Good afternoon lovely email friends. Many lovely things for you this week.Today is not only Odometer Day but also Root Canal Appreciation Day. For these opening remarks, maybe I can get some mileage out of one or both of those; you know the drill.
🧠 The ultimate list of digital mental health support: It’s Mental Health Awareness Week again, the overarching lesson of which is we’re getting long on awareness and short on support. I wrote more last year and the year before.
💰 Gold is now a green Bitcoin, and both are disastrous: Gold mining is an absolute disaster for environment, but nothing can compete with the footprint of bitcoin. See also, a thousand times over: Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster.
😭 An oral history of the Dawson crying GIF and its outsized legacy: You’ve seen James Van Der Beek dissolving into exquisitely artificial tears, his face crumpling like a discarded gum wrapper. It’s the reaction gif of absurd sorrow, of tragedy so overwrought as to be funny. Crying Dawson ruled the internet comment sections of the late ’00s and early ’10s. Anyone who’s been even remotely online in the past decade or so knows it. But Crying Dawson has a secret history — one that most people who saw the GIF would never know.
🗯 Curses Aren’t Just Words: Profanity is distinctly odd as words go. Often, they don’t exactly mean anything, or even make sense as grammar. Also, why does a word exist if we aren’t supposed to utter it? Or if certain words are profane, why do so many of us use them all the time? See also: How the N-Word Became Unsayable.
⛩ OpenStreetMap Haiku: Okay so they’re more like Senryū, but this is poetry generated from the characteristics of wherever you place the cursor on the map. See also: I’m moderately fascinated by the enduring promotion of What3Words, despite limited real-world use and flaws in its algorithm.
🤝 Is negotiation-as-a-service the next startup frontier? Wouldn’t it be nice to let a robot negotiate all your contracts for you? That future might not be as far off as it sounds — at least according to an Estonia-founded startup that has just announced its latest round of funding.
🚘 Internal Combustion Engine: Its time is nearly up, but internal combustion engine revolutionised transportation over land, water, and air. Although omnipresent, the workings of an engine are cryptic. This article beautifully illustrates the functionality of all the basic engine parts. See also: An obituary for the internal combustion engine.
🗼 The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower: The one sight on my list while visiting Japan that I didn’t manage to fit in is now destined for demolition. An asymmetric pile of 145 identical concrete boxes, each housing a living space with a large circular window, the tower is an icon of Japan’s architectural avant garde.
🔢 12 Incredible Masterpieces That Show the Oneness of Mathematics and Design: Exploring geometric design and the mathematics that underpins it, by way of some outstanding and timeless examples.
🏞 How the trees in your local park help protect you from disease: As we are all now acutely aware, the air around us is highly populated with microscopic life forms: dense clouds of bacteria, tiny fungi, algae and vast quantities of viruses, moss spores and plant pollen. But where does all this invisible life come from? And what does our exposure to it mean for our health? This article sets out to discover the kinds of microbes people are likely to encounter during walks in urban parks.
🚸 Should I have kids: 6 tips to help you decide if you want to start a family: A parenthood clarity therapist explains how she helps fence sitters make one of the most important decisions of their lives.