How to type an é
She’s the last of a forgotten and persecuted people
From Sean Thomas for The Independent: “Sitting in her little house near Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry. The story of her bloodline is marked with a unique sadness: because she belongs to an extraordinary tribe of hidden pariahs, repressed in France for a thousand years. Marie-Pierre is a Cagot. If the word “Cagot” means nothing to you, that is not surprising. The history of the Cagot people is obscure; some assert it has been deliberately erased. Marie certainly believes that: “To talk about the Cagots is still a bad thing in the mountains. The French are ashamed of what they did to us, the Cagots are ashamed of what they were.”
Research shows there’s nothing wrong with marrying your first cousin
From Richard Conniff for Discover: “Charles Darwin, the grandchild of first cousins, married a first cousin. So did Albert Einstein. In our lore, cousin marriages are unnatural, the province of hillbillies and swamp rats. In the United States they are deemed such a threat to mental health that 31 states have outlawed first-cousin marriages. This phobia is distinctly American, a heritage of early evolutionists with misguided notions about the upward march of human societies. Their fear was that cousin marriages would cause us to breed our way back to frontier savagery. But a team of scientists led by Robin L. Bennett, president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, found cousin marriages are not significantly riskier than any other marriage.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “She’s the last of a forgotten and persecuted people”I’d love to go back in time
Viral hit Baby Shark is based on a German camp song
From Twenty Thousand Hertz: “Pinkfong’s version of Baby Shark is especially sticky, but I think that there’s something elementally enticing and irreducibly catchy about Baby Shark no matter what its arrangement. And I think this because the Pinkfong version, it’s not the first time that Baby Shark has gone viral. In 2006, Alexandra Mueller was working at a camp for kids teaching journalism. There was a song they sang at the camp called the Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. Kleiner Hai means little shark in German. As you can hear, the song has a different tune than Baby Shark, but it’s recognizably related. The verses mean more or less the same thing and it comes with all of the same hand motions.”
An engineer got a ticket and his response changed the way traffic lights work
From Thomas Claburn for The Register: “A Swedish engineer’s umbrage at a traffic ticket has led to a six-year legal fight and now a global change in the speed with which traffic light signals are timed. After Mats Järlström lost an initial legal challenge in 2014, a federal judge ruled that Oregon’s rules prohibiting people from representing themselves as engineers without a license from the state are unconstitutional. Järlström’s calculations and advocacy have led the Institute of Transportation Engineers to revisit its guidelines for the timing of traffic signals. As a result, yellow lights around the globe could last longer, since the ITE is an international advisory group of 90 countries.”
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Viral hit Baby Shark is based on a German camp song”Disney loves the public domain when it applies to someone else’s stuff
Trung Phan has a great newsletter, and one of the topics he wrote about recently was how Disney loves — but also hates — the idea of copyrighted work losing its protection and winding up in public domain. Here’s an excerpt:
“January 1st is Public Domain Day, when works lose their copyright protection. The 2024 batch was highly highly anticipated. Why? Because Disney lost the copyright on Mickey Mouse (specifically, the version that was in the 1928 “Steamboat Willie” short film). And people care about Disney because the entertainment conglomerate has a very contradictory relationship to copyright.
On the one hand, the number of Disney films that are sniped from Public Domain is astounding. There are at least 50 of them. Just 8 of these sources — including Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Sea Maid), Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland) and some little-known writer named Shakespeare — have accounted for more than $16B at the box office:
But when it comes to Disney’s own content, it’s a very different story. Why? In 1927, Walt and his chief animator created a popular cartoon character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The character blew up and then the chief animator took his team to Universal and basically jacked Oswald. In response, Walt was determined to never let someone else control the fate of his animations. This has manifested in US copyright laws conveniently being extended every single time Disney’s works are about to enter the public domain:
Trying to acquire “The Knowledge”
From the Everything Is Amazing newsletter comes this gem, about what is involved in trying to join the legendary tribe of Brits who drive traditional London black cabs:
“Everton Thomas, a 33-year-old bus driver from Woolwich in southeast London, is sitting in a cramped, ugly office decorated with maps of the city. There are maps on the walls, maps on shelves, and a big paper map spread out on the angled desk opposite him. But if Everton sneaks a look at any of these maps, he goes back to being a bus driver – a job he’s desperate to leave. He’s hoping a better life awaits him and his family if he can keep his eyes fixed straight ahead, and not let his nervousness cloud his brain. He really, really needs to think clearly right now. In a sense, this is a job interview – but it’s also one of the hardest memory tests in the world.
The examiner says: “Everton, where’s the London Edition Hotel?”
This question, and the following ones like it, requires him to remember specific locations from London’s roughly 100,000 landmarks. He has to know where these places are – and he has to know how to get there from anywhere else. The exam is called The Knowledge – and these days, Everton teaches it, in the school he set up after he successfully passed it in 2017. Most students take four or five years of study to get to the required level – or they drop out, or get disqualified (there’s a 70% fail rate). But the ones that succeed will earn anything from £15,000 to £30,000 more per year than any of London’s bus drivers.”
One man’s fight to prove he’s alive
Cray vs Raspberry Pi
In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1
(via Slashdot)
Four years ago
It’s four years to the day since a doctor in China privately warned colleagues about pneumonia cases related to coronavirus (which turned out to be COVID). His message was leaked, and went viral on social media, leading to his arrest by authorities for spreading fake news. A few months later he contracted COVID and died, aged 33 (via Kevin Beaumont on Mastodon)
Jimmy the Raven
Random fun film fact: The crow in It’s a Wonderful Life seen in the Building & Loan that Uncle Billy kept as a pet is the same crow that flew on Scarecrow’s arm in The Wizard of Oz whom he was unable to scare. His name was Jimmy and he was a raven who first appeared in You Can’t Take It With You directed by Frank Capra who went on to cast the bird in every subsequent movie he made.
Via John Pinter on Mastodon
That time I used Google to cure myself of something
In most cases, people will tell you (as they have definitely told me) not to Google symptoms or use “Doctor Google” to try to diagnose or treat something, the implication being that whatever you are likely to find will be misleading and/or completely wrong, and possibly even wrong in a dangerous way. All of which is often true! But not always, as I found out a number of years ago, when I was hit with a medical issue very suddenly, and the internet was my only hope in terms of figuring out what I should do about it.
So what was the issue? In a word, vertigo. Repeated and paralyzing vertigo, which started when I woke up one morning and turned my head to look at the clock. Immediately, my head started spinning as though I had just gotten off the Tilt-A-Whirl ride at the fair. After about 30 seconds it went away, but when I sat up, the same thing happened — swirling, head spinning, a feeling of being nauseated. I should mention here that I suffer from motion sickness quite badly, and always have — according to my family, I used to throw up on pretty much every car ride.
Even as an adult, I found I couldn’t go on any amusement park ride that went around in circles — even ones designed for small children. Going up and down was fine, but around and around was death. When our youngest daughter was little she begged me to go on the spinning tea-cup ride, where you sit in a giant tea cup and then the cup goes around and the thing it’s attached to also goes around. After what seemed like hours of agony (it was probably about three minutes) I had to go lie down on a bench, and didn’t feel right for hours.
Continue reading “That time I used Google to cure myself of something”Canada and guitars
As an acoustic guitar player, I’ve played Norman guitars and Godin guitars and Boucher guitars and Seagull and La Patrie guitars, and I knew they were all connected somehow, but I was never sure how. This is a chronological description of the relationships between some of Canada’s best luthiers (guitar-makers) rrom a regular poster on the Acoustic Guitar group on Facebook:
“Robert Godin met Normand Boucher on a hunting trip to La Patrie around 1969-70, maybe 71. Robert was then a salesman at La Tosca music store in Montreal. Normand Boucher was then a carpenter, door and windows and cabinet maker in La Patrie. Building / designing guitars took more and more of his spare time.
He wanted to design an adjustable angle neck so that musicians could adjust their guitars as needed in a few minutes. Normand Boucher and Robert Godin both started working together in 1972, Normand running his shop, Robert being the exclusive distributor through his company Sibécor.
Even before that, Robert started to sell Norman guitars through La Tosca. Norman guitars were a smash hit in the province of Quebec, every player wanted one, tons of artists using them. Robert Godin started to build his own guitars in 1979 with Claude Boucher, son of Normand: Kamouraska and Lys, which later became La Patrie and Seagull. Claude designed and ran the shop, Robert on the road selling. Now we had in La Patrie the Unisonic shop up the hill (Robert Godin/Claude Boucher) and the Norman shop down the hill (Normand Boucher), All distributed by Sibécor (Robert Godin).
The early 80’s were tough times for the acoustic guitar industry. In 1982 the Unisonic / Sibécor companies were shut down, Claude Boucher left and Robert with fresh investors restarted under a new company structure: Guitabec (the shop) / Lasido (distribution), that is when the Kamouraska / Lys lines changed names to La Patrie / Seagull. Meanwhile down the hill in September 1980 the Norman shop burned down to the ground completely. Normand Boucher rebuilt the shop and tooling, and tried to restructure a decent distribution network. Claude Boucher came back to the Norman shop in 1983.
Times were hard as there was also a general economic recession. Eventually Normand Boucher lost control of his shop around 1986 and the new management who had no experience in the making of musical instruments. Struggled trying to survive, eventually, Robert Godin ended up buying Norman in 1989. Claude left Norman in 1986 and bought the village’s restaurant. Richard Boucher (Normand’s other son) stayed at the Norman shop till the end. Richard and Claude would years later start up the « Boucher » line of guitars, run today by Robin Boucher, Normand’s nephew.”
Ma Vie en Bling
A poem by Anne Boyer, found via Matt Bogle’s excellent newsletter Pome, which sends used to send you a new poem every day (alas, Matt recently announced the Pome newsletter is on hiatus):
“Did I explain that those days were the days when the people wrote on machines that connected to machines that connected to machines that connected to people who wrote on machines?
Those were the days when we believed in information.
And I was a person in those days, but I did not believe in information. I liked to imagine the interfaces that would make the public private and make the private okay.
Privacy was not an effect, exactly, of confession, which in those days was buying stock in the public company. Those were the days of crude luxury and genteel sorrow. Those were the days I loved to delete.”
Anne Boyer (2015)
Here are the things you clicked on the most in 2023
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. Before we begin, I realize that the “year-end round-up” newsletter has become so ubiquitous that you may have no room in your life for another one. But the round-up has become a time-tested tradition in the media business for some pretty compelling reasons – for one, the period between Christmas and New Year’s is kind of a dead zone, and round-ups are relatively easy to pull together when you are a) understaffed, b) tired c) hungover d) lacking in motivation or e) all of the above.
I am not immune to these kinds of pressures myself, I confess. But on top of that, I also find it kind of fascinating to look at which of the links I include here get the most clicks. That’s why when I started this newsletter, I also installed an open-source link-shortening service called Yourls, which lets me create custom links for the articles I share. It comes with built-in analytics that track the clicks on those links, in much the same way Twitter and other services do. I don’t really do anything with this information – I don’t sell it to advertisers, or pick different links to include based on whether they might get more clicks (at least not consciously). I just find it interesting! And maybe you will too.
This sample is obviously weighted with respect to time, in that the links I included in early versions of the newsletter have had time to accumulate more clicks. But I’m not sure how many people go back and look at previous versions of the newsletter, so it’s hard to say how much of an impact that has. Anyway, without further ado, here are the 10 most popular links since January, 2023:
Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Here are the things you clicked on the most in 2023”The gym changed my life
