Weekend Reads

This Week on the Lindy Newsletter

I wrote about the recent proposal to ban gas stoves on new housing. The public reason is safety related, but really, if we dig deeper, we can see that the real reason for this change is to switch homes to be fully electric. This is part of a larger design change happening. People are commonly living in a sealed home.

The Sealed Home imposes an architectural homogeneity. Gone are the homes that adapt to the climate and landscape, such as the New Orleans Shotgun Homes.

The Sealed Home eventually turns into the Sealed Person. If you look at car sales during the past year, you'll see 80 percent of new car sales have been SUVS and Trucks. This increasingly sealed existence is defining our current age.

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Weekend Reads

Trader Joe's has become a staple of any urban affluent area in America. It seems to really know it's customers. This is intentional. The store isn't really special, but it is a real master class of marketing.

I use a Moka pot to brew my coffee. But here is a counterintuitive finding. A new study of coffee consumption found that using pods can be more environmentally friendly than brewing traditional filter coffee. Basically you get less wastage and higher extraction from a pod compared to filter coffee. Plus there’s the option of recycling the aluminum

Remember bike messengers? They were these interesting characters in the 90s. They were everywhere and now they're not. Mostly because we can send documents through email, especially PDF. So there is no reason to send a bike messenger across the city. But it was a risky profession. There was no urban bicycle culture like there is now. Cars didn't care about hitting someone back then. Some are still around, but delivering food now.

Joe Biden making a speech 30 years ago in the Senate. He resembles an Ancient Roman Counsel describing the power of Rome here in this clip. It makes me think that the war in Ukraine will not end anytime soon. Russia does not want to get embarrassed, Ukraine has a lot of soldiers and America has a lot of money. The United States has a large military, but it isn't to fight Canada or Mexico.

In 1867, the US produced roughly 20,000 tons of steel a year. 40 years later, that had increased 1000-fold, to over 23 million tons a year, and the price had fallen by nearly 75%.

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As I get older, I see the importance of luck everywhere. It's something that I knew existed and was a factor, but it can compound and transform a person's life completely. This is a fun read on luck. The concept of "luck surface area" is one of those fundamental ideas that I believe has the power to change an individual's life if fully embraced. 

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I notice less stars in the sky after LEDs have replaced traditional street lights during the past 5 years. Citizen scientists report global rapid reductions in the visibility of stars from 2011 to 2022

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Ancient Celtic culture was really into the practice of casting valuable objects into bodies of water - apparently this was a central religious practice for them. Archaeologists Unearth 3,000-Year-Old Wishing Well in Germany

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An article on why Tik-Tok resembles Cable Television from the 90s and early 00s.

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How interested in the weather are you? Well, I have the website for you. An entire interactive globe that lets you see the temperature, wind, sea and almost everything else you can imagine. Updated every 3 hours. Kind of cool.

Music

Ahmed Malek was an Algerian pianist/flutist, conductor and composer who made music for television and the big screen. I've been listening to an album called Musique Originale De Films.