More starred places are coming tomorrow, so we will see if anything makes it to the new list of favourites.
On a completely separate note I am currently working my way through applying for a Global Talent visa so probably will be reaching out to folks who have seen me speaking at conferences and writing code for companies to secure a few recommendation letters – stay tuned!
Things I enjoyed reading
A really pleasant format: mostly pictures, and the text is only supplementary, but it still tells the story in great details.
However, recently there have been problems with Nigerian suppliers in the north of the country — where Bakare grew up — because of sectarianism. Fonio, a staple grass grain, is now particularly difficult to get, Bakare explains. Ordinarily it would have been sourced from a women’s cooperative but they can’t get to the farm.
Judging by some guides, this Brixton restaurant was named among the top few in London, so we probably should pay them a visit some time soon.
What's the meaning of Stonehenge? I feel like someone tries to answer this question pretty much every year, and every year they are more and more convincing. This is a fresh attempt:
The revision began with a kind of social coincidence. In 2008, Bevins received an e-mail from a retired geologist named Rob Ixer, with whom he’d once provenanced a collection of axe-heads. Ixer was convinced that he’d stumbled upon a more accurate way to provenance the bluestones. Earlier that year, two archeologists, Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright, had conducted the first excavations inside Stonehenge in more than forty years, and asked Ixer to examine some of the thousands of stone fragments brought up to the surface.
Also check out that Ylvis music video I've mentioned a year ago.
Blending art and programming together usually produces really beautiful resultats, like here:
These drawings are simple and beautiful. I got to thinking about reproducing them. But instead of printing them with an inkjet printer, I was interested in drawing them in the style they were meant to be created - using one line.
On a somewhat related note I keep toying with an idea to set up a thermal printer to either print cocktail orders, or Github tickets, or maybe RSS feed, but seems like the amount of paper waste just doesn't make any sense.
I loved the show Mentalist back then, and honestly spent some weeks watching videos with card tricks and so on, but never actually got to learn something party-worthy. This is a completely different story of someone who got actually really good at it:
The longer I do this work, the less I believe in the supernatural and the more I believe in intuition. So much of what I do is based on psychology, observing human behavior, and recognizing patterns of thought and body language. It’s also about knowing how to control someone’s choices through linguistics or “verbal judo,” as mentalist Andy Nyman calls it. I can get a volunteer to make the choices I want them to make without them, or the audience, ever getting a sense of my process.
Maybe it is worth to give it a try again.
I rarely look at the critics' scores when I am picking up a movie. A few movies I've enjoyed have very low ratings among the professionals, and impeccable scores among ordinary folks, so why does it happen then?
We need to start by looking at whether there is any link between the tastes of the two groups. Each yellow dot on the chart below is a movie in the dataset, displaying it’s Metascore and IMDb user score. I’ve also added a green trendline to help show the overall pattern.
This is an interesting attempt at going through a bunch of records from both audiences and then a few attempts to compare them to each other.
A pretty much detective story about a probably one of the most beautiful books in the world that got repeatedly destroyed:
For both boards, hundreds of pieces of coloured goatskin needed to be prepared and cut, numerous jewels had to be set in place each within their own individual clasp, and weeks were spent applying intricate gold tooling across all the surfaces.
At least nowadays we have torrent trackers.
Learning a new language is the real superpower, as it unlocks access to some otherwise unavailable knowledge and experiences. Pretty cool that for some people it's easier than for the others:
Vaughn glances at me. He is still underselling his abilities. By his count, it is actually 37 more languages, with at least 24 he speaks well enough to carry on lengthy conversations. He can read and write in eight alphabets and scripts. He can tell stories in Italian and Finnish and American Sign Language. He’s teaching himself Indigenous languages, from Mexico’s Nahuatl. to Montana’s Salish. The quality of his accents in Dutch and Catalan dazzle people from the Netherlands and Spain.
Yet here I am, struggling to memorise verbs in Italian.
A mining project was in danger due to a few rare species, so they've decided to move them to another place which turned into a logistic nightmare:
Operation chinchilla will hardly have the drama of an elephant capture. The short-tailed chinchillas are being moved via small traps to an area that scat and other evidence suggest was once a part of their range, according to Luis Ortega, the Chilean environmental manager overseeing the rodent removal. The animals are easy prey: Fur hunters can scoop the rabbit-sized rodents by hand from their shallow dens, Ortega said.
The article is a few years old though, so probably by know the story has its happy ending.
A really nice overview of things that worked and things that didn't during a year long redesign of a web app:
Making mockups is easy, communicating is hard. So the first thing to do was establish a shared foundation and vision. I started by asking questions to understand the thinking behind the existing design, and by collecting feedback from the community.
I also really enjoyed some of the more unconventional UI decisions thrown here and there.
Given that we've been using emails for quite a few decades now, it doesn't surprise me that there must be some etiquette to it.
Next, be consistent. “Yours truly” was a common way to conclude a business letter in the 19th century. But in that era correspondence was layered with nuance. “Yours faithfully” could be preceded only by “Dear Sir” (or, on rare occasions in commerce, “Dear Madam”). If the recipient was named (“Dear Mr So and So”) then the book-end was “Yours sincerely”. Today writers fasten the formal to the informal. If your subject line is “Now in paperback” don’t overcompensate by personalising your sign-off. If you send out a press release on emissions cuts, do not end your note with “Hugs”.
I am usually too lazy to change the default template though.
Things I didn't know last Tuesday
In Russian this word ("целовальник") literally means "kisser", but in fact was used as "sworn man":
Nowadays, usage of the term often refers to its 19th-century meaning: under the Russian state alcohol monopoly, vodka sellers in taverns were commonly called tselovalniks because they gave a cross-kissing oath not to dilute vodka supplied from state-controlled distilleries and to sell it according to the demand.
So this is how the first Russian bartenders were called.
Folks in Japan invented chopstics that hit food with electricity to transmit sodium ions which in turn amplifies the feeling of saltiness and umami.
The device transmits sodium ions from food, through the chopsticks, to the mouth where they create a sense of saltiness, according to Homei Miyashita, a professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, whose laboratory collaborated with the food and drink manufacturer Kirin to develop the device.
This way people eat less salt, which keeps them healthier.
I didn't know that this chair shape has its own name:
The Monobloc chair is a lightweight stackable polypropylene chair, usually white in colour, often described as the world's most common plastic chair.
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