📖 reading time: 4m 30s.
hi there. happy monday :)
this week is an exciting one! i have a sponsor for this week’s newsletter.
now, you may think:
“oh no, it’s time to unsubscribe from this capitalist newsletter provider”
and to that i say two things:
my entire brand is writing in lowercase so i don’t understand capitalism
i promise i will not consider a sponsor that doesn’t meet my high bar of excellence (see fig. 1.)
fig. 1.
a very accurate graph of my high bar of excellence.
so, who is the sponsor this week you ask inquisitively? it’s liist.
liist uses some magic ✨ so that you can simply screenshot a beautiful sunrise spot or a new café on instagram and they’ll save it to a map for you instantly.
the gif sums it up nicely:
it’s completely free and built by an amazing team led by an ex-creative director at instagram.
i also think that it’s pretty cool - i’ve been using it to easily build a list of places i want to visit on an upcoming trip.
you can support this newsletter and try out liist on your iphone here:
tag me on instagram or follow me on twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain.
a special thank you to my paid subscribers: i appreciate the support.
👂 earworm: listen to sonn on spotify or apple music.
📚 word of the week:
“
vacillate
”.
to waver in mind or opinion; be indecisive or irresolute.
manfred, who has an unusual ability to vacillate between pugnacious and charming, cajoled owners, stressing the idea that the sport had to have a season.
- new york times, july 25, 2020
🧠 brain candy:
🗽 is new york city dead? not even close. a new york taxi driver shared why in a response to a seinfeld op-ed in the new york times: “all things are possible. it will take more than a crumby pandemic to change that.”
🇨🇳 china's baidu has blank spots in its mapping platform. we used those blank locations to look for the network of prisons and internment camps in xinjiang, where up to a million muslim minorities have been detained.
🌵 the university of arizona says it caught a dorm’s covid-19 outbreak before it started. its secret weapon? poop. i wrote about wastewater testing before: when done well it could be a great tool in the arsenal to fight covid-19.
📒 almost every article on scots wikipedia was written by one american teenager, who does not speak scots and was just writing english in an "accent".
🤪 mildly humorous:
💡 longer reads:
🚢 driverless boats.
four hundred years after the trans-atlantic crossing of the mayflower, a ship of the same name will retrace its historic voyage. but while the original mayflower bore 102 passengers to plymouth rock, this one will ply the seas for about two weeks next spring with no living souls aboard.
promare, a u.k. ocean-research nonprofit, in partnership with international business machines corp., will unveil this new, fully autonomous mayflower on sept. 16 in portsmouth, the same seaside english town from which its namesake set sail in 1620.
the symbolism of sending a crewless, autonomous ship across an ocean in 2021—as automation accelerates the economic divide among american workers—might be a little on the nose, but its creators insist autonomous ships aren’t about replacing people. instead, this technology is intended to serve where crewed voyages are deemed too expensive—or too risky.
this is a common refrain among firms building autonomous ships: for the 70% of the earth’s surface covered by water, there are far too few humans and vessels, despite a pressing need for oceanographic data, scientific research, naval patrols and new means of transporting goods. this is in contrast to the situation on our roads, or even in our skies. yet as with autonomous cars and aerial drones, launching an autonomous ship depends as much on risk tolerance as it does technical barriers.
👉 read more via the wall street journal.
🇮🇩
a sinking city
.
since before recorded history, indonesia has been the world’s vortex of natural catastrophe, largely due to its location: the nation of 17,500 islands could not be in a worse place tectonically, within the “ring of fire,” a huge, horseshoe-shaped seismic zone that stretches east all the way to california’s san andreas fault and washington state’s mount st. helens. just west of the ring is the alpide belt, the world’s next-most seismically active zone. together, the ring of fire and the alpide account for 95% of all the world’s known earthquakes since the last ice age 11,700 years ago, and all but three of the 25 largest volcanic eruptions. four of the six biggest earthquakes this century have occurred in indonesia, and three of the 10 deadliest. in the latter category, it’s the only country to be listed more than once.
between volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and disease, no single place has inflicted anywhere near the same scale of disaster on itself and the rest of the planet. a 2004 earthquake near sumatra killed some 227,000 people in 14 countries. in 2018, indonesia was responsible for nearly half of all the world’s disaster-related deaths. but nothing before or since appears to have equaled the ferocity of the supervolcano toba, which wiped out nearly every human on the planet 75,000 years ago, according to some scientists. the few thousand surviving homo sapiens had to more or less start over.
in the context of such history, you might not expect indonesians to be easily spooked by word of another disaster, and a slow-moving one at that. but that would be wrong. the country’s latest tribulation has shaken people: jakarta is sinking into the sea. in 2030, it will be the world’s most populous city, surpassing tokyo, but just two decades later — in 2050 — it will also probably be largely under water. already, at least 20% of the city sags below sea level.
👉 read more via gen.
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👋 read one of my last 3 posts:
💰 fat cats.
🚴♀️ youth bike america.
📦 the amazonification of retail.
or click to see them all.