Hello lovely email friends. Since last I wrote, I shaved off my beard on a whim. For my own gentle amusement in front of the bathroom mirror, opportunities for which are limited these days, I started by going for a Geoff from Byker Grove. Yet, with lockdown hair, the result was Lemmy. Who knew that the distance between Geoff and Lemmy is measured only in time.

💸 It’s Not That Hard to Buy Nothing: Amid the disruption of last year, some re-evaluated their relationship with things. This article explores what they learned.

🧼 Ice bubbles’ on surface of frozen lake delight photographers in northern Japan: Beautiful disc-shaped bubbles form in the ice of Lake Nukabira in Japan’s northernmost prefecture. Photographers are flocking, as this phenomenon is usually seen only for a short period after the surface of the lake freezes but before it is covered in snow.

🦐 Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea: An excellent longform study of the explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth. Deep-sea exploration is so difficult and so expensive that those involved are a peculiar bunch even before anyone gets in the water.

👵 Future generations deserve good ancestors. Will you be one? If you’re looking for a sense of place in the universe, the living are outnumbered by the deceased, but both are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those unborn. In just the next millennium, more than 135 billion people will be born. Can we value our wellbeing over theirs?

🧫 The Science Museum’s Never Been Seen website shows you objects with zero views: I’ll level with you: when visiting the Science Museum I tend to do exactly as I did over thirty years ago and head straight for the lunar lander. But it turns out they’ve got a whole bunch of other stuff too, including some never displayed, that you can enjoy from the comfort or perpetual torture of your own home.

🧰 Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the “Right to Repair”: Unfixable stuff be damned! The EU is restricting products designed to be unfixable, forcing companies to change their ways.

☁️ Do clouds pay taxes? If you were to start a tech company today, where would you base it? Online businesses are somewhat abstracted from real locations, which then forces big questions about what tech is and to what regime it is accountable. That said, much of Silicon Valley does stick to a relatively small geographic footprint. This piece explores why.