Greetings, world! Here’s this week’s list. I’ve been very busy lately, and apologies are tendered in advance if I’ve made errors. Have a great week ahead!
- Earth Temperature Timeline - xkcd doing what it does best.
- [Hilarious] That Time Jordan Anderson Sent His “Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master” - A slave freed from his plantation in 1864 writes back to his master upon receiving an urgent letter calling him back to ‘work’. His reply is brilliant - sarcastic and so falsely patronising that I cannot accept that this man could not read or write.
- How Elizabeth Holmes’ House of Cards came tumbling down - I’m really confused about how to judge Holmes. This piece helped.
- How airlines decide what fare you pay - Interesting. We all know that airlines dynamically change fares, but why? Which routes? What price do they start at? CNN reports.
- What I Learned From Executing Two Men - A man who agreed to be the executioner, then underwent a change of heart but still carried on with his job because he’d agreed to it.
During the execution itself, correctional officers are responsible for everything, from strapping the prisoner’s ankles and wrists to a gurney to administering the lethal chemicals. One of the condemned men asked to have his wrist straps adjusted because they were hurting him. After the adjustment was made, he looked me in the eye and said: “Yes. Thanks, boss.” - The man who gave himself away - George Price came up with an equation for altruism. He wrote out a relation that capture the essence of natural selection. He was a genius, but is yet forgotten. Great piece of scientific writing coupled with a definite profile of Price.
Told like that, it seems obvious that everything was connected – he studied the concept of family because of the way he’d left his wife and daughters; his subsequent altruism was related to the equation he discovered; his suicide was a result of his extreme altruism. But as Farnworth discovered, nothing in Price’s story is that simple. - The woman who is allergic to water - I can’t even.
Rachel wakes up – and drinks a kind of poison that feels like a glass of stinging nettles. As it slips downs her throat, she can feel it blistering her skin, leaving a trail of red, itchy welts behind. Later that day, scorching drops of the stuff start falling from the sky. At the local leisure centre, she watches others splash around in a pool of the irritant. They seem unfazed, but the moment she dips her toe in, she’s faced with burning pain. - The pilot who stole a secret Soviet fighter jet - Yup. Disillusioned by the soviet ideology and the communism that it wished to spread, Viktor Ivanovich Belenko defected, thereby giving the rest of the world the intelligence it wanted about the Russian MiG 25. His military ID (below) is now shown at the CIA Museum in Washington DC.
- Pete Wells Has His Knives Out - A very nice peek into the world of food critics. Ratatouille wasn’t too far off.
Although skeptical about much of what has lately counted as restaurant excellence, Wells hasn’t quite drawn his own boundary line—one defined, perhaps, by affability and chaos. In his columns, where even his expressions of delight are often a little wistful, it’s perhaps possible to detect a critic’s regret that he’ll never report on the dining equivalent of a perfect first album recorded in a garage over a weekend. - A Gorgeous—and Unsettling—Video of Evolution in Action - This is crazy. You should watch this. Highly recommended.