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
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)
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
- Bread
- An early bugging device
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
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
Modern
- I often forget how US segregation like this happened in living memory
- After WW2 the USA set up a National Raisin Reserve
Literature
- 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
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
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?
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?!
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
Medicine
- Theraputic index as a way of measuring how much leeway you have in adjusting drug dosage
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
-
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
-
“Dissent channel” for diplomats
Politics
- 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)
Food
- Tempura has Portuguese heritage (missionaries, again)
- Taiwanese fast food plus wok and stove use
Geography
- More about people than geography, but this balancing boulder has a good story
Art
- A beautiful panoramic drawing of the Yangtze by a 13th-century artist
- Robot painting machines at a fashion show
