The world around us

• 

  It’s cool to care

  Caring deeply – about art, my friends, and shared experiences – has brought me so much joy.

• 

  Plates and states

  On a recent trip to the US, I learnt a surprising amount from watching the license plates on passing cars.

• 

  A day out at the Bure Valley Railway

  My photos from a delightful day on a steam railway with smol trains.

• 

  A day out to the Forth Bridge

  Photographs from a trip to North Queensferry to see the Forth Bridge, the Forth Road Bridge, and an unexpected light tower.

• 

  A visit to the Crossness pumping station

  Pictures from my recent visit to Crossness, a Victorian pumping station for London’s sewers.

11 articles

• Can you take an ox to Oxford?

  Let’s work out exactly when you need to pay Oxford’s new congestion charge.

• We all lose when art is anonymised

  When art loses its creator, we lose the story behind the image – a plea for attribution in our endless scroll culture.

• Google is showing outdated results from the UK’s election

  Dozens of MPs who were re-elected to their seats are still labelled “former Member of Parliament”, days after the election results.

• Preserving pixels in Paris

  I went to France for a conference about archiving the web, and I came back with thoughts and photos.

• What is psephology?

  It’s the scientific study of elections and voting, and it comes from the Greek word for “pebble”, because pebbles were used for voting in ancient Greece.

• The Star-Spangled Ballad

  If you listen carefully to the Ballad of Willie Watkins, you might hear another song peeking through.

• What mammal is that?

  In which Apple Photos accidentally tells me about a cool new animal.

• Fictional phone numbers in For All Mankind

  Where did this UK phone number come from?

• The Sachsenhausen concentration camp

  Feeling the weight of death in a former concentration camp.

• Ten braille facts / ⠼⠁⠚⠀⠃⠗⠁⠊⠇⠇⠑⠀⠋⠁⠉⠞⠎

  Where does braille come from? How was braille originally written? What can you write in braille today? And more.

• Reading a Chinese dictionary / 读一本中文字典

  Although paper dictionaries are mostly a thing of the past, knowing how to use a Chinese dictionary helps me learn the rest of the language.

12 notes

• The “strangler” pattern is named after a tree, not an act of violence

  It’s named after the strangler fig tree, which wraps itself a host tree and gradually kills them.

• Place with the same name, but different etymology

• The @ symbol was added to Morse code in 2004

  It was added in May 2004, it’s the first new symbol since the Second World War, and the French have a cute name for it. The rest of Morse code has some surprising omissions.

• Some countries have “poison centers” as part of their healthcare service

  Poison centres are specialist services offering expert medical advice when you’re poisoned. They’re common in countries like the US, but barely visible to the public in the UK.

• The Panamanian Golden Frog communicates by semaphore

• What does the word “gubernatorial” mean?

  It’s anything related to a governor, and mostly used for the governors of US states.

• The British Forces Post Office (BFPO) and the Loamshire Regiment

  The BFPO sends post to the armed forces and MoD personnel, but they’ll never send it to the Loamshire Regiment, which is just a placeholder name for documentation.

• Not all coal is the same

• What does “insomnolent” mean?

• There’s a musical that tells you the number of minutes in a year

  The song Seasons of Love from Rent starts with the line “Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes”.

• Calley-ope (calliope) Syndrome is pronouncing a word wrong because you’ve only ever read it on the page

• Germany has longer telephone numbers than the rest of the world