700 posts in, it’s time for more updates.
In keeping with my personal tradition, every hundred posts I include a short update on the state of the blog, plus any news on old posts.
1. New friends
The last few months have been the busiest in this blog’s history, primarily because the post election of the doge was picked up by the influential paid newsletter The Browser, and from there to Hacker News. If you came here from one of those sources, welcome and thanks for reading!
An old post on military skateboarding was picked up on the Today I Learned subreddit, and that was cool. This blog and TIL share a passion for intriguing ephemera, although they tend to go wide and I tend to go (comparatively) deep.
I (virtually) met another New Zealand blogger with a passion for the obscure and interesting. If you enjoy the Generalist Academy I think you’ll also appreciate Content Catnip – a great place for a “meander through the quirky and curious aspects of history, indigenous spirituality, the natural world, animals, art, storytelling, books, philosophy, travel, Māori culture and loads more.”
2. Updates
Gilligan’s Grace – From Robbie A. on the Facebook comments, the children’s nursery rhyme is known as “Itsy Bitsy Spider” in the States but “Incy Wincy Spider” in the UK and Australasia. The original rhyme, from 1910, is actually “Blooming Bloody Spider.”
Return to the fold – The folding protein problem described in this post from March has a new challenger: AlphaFold. This AI doesn’t solve the problem entirely, and because the internal workings of AlphaFold are not publicly available there’s a limit to what we can learn from it, but it’s nevertheless an important step forward in this branch of biological science.
Medieval sleep – I came across an interesting discussion on Reddit about just how much the Medieval biphasic sleep pattern applied to other pre-Industrial Revolution contexts.
Christmas cannibals (part 1) – Reader Martijn van der Ven noted a very 2020 development: “Comedian Youp van ‘t Hek appeared on a Dutch satirical TV show this month to revisit Flappie. He did a parody text on the song, now called Wappie. Again set during the Christmas days, but now in 2020. This parody focuses not on a rabbit or a little boy, but on someone who ignores all the COVID restrictions (“because he would not get Corona”). This time the song ends on Boxing Day when the titular character Wappie develops a cough and ends up hospitalised. So far I do not think any full English translations of the lyric have been made available, but the parody can be watched on YouTube in its entirety:
3. Moby-Dick
In the last few posts, the total word count of this site surpassed that of the Herman Melville novel Moby-Dick. This site has fewer detailed descriptions of the whaling industry than Melville’s, but on the plus side we do have more readers: in the author’s lifetime, he only ever sold 3,200 copies of Moby-Dick.
Take that, Melville.
2. Updates on previous topics
Queen’s duck – apparently comedy writer jargonhas an equivalent term: the lightning rod.
Peninsula no more – still no progress on Saudi Arabia’s plan to turn Qatar into an island, but the president of Turkey has been talking about turning Istanbul into an island the same way.
Switching sides – Gareth E. reminds me that Samoa recently switched the direction of traffictoo, the first such switch in decades.
The end of the tower – Arthur C. Clarke wrote an excellent short story about a similar apocalyptic destiny. It has one of the best final lines in sci-fi.
Da Vinci and Machiavelli steal a river; emperor auction – apparently buying your way to powerand trying to steal a river are not uncommon in Italy.
Pizza Island – the artists’ collective has a shared blog to keep us updated on their progress and current whereabouts. Good news on that front: the cancelled animated show Tuca and Bertiehas been saved.
Interstellar comet – More details have come out about the origin and chemical composition of 2I/Borisov, the comet from another solar system.
The old philosopher – a reader on Facebook has suggested the notorious Hungarian suicide songas another candidate for most depressing music; reader David S. has offered this sad cover of Don’t Worry, Be Happy as well.
Involuntary park – a reader on Twitter has noted that the former border between East and West Germany is now the gorgeous German Green Belt, although according to her “green ribbon” would be a more fitting translation.
Largest number – Ron Graham, the creator of the impossibly large Graham’s Number, died just two days ago. A sad loss of a brilliant mathematician.
King of Fire – an anonymous reader suggests a source for Ivan Chabert’s magical act. The British scientist Charles Blagden experimented with sitting in an oven while cooking meat as a way to test human thermoregulation in 1774. Read his Experiments and Observations in an Heated Room for the details. Blagden, by the way, was also one of the people who inspired Lavoisier to work out how combustion worked.
Girih tiles – there’s a fantastic online Girih tile designer that lets you create your own patterns, like this one I threw together in a few minutes
Surprising eponyms – David S. observes that macadamia nuts and tarmac are both named for John MacAdam, although it’s two different John MacAdams.
Parahawking – a friend of mine, after reading the blog post, reported that he had actually been flying with Adam Hill in Nepal. Crazy coincidence.
Oldest art – it’s not the oldest figurative art any more! An older example has just been discovered and dated in Sulawesi, Indonesia: earliest hunting scene in prehistory
Decimal time – I didn’t mention it in the post, but there’s a website that will tell you what time it is right now in decimal: Decimal time now!
3. Simultaneity
Today’s post was on simultaneous discovery. It’s one of my biggest fears for this website, that I’ll write a post in advance and then someone else will coincidentally write about the same topic before mine is published. Well, it finally happened. Except in reverse.
Four days after I wrote about the second-fastest animal, the same topic was mentioned in the radio programme Engines of Our Ingenuity (as observed on Twitter).
One week after I wrote about ice delivery across the Sahara, it was mentioned in No Such Thing as a Fish Episode 293.
In both cases, I assume that it’s just a coincidence, that we have both picked up on the same topic at roughly the same time independently. Which is great! No-one owns these – or any – topics, I’m always delighted to see interesting things get a wide audience.
