☾ jan ─────── jul ☀
      ˖ ✦ 2026 ✦ ˖

Here are some things I did not forget to save for the digest over the first half of the year:

• Two odd things I was told about:
  1. the Easter whip and the custom of whipping women with a decorated willow branch to pass on health, beauty and fertility for the coming year
  2. the Turnspit dog, the “cook’s dog”, bred with short legs and a long body to run inside a wheel and turn the roasting spit.
• Sam Kriss’ essay Reading is magic, on Luria’s 1931 study of illiterate Uzbek peasants and how learning to read seems to reshape thought itself. On a similar vein, I read a bit more on the Pirahã language, which was also mentioned in the What is Intelligence? book.
• Frequency-dependent selection – the idea that how well a trait does depends on how common it already is. In the region where I live there are both coralillos and fake coralillos. The fakes get a free pass only while the venomous ones stay common enough that predators keep respecting the colors; if the fakes ones outnumber the dangerous ones, the disguise stops paying off. There’s even a rhyme to tell them apart: “red and black, venom lack; red and yellow, kills a fellow”.
• Minjeong Ahn’s autobiography in diagrams.

• Via moultano, this paper that quantifies the color perception of hummingbirds.
• Finally, during the World Cup fever, learnt about CONIFA, the confederation for football associations left outside FIFA. Current members:

🍀