Thom's Link Emporium - 0018 - 23 May 2022

in

If you’d like these links delivered directly to your inbox (or spam folder) every Monday, you can sign up here.

Links

  1. If I still lived in London, I'd have snapped up this real-time LED tube-train tracker in a second

  2. How to build a nuclear weapon. In fact a lot of this is about getting enough enriched uranium, which to be fair, is the hardest part if you’re starting from scratch. The reason US only set off one test prior to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is because they only had enough materials for two uranium bombs and one plutonium bomb.

  3. What are the features of a good audiobook recording? There’s a lot in here on why stage actors don’t necessarily make good audiobook readers. Similarly there are a lot of excellent audiobook performers who are not well-known in the slightest. It’s a very different skillset.

  4. Can lavender treat anxiety? In summary, maybe, and since there’s no likely harm, it might well be worth trying. The news on its effectiveness being through giving people lavender-scented burps is something you’ll have to decide on for yourself.

  5. Rob Manuel runs @Fesshole, a Twitter account where people can anonymously confess to anything. Someone confessed to putting rude words in the starting letters of academic papers, so Manuel reviewed 32 million papers to see what he can find.

  6. Schopenhauer's 38 ways to win an argument. From 1896, but it still feels very relevant for the social media age, e.g. "Ignore your opponent's proposition, which was intended to refer to a particular thing. Rather, understand it in some quite different sense, and then refute it. Attack something different than that which was asserted."

Listening

If you're a fan of Wet Leg, and if you're not you should be, you might like to see Rhian singing very differently in 2016.

Reading

I’m currently reading Solid State: The Story of "Abbey Road" and the End of the Beatles by Kenneth Womack. Even in the context of Beatles books, this is pretty nerdy and spends an awful lot of time looking at the equipment that was available in Abbey Road through the years and the specific change of a recording console that affected the tone of the recording. The book is better on the tech than a lot of the story (which, to be fair, really needs to be updated following what we discovered in Get Back), but it’s an interesting read if nerdy music-recording information is your bag.

Watching

Firstly, there’s a new feature-length episode of Detectorists being made. It’s one of my favourite sit coms and I really can’t wait. They'll have to meet in the new village hall, though, since the previous one has been knocked down.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a video about RRR, an Indian blockbuster that hasn’t had much impact in the west so far. However, it’s on Netflix now, so I had the opportunity to see it. It’s three hours long, totally epic, has some of the best dance and fight scenes I’ve seen in years. It’s genuinely extraordinary. As an aside, I’ve got so used to seeing western blockbusters graded in increasingly murky shades of brown that seeing a film so comfortable with a bright colour palette felt pretty revolutionary all by itself.

Quote

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness