A group of Indonesians have evolved to have bigger spleens

The Bajau are a group of people who have lived  on an Indonesian island for centuries. Traditionally they spend a lot of of time diving in the ocean for food.

When humans enter the water, the spleen contracts. This releases more red blood cells which in turn has the effect of helping us hold our breath for longer.

How are these two things linked? The Bajau have developed spleens up to 50% bigger than normal, and can hold their breath for a very long time while diving. This isn’t quite evolution, as the article states, but it’s pretty remarkable nonetheless.

Source: A group of Indonesians have evolved to have bigger spleens — Quartz

Impressed with BuzzFeed and their style guide’s insistence on removing spaces and hyphens. This from a recent update. How long until we get to ‘crosspost’?

A tale of three seafood sandwiches

This is an article about making seafood sandwiches for friends in New England. My main(e?) takeaway isn’t the methods or recipes, though—it’s the frankly bizarre dance of imports and exports that sends locally sourced fish around the world and back again before it reaches consumers:

Next up will be a squid sloppy joe. Squid is another extremely common animal we find off New England’s shores, but it is rarely available fresh in our fish markets. Like herring, it is often used as bait. What we do eat directly comes to us through a truly bizarre transport system that makes my Tennessee-waylaid FedEx delivery seem downright direct. New England squid is typically caught off Massachusetts and Rhode Island, frozen whole, shipped to China, defrosted, cleaned and ringed, refrozen, and sent back to us as a twice-frozen product.

Source: A Tale of Three Seafood Sandwiches | Hakai Magazine

Sainsbury’s packaging archive

When I was growing up, my family shopped at Sainsbury’s. I later worked there for a few years when studying for my A Levels and between university semesters. The brand is fairly well ingrained in me, so I have just spent rather too long browsing the packaging section of the Sainsbury’s archive:

Packaging from Sainsbury’s cheese and onion crisps, 1970s-1980s
Packaging from Sainsbury’s cheese and onion crisps, 1970s-1980s
Packaging from Sainsbury’s table salt, c. 1978
Packaging from Sainsbury’s table salt, c. 1978
Packaging from Sainsbury’s spaghetti rings and pork sausages, 1998
Packaging from Sainsbury’s spaghetti rings and pork sausages, 1998

I started working there in 1998 which—coincidentally, I hope—seems to be the point where the strong, simple and consistent brand identity visible in the first two images started to erode, replaced by more individualistic oddities like the bottom image.

The entire site is very interesting, occupying a position somewhere between corporate story-telling and social history. See also The typography of John Lewis.

Why brands are friendly on social media

Ian Bogost discusses the style, tone and “methods of engagement” used by #brands to surprise and befriend you, the potentially influential follower.

This resonated strongly with me—I’ve worked in several offices where people really wanted the social channels to talk in Innocent-ese or jump on the back of whatever the John Lewis ad was that year or surprise followers with “random acts of kindness” (which of course were neither random nor kind).

It’s a bit gross, horribly transparent once you start to notice it, and of course it works. So it will continue forever.

Social media has made it easier than ever for companies to connect with people. These new, personal bonds between companies and customers feel uncanny—the brands are not real human friends, exactly, but neither are they faceless corporations anymore. Isn’t that the point, though? Branding’s purpose is to get under your skin, to make you remember an otherwise forgettable company or product. When the surprise wanes, that feels a lot less delightful.

Source: Why Brands Are Friendly on Social Media – The Atlantic

Google is not a search engine

Shelly Palmer:

Google is not optimized to be the best search engine in the world; it is optimized to be the best tool for transforming the currency of intention into shareholder value. This means that its search capabilities only have to be good enough to keep you coming back to Google for search. Considering that Google’s only real competition is Bing, the bar is not very high.

This does leave Google in a unique position. It can subjugate search to advertising efficacy. In other words, Google can optimize for maximum revenue – which is exactly what it does.

Search results on Google are fast, but are they really what you are looking for? If Google revenue was derived directly from search, it would be the best search engine on earth. But Google doesn’t make money from search; it makes money by getting you to click on ads (which you would never need to see if search results gave you exactly what you were searching for). Oh, and if Google were optimized for search (as opposed to advertising revenue), it would go out of business (or have to charge a subscription fee).

Said differently, search is just the best clickbait Google can produce.

Source: Google: I Don’t Think That Word Means What You Think It Means – Shelly Palmer

I have struggled to make a really good cacio e pepe—my method works well perhaps 25% of the time. (When it doesn’t work, it’s never bad, just not perfect.) I’m looking forward to trying this foolproof cacio e pepe recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

Being a film geek before the internet

On solving the ‘what film is this?’ question using Leslie Halliwell’s reference books:

Imagine it is a summer’s day long in the past and you think you will watch some Wimbledon or cricket on a Tuesday afternoon, so you switch on the TV, but there are no sportspersons in sight. Instead there is a black and white film halfway through. It is obvious that rain must have halted play, so the BBC is showing a film instead – but infuriatingly, there is no way to know what film it is if you don’t recognize it. This is maddening, an unscratched itch. We are talking the 1970s, 80s and most of the 90s here: you can’t just hit an info button on your remote control, you can’t go on Twitter and ask your mates, you can’t look at a BBC website and see if they are explaining what is happening.

Source: Being a Film Geek Before the Internet: the Double Halliwell

Many years ago I had an idea for an iPhone app that enabled you to put in the names of two actors and it would query IMDb to return any films they appeared in together. You would also do the reverse: input two films and get the name of any actor that appeared in both.

Shortly afterwards an app, Double Feature, was released that did exactly this. Naturally I concluded my thoughts were being monitored and I was extremely annoyed that my life-changing idea, which I’d since done precisely nothing to advance, had been stolen from me.

I bought the app. By the second time I thought to use it, it had stopped working and was subsequently abandoned by its creator. I suppose the moral of the story is to never have ideas?