A Calendar of Astrological Events, Recent Scientific Breakthroughs, Lovely Advice, etc.
In which I also share news on a (nearly) 300-year-old restaurant, some 181-year-old photos and a video detailing 300,000 years of human existence.
🍽 On Madrid’s Sobrino de Botín, the oldest restaurant in the world, rapidly approaching its 300th birthday. “‘We lunched up-stairs at Botin’s,’ writes Ernest Hemingway near the end of The Sun Also Rises (1926). ‘It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast suckling pig and drank rioja alta.’ You can do the very same thing today, a century after the period of that novel — and indeed, you also could’ve done it two centuries before the period of that novel, for Botin’s was established in 1725, and now stands as the oldest restaurant in continuous operation.”
✈️ A Dutch airline is creating an “adult’s only” section for their customers. “With dedicated seating for passengers ages 16 and up, the Dutch airline hopes to improve the experiences of both those with and without children.”
☄️ Sync your calendar with the solar system, via The New York Times’ Space Calendar. “Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world.”
📸 Some of the oldest photographs in the world. “In 1842, a French artist and scholar named Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey set out on a tour of the eastern Mediterranean to document sights and architecture via the brand new medium of photography.”
🧠 Scientists recreated a Pink Floyd song from people’s brainwaves. “Researchers trained a computer model on the brain data from participants as they listened to about 90 percent of the Pink Floyd song. But the remaining 10 percent—a 15-second clip from the middle of the track—was left out of the training data, writes Science. Instead, the team asked the algorithm to recreate this section of the music from the brain activity based on patterns it had learned. The team trained 128 models, each operating at a different frequency, and together, they matched specific electrode signals to certain characteristics of music.”
💬 A breakthrough brain implant has given a stroke survivor her voice back. “To synthesize Ann’s speech, the team devised an algorithm for synthesizing speech, which they personalized to sound like her voice before the injury by using a recording of Ann speaking at her wedding. ‘My brain feels funny when it hears my synthesized voice,’ she wrote in answer to a question. ‘It’s like hearing an old friend.’”
🌎 How earth’s population reached 8 billion: an animated video that covers 300,000 years in about five minutes.
📺 25 perfect television episodes, so says Vanity Fair. Can’t vouch for most of these, but I would co-sign their Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Wire choices, and I do love those episodes of Arrested Development and The Sopranos as well.
✅ The Bechdel Test, credited to longtime cartoonist Alison Bechdel, is “a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.” From an interview she did this summer: “It was a joke. I didn’t ever intend for it to be the real gauge it has become and it’s hard to keep talking about it over and over, but it’s kind of cool… What’s really dismaying now is the way so many movies cynically try to take shortcuts and feature strong female characters – but they just have a veneer of strength and they’re still not fully developed characters.”
💔 Sad to hear about Nicholas Hitchon, who was first filmed when he was 7-years old, has passed. “Nicholas Hitchon, whose life was chronicled in the acclaimed “Up” series of British documentaries, beginning when he was a boy in the English countryside in 1964 and continuing through the decades as he grew to become a researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin, died on July 23 in Madison, Wis. He was 65.” I wrote a little about the Up documentaries in 2021, which checked in every seven years with a group of people, following the passing of longtime director Michael Apted:
Each film is relatively simplistic in structure, short interviews with each subject cut with footage of what they’ve been up to recently. But with each new installment, we see entire lives unfolding. Their lives force us to examine our own. It seems impossible not to watch the Up Series and not think about where you were when you were 7 and 21 and 28, or where you think you will be, or who you want to be, in seven years, in fourteen years, in thirty-five years. And with the passing of Apted [and now Hitchon], if you will be.”
💯 Writer Mari Andrew’s list of “100 Things I Know” is worth the read. A few things I’ve always agreed with:
“When emailing someone to ask for a favor, start by asking the favor first, THEN move on to small talk. I always rush through the “Hope you’re well!” paragraph to get to the Big Ask. It reads as much more genuine when it follows after the request.”
“Board last on the plane. Ignore your boarding group. It’s okay.”
I know that fretting over other people’s choices is one of my favorite hobbies. To stop myself, I repeat this golden phrase: “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
✍️ Another great piece of advice: write a brag document.
？And finally, make sure you are having a good day, every day that you can. “Did I sleep enough? Did I connect deeply with people I love? Did I get some time to myself? Did I make choices for my body that felt good—like, did I take a good walk, did I eat healthy, did I exercise? If I get those four things in place, usually my days are pretty good.”
❤️ Remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
