Good afternoon lovely email friends, hope all’s well. Here’s one I’ve had in the back of my mind for a long, long time, just waiting for the right occasion. But first, let’s do links!
š Snake Person: a charming graphic story about taking on a pet python.
š£ This Website Will Self-destruct: if it goes 24 hours without someone sending it a message, it will be permanently wiped. Visitors are encouraged to say what’s on their minds.
š½ Hunger is psychological ā and dieting only makes it worse: hunger isn’t in your stomach or your blood-sugar levels. It’s in your mind ā and that’s where we need to shape up.
š¢ Close your eyes and imagine you’re in the office: if you’ve ever used Noisli to block out the sound of your workplace, here’s something that’ll let you put it back in.
š¤ 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice from Kevin Kelly is perhaps the best such list I’ve found. And I read a fair few in preparation for my own list of learnings a couple of weeks back.
š How to be a good listener: my mission to learn the most important skill of all: The author Kate Murphy thinks our inability to listen properly to other people is leaving us all feeling isolated. In a world of smartphones and busy schedules, can we re-engage?
š§š»āāļø Hogwarts Digital Escape Room: created by Sydney Krawiec, a Pennsylvania librarian, this lets you and friends explore Hogwarts.
š Foster + Partners shares architecture challenges for children: the British architecture studio is publishing a series of architecture challenges, including building a paper skyscraper and creating a city, to keep children in lockdown entertained.
š„ WWII-era ‘victory gardens’ make a comeback: Washington gardeners are growing food in P-Patches and backyards to boost morale and community food supplies.
š©š»āš Recommend me a course on Coursera: you might already be overwhelmed, in which case you’re excused from taking on anything new. But in case you’re finding you’re occasionally at a loose end, this Hacker News picks out some of the best courses. See also: 33 Good Habits To Start While You’re At Home.
š¤ During a Pandemic, ‘How Are You?’ Is a Bad Question: The Atlantic goes in search of a better social convention.
Why can’t they just share the hedges?
I love hedgehogs. I like all creatures, but I didn’t fully appreciate how likeable hedgehogs are until I took on one as a pet. That said, I don’t advocate keeping a pet hedgehog: they’re extremely complicated to care for out of their own habitat. Moreover, their cousins in the wild need our attention.
This is Cicely, busying herself one night back in 2012. The thing about having a nocturnal pet is they wait for you to go to bed before doing anything, so I rigged up a little infrared camera to see how she was getting on when not being bothered by people. This is when she was happiest: doing her own thing, running long distances and snuffling about. I put a cycle computer on that wheel and discovered she’d easily run a marathon a week.
Spend any time with a hedgehog and you’ll struggle to believe, even just for a moment, they aren’t the product of some higher intelligence. If you set out to design something adorable that could withstand toothy predators while surviving on widely-dispersed insects, this is where you’d end up.
Yet, wild hedgehogs are in trouble. In the UK, hedgehog numbers have halved since 2000 and continue to decline. So as it’s Hedgehog Awareness Week, please consider a donation to the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, and modify your garden to better accommodate your nocturnal neighbours.
