A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
An Undulating Thrill
In the winter of 1886, William Alexander Hammond – a famed neurologist and the former Surgeon General of the United States Army – took an enormous amount of cocaine. A reporter from the New York paper The Sun who interviewed him waggishly observed that the doctor had been ‘on a terrific spree for science’. Hammond had experimentally worked his way through as many different ways of taking the drug in as many different quantities as he could devise: he tried fluid extracts of coca (the plant from which pure cocaine is extracted), mixed grains of cocaine hydrochloride into purified wines, and eventually began injecting the drug hypodermically. The injections, he said, gave him ‘a delightful, undulating thrill.’
Managing Life’s 8-10 Year Cycle
“Roughly, every eight to ten years, life seems to cycle through like a brush fire to clean up the excesses of the past decade.” The current cycle never ended as planned. As the cycle moves to the next cycle, people feel ungrounded and seek even deeper for purpose and meaning. There are proven tools to navigate and grow into these changes, including ways to embrace uncertainty, get quiet to listen to life’s callings, and take small, reversible actions to discover new, more expansive directions
Where Did Times New Roman Come From?
You might be surprised to learn that Times New Roman began as a challenge, when esteemed type designer Stanley Morison criticized London’s newspaper The Times for being out-of-touch with modern typographical trends. So The Times asked him to create something better. Morison enlisted the help of draftsman Victor Lardent and began conceptualizing a new typeface with two goals in mind: efficiency—maximizing the amount of type that would fit on a line and thus on a page—and readability.
Nation With Lowest Birthrate Is Rocked by Soaring Sales of Dog Strollers
After pushing a stroller to a park near her home in a Seoul suburb, Kang Seung-min plopped down on a bench. Then an elderly woman approached, looking for a friendly chat with Kang about motherhood.
“I’m not even married yet,” Kang, 24, responded.
The startled woman stared into the stroller and took in the little passenger: a brown poodle named Coco. She left, imploring Kang to start a family. “I don’t want to get married,” Kang says. “I’d rather spend money on my dog.”
Why Acquired Is Your Boss’s Favorite Podcast
Jensen Huang, cofounder and CEO of AI tech giant Nvidia, was so impressed with the episodes about his company that Nvidia features them on its employee intranet. “I’m really proud of Ben and David,” Huang says in an email. “I still remember them telling me about the beginning of Acquired and their thinking process in addressing audiences that wanted to go a lot deeper into a particular topic. Their success shows their instincts were right.”
“A lot deeper” is an understatement. Compared with the standard interview podcast, which might run an hour at most and come out weekly, Acquired episodes often stretch past four hours and appear every six weeks or so.
Hybrid Energy Raft Could Power 1,000 Homes a Day With Wave, Wind, Solar
A Swedish renewable energy firm is aiming to further clean energy generation with its innovative Hybrid Energy Converter (HEC) that harnesses the combined power of wave, wind, and solar energy.
NoviOcean’s HEC generates double the power per sea area compared to wind. It uses a hybrid wave, wind, and solar design to lower the levelized cost of Energy (LCOE) early on.
The firm claims that HEC’s modular design and proven components make it easy to produce, install, and maintain, with a low environmental impact and higher power-to-weight ratio than offshore wind.
Why Is Hungary’s Orban Sending Soldiers to Chad?
In the past year alone, Hungary has opened a diplomatic mission in the Sahelian nation, launched a humanitarian centre and promised $200m in aid. It also plans to send soldiers to help Chad fight armed groups.
The aid is a generous gesture from a Central European country that has had no substantive relations with Chad previously – but it’s also an eyebrow-raising one, experts said.
Hungary is one of Europe’s poorer countries, and it presently has zero economic holdings in Chad or the Sahel. There are also no Hungarian communities there.
However, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has stressed the need for Europe to befriend countries in the Sahel, where, he said, a toxic mix of armed groups and military governments is fuelling migration.
“Migration from Africa to Europe cannot be stopped without the countries of the Sahel region. … That is why Hungary is building a cooperation partnership with Chad,” Orban said in September.