☾ 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 branch on Easter.
  2. the Turnspit dog, a dog specifically bred to work in the kitchen.
• A couple of things on language and thinking: Sam Kriss’ essay Reading is magic and more on the Pirahã language, which I remember being 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. Apparently this can be explained by the fact that the fake ones sort of live off the real one’s threat toward predators etc. If the fake-to-real ratio was too high that strategy would not be viable. I remember someone telling me the rhyme: “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:

🍀