Hey there lovely email friends, hope all’s well. Perhaps like you, I’ve been humming Beatles songs all week. I love that illusion of old songs: you can’t remember them ever not being there, so it’s strange to think there was ever a time before they existed. It’s pretty impressive, therefore, to get a change to show an audience footage of the precise moment a song they all know fell out of the mind of its creator.
If only someone had run the cameras while Mercury penned Bohemian Rhapsody, as King imagined You’ve Got a Friend, or as Andersson, Ulvaeus and Anderson conceived Dancing Queen. Now that everything’s a camera, perhaps we’ll see this much more.
🧮 That’s a Moiré: I’ll be honest with you, this was always going to be included on the strength of the headline alone. But this is interesting stuff: we experience mismatched oscillations, or beat frequencies, all the time. Mad observable phenomena like these patterns makes maths approachable for the rest of us.
🌨 Back when it was normal to advertise cocaine gadgets in magazines: These vintage ads for cocaine paraphernalia show the crazy side of the 1970s were: offering products to keep the powder dry and free of clumps, ivory snorting straws and gold-plated razor blades.
🌭 What Hot Dogs Can Teach Us About Number Theory: If you’ve ever had to buy hot dogs and buns, you’ve probably solved a problem identifying least common multiples matching hot dogs to buns. If hot dogs come in tens and buns in eights, a simple solution is to buy eight packs of hot dogs and ten packs of buns… but who needs 80 hot dogs? Can you buy fewer packs and still make the numbers match?
👹 Marilyn Manson Abuse Allegations: A Monster Hiding in Plain Sight: It’s Rolling Stone again; perhaps they should just rename their magazine Hiding In Plain Sight. For not long after a thorough character assassination of Eric Clapton, a former stalwart, they’ve turned their attention to Manson.
🚧 Carter and Goldfinger explain the County of London Plan: published in 1943, the plan provided a view of what the city could become after the devastation of wartime bombing. It’s explained in a booklet by Edward Julian Carter, Librarian of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and Erno Goldfinger, architect of buildings such as the Balfron Tower and noted infurator of Ian Fleming.
🚢 What’s the point of the LEGO Titanic? Lego has made a habit of offering lavish, large-scale ornamental models. Writer and Enthusiast Emma Kennedy asks why anyone would want one. Once they’re built, that’s it: they’re not for playing with… nobody likes dusting that much, so why bother?
💬 The global streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage: Criticism of the international versions of Squid Game drew a bright spotlight onto a rarely discussed industry at the heart of major international streaming platforms. Language service providers provide outsourced subtitling, captioning, and dubbing through a global network of contract subtitle translators, voice-over actors, translation editors, and sound mixers. It also underscored a looming concern for streaming services: a shortage of quality translators who can handle an increasingly global audience.
🗼 Why Tokyo Works: Tokyo, the world’s largest city, frequently finds itself in the top ranks on lists for most liveable cities and best places to visit. For visitors, the scale, density, cleanliness and bright lights dazzle; for locals, the liveability, dynamism, variety and safety keep them satisfied. It takes only a few minutes in the metropolis to understand that Tokyo is an impressive place, but it takes a lot longer to understand how it got that way, and why it works so well.
🏃♀️ How To Learn Stuff Quickly: A common question I hear is “how did you get into x?”, to which I tend to reply “how did x become the one I could remember?”. We learn all kinds of stuff all the time, but not necessarily to the depth we’d like. So I’m interested in the means by which those with roles that still require a lot of knowledge manage to learn and retain all that information. So while this is aimed at software developers, we can all pick up a thing or two.