🌚 crime in space?

welcome to sam’s brain drain, a weekly collection of thumb-stopping things to tap, read, & watch.

sam mcallister

Sep 02, 2019

estimated reading time: 3m 04s.

⚡️ gooood morning.

i’m heading to venice, italy in a little under two weeks if you’ve been, reply with some unmissable things to do!

on the agenda this week: crime in space, incongruity & ancient knots.

⚡️ tag me on instagram or twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain!

👂 earworm:

indie group bombay bicycle club have made a triumphant return with their first new single in five years.

this makes me very happy. go listen, ~immediately.

the beautiful cover artwork is by marìa medem.

in early 2014, everything in bombay bicycle club’s world was sublime—or at least that’s how it seemed on their remarkable fourth album, so long, see you tomorrow. a euphoric synth-pop odyssey, so long proved that the london four-piece had fled the jangle-rock coop where they started their career.
there was no reason to expect that their next move would be an indefinite hiatus, but roughly two years later, that’s what they did. “after 10 years of doing this—and it being the only thing we’ve known since we were 16—we thought it was time for all of us to try something else,” they explained, before falling silent.
read more via pitchfork.

stream it now:

listen on spotify or on apple music.

📚 word of the week

“incongruous”:

meaning something that is not in harmony or keeping with the surroundings or other aspects of it.

the girls will screech when she says this, fall about laughing, because for someone so tiny and sweet, the incongruity of these words is hilarious, and she knows it.

🧠 brain candy

🖥 decoding inca knots:

no better way to make an impact as a freshman college student than to decipher an archaeological mystery:

there are many ways a college student might spend spring break. making an archaeological breakthrough is not usually one of them. in his first year at harvard, manny medrano did just that.
“there’s something in me, i can’t explain where it came from, but i love the idea of digging around and trying to find secrets hidden from the past,” medrano says.
with the help of his professor, gary urton, a scholar of pre-columbian studies, medrano interpreted a set of six khipus, knotted cords used for record keeping in the inca empire. by matching the khipus to a colonial-era spanish census document, medrano and urton uncovered the meaning of the cords in greater detail than ever before. their findings could contribute to a better understanding of daily life in the andean civilization.

🌚 crime in space:

this is a sad and simultaneously interesting story surrounding what may be the first allegation of criminal wrongdoing in space:

summer worden, a former air force intelligence officer living in kansas, has been in the midst of a bitter separation and parenting dispute for much of the past year. so she was surprised when she noticed that her estranged spouse still seemed to know things about her spending. had she bought a car? how could she afford that?
ms. worden put her intelligence background to work, asking her bank about the locations of computers that had recently accessed her bank account using her login credentials. the bank got back to her with an answer: one was a computer network registered to the national aeronautics and space administration.
ms. worden’s spouse, anne mcclain, was a decorated nasa astronaut on a six-month mission aboard the international space station. she was about to be part of nasa’s first all-female spacewalk. but the couple’s domestic troubles on earth, it seemed, had extended into outer space.