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Today I learned…

Here you can find interesting things I picked up while going about my day. Or down another random rabbit hole.

Have something interesting to share with me? Please reach out!

2024 / Week 38

Third places

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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.

2024 / Week 36

Libel-proof

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You are libel-proof if you can’t sue for defamation because your reputation is already so bad.

2024 / Week 35

CSS @starting-style

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With @starting-style, we can define styles that an element will animate in from once rendered. E.g. from opacity: 0 to opacity: 1.

2024 / Week 34

A fun fact

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The human species will 100% not go extinct during your lifetime. Never thought about it this way.

A handy CLI trick

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sudo !! reruns the previous command with sudo.

Bamboo & Glass Ceiling

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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

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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.‘”

The Economics of Superstars

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This term describes the phenomenon, where a small group of people gets almost all the attention and rewards in a certain space.

2024 / Week 33

Tiny Saturday

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Wednesday is called “Tiny Saturday” (“lillördag”) in Sweden.

2024 / Week 32

The kickers always win

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Kickers are athletes that still have the ability to sprint at the end of an endurance race.

2024 / Week 31

The album that was 30 years in the making

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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

2024 / Week 30

Want to write better copy?

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3 questions to ask yourself when writing copy (by Harry Dry, creator of Marketing Examples):

  1. Can I visualize it?
  2. Can I falsify it?
  3. Can nobody else say this?

2024 / Week 29

Emotional Labour

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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.

2024 / Week 28

Blue Zones

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“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).

Exophony

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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

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The famous song by is based on psalms (19 & 137) from the Hebrew Bible.

Memories are essentially replays of neural firing patterns

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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).

You have a Jennifer Aniston neuron

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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.

2024 / Week 27

Switzerland is the second oldest democracy in the world

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It’s been one since 1848. The United States is the oldest democracy in the world (1789), third place goes to New Zealand (1857).

Landlocked countries

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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).

2024 / Week 26

What3Words Algorithm

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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.

A key principle of test-driven development…

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…is making the error message change. That sounds so simple yet so effective.

Time Billionaire

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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.

2024 / Week 25

Calculator Spelling

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There are a ton of words you can spell with your calculator. Way more than I thought.

The Philosophy Game

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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)