Interesting Stuff

Mostly, Wikipedia rabbit holes I’ve gone down and enjoyed.

Technology

• It’s astonishing that the internet all works - e.g. a solution was needed to IP addresses running out
• Focus stacking and depth of field
• The earliest type of photography, which apparently has higher resolution than modern digital cameras?!
• The flat, minimalist style used by apps & websites has a name: Corporate Memphis. And on the other hand you have skeumorphism
• A device used to grade tomato ketchup
• How Victorians transported foreign plants being imported
• An auditory illusion
• The steam coming out of all those NYC streets is… steam
• A proposal to make spam costlier (now being used by some sites to block AI crawlers)

Transport

• Various cool maintenance trains
• A deliberate (unmanned) plane crash (seems very wasteful to me. And only for a 2-hour TV show!!)
• Why you drive on the right on Savoy Court, plus London cab turning circles
• SF buses and apparent corruption in Shenyang (Northeast China)
• An insanely long flight around the world

History of

• Parental censorship of inappropriate TV programmes
• Roads and transport
  • The concept of a stagecoach
  • Material science of roads
  • Governance / financing in early modern era
  • Water locks
  • A past train crash (there are loads and loads of high-quality Wikipedia articles about these and they make pretty interesting reading, in terms of spotting the recurring themes and how they developed new technologies to help reduce the impact of inevitable human errors).
    • also, didn’t know that railway time used to exist; another fact to add to my “history of time” collection
• Housing
  • Back to back houses
• Bread
  • A WW1 ban on fresh bread
  • Industrial production of it
• An early bugging device
• Landline phones had a “sidetone” feature where you could hear back what you were saying. People hypothesised that this helped you talk at the right volume. It would be pretty easy to test whether this was true, since mobile phones don’t have any sidetone. There’s one n=18 study related to this, plus maybe one or two other small studies, but not much else I can see.
• TV test screens and video transmission tradeoffs
• A 20th-century audio-only group version of Omegle

Construction

• The Georgian houses you see with black bricks (e.g. on Downing Street) were originally yellow and darkened because of soot pollution

History

Pre-modern

• A Chinese polymath’s oeuvre
• Early lotteries
  • Also, these stats
  • And a history of gambling in Britain (especially the Unlawful Games Act 1541!!) on the regressiveness of modern lotteries
• The first printed Tamil text (from a missionary)
  • And another early Christian in Asia (who was a local, not a missionary)
• The precursor to a monotheistic Jewish god.
• An ancient clay disc that’s undeciphered but nonetheless has its own Unicode block
• A book describing Zhou Dynasty customs
• A Pope that wasn’t
• Cosmic rays interfering with electronics

Early modern & earlier

• There’s something amusing about Charles I’s attempts to stick within the letter of the law whilst being a tyrant (at least as it’s presented here):

To raise revenue without reconvening Parliament, Charles resurrected an all-but-forgotten law called the “Distraint of Knighthood”, in abeyance for over a century, which required any man who earned £40 or more from land each year to present himself at the king’s coronation to be knighted. Relying on this old statute, Charles fined individuals who had failed to attend his coronation in 1626.

• The granting of monopolies by the Crown to raise money
• The role of technology (trains & telegraphs) in helping police do away with Australian outlaws
• A mysteriously-persecuted group in southern Europe

Modern

• I often forget how US segregation like this happened in living memory
• After WW2 the USA set up a National Raisin Reserve
• A dramatically-named arts fund under the New Deal
• Pretty terrible German security failures in the 1970s
• A modern shipwreck and enthusiastic scavengers

Literature, film, etc

• I can’t tell whether the law of re-entry is something we have direct or only indirect evidence of, but it made me wonder whether there are things today in arts/literature which are obeyed like laws, not written down explicitly, yet could be reconstructed by future people.
  • It definitely feels like there are fewer rules today e.g. in music nowadays you don’t have to follow “no parallel fifths”, modern art is much more expansive in boundaries than classical, etc
• Two notable sitcom episodes – I watched very little TV when I was younger, but it’s cool (although shouldn’t be unexpected) reading how earlier shows heavily influenced & were referenced in later ones

Organisations

• The precursor to Woodcraft Folk
• The rave that made Parliament come up with a definition of music (Radio 4 documentary)

Maths

• Maths duels in Italy about cubics; Ruffini and the non-existence of a quintic formula
• Fisher’s exact test
• Etymology of Student’s t-distribution, involving Guinness beer
• The cottage industry of small scannable codes, lots of which are less well-known than the QR
• Kaprekar’s routine
• Censoring and trunctation of data

Combinatorics, geometry

• Ley lines and random points
• Chess puzzles
  • About queens and other pieces
• Constructible numbers
• Various levels of abstraction away from cooling towers

Economics & finance

• A particularly risky kind of short-selling
  • And a peculiarity I discovered writing a matchmaking survey
• “Alchian-Allen effect”; also Baumol’s cost disease
• Courts making incorrect competition law judgements (from the sounds of things, haven’t looked closely into it)
• Because they use different-sized bars in New York and London, when there’s physical delivery of gold being traded across the Atlantic, it has to go via Switzerland to be smelted down. (What a waste of energy…)
• A big UK reinsurance scheme with an unlimited government guarantee (and the reason why there are so many of those now-empty little police booths around the City of London)
• Continuous time games
  • I wonder if they’re related to hyper-real numbers?
• The microlife, which in many cases seems more useful a unit than the micromort

Business

• Ways to avoid hostile takeovers, all of which have colourful names, e.g. posion pill
• Corporate structure of car manufacturers
• A “stand-up” meeting is called that because you’re meant to stand up to keep it short?!
• The absurd amount of spam emails you get from sell-side analysts asking for your vote at some industry awards (and the amusing way the award-organiser talks about these “significant efforts in lobbying”)
• A board game developer bought up by private equity, but now publicly listed

Biology

• It is crazy that an entire forest of bamboo blossoms at the same time
• Various kinds of hallucinations (I suspect written about by someone with a personal interest in the topic and without very many references, but still)
• Ant colonies are so complicated; some insect-eating birds team up with other species; interesting to read about different types of cuckoo; started this walk looking up mistletoe, which is an “obligate” parasite
• Theory about why human eyes are much easier to see than other primates'.
• Calculating consanguinity
• Dance fever
• Sex differences in sleep brain waves
• How predator fish sense water movements and schools of prey decide how to avoid them

Medicine

• Theraputic index as a way of measuring how much leeway you have in adjusting drug dosage
• Meticulous calculation (& definition) of reference intakes for lots of unusual chemicals

Law & diplomacy

• Legal doublets are fun

• The Public Order Act 1936 banned “political uniforms” because of the rise of Mosley’s fascists; some leaders from Britain First were convicted of the offence as recently as the mid-2010s

• Trop v. Dulles

  denationalization as a punishment is barred by the Eighth Amendment [because it is] a form of punishment more primitive than torture

  evolving standards of decency

• “Vagueness doctrine” and sodomy laws

• “Dissent channel” for diplomats

• Swiss entities and professional-services firms; the corporate veil

• Various tragic criminal cases that have influenced current practice around diminished responsibility & other mental disorder defences

• Many parts of the HMRC internal manual, e.g. about how VAT is applied to illegal supplies (who would’ve known: heroin is treated differently to stolen vehicles)

• The loss of thousands of US patents in a fire, and in general the fact that devastating fires seem to have historically been of fairly large significance, to culture & record-keeping & much else

Politics and government

• Not sure if it’s just the English translations, but the names of Chinese principles / conventions are often very long and cryptic, e.g. “Party media takes the party’s last name” (which is in fact an abbreviation)
• A spot for free speech in Singapore
• China was being invited to US-led military exercises as recently as 2018?!
• Up-or-out in the military

Food

• Tempura has Portuguese heritage (missionaries, again)
• Taiwanese fast food plus wok and stove use
• There were vegetarian cookbooks with explicit meat alternative dishes earlier than I would’ve thought (end of the 19th century)
  • Also didn’t know that there was a vegetarian Christian denomination
• How to make chocolate shiny
• An intelligence officer turned chef

Geography

• More about people than geography, but this balancing boulder has a good story
• A Saharan megaproject that never happened

Art

• A beautiful panoramic drawing of the Yangtze by a 13th-century artist
• Robot painting machines at a fashion show