No.115 Asides

😍 Amazon’s Tales from the Loop trailer brings Simon Stålenhag’s sci-fi suburbs to life. “Inspired by the wondrous paintings of Simon Stålenhag, Tales from the Loop explores the mind-bending adventures of the people who live above the Loop, a machine built to unlock and explore the mysteries of the universe – making things previously relegated to science fiction, possible.”
🤔 AirBnb hasn’t lived up to its utopian claims. “We need many and varied housing structures and funding models (rental and ownership) to help us find homes that fit across our lifetimes. Long-term, that means imagining a new architecture of flexible, reorganisable living structures – but in the short term we need ways to rearrange people in the housing we already have.”
🏯 Castles in the Sky: Studio Ghibli on Netflix. “Part of the soulful quality viewers find in Studio Ghibli films stems from the empathy shown not just to characters but to the environment and to how both need each other to survive. There is an almost animist relationship between the two, which is threatened time and again through development, war, and pollution.”
🧫 Huge if true, as they say. Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time. “Tests showed that the drug wiped out a range of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, including Acinetobacter baumannii and Enterobacteriaceae, two of the three high-priority pathogens that the World Health Organization ranks as “critical” for new antibiotics to target.”
🧵 I was looking at the “biosuit” design for next generation space suits that don’t rely on air pressure, but tension over “lines of non-extension.” “Basically, it applies pressure through the fabric over specific patterns on the skin instead of air, which offers greater flexibility and greater sexiness.”
🌏 Total vs native speakers and the origin tree are especially interesting. The 100 Most Spoken Languages Worldwide. “[I]llustrates the 100 most spoken languages in the world, the number of native speakers for each language, and the origin tree that each language has branched out from.”
JP Morgan economists warn climate crisis is threat to human race. “The world’s largest financier of fossil fuels has warned clients that the climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity and that the planet is on an unsustainable trajectory, according to a leaked document.”