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I recently took a week off, rented a car and went on a road trip. The charcoal-coloured scars of the devastating 2019/2020 bushfires followed us everywhere, but it was reassuring to see trees and shrubs come back to life. We enjoyed some amazing beaches and national parks and after several days on country roads arrived back in Melbourne.
As we entered the city boundaries, our car turned from necessity to liability. Since I couldn’t return the car until the next morning, I spent a good twenty minutes circling my block – weaving in and out of traffic – in order to find a parking spot. When I finally got home, I set my alarm to pick up the car early the next morning hoping to avoid parking fines and the onslaught of traffic. By the time I dropped off the car I felt a sense of relief.
Sitting on the tram home I wondered why car ownership is still considered an aspiration instead of a burden. The fact that walking, cycling and public transport don’t have high-budget marketing teams concocting strategies that appeal to our sense of freedom and status might have something to do with it. And perhaps the fact that governments seem to want transit systems to return a profit while showering cars with money.
I’ve written before about how placing cars at the centre of mobility has led to grotesquely inhumane cities. Ridding our cities of the curse of car dependency would be transformational on so many levels. Numerous studies show that when cities prioritise walking, cycling and transit over cars, everyone is better off, including drivers. Think about the following quote I found in this paper on walkable cities:
“According to economists from the University of Zurich, who analysed the effects of commuting on wellbeing, a person with a one-hour commute to work has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied as someone who walks. At the same time, shifting from a long commute to a short walk would make a single person as happy as if he or she had found a new love.”
I highly recommend following city planner and urbanist Brent Toderian who is regularly sharing a wealth of research and news on making our cities more liveable. Don’t miss the interview with Brent in the Food for Thought section below, one of the most insightful videos I’ve watched in a while.
I’ll leave you with a quote by historian and urbanist Lewis Mumford who, in 1955, wrote: “Building more roads to prevent congestion is like a fat man loosening his belt to prevent obesity.”
– Kai
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Become a Friend of DD for $1.80/month →
With a modest yearly contribution you’re not only helping keep Dense Discovery going, you also receive special discounts and get access to the DD Index, a searchable catalogue of past issues. (And it makes this message disappear.)
You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of technology, design and culture. Writing to you from Melbourne is Kai Brach. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Sponsor an issue or book a classified.
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Your new best friend against noise distractions
Noisli provides background sounds to mask distracting noises in order to help you stay focused and reduce stress. Sign up for a free account and start creating your personal sound environment for work and relax! Plus, use the code NOISLIDD to get 20% off your first purchase.
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Apps & Sites
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Powerful file-based note-taking
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Another note-taking app built on local plain-text files using Markdown, Obsidian offers the full gamut of desktop and mobile apps for easy entry. One of its more unique features is its ability to generate ‘knowledge graphs’ that display connections between notes visually. There are also loads of plugins and add-on services available to customise it to your needs.
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Invoicing & time tracking
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I’ve lately been working on some smaller freelance gigs with select clients and for the first time since becoming a Harvest user made use of its built-in time-tracking feature. It makes it delightfully easy to compile invoices from time sheets at the end of the month. Friends of DD enjoy a 50% discount on their first paid month.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
(Disclosure: Harvest has been a sponsor of Offscreen and DD in the past, though this is not a paid endorsement.)
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Wireless device assistant
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AirBuddy for macOS is a little helper app giving you easy access to all your wireless devices such as AirPods, keyboard, mouse, etc. You can quickly see their battery status, switch connections and set handy shortcuts.
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Check shade angles anywhere
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A mapping tool that lets you see the shade of buildings (zoom in) or terrain (zoom out) at a specific time and date. One handy use case I can think of: if you’re moving into a new place, check how much sunlight you’re getting at different times of the day/seasons.
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Worthy Five: Menka Sanghvi
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Five recommendations by mindfulness and digital habits researcher and podcaster Menka Sanghvi
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A question worth asking:
‘What does this narrative do to my being?’ Every story moves us to think, feel and act differently in the world, so why not be more discerning about which ones we immerse in. Especially online, where algorithms are constantly making automated narrative decisions for us.
A video worth watching:
OVERVIEW is a short documentary about the profound experience many astronauts have on seeing the Earth from the ‘outside’ for the first time, as an interconnected, living system. It had me revisit the clichéd Blue Marble photo with fresh eyes and new wonder.
A newsletter worth subscribing to:
The Convivial Society offers clarity and insights into ‘digital wellbeing’ (although, perhaps wisely, writer L.M. Sacasas never uses that phrase). He brings a historical, moral, and philosophical lens to bear on the technologies we use today, raising questions about what we really value. Here’s a good example about meaningful silences on social media.
A piece of advice worth passing on:
My meditation teacher, in the Jain wisdom tradition, often recommends learning to forgive quickly. Holding onto anger, he says, is like holding onto a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone, but of course burning ourselves all the while. Forgiveness is letting go.
A Twitter account worth following:
Try Miranda Keeling for Haiku-like descriptions of everyday mundane moments. Her posts remind me how easily the humble act of noticing connects us more deeply to life. She lives in London, with a toddler, just like me, so I find her observations endearingly familiar, but the gestures are universal.
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Books & Accessories
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Why maths is almost everything
An intriguing new book that looks at how much of our modern world is underpinned by maths, illuminating the many hidden principles that hold our systems together. “Yates takes us on a fascinating tour of everyday situations and grand-scale applications of mathematical concepts, including exponential growth and decay, optimization, statistics and probability, and number systems.”
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Deepening relationships through active listening
This is certainly not the first book hoping to improve our ability to listen with intent. The author Ximena Vengoechea offers proactive strategies borrowed from psychology and communication experts that can be equally useful in a friend or family setting. “An essential listening guide for our times, revealing tried-and-true strategies honed in her own research sessions and drawn from interviews with marriage counselors, podcast hosts, life coaches, journalists, filmmakers, and other listening experts.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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We need a pill that makes you feel like you’re buying stuff online.
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Food for Thought
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If you live in a city, this is perhaps the best video to watch to better understand the many issues associated with prioritising car use in the urban environment, which is sadly still the default in most planning departments. I really admire how succinctly and cogently Brent Toderian can make a case for putting walking, biking and transit first. “There are carrots, sticks, and ice cream. Currently, we give the car drivers ice cream.”
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Charlie Warzel makes some really excellent points about the tech world’s default-to-innovation mindset that avoids simple, boring solutions that work quickly and instead opts for shiny, complicated ones that can be sold as a novelty. “The Builders do not repair. They build. That’s because building is virtuous. Unlike, in their mind, criticism, which is passive and vampiric in nature, building is active and generative. It is a de facto good to build, regardless, perhaps, of the outcome.”
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A cynical but entertaining piece about the aesthetics of the newest generation of crypto-opportunists masquerading as artists: “And this is why the future, be it NFTs or Memoji or the howling existential horror of the Metaverse, looks so ugly and boring: it reflects the stunted inner lives of the finance and technology professionals who produced it. As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Lithuanian artist Alisa uses air-dry clay to create mesmerising, tactile landscapes, seascapes and underwater sceneries.
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Browse through the impressive creative portfolio of Ragged Edge, a London-based branding and design agency.
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Apoc is an elegant, expressive font family with unique characteristics and a set of playful alternates, available in sans, serif and display.
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Did You Know?
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There are technically four North (and South) Poles.
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When we talk about the North/South Poles we usually mean the Geographic Poles, the point where all meridians of longitude converge. There are, however, three additional points at different geographic locations that scientists sometimes use when referring to the North/South Poles: the Magnetic Pole is where the geomagnetic field lines are directed vertically downwards (North) or upwards (South); the Geomagnetic Poles refer to the points where the magnetosphere’s axis passes through the planet; and the Pole of Inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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