Six Things, Volume 159

I took last week off. Sorry about that. I assume you all observed the traditional weekend of mourning for my absence.

Oh.

Anyway, I have an excuse. A dog ate my Substack. Also, I was in Venice for a family celebration, and without wishing to be disrespectful, when you’re in Venice pretty much everything – including trawling the internet for engaging content to present to an adoring virtual public – takes second place to the simple yet overwhelming activity called ‘being in Venice’.

What a place. It never fails.

So, terribly sorry and all that, but a Venetian dog ate my Substack. And those guys are hungry.

Anyway, I’m back now, so here are this week’s things.

We went over quite a few bridges while in Venice – it’s difficult not to, what with one thing and another. And while the density of tourists in certain (but by no means all) areas occasionally resembled the scene above, thankfully the level of brawling described in this informative and entertaining piece on the Public Domain Review has fallen into abeyance.

The Hundred Hunt is a simple project “for curious walkers, street photographers, and anyone who wants to see the world differently”. Just go out and about, find all the numbers from 1 to 100 and photograph them. Then upload them and tag your city to add your contribution to the project. The stipulation is that they should be “numbers that are just existing – not pointing anywhere, not doing a job”. There’s a random number generator if you need help deciding which number to find today. A nice little way to encourage a bit of looking, which is never a bad thing, I don’t think.

This is the fourth (of five so far) in an excellent series called How The Heck? – interactive explainers of everyday technology by Shri Khalpada. They’re clearly written, and while you do have to concentrate a bit if you’re not sciencey, there are excellent graphics to make it all clearer.

The others in the series are QR codes, GPS, Shazam and traffic lights – they’re all well worth exploring.

Oh this is a lovely project, created by Jack Thurston (who’s written a series of guides to beautiful bike rides in Britain). It is simply a map and database of all the lanes in Britain, mapped. It’s searchable, but there’s also a lane of the day, weird names (rude, dark, magical, just plain odd), themes, and inevitable statistics. From it, I learn that there are 77,813 lanes in Britain, with 32,795 unique names – and I’m sure you can have an educated guess at the commonest one.

Mowing (produced by The Pudding in partnership with Citizen Codex) is both a fun little game and a small experiment. The aim is to mow the lawn as efficiently as possible. They give you two rounds to play, and they’ll be breaking down their findings in a few weeks – presumably there’ll be spiffy graphics and it will be both entertaining and informative. Do play it, even if only for the sake of infographical science stories. There are also bonus rounds if you’re feeling competitive.

I’m spectacularly bad at this, and yet I continue to play it in the hope of some kind of self-improvement. Simply identify the title of the Wikipedia article from a collection of its categories. Simple, but not.

It’s gonna be hot in London this week. But wherever you are, the shade map might well be your friend.