til
I strongly believe you can put some system in your curiosity, make sure that you maximize how much new inspiration you get. A system that I personally like a lot - but then I'm also a systems-type person - is Today I learned aka TIL. It kind of forces you each day to think about what you learned that day, something you didn't know before. And if you can think of anything, open up a few goto sources that inspire you differently, you'll find something you didn't know soon enough. Put a system in it. Or come here, below is what I learned today.
01.08.2024
WMC has identified that more than half (52%) of the companies in the Fortune 500 list in 2003 no longer exist today. Some of the former Fortune 500 businesses that have ceased trading include PanAM, WorldCom and TWA, with many of them declaring bankruptcy before their eventual demise. In their place are giants such as Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, while General Motors, Exxon Mobil and Walmart have retained their place.
31.07.2024
Nothing smells quite like Earth after it's been through the rinse cycle. In fact, rain is such a pleasant smell that perfume-makers, soap makers and scent-purveyors the world over try to recreate it. And now I found out this smell has a name! Called "petrichor," lingers when rain falls after a prolonged dry spell. The word is derived from a combination of the prefix "petr" referring to stone, and "ichor," referring to a tenuous essence, and was first coined in 1964 in the journal Nature by two Australian scientists studying the smells of wet weather
30.07.2024
The Olympic torch relay is a tradition that feels ancient, but it originated in 1936 as a German publicity stunt. The Greeks employed a ritual fire in the ancient Olympics, but they never staged a relay of torchbearers to open their games. The Olympic torch relay was the brainchild of Carl Diem, the chief organizer of the Berlin Games, who envisioned an unprecedented succession of more than 3,000 runners transporting the flame from the cradle of the ancient Olympics to Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, where it would light the cauldron during the opening ceremonies of the XI Olympiad.
15.07.2024
Shinrin-yoku aka the Japanese art of forest bathing, the term emerged in Japan in the 1980s as a physiological and psychological exercise. The purpose was twofold: to offer an eco-antidote to tech-boom burnout and to inspire residents to reconnect with and protect the country’s forests.
03.07.2024
Study shows traffic speeds decrease when bike lane is present. As many traffic analyses have identified speeding as a contributing factor in a majority of crashes, inducing such a "traffic calming" effect with a bike lane could enhance road safety and decrease the risk and severity of crashes, the researchers said. The research was published in the Journal of Urban Mobility. "We are giving you more evidence that bike lanes save lives," said Hannah Younes, "and it's not only cyclists' lives that could be saved. It's more than that—drivers and pedestrians as well."
27.06.2024
Walmart, the US leading grocer by sales, recently announced plans to expand its “digital shelf labels” to 2,300 of its stores nationwide by 2026, which could expose millions of consumers to the technology. It will also introduce dynamic pricing–a concept usually tied to ride share apps like Uber–to the old-school practice of buying bananas and milk. What does that mean? Digital price tags can change the cost of groceries 6 times per minute!
26.06.2024
There is a relationship between cricket chirping and temperature, who knew. Well some people knew for a long time it seems. In Western science, it is called Dolbear’s law after the most widely referenced early publication on the phenomenon published in 1897 by Amos Dolbear. His observations showed that you can count the number of chirps per 15 seconds, add 40, and that will give you the temperature in Fahrenheit (F).
17.05.2024
Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a staple of Japanese art. Created using traditional woodblock printing techniques, the work typifies the ukiyo-e practice. Given its prominence and popularity, you may think that The Great Wave that we know and love is the only one of its kind. However, Katsushika Hokusai actually depicted this subject matter several times throughout his life, culminating in a collection of four similarly themed canvases. The first from 1792, when he was 33; the second from 1803, when he was 44; the third from 1805, when he was 46; and the famous fourth from 1831, when he was 72.
14.05.2024
Moravec's paradox is a phenomenon observed by robotics researcher Hans Moravec, in which tasks that are easy for humans to perform (eg, motor or social skills) are difficult for machines to replicate, whereas tasks that are difficult for humans (eg, performing mathematical calculations or large-scale data analysis) are relatively easy for machines to accomplish.
24.04.2024
Fake artists on Spotify is a thing. A composer from Sweden named Johan Röhr for instance, whose music, it says, has been released on Spotify under “50 composer aliases and at least 656 invented artist names” and has been streamed over 15 billion times on the platform. Largely because the integration of the music into dozens of official Spotify playlists.
23.04.2024
In the heart of Iceland lies a geological marvel unlike any other: the Silfra fissure, where the American and Eurasian tectonic plates almost converge. This extraordinary location is believed to be the only spot on Earth where one can physically touch two continents simultaneously, making it a must-visit destination for adventurers and nature enthusiasts alike.
16.02.2024
Generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University. However, they found that using an AI model to generate text is significantly less energy-intensive. Creating text 1,000 times only uses as much energy as 16% of a full smartphone charge.
15.02.2024
New cars in Europe are getting 1 cm wider every two years, on average. That’s according to research by Transport & Environment (T&E) which says the trend will continue due to the rising sales of SUVs – unless lawmakers take action. Around half of new cars sold are already too wide for the minimum on-street parking space in many countries. Paris could be the first major European capital to tackle this trend if citizens endorse higher parking charges for SUVs in a referendum next month.
14.02.2024
Who knew this world famous sign was started by a Belgian? ‘On January 14, 1941, the Belgian resistance invented the V sign ✌️. Via the BBC war radio 'Hier Radio België', Brussels resident Victor De Laveleye calls for it to be made visible everywhere in the streets. As a symbol of 'Victoire' and 'Freedom'. As a symbol of resistance against the Nazi occupier. Later, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill took over the sign and made it world famous. To this day, the V sign is the most famous hand gesture in the world.”
13.01.2024
In the US you can find weird huge barcodes across the country to improve their spy satellite imagery. The strange symbols were used in the 20th century to calibrate the lenses of aerial and satellite cameras. Most were made in the 1950s and '60s when the Cold War was heating up and the US was bolstering its aerial reconnaissance technology.
18.08.2023
Bots, it seems, are better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans are. That's according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine, who tested 1,400 subjects on several types of CAPTCHAs. They found that bots are not only better at solving various forms of CAPTCHAs such as image recognition, puzzle sliders and distorted text, they're faster, too.
03.08.2023
A new report revealed that Starlink satellites had to make 25,000 collision avoidance maneuvers in the six-month period between December 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023, Space.com first reported. On average, that’s a whopping 137 collision avoidances performed by the Starlink satellites each day. Overall, SpaceX’s satellites have made a total of 50,000 collision avoidance maneuvers since the company began launching Starlinks to orbit in 2019, based on reports filed by SpaceX to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
27.07.2023
Since 2010, the media massively increased headlines that use fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. It has also decreased articles of neutrality and joy. So basically media is becoming increasingly more negative, that's a fact.
26.06.2023
A beautiful QR code is possible... I wouldn't click the link as I don't know what's behind it, but just seeing this work is cool. Thanks to AI.
15.05.2023
Interestingly, the use of machines increases human's workload most when the professional is cognitively constrained, for instance, experiencing time pressures or multitasking. However, situations where decision makers experience high workload is precisely when introducing AI to alleviate some of this load appears most tempting. The research suggests that using AI, in this instance, to make the process faster can backfire, and actually increase rather than decrease the human's cognitive effort.
It's pretty interesting that kale and cabbage — along with broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collard greens, and kohlrabi, and several other vegetables — all come from the exact same plant species: Brassica oleracea.
09.05.2023
This ancient barrier between two islands both does and doesn't exist. Indonesia's Bali and Lombok are separated by an invisible line that explains why the islands have such starkly different wildlife.
08.05.2023
In 2009 while watching Stewart Little (1999), Hungarian art historian Gergely Barki, saw the painting "Sleeping Lady with Black Vase" by Róbert Berény. It had been missing for 90 years and had been used as a prop. It was the original!
27.04.2023
ChatGPT lies in some languages more than others. AI is very much a work in progress, and we should all be wary of its potential for confidently spouting misinformation. But it seems to be more likely to do so in some languages than others. Why is that?The question comes in the wake of a report by NewsGuard, a misinformation watchdog, that shows how ChatGPT repeats more inaccurate information in Chinese dialects than when asked to do so in English.
12.04.2023
Industrial-scale bitcoin mining facilities in the US create as much carbon pollution as 3.5 million gas-powered cars, and Texas, which boasts the largest number of mining facilities in the country, will see the cost of electricity rise nearly 5% by mid-2023 due to cryptocurrency mining... Not only that, in 2021 when Storm Uri impacted the power grid, he state’s power grid operator ordered Bitcoin mining plants to shut off, under an agreement that allowed it to do so if the system was about to fail. In return, it began paying the Bitcoin company, Bitdeer, an average of $175,000 an hour to keep the computers offline. Over the next four days, Bitdeer would make more than $18 million for not operating, from fees ultimately paid by Texans who had endured the storm.
06.04.2023
Only 12,305 of roughly 420,000 legacy verified accounts have subscribed to a paid Twitter Blue plan as of Tuesday. That's just above 3 percent of the celebrities, pro athletes, influencers, and media personalities who make up the platform's power users. That said, over the course of the nearly 4 months the subscription service has been live, Twitter has just crossed the 500,000 Twitter Blue subscriber threshold. But as stated earlier, only few of them being legacy verified accounts. What's more, 244,562 Twitter Blue subscribers have fewer than 1,000 followers. Of those, 88,085 accounts have fewer than 100 followers. And then there's the 2,585 Twitter Blue subscribers with no followers at all.
05.04.2023
In the series 'why simple when it can also be difficult': the word "queue" is pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.
04.04.2023
The heart of a blue whale, which can weigh in excess of 1,300 lbs and is the size of a small car. The gigantic heart beats 8 to 10 times per minute and each heartbeat can be heard from over 2 miles away. Two miles!
03.04.2023
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge. This has WARPED written all over it: “curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon, and to Sir Isaac Newton, and it must be absolutely unhampered. Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.”
30.03.2023
South Africans spent at least 9.5 hours a day online in 2022. This was the highest in the world, exceeding the global figure by around three hours, a study showed. And all that while internet speeds are lower than global average.
27.03.2023
On average, parking lots gobble up 20% of prime locations in U.S. city centers.
24.03.2023
Starbucks Rewards is next level. Customers are incentivized to preload their account to earn 2x points. In 2019, they held $1.6bn on these cards with an avg of 10% breakage. Starbucks is effectively borrowing from its customers at a -10% interest rate.
21.03.2023
This looks like a trap. Nice one English language... nice one.
ingenuity (noun): The ability to solve difficult problems, often in original, clever, and inventive ways.
ingenuine (adj): False, not genuine or authentic.
ingenuous (adj): Demonstrating childlike simplicity.
ingenious (adj): Of a person: Displaying genius or brilliance; inventive.
07.03.2023
Making a decision with every word you say may actually be like weightlifting for the brain. "Kroll thinks this constant cognitive challenge that bilinguals face may be responsible for an observed improvement in what’s called executive function, or the ability to filter out unnecessary information and make decisions."
06.03.2023
When Mount Everest was first measured it was found to be exactly 29,000 feet tall. It was reported as 29,002 because surveyors worried the public would assume 29,000 was merely an estimate.
02.03.2023
WikiShootMe is a tool that shows all geotagged content of Wikepedia & Wikimedia on a map, it's a really interesting way to go explore a specific area you're interested in.
01.03.2023
Europe's stunning digital divide. It’s not just the spear-shaking Sentinelese or the adamantly analog Amish who shun the 21st century. There are also a considerable contingent of Europeans who still don’t use the internet. As this map illustrates, Europe’s offliners are concentrated in the southeast of the continent. On the other hand, almost everyone in northwestern Europe is online.
28.02.2023
As electric vehicles continues to speed ahead in the market, a new study from the University of Maryland's Center for Global Sustainability (CGS) found that homebuyers are willing to pay a premium in areas where it's easy to top up those electrons in the batteries of their plug-in rides. More charging stations basically ramp up home prices.
08.12.2022
In Dec. 1945, Picasso created "The Bull", a series of 11 lithographs. With each successive print, a bull is simplified and abstracted. Picasso's goal was to find "spirit of the beast". The philosophy behind this is taught at companies like Apple, to be used when designing products & services.
07.12.2022
The internet will effectively take over the functions normally performed by your instinct for enquiry. Your curiosity will be outsourced, and before you know it, you will forget how to practise it. Rather than a great dumbing-down, it’s likely that we are at the beginning of a cognitive polarisation — a division into the curious and the incurious. People who are inclined to set off on intellectual adventures will have more opportunities to do so than ever in human history; people who merely seek quick answers to someone else’s questions will fall out of the habit of asking their own, or never learn it in the first place. In the blunt formulation of the writer Kevin Drum, “The internet is making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber." (out of Curious, by Ian Leslie)
02.12.2022
A bolt of lightning contains about ¼ of a kilowatt-hour of power. Even with recent energy price rises, it’s only worth about 9 pence. So while it might be possible to harness electricity from lightning... it's probably not worth it.
30.11.2022
The antilibrary aka all the books in your library you haven't read yet. Coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan, "Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. [Your] library should contain as much of what you do not know. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary." I like this, gives purpose to my Tsundoku ;)
21.11.2022
According to a new study published in Current Biology, very-low frequency (VLF) speakers pumping out deep bass makes people dance harder and the scientists behind the study don’t know why.
17.11.2022
Nostalgia mapping. Interesting to see how our nostalgia moved decades in just 15 years. Soon back to the Sixties then? Or more back?
24.10.2022
Birds give up the complexity of song for volume in noisy places - so they sing louder but less interesting (to both humans & mates) songs in cities. When traffic noise in San Francisco fell due to COVID, birds began to sing more complex, quieter songs like they did 50 years ago!
09.06.2022
MIT researchers developed a machine learning technique that learns to represent data in a way that captures concepts which are shared between visual and audio modalities. Their model can identify where certain action is taking place in a video and label it.
18.05.2022
Interesting story about the Italian streets that don't exist: “So the authorities invented this system of a made-up street, which doesn’t exist in real life but is in the city’s registry. You can call it anything—Nutella Street, for example, and next to ‘Nutella Street’ in the registry, you write the names of all the people who don’t have a fixed address but have an economic reason for staying in the city, like their circus coming to town,” says Sibillano. Nowadays, Italy’s peculiar system of fictitious streets is used less for trapeze artists or lion tamers and more for people who are homeless or precariously housed. Homeless people can ask to be registered as a resident of a fictitious street, which gives them an official address that they can put on their ID.
16.05.2022
In 1969, Dali designed the Chupa Chups logo. Also, keenly aware of branding, he suggested that the logo be placed on top of the lolly instead of the side so that it could always be seen intact.
26.04.2022
“Sneezing is such a great feature!” Earth is a simulation, and now you can submit a user review. Just discovered this website via The Morning News. Love it.
25.04.2022
Algorithms have become something we all know about 'thanks' to the important role it plays in sorting out our social media feeds. This video from BBC Ideas explains that the term has its roots in the work of 9th century Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who also gave the world the word “algebra”.
17.03.2022
Americans overestimate the size of minority groups and underestimate the size of most majority groups. Interesting chart, wouldn't that be true for everyone though? Not just Americans?
16.03.2022
There is a mall in China that offers "husband storage" where wives can leave their husband while they shop.
10.03.2022
If everybody lived as densely as they do in Bangladesh... The Human Race could fit in Australia. Say what?!
08.03.2022
And versus &. A colleague who used to do some writing for TV shows learned me about the difference of this in credits of movies or TV. The ampersand means that the two writers are a team, and are treated as one person for WGA purposes. When it says and this indicates that the writers worked at different times.
18.01.2022
Astronaut Mark Kelly once smuggled a full gorilla suit on board the International Space Station. He didn't tell anyone about it. One day, without anyone knowing, he put it on.
07.01.2022
Where fashion goes to die. Deep in the Atacama Desert of Chile, new dunes are forming — not of sand, but of last year’s unsold clothing from around the world. Piled high atop the previous year’s fast fashion casualties and unpurchased lines of clothes, the garments are usually filled with toxins and dyes and do not biodegrade. The horror.
03.01.2022
How the paperclip became a symbol of resistance in WWII. The first mass outbreak of civil disobedience occurred in the autumn of 1940, when students of Oslo University began to wear paper clips on their lapels to demonstrate their resistance to the German occupiers and their Norwegian collaborators. A seemingly innocuous item, the paper clip was a symbol of solidarity and unity, implying resistance. The wearing of paper clips was outlawed and could lead to arrest and punishment.
06.12.2021
Just in time for the holidays. And honestly, the fun Microsoft is having with some of its legacy is fantastic, this is just one example. Very self-aware, very enjoyable.
04.12.2021
Most ransomware is designed not to install on computers that have Russian or Ukrainian language keyboards. I sense a little hack here.
03.12.2021
Here's a remarkable fact: For the past two decades, 10 percent of all the electricity consumed in the United States has come from Russian nuclear warheads. Curious to know more... click the link.
26.11.2021
A tiny handbag for your AirPods: the AirBag. This exists, not making stuff up.
19.11.2021
It appears that Tom and Jerry aren’t in fact the true first names of the titular characters! In MultiVersus, an upcoming video game by Warner Bros, the mouse and cat’s full names are listed as “Gerald Jinx ‘Jerry’ Mouse” and “Thomas Jasper ‘Tom’ Cat, Sr” respectively. Who knew ;-)
18.11.2021
The Author Clock doesn’t just tell the time, it tells a story too. Putting a wonderfully creative spin on the time-telling experience, the Author Clock has you do more than just reading time. It has you reading excerpts from literature too! Isn't that just beautiful?
28.10.2021
"I'll do it in a jiffy". Did you know that a jiffy is actually a legitimate unit of time? It is the length of one cycle of a computers system clock (about 10 milliseconds). I had no idea!
08.10.2021
In Denmark, there are libraries where you can borrow a person instead of a book to listen to their life story for 30 minutes. The aim is to fight against prejudices. Each person has a title - "unemployed", "refugee", "bipolar", etc. - but by listening to their story, you realize how much you shouldn't "judge a book by its cover". This innovative and brilliant project is active in more than 50 countries. It's called "The Human Library". Never heard of this before but totally love the idea. Unfortunately no "Human Library" in my country :-(
09.07.2021
Talk about stickyness for TikTok. Never in the past year dropped the % of users opening the app on weekly bases below 95%!!
08.07.2021
The Google app on iOS appears to have gotten a new Easter egg: a rather entertaining little pinball app hidden away in the “Tabs” menu.
07.07.2021
Humans are becoming less creative. "Kim feared that society was headed for a “creativity crisis,” alluding to the rushed day-to-day lives and the “ever-increasing amounts of [time] interacting with electronic entertainment devices of the modern era.” Thankfully, this means creative ruts are easier to identify and remedy than tanking IQ scores. Due to the immediate gratification of modern technology, people have forgotten to nurture creativity and find beauty in the mundane. The remote life gives us an opportunity to fix that, Inc. reassures."
06.07.2021
Brown trout can become addicted to the illegal drug methamphetamine when it accumulates in waterways, according to new research. Researchers led by Pavel Horky, a behavioral ecologist from the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, set out to investigate whether illicit drugs alter fish behavior at levels found in bodies of water, according to the study published Tuesday.
01.07.2021
Mind blown. Brickit helps to build new creations from your Lego bricks:
- Scan your pile of bricks
- Brickit will show you what you can build with them
- Assemble ideas with the help of instructions
- Find bricks by looking at their location in the pile
22.06.2021
This website gives a great view on the data behind "Taxi and Ridehailing Usage in New York City" worth a visit. What I take from this is that Ridehailing apps did put way more cars on the road, whereas the usage for Yellow Cabs per car is a lot higher (trips per car).
15.06.2021
The average car had more than 150 million lines of code to run increasingly complex systems. some 40% of the cost of a new car can be attributed to semiconductor-based electronic systems, a cost doubling since 2007. It estimates this total will approach 50% by 2030. The company further predicts that each new car today has about $600 worth of semiconductors packed into it, consisting of up to 3,000 chips of all types.
14.06.2021
The NIXOID NEXT is the world’s first dual-core nixie tube wristwatch. With one core dedicated to keeping the watch running, and another core for powering the watch’s built-in accelerometer. Looks incredibly unpractical. Totally want it!
12.06.2021
Just found out there's an agency called Thinkerbell. Tinker / Thinker. I like it. That's all :-)
11.06.2021
A Gucci bag in Roblox resold for 350,000 Robux or roughly $4,115. The same purse IRL costs $3,400. Remember: this Roblox purse is NOT an NFT and thus has no value/use/transferability outside the Roblox world-yet it's worth more than the physical one. Mind blown.
10.06.2021
"Starbucks customers have something like $1.4 billion in balances in the Starbucks app at any given time. We give them a billion and a half dollar loan, no interest, and only ask for it back when we want to buy some 90% margin coffee from em. Amazing." Read the whole Twitter thread if interested.
05.06.2021
A search engine for memes. And as for the record: a whopping 10,000 new memes are added every day from all sources combined.
02.06.2021
So there appears to be a Wikipedia page featuring the most odd Wikipedia entries around: "Of the over six million articles in the English Wikipedia there are some articles that Wikipedians have identified as being somewhat unusual. These articles are verifiable, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something one would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica." Enjoy!
29.05.2021
This site that reveals rude word combinations in What3Words, here's what that looks like for London (or allow location to see your local area)
27.05.2021
Seeing MIKO being mocapped live is pretty impressive. In case you don't know who MIKO or The Technician are then check this out.
26.05.2021
The Lion's roar from the Metro-Goldwyn logo is actually made from tiger vocalizations, as "lions don't make that kind of ferocious noise and the logo needed to be ferocious and majestic".
19.05.2021
Remember the space trash issue I posted about on May 4th, there is actually a company that aims at cleaning up (part of) that mess! Take a look at https://clearspace.today/ and how they aim to do that, quite fascinating.
17.05.2021
Marvel.AI will let creators, media figures, and others generate deepfake clones of their voice to license as they wish. So make the money without doing the work.
15.05.2021
Very cool paper analyzed Doctor Who episodes to find a way of increasing creativity: regularly shaking up a team by adding new members with new connections. Switching in team members upped creative quality; going against manager’s desire for stable teams.
11.05.2021
The new electric BMW i4will offer IconicSounds driving sound, developed in cooperation with Academy Award winning composer Hans Zimmer. How about that for sound design or sonic branding!
05.05.2021
Had to call Adobe support yesterday for an issue with some older software on my dad’s computer. Their support line isn’t available in Dutch so I chose English and after a few numeric choices I got connected to someone in India. He fixed my issue in like 5 minutes and yet we talked for over 20. He asked about the virus, and it didn’t take long to realize he was feeling lonely, locked in an apartment with no-one to talk to. I was heartbroken, here you have a guy who’s on the line with people around the world for his job all day long and yet they’re lonely. So sad.
04.05.2021
This is a ‘realtime’ visualization of all the debris in space. With what they call near-earth as the most problematic part of space. Like we fail to see that space isn’t infinite, but starts to look like a space version of landfill. “Near-Earth space is becoming cluttered with objects, whether that be probes sent by different governments vying for dominance, or test equipment launched by a growing number of commercial companies. Within the next five years, U.S. companies alone are planning to send 15,000 satellites into space. The areas of space most readily accessible to us are becoming more limited, and it all boils down to the fact that people fail to recognize near-Earth space as a finite resource.” Within the overland (aka off road camping) or trail communities we always talk about the ‘leave no trace’ principle. How it’s okay to wildcamp as long as you make sure you leave no trace of it when you leave, respect where you have been. We’re definitely not doing that in space.
03.05.2021
There was a scary article on Fast Company about how Apple’s new AirTags could enable domestic abuse in terrifying ways - never really thought about this, but sounds bloody obvious when you read it. It makes me wonder if the real threat of surveillance technology isn’t the government spying on us all, but individuals spying on each other. At least the first one is kinda public and regulated, the second is under the radar, invasive, bad behavior. “Surveillance devices can be a serious issue for survivors of domestic abuse. A woman in Houston was followed constantly by her ex before she realized the culprit was a locater that had been placed in her car. As NNDEV explains, it’s now standard procedure for halfway houses to talk through the technology a person is carrying or left behind. Smartphones are the most obvious tracker, and staff will check that these devices have options such as Find My iPhone turned off. Often, they’ll even search the bags of survivors, hunting down potential trackers. “There are many instances, in doing that, they have discovered a tracker in a bag, or a stuffed animal a little kid brought,” says Olsen.”
26.04.2021
"Tea vs Cha. Across languages, there are two primary ways of referring to the golden liquid we all love - chai or tea. English (tea), Dutch (thee), Tamil (te-neer) or Hindi (chai), Persian (chay), Arabic (shay). The reason is interesting, showing how the imprint of globalization remains on languages. Tea originated in China and it was represented by the letter "茶" - this character was called "cha" in Mandarin spoken in mainland China and "te" in Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal province of Fujian. The countries that got tea via China through the Silk Road (land) referred to it in various forms of the word "cha". On the other hand, the countries that traded with China via sea - through the Min Nan port called it in different forms of "te". Interestingly, Portugal traded with China from the Macaw port instead of Fujian and thus uniquely adopted cha, in contrast with its neighboring countries." Facebook can be useful sometimes. Sometimes.
23.04.2021
22.04.2021
“Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness.” So there’s a word for this then. Not 100% sure this is where I am right now, but it does definitely resonate with the sentiment I often have these days.
19.04.2021
This weekend I learned. How much recharge you really get from a solid disconnect. We just spent 3 days by the Semois river with the Land Rover, rooftop tent making chili con carne in a Dutch Oven (cast iron pot that hangs over a fire basically). I only had camera gadgets with me, no iPads or computers and we hardly had decent mobile internet connection anyway. I didn’t think about work, didn’t even think about the kids back home. It was the best. I feel incredibly energized. And with that I learned that the investment to build out the Land Rover further was more than worth it, so that’s good news. And I’m now even more confident that the outdoor idea of WARPED is maybe a better idea than I thought it could be.
16.04.2021
I guess we all know this, yet it’s still quite fascinating to see it proven by science the way they do here. Our brain needs breaks to perform better.
15.04.2021
Today, Google announced a new 3D time-lapse feature in its Google Earth platform. It allows users to navigate to any spot on the globe and press Play to watch the geography change. The timeline goes back 37 years, from 1984 through today. Each frame of the time-lapse is pulled from one year of imagery. While the playback is running, users can move the camera’s position to view the shifting landscape from different angles. This proves that the things you know are bad are way worse when visualized properly.
09.04.2021
Meanwhile on Reddit, Amazon delivery drivers are discussing leaving packages upside down -- a frown -- as a form of protest against working conditions
07.04.2021
A reindeer cyclone. When reindeers sense a threat, this is what they do to protect the herd (with the little calves in the centre). Mesmerizing, especially the way it’s filmed here as well.
05.04.2021
Americans have a new pandemic-related problem to worry about: zombies. No, not the kind that kills to eat brains, but the type that kills because their own noggins aren’t operating at full capacity. So-called Zoom zombies are terrorizing U.S. drivers and pedestrians, according to the Root Insurance Distracted Driving Awareness Survey, released today. According to the survey, 54% of motorists who have driven their vehicles soon after using a videoconferencing platform report having trouble concentrating on the road.
02.04.2021
I know we don't need more proof climate change is real. What I liked about this one is that is measures the peak bloom day of cherry blossoms in Kyoto since the year 812! That graph is 1200 years of data!
31.03.2021
Mission Minnow. That’s the name of a sponsor on the Scuderia Ferrari F1 car for the last 2-3 years. Never really knew what it was, never really paid attention. (I might be a petrolhead but just don’t find F1 to be really exciting.) But the story behind it is pretty interesting… Mission Minnow is essentially a division from Philip Morris. It’s totally unclear what they do, question is if they do anything at all… the article digs into how this is all subliminal advertising for Marlboro, which historically was a Scuderia Ferrari sponsor and used to be on the cars for years.
29.03.2021
I just found out there’s been an ongoing study in Belgium (ongoing during pandemic that is) that measures the evolution of people’s motivation. I’ll link to the study down below although it’s in Dutch. But you get a ton out of the graph below. The blue line is ‘voluntary motivation’, the red line literally translates as ‘MUST-ivation’ so I guess you can tell that is ‘mandatory motivation’ or something similar. And the last one is ‘Amotivation’ which I guess translates as lack of motivation or not doing without understanding why you do it?
28.03.2021
A “first-review effect” on e-commerce sites suggests that the first piece of user-generated feedback about a product can have an impact on word of mouth for up to 36 months. Whether a first review is positive or negative was found to have a lasting influence on the number of future reviews, and the associated star ratings. This analysis was based on a study of over 170 vacuum cleaners sold on the websites from Amazon and Best Buy.
26.03.2021
"Container ships have lost at least 2,980 containers since November. According to American Shipper, these ships lost a year’s worth of lost cargo in only two months. These ships were carrying cargo like like Ikea furniture, Puma shoes, Kate Spade accessories, frozen shrimp and even vacuum cleaners." A negative side effect of e-commerce? Or just a coincident. It makes you wonder how much cargo has been lost to the bottom of the oceans over time though.
25.03.2021
n 1930 the Indiana Bell building was rotated 90°. Over a month, the structure was moved 15 inch/hr, all while 600 employees still worked there. There was no interruption to gas, heat, electricity, water, sewage, or the telephone service they provided. No one inside felt it move.
24.03.2021
"With No Time to Die pushed back to fall now, it bears reminding that James Bond is not only an industry leader when it comes to movie delays, but also when it comes to product placement. And it's precisely that reason why it's being speculated Daniel Craig’s 007 could be called back on the field to reshoot some scenes." The idea that they have to reshoot scenes because the product placements of Nokia etc is already outdated, makes you wonder if movies are more time sensitive than they were.
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