Good afternoon lovely email friends, how’s it going? If you’re a Christmas person, I hope and expect you’ve dived right in already. If you’re not, I hope it’s leaving you alone. Remember, if that blasted Wham song becomes an earworm, you can always get rid of it by singing Club Tropicana. Not the vocal bit, mind—otherwise you’ll just end up with another earworm—you need to sing the trumpety bit from about 3:39 onwards. Trust me, Club Tropicana is like salt on a wine-stained carpet. Works every time.
Anyway, I’ve spent far too much time this week (and, if I’m honest, last week and several of the weeks before) playing Townscaper, if indeed it’s possible to ‘play’ a ‘game’ with total creative freedom and no real objective. I love it. I adore it. I can barely put it down to do anything else. So it’s against the odds that I have another heap of interesting things for you to click upon:
💸 Introducing Amazon Brand Detector: We think of Amazon as a retailer, or distributor, of other people’s stuff. But a surprising amount of brands on Amazon are Amazon-owned and, unsurprisingly, they don’t do too badly in search-result rankings. This browser extension reveals Amazon brands and exclusive products while you shop.
🇬🇧 Lads, Gak and Union Jacks: The Oral History of ‘Cool Britannia’: In 1996, England was supposedly swinging just as it had done four decades before. While for some it represented a period of artistic growth, cultural awakening and a political reset, for others the period seemed vacuous and defined by a vapid swagger fuelled by cocaine, in an environment where laddism thrived and diversity was non-existent.
🤑 Web3 is not Decentralisation — it’s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge: This week’s warning from the near future is an elegant dismantling of all that lies behind ‘Web 3.0’: a new movement for technological monopolisation in our midst that’s receiving a lot of uncritical acceptance. Like prior attempts at technological monopolisation, those shilling it claim that it will bring innovation and a better experience for Web users, and derisively portray their critics as ignorant technophobes. But unlike those prior attempts, they co-opt the language of anti-corporatism and digital freedoms, cynically carving out a space in the current zeitgeist around concerns over the way social media and big tech operates.
📴 The worst gadgets The Verge has ever touched: Given this is the age of miracle and wonder, there’s a surprising amount of crap out there. The Verge has spent a decade reviewing consumer technology, and is marking this by looking back at the biggest duds.
👆 Your Fingerprint Can Be Hacked For $5. Here’s How: Fingerprint authentication is a convenient alternative to passwords and PIN codes. Who wants to spend time typing in a lengthy string of numbers, letters and characters when a simple tap will suffice? Unfortunately, that convenience comes at a cost. Unlike a password, you leave your fingerprint around on taxi doors, iPhone screens, and glasses of wine at your local restaurant. This article demonstrates just how easy it is for malicious actors to bypass your favourite login method.
🗺 35 History Maps That Explain The World Better Than Textbooks: We primarily think of maps as tools to show us where we’re going. But these 35 world history maps can show us where we’ve been.
🧪 Why are people obsessed with dubious personality tests? Scientists love to hate on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, easily the most popular and well-known measure of personality. For good reasons. Experts believe that the Myers-Briggs has dubious predictive ability and is grounded in debunked theory. To make matters worse, if you take the test more than once to learn more about your “true self”, it’s quite likely to give you different answers each time. And yet, despite these flaws, the Myers-Briggs remains tremendously popular. More than one-and-a-half million people take it each year and a full 89 out of the Fortune 100 companies were using the measure as recently as 2014.
🎶 10 lessons in productivity and brainstorming from The Beatles: So yeah, this obscure Liverpudlian four-piece is really starting to get some traction recently, thanks in part to a documentary by the strongest bladder in Hollywood, director Peter Jackson. And about time too. This article argues the first part of Jackson’s epic documentary is a masterclass in facilitation and creative management. Paul McCartney ushers a stoned, grumpy band through writing, arranging, recording and performing dozens of songs within a short deadline.
🩺 Telemedicine’s tipping point: Sheltering in place has pushed virtual health care into the mainstream. Will we go back to doctors’ waiting rooms? See also: Can telehealth for PTSD and bipolar disorder in rural areas be scaled up?
🚎 Electric cars aren’t enough to hit climate targets: we need to develop better public transport too: Introducing EVs on a massive scale has often been framed as the solution to reducing passenger transport emissions – witness the UK’s plans for all new homes and upgraded buildings to have EV charging points from 2022. However, recent research from the US has shown that the electrification of cars alone will not be enough for the transport sector to reach ambitious global climate action targets aiming to prevent more than 2 °C of global warming.