Harkstead, 2017

This week’s Five Things…

1. An amazing collection of photos: Underwater photographer of the year 2021 winners

2. Explore cities of the world with Drive and Listen . Select a city from the list and you become a passenger in someone’s car as they drive around the city. You can even listen to local radio as you drive!

3. We watched The Dig the other day. Excellent film. Very strange seeing Ipswich and Suffolk in a Netflix film!

4. An interesting thread on UK postcodes. Makes sense that they were designed to be memorable. I can recall a lot of the postcodes of places I’ve lived.

5. A fascinating profile of David Eagleman from 2011. It’s a long one but worth your time. Particularly the bit about drummers towards the end!

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Snowy Ipswich, Feb 2021

This week’s Five Things…

1. How to draw a water droplet

2. I’m reading A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles for the second time. It’s my favourite book and you should definitely read it!

3. Just keep on zooming! A 10-gigapixel scan of Girl With a Pearl Earring. This behind the scenes video explains the process of capturing the image.

4. Now that’s a lockdown project!

5. The Science Museum Group has a cool tool for viewing pieces in their online collection that have never been viewed before. Very clever!

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Berlin, May 2018

This week’s Five Things…

1. The Investigation (currently streaming on iPlayer) is very good. The best real life crime drama I’ve seen.

2. Science solves the mystery of why wombats have cube-shaped poo. Without doubt the biggest science news of the year!

3. I love these bubble wrap portraits. Very clever.

4. An a cappella group with a very niche speciality — Windows sound effects!

5. I could listen to this song on a loop for a very long time. Kyoto by Phoebe Bridgers.

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Seville, February 2018

This week’s Five Things…

1. This informative little website has been set up to counter a lot of the COVID-19 misinformation out there — with evidence! Well worth a read.

2. Obviously flooding is never a good thing but this is pretty cool: “Floods in Cambridgeshire highlight shape of English Civil War fort”

3. Max Richter on Tiny Desk

4. A nice interview with Brian Eno. Such an interesting guy.

5. This is fun, a snowflake generator!

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Copenhagen, September 2015

This week’s Five Things…

1. Animals interrupting wildlife photographers

2. What a great word: “Dustsceawung (Old English): contemplation of the fact that dust used to be other things — the walls of a city, the chief of the guards, a book, a great tree: dust is always the ultimate destination. Such contemplation may loosen the grip of our worldly desires.”

3. How lava lamps help to secure the internet

4. Tim Harford has a new podcast series called How to Vaccinate the World . It’s very good!

5. I really enjoyed this Tiny Desk performance by Jon Batiste. He’s one of those annoying people that can seemingly play everything!

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Christiania, Copenhagen — September 2015

This week’s Five Things…

1. “Happiness & sadness are contagious, this study finds. Each person in your network who became happy increases your chance of becoming happy by 9%, an unhappy person drops it by 7%. If a friend who lives within a mile becomes happy, your chance of becoming happy goes up 25%.”

2. A very good explainer of hypnic jerks. A thing I have regularly experienced but not known the name of!

3. Not just any illusion, an award-winning illusion.

4. A fascinating episode of Lexicon Valley on how new words are formed from older ones, and how their meanings drift over time.

5. I didn’t have Sea Shanty’s down as a 2021 trend.

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