage in the process. Using a fine tip paintbrush, I carefully painted the lacquer on top of the sabi urushi. To my surprise, this was the most difficult part of the whole process, especially painting the inside of the mug. Save for painting houses, I have never used a paintbrush in this capacity, nor do I have any drawing skills.
I don't really understand people who break their pottery on purpose to do kintsugi afterwards. That kind of defeats the purpose.
I absolutely love DIY projects like this one: totally useless but also exceptionally inspirational.
The solar Apple Watch face had drawn my inspiration for a while and I wanted to create a physical clock based on this. I was struggling to develop a nice way to present this however: I’d developed a sun clock based colour temperature of WS2812B LEDs but didn’t want another purely LED clock!
Ball bearings also peaked my interest and started considering how to build a clock around this, without it becoming a marble run. Again, I wanted sound but not actuation sound; only the sound of the ball rolling. How could I move balls without some form of actuation? Magnets.
I am yet to find the time to learn how to use something like AutoCAD properly, but I always enjoy reading stories about someone prototyping and building something cool, no matter how redundant that is.
Back to our usual programming, another article about stolen museum pieces: for some reason thieves seem to be drawn to art objects no matter how protected they're.
An estimated 2.4 million items at the museum are uncatalogued, or partially uncatalogued, out of its total collection of 8 million. The museum, which has now brought a civil court case against Dr Higgs, believes he was mostly targeting these uncatalogued artefacts - and that, this time, he had made a mistake.
Dr Higgs would have been able to see the cameo was a catalogued item, searchable by the public and staff alike. It was even on the museum’s website - it was not the kind of item that could disappear and not be missed.
If his tampering had been successful, says the museum in its court papers, it would have hidden the database photo of the cameo from view - but it says he failed.
The interesting part in this story is that it was an inside job – surely someone missed all mandatory training on company policies.
I am pretty sure I shared once an article about a T9 alternative for Chinese and Japanese mobile phones, but always thought computer keyboards are similar to QWERTY no matter what part of the world you're in. Boy was I wrong:
By the mid-1970s, the People’s Republic of China was far more advanced in the arena of mainframe computing than most outsiders realized. In July 1972, just months after the famed tour by U.S. president Richard Nixon, a veritable blue-ribbon committee of prominent American computer scientists visited the PRC. The delegation visited China’s main centers of computer science at the time, and upon learning what their counterparts had been up to during the many years of Sino-American estrangement, the delegation was stunned.
But there was one key arena of computing that the delegation did not bear witness to: the computational processing of Chinese characters. It was not until October 1974 that mainland Chinese engineers began to dive seriously into this problem. Soon after, in 1975, the newly formed Chinese Character Information Processing Technology Research Office at Peking University set out upon the goal of creating a “Chinese Character Information Processing and Input System” and a “Chinese Character Keyboard.”
Check out the whole post for visual examples, there are some pretty cool keyboards. It also made me think about a software development-dedicated keyboard: something with buttons for all mostly used keywords and symbols. Of course, there are lots of software solutions for the problem, but it might have been a great gift to a developer.
Growing up, I had mixed feelings about bamboo: on one hand, it was used for Medieval tortures, on the other hand you could by a stalk at IKEA and keep it in a vase for pretty much eternity.
Running bamboos are the ones to avoid. They have evolved to colonise surrounding ground to create forests, sending out rhizomes that can reach several metres in every direction. Each rhizome produces knuckle-like nodes, from which thick new shoots then reach for the light.
These shoots “come up through the ground at the diameter of the finished bamboo cane”, Grant says. “So they might be 2cm or 3cm across, pushing through the ground at that diameter with a huge amount of force. I get a bit of a shiver down my spine when I see people have planted the more exotic varieties, which can be 10cm across.”
Seems like these days it's not a good idea to plant bamboo in one's garden. When we were renting in London, our neighbors had some bamboo in their garden and it was slowly breaking the fence apart alongside some stone tiles.
It's easy to forget that not everyone in the world has access to the Internet, and while Elon Mask did (and still does) many questionable things, Starlink is a great product and could aid pretty much anyone – from yacht crews suffering without Instagram access to remote tribes who didn't know about memes in WhatsApp channels.
Leaders realized they needed limits. The internet would be switched on for only two hours in the morning, five hours in the evening, and all day Sunday.
During those windows, many Marubo are crouched over or reclined in hammocks on their phones. They spend lots of time on WhatsApp. There, leaders coordinate between villages and alert the authorities to health issues and environmental destruction. Marubo teachers share lessons with students in different villages. And everyone is in much closer contact with faraway family and friends.
Seems like the experiment didn't go well – the younger generations got addicted to pornography and don't want to work anymore – but the scientists seem to be keen on expanding the project towards other tribes as well.
What a time to be alive.
Things I didn't know last Tuesday
Sometimes archeology is even more fun than I thought:
A group of special armed-forces personnel wearing a replica of the Dendra armour were able to complete an 11-hour simulated Late Bronze Age combat protocol that we developed from a series of studies based on the available evidence. Numerical simulation of the thermal exchanges in Late Bronze Age warfare extended this conclusion across different environmental conditions and fighting intensities. Our results support the notion that the Mycenaeans had such a powerful impact in Eastern Mediterranean at least partly as a result of their armour technology.
I must also mention that this armour looks very different from what I'd imagine the Ancient Greek body armour should look like.
Sounds like a very convenient gadget:
A milk watcher, milk saver, pot watcher, pot minder, milk guard, or boil over preventer is a cooking utensil placed at the bottom of a pot to prevent the foaming boil-over of liquids by collecting small bubbles of steam into one large bubble.
I wonder if there are pots with these watchers built in? Probably would make washing them more complicated but that's a very neat idea nonetheless.
It's been a while since I used wired headphones, so I had no idea some of them need Bluetooth to work:
I think the problem these cheap manufacturers are solving isn’t that Lightning is expensive to license, but that it’s difficult to implement for audio. Actual Lightning headphones and headphone adapters have a tiny little digital-to-analog converter (DAC) inside the Lightning plug. It’s like a little computer. Doing it with Bluetooth and using the Lightning plug only for power is surely easier. It’s just lazy. But it’s kind of wild that the laziest, cheapest way to make unofficial “Lightning” headphones is with Bluetooth.
Which reminds me, I've been very happy connecting my iPhone to the car via a cable, but I might just get a BT-transmitter instead and get rid of at least one cable hanging around.
This is my word of the day (imagine the real problems this country faces for that word to be invented):
a person who talks foolishly at length
It's an alteration of the Scottish compound blather skate (skate means "a contemptible person"). If you need to describe an overly chatty person, and blatherskite is too genteel for your tastes, you can always rely on clatterfart, an archaic word defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a chatterer, babbler, blabber.”
And there are a few more hilarious insults if you were to follow the link.
It took me a few years in the UK to get used to the fact that Afternoon Tea is not, in fact, about tea. Now we're getting in some more peculiar details:
The addition of the word "high" to the phrase "high tea" is believed to differentiate between the afternoon tea that is traditionally served on low, comfortable, parlor chairs or relaxing in the garden and the worker’s after-work high tea that is served at the table and seated on high back dining chairs. Today, the evening meal in working-class households is still often called "tea" but as working patterns have changed yet again, many households now refer to the evening meal as supper.
If that's not enough, here is a Scottish take on high tea: it's still similar to an afternoon tea, but it should include some hot food, like a pie or cheese on toast, or other savory goodies.
I came across this article a few days ago, but today completely unexpectedly walked to a ridiculous building in the middle of nowhere just to see that it's a dovecote.
Known as dovecotes, pigeonniers, doocots, or colombiers, these buildings served as apartment blocks for hundreds of pigeons who were waiting to be eaten by members of the nobility.
They all look different by the way, but you can tell pretty much instantly lots of birds live inside, thanks to numerous... markings.
I wonder if someone already built a mobile game inspired by this:
Ganjifa, Ganjapa or Gânjaphâ, is a card game and type of playing cards that are most associated with Persia and India. After Ganjifa cards fell out of use in Iran before the twentieth century, India became the last country to produce them.
Ancient games are a very underestimated source of ideas for games, as they're very hard to come across, but survived through centuries for a reason.
Talking about ancient inventions, I don't really understand how it works given that turmeric tends to colour everything orange, but seems like it also works as a sunscreen:
Borak is a locally manufactured turmeric paste, which the Bajau use every day to protect their skin from the sun.
I remember my surfing instructor in Bali giving me Zinc paste to protect from the sun as all these fancy SPF 50 creams seized to exist after twenty minutes in the water, but turmeric is a different level.
Seems like beer drives innovations, not only because Guinness has these fancy capsules in beer cans that foam it up, but also because they're behind inventing the t-test.
Gosset recognized that this approach worked only with large sample sizes; small samples of hops wouldn’t guarantee that normal distribution. So he meticulously tabulated new distributions for smaller sample sizes. Now known as t distributions, these plots resemble the normal distribution in that they’re bell-shaped, but the curves of the bell don’t drop off as sharply. That translates to needing an even larger signal-to-noise ratio to conclude significance. His t-test allows us to make inferences in settings where people couldn’t before.
I also must say, their non-alcoholic beer is the only non-alcoholic product I moderately enjoy. All other beers, wine, and (gods forbid) spirits are just coloured or flavoured water and glycerin mixtures.
Some time ago I learnt that not everyone can imagine and visualize things, and now apparently not everyone has an inner voice:
This latest study, from researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, also proposes a new name for the condition of not having any inner speech: anendophasia.
This is similar to (if not the same as) anauralia, a term researchers coined in 2021 for people who don't have an inner voice, nor can they imagine sounds, like a musical tune or siren.
Does it make programming harder or easier? What about nerves before test, would it reduce anxiety or not?
Book of the week
Around three years ago I shared my mostly positive feedback about Caroline Eden's Black sea, and while some of the stories brought warm childhood memories, the book was all over the place. It was nice though, as it was more stories- and people-focused and didn't feel like a cookbook (from a cookbook perspective it wasn't good).
The other day Sasha spotted another book from the same author, co-authored by Eleanor Ford and called Samarkand:
Throughout its long history, Samarkand has inspired poets to write, and these famous lines by James Elroy Flecker are on my mind as the journey begins. So too is breakfast. A quick rummage in my bag tells me that once again the romance of the road has got in the way of sense and I realise, stomach rumbling, that I haven’t packed a ration of survival food. As our car kicks up dust on hairpin bends, nothing we pass is edible. Spotting our car, women wearing psychedelic paisley-print headscarves offer us the nomadic snack of qurut. I decline glumly, for these brackish dried yogurt balls are dehydrating salt bombs that make a decent partner for beer, but are not much good for breakfast. Rivers curl between deep valleys and peaks rise higher than the Alps. It is a nettlesome but spectacular journey.
Three hours in and my eyes sting with tiredness. Sleep had not come easily at the Hotel Vakhsh in Dushanbe where I had spent two days waiting for my Uzbek visa. Once occupied by Basmachi fighters, today it is a Soviet-style hotel where you deposit your jewellery to reserve a room and sleep under itchy sheets. Grim-faced ‘floor ladies’, their hair dyed cherry-red, keep a watchful eye on those coming and going, mainly drunk businessmen. I had been glad to leave.
Ravenous now, we roll into Penjikent at dusk. A pink glow hovers over the ruins that mark a former major city on the Silk Road. Only grass-tufted foundations are visible today, but once a palace stood here with columns in the shape of dancing girls.
My fixer in Dushanbe had hooked me up with Firdauz, a local man who runs a homestay. As promised, he is there to meet me and leads the way to his low-slung house set around a court-yard and small orchard. As I finish unpacking a few essentials, Firdauz motions me into their dining room. There is little furniture. Red and orange Bukharan rugs cover both floors and walls. In the corner, video footage is showing a Tajik wedding. Two Spanish travellers sit, watching the film. What my hungry eyes fix on in the scenes of celebration is a bubbling kazan of plov, big enough to feed several hundred.
I quite like the narrative again – the stories are nice and livid, but this time there are way less stories and way more recipes.
Sadly, authors have pretty much zero credibility when it comes to cooking – they're jacks of all trades, travel blogers who authored half a dozen of books about cuisines of countries they have little understanding about, and it's easy to tell: the recipes give a good overview of how rich the local cuisine is, but the definition of "local" gets blended between too many ethnic groups to be consistent enough (think Uzbeks, Russians, Jews, Koreans, etc).
Would I cook something from the book? Probably. Should I have any expectations? Most definitely not.
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