February 2022

This Week on the Lindy Newsletter

For most of the 20th century homes were furnished with indoor carpeting. This new product replaced hardwood floors and rugs. You would have thought that indoor carpeting would be around forever. Fast forward to today, and people are ripping carpeting out of their homes. Wood floors are back. Rugs are back. Indoor carpeting was a fad.

I write about what other fads we see today may go away. Starting with the automatic bathroom, architecture, and more...

Weekend Reads

Why is there so little candy variety? Three companies dominate the candy market, preventing newcomers with new products from ever making it to store shelves

I forgot how good 90s fashion shows were. They were really full of vitality and beauty.

Much like full self-driving cars. I don't ever want to hear about how AGI, self-driving cars, drone delivery, etc are just "a few years" away. The evangelists have consistently been wrong.

If you want a clean house, invite people over.

Humans and Neanderthals lived side-by-side for hundreds of thousands of years. And then 40,000 years ago Neanderthals went extinct. What happened?

26 million people under lockdown in Shanghai. China has a zero-covid policy, I follow Darin, who is living there for updates.

Modern Chickens are different than Chickens a hundred years ago

Motorcycle fatalities are not only our number one source of organs. They are also the highest-quality source of organs, because donors are usually young, healthy people with no other traumatic injuries to the body, except to the head,” the unidentified physician was quoted as saying.

In ancient athletics, a truce would be observed so that all competitors, even those from warring states, could travel unimpeded and participate in the games. It is sad to see the take this decision. The truce was for the safe passage of athletes and spectators to and from the host city and for the host city itself. It wasn't a stop to all wars taking place at the time, nor was any athlete prevented from participating because their country was at war at the time.

Most folks push too hard on slow days and too slow on fast days... your times are not improving- so you push harder. This scenario doesn't end well.

From the Archives

Ceiling Height Matters.

America had this massive home building boom in the 20th century. But like the nouveau riche that they are they focused on square feet instead of Lindy rich ceiling height.

Ceiling heights in Victorian times had reached an average of 13 feet, based on English city houses. American heights moderated to eight feet with the advent of mass housing developments after World War II. Ceiling heights moderated to eight feet with the advent of mass housing developments after World War II. That height, based on the standardized length of an eight-foot stud, stayed in place until the term McMansion was coined in the early 1980s, where center halls and family rooms could soar two stories high. By the end of the 20th century, increased fuel costs put a damper on ceiling heights so that today the average new construction had nine-foot ceilings on the first floor and eight feet on the second. That extra foot in height on the first floor, it is estimated, can increase the building cost from $20,000 to $30,000 for a 4,000-square-foot house, depending on the region.

Music