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5 comments

  1. Is anyone else baffled by how much international coverage the New York mayoral election has got? I mean, this shit’s been going on for months and it’s too much even for me as someone who actually lives in the US. Why should anyone outside the US give a single fuck who the mayor of NYC is? I barely care about the mayor of London and I actually have the right to vote for (or against) him.

    What other random world megacity should we nominate to have its mayoral election get a completely disproportionate amount of international media coverage relative to its standing in the world? I’ll go with Kinshasa. Kinshasa would at least be fun to watch.

  3. I saw a news article that a retired chemist is growing bacteria with interesting colors in a lab I guess at a university somewhere) and he now had a nice collection of colorful bacteria.

    A while ago a friend who was taking spirulina supplements and I had a bit of a discussion. I told them that algae aren’t grown sterile (for most algae it is not even possible to separate them from other bacteria) and they grow outside in large tanks in sunlight. They didn’t want to believe me, so I plated the spirulina powder on some freshwater medium and there were so many very colorful bacteria growing on it (one of them was very very purple). My friend was very surprised, but spirulina is also just bacteria, so… Anyhow, I didn’t really think of doing something more with them. It seems like some of these bacteria even have quite lightfast pigments.

    I haven’t grown any bacteria in ages. Maybe I should think of a new project. Back to the roots. That guy’s collection looked so cool.

  4. On the Tampere subreddit somebody linked [this map](https://sok.riksarkivet.se/bildvisning/K0033763_00001#?xywh=-3576%2C2527%2C11901%2C5725) of the region from 1770. It’s from before Tampere was founded in 1779, and back then the centre of the region was a village called Pirkkala, or Birkala in Swedish. The whole map is in Swedish. This village is on the southern shore of the southern lake, roughly midpoint, and on the map it is marked as “Birkala!”. I love the exclamation point. We should use that in all maps. Like on a map of Europe all the capitals should have an exclamation point after them, it’d just be more fun and joyful.

    Edit: Browsing the Swedish national archives I also found [this map](https://sok.riksarkivet.se/bildvisning/K0033802_00001#?xywh=-1377%2C218%2C7521%2C3618) of the Tampere city plan from 1781. Up until then there was just a couple of farms there, which you can see on the map, and a road going through. Interestingly enough the main arteries of the city still follow those roads to this day.

    But anyway, seeing a map of the downtown area almost in its natural state before any urbanisation makes me think what a crime towards nature this city is. The spot must have been absolutely breathtaking before the city. A narrow isthmus between two lakes with an 80 meter tall esker running along it and natural rapids rushing through it.

  5. The outer doors on one side of a freshly finished building in Helsinki are about 2 meters in the air, rendering them useless. Miscommunication about whether there would be structures to enable exiting caused the error.

    Some master of humour commented the piece of news by saying ‘it’s a lot better for the doors to be 2 meters too high than 2 meters too low”. Good point as such.

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