Six Things, Volume 125

New York | Birdcast | YoYo | Lego & Walls | Tyre Roll | Primesweeper

Hello! There won’t be a Six Things for a couple of weeks. Call it time off for average behaviour. To compensate for the absence, the division of a couple of this week’s things means there are probably nine of them rather than six. That’s an extra 50%, at no cost to the taxpayer.

Anyway, if I feel energised while I’m away, there might be a Birds post or two. We’ll see. See you in a bit, and thanks for the continued support.

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Thing 1 – New York

A Thing in Three Parts

1: File this piece, about “the hardest working font in Manhattan”, under “people who know an awful lot about something you probably haven’t thought that much about but it turns out it’s really really interesting.”

2: While we’re in New York, this, by media artist Yufeng Zhao for The Pudding, is quite something. It’s an urban textscape, based on analysis of over 8 million Google Street View images and 138 million identified snippets of text. You could do any amount of playing around with this data, for example this map of the 111,290 instances of the word ‘pizza’. There’s plenty more to explore, though, including maps of ‘Broadway’, ‘luxury’, ‘beware’, and (inevitably) ‘fuck’, as well as a list of the top 1,000 words.

3: Another NY-based thing (from the ever excellent Web Curios) for anyone who doesn’t trust weather forecasts: a webcam that notes what passers-by are wearing (shorts, length of sleeves) and whether they’re carrying an umbrella.

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Thing 2 – Birdcast

Autumn migration (despite the calendar not yet having reached the -ber months) is well under way. Birdcast is a suite of tools using advanced Clever Technology™ to map and forecast bird movements over America. As someone commented on Bluesky, “phwoar”.

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Thing 3 – YoYo

I was never any good with a YoYo.

Hajime Miura is good with a YoYo.

Mesmerising, especially the audience reactions.

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Thing 4 – Lego & Walls

A Thing in Two Parts

1: Nine minutes watching Lego vehicles trying to ascend ever higher walls are nine minutes well spent.

2: Thanks to artist Jan Vormann, there are now walls all over the world that have been patched up with Lego. If you want to find one near you, there’s an interactive map of them here.

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Thing 5 – Tyre Roll

It’s a simple concept. Find the highest sand dune you can. Throw a tyre down it. Film with drone until the tire stops rolling. The resulting three-minute film is strangely satisfying, not least for the absence of unnecessary adornment or accompanying material (fast cuts, graphics, over-enthusiastic discussion of the AMAZING WOW YOU SHOULD SEE THIS BOY YOU’RE NOT GONNA BELIEVE HOW LONG IT ROLLED FOR tyre roll and so so forth). Even the music, so often destroyer of potentially enjoyable videos, is low-key and unobtrusive.

And yes, they did fetch the tyre afterwards.

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Thing 6 – Primesweeper

Minesweeper, but with prime numbers.

Fun, and EDUCATIONAL.