Six Things, Volume 60
Bees | Horses | Colour | Cities | Needledrop | Snif & Snüf
Before we move on to the Things, a brief trumpeting of wares.
I spent an enjoyable* couple of hours this morning creating, deleting, recreating, editing, re-editing, almost accidentally deleting, and swearing at a page featuring all my books and making it ridiculously easy for everyone to find out all about them and – and this, I’m going to be honest and come out and say it, is the important bit – BUY them.
It was fine. I’m fine.
Seriously, though, I’d be pathetically grateful if you were to have a look, and particularly if you felt able to pass it on to anyone you think might be interested. Things being what they are these days, it falls to creators of all kinds to market/promote/advertise their own work. This is emphatically not a complaint, more a mealy-mouthed, half-arsed apology for occasionally delaying your access to the main content of this newsletter with poorly planned, seat-of-the-pants extra content on the lines of this paragraph.
The headline is that Taking Flight is out in paperback on 16th May.
Right, that’s enough. To the Things!
*really not that enjoyable, if I’m to be completely honest. Other, more accurate descriptors are available.
Thing 1 – Bees
Anyone who has ever spent ten minutes trying to encourage a bumblebee back out through a wide open window THROUGH WHICH IT’S JUST FLOWN might need some persuading that they are in fact quite intelligent. But recent research suggests that they’re capable of a kind of learning previously only thought to exist in humans. It hinges on their ability, through ‘social learning’ or ‘cumulative culture’, to learn a novel behaviour that can’t be learned through individual trial and error. The researchers liken it to the way humans develop new technology over many generations of iterative steps.
Part of me looks at this and thinks that it’s typical of human arrogance to assume that we’re the only ones capable of intelligence. But that part is quickly shushed by the other part, which is going ‘JUST LOOK AT THE CLEVER BUMBLERS’.
For those wanting to delve deeper, here’s the original paper.
Thing 2 – Horse markings
This is one of those things that you don’t think about at all for most of your life but when someone mentions it or talks about it you quickly find yourself obsessed. It comes from the estimable Lucy Inglis (get yourself over to her very fine Cow Parsley Substack) and concerns the facial markings of horses. Some of it I was familiar with thanks to my teenage Dick Francis habit – and of course if you’re a horse person words like blaze, pastern, shield and Birdcatcher spots will be as familiar to you as gape, tertials, alula and malar stripe are to birders – but I find myself eager to learn more. Specialist jargon is a wonderful and endlessly fascinating area of language – boating is particularly rich with it, as is aviation. I’m sure you’ll all be able to supply me with further examples.
Thing 3 – Colour
This excellent analysis of the way van Gogh’s colour palette adjusted over time, and why this might be, comes courtesy of the Breakfast of Champignons newsletter, which I commend to the house in strong terms.
Thing 4 – Cities
A cool infographic-film-type-thing charting the largest cities by population over the last 5,000 years. Fascinating stuff, not least for the realisation that halfway through the 9th century Baghdad became the first city to top a million inhabitants. It dropped below that mark about 100 years later, after which the next city to attain that level was Beijing, over 800 years later. Nowadays, of course, a million barely registers.
from kottke
Thing 5 – Needledrop
Nothing to do with Christmas trees, this is a neat daily game to add to the ever-increasing canon.
The premise is simple. The game plays you a piece of music. All you have to do is name the film in which it first appeared. You get up to four clues, and it’s pitched at just about the right level of difficulty for someone like me to get the right answer occasionally. For some of you it might well be childishly easy; for others, downright impossible. Such is the way with games.
Thanks to web curios for the link.
Thing 6 – Snif & Snüf
Oh this is wonderful and I love everything about it. It’s the kind of thing you might have seen once on Channel 4 in 1988 and then when the internet came along you spent half an hour trying to find it even though you couldn’t remember what it was called so you used search terms like ‘funny cartoon great music stick men hats’.
Show it to your children.
Show it to your grandparents.
Show it to yourself on a regular basis as an act of self care.
It will take 283 seconds for you to watch it. What else are you going to do for 283 seconds?
Quite.
Bees eh. Always more amazing than I already think
Snif and Snuf...how marvelous. Thank you!