Third places
The “third place” is the concept of a public space where you can connect with others over a shared interest. It is called that because it complements your home and your work/school. A common third place might be the local library.
Source: https://youtu.be/hEvMZ5S6zy0
Libel-proof
You are libel-proof if you can't sue for defamation because your reputation is already so bad.
CSS @starting-style
With @starting-style, we can define styles that an element will animate in from once rendered. E.g. from opacity: 0 to opacity: 1.
Source: https://motion.dev/blog/do-you-still-need-framer-motion
A fun fact
The human species will 100% not go extinct during your lifetime. Never thought about it this way.
A handy CLI trick
sudo !! reruns the previous command with sudo.
Source: https://youtu.be/mLznVlBAtcg
Bamboo & Glass Ceiling
These are metaphors for invisible barriers certain demographic groups experience when placed in a hierarchy. Feminists coined the term “Glass Ceiling”, while East Asian and East Asian Americans did the same for the “Bamboo Ceiling”.
Lil Peep’s first face tattoo
He got it at the age of 17 as “a sign of his commitment to avoiding the straight life. ‘A tattoo on your face,' he explained later, ‘is gonna stop you from getting a lot of jobs.'”
Source: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/lil-peep-tragedy-torment-804686/
The Economics of Superstars
This term describes the phenomenon, where a small group of people gets almost all the attention and rewards in a certain space.
Source: https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981a.pdf
Tiny Saturday
Wednesday is called “Tiny Saturday" (“lillördag”) in Sweden.
The kickers always win
Kickers are athletes that still have the ability to sprint at the end of an endurance race.
Source: https://www.eddiedale.com/blog/the-kickers-always-win
The album that was 30 years in the making
This debut (and only) album by German actress and singer-songwriter Sibylle Baier was released in 2006 but recorded over 30 years prior in her own home. Here's the album on Spotify: Colour Green – Sibylle Baier
Want to write better copy?
3 questions to ask yourself when writing copy (by Harry Dry, creator of Marketing Examples):
Source: https://youtu.be/TUMjnmfsPeM
Emotional Labour
Emotional labour is a form of labour that represents the effort required to manage and control one’s emotions in order to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. Think about a waitress that pretends that your joke was funny. It is a concept that was first introduced by sociologist Arlie Hochschild.
Source: https://youtu.be/XiwUDzyACWY
Blue Zones
“Blue Zones” are regions of the world where people live significantly longer than the average. The common denominator for the lifestyle of the people living there is a natural diet (low-processed food), a lot of physical activity (walking, gardening, etc.), and generally a pre-modern way of living without the problems of the modern world (like stress). Some places in the Blue Zone are Okinawa (Japan), Sardinia (Italy), Nicoya (Costa Rica), Ikaria (Greece), and Loma Linda (California).
Source: https://www.srf.ch/news/gesellschaft/hohe-lebenserwartung-blue-zones-der-schluessel-zum-langen-leben
Exophony
I now finally have a word for what I do on this website: Exophony – writing in a language that is not my mother tongue. Wikipedia also has a list of exophonic writers (that are way more famous than I am).
Rivers of Babylon
The famous song by is based on psalms (19 & 137) from the Hebrew Bible.
Source: https://pca.st/8ypfdts9
You have a Jennifer Aniston neuron
This hypothetical neuron is officially called a “grandmother cell”, but I like the other name more. Research has shown, that when presented with a concept you already know, the same very specific set of neurons fires in your brain (no matter if you see Jennifer Aniston in an Episode of Friends or on a gala photo). It’s like a little detector in your brain.
Memories are essentially replays of neural firing patterns
That’s also how déjà vus work. Your brain plays a similar pattern to one it’s played earlier, and you feel like you’ve experienced it before (I’m not sure though if that’s really based on the newest scientific findings, so don’t quote me on it).
Source: https://pca.st/episode/d8d186e1-afef-4080-8c5f-0e896b59163d
Switzerland is the second oldest democracy in the world
It's been one since 1848. The United States is the oldest democracy in the world (1789), third place goes to New Zealand (1857).
Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-worlds-oldest-democracies/
Landlocked countries
A landlocked country is a country that does not have a coastline. Worldwide, there are 44 of them. Kazakhstan is the world’s largest, while Ethiopia is the most populous one.
A double-landlocked country, on the other hand, is a landlocked country that is entirely surrounded by other landlocked countries. There are only two double-landlocked countries in the world (Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan).
What3Words Algorithm
There is a geocoding system that divides the world into 3×3m squares and assigns three words to each of them. Need an example? The best place to get pizza in Bern is at this location: ///cuts.deserved.cave.
Source: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/what3words-the-algorithm/
A key principle of test-driven development…
…is making the error message change. That sounds so simple yet so effective.
Source: https://laracasts.com/series/30-days-to-learn-laravel-11/episodes/29
Time Billionaire
If you are in your 20s, you are a Time Billionaire – twice. A Time Billionaire is someone who has (statistically speaking) more than one billion seconds left to live.
Source: https://www.sahilbloom.com/newsletter/the-time-billionaire-a-concept-that-changed-my-life
Calculator Spelling
There are a ton of words you can spell with your calculator. Way more than I thought.
Source: https://paperlined.org/apps/wikipedia/offsite_content/Calculator_spelling.txt
The Philosophy Game
Apparently, always clicking the first link of a Wikipedia article will send you to the same page in the end: Philosophy (at least in 97.3% of cases)
Source: https://youtu.be/-llumS2rA8I