Violette, Ventôse, 228; Falling through Earth

Hi. This is a short missive. I know I didn't do one last week but time just ran away with me. My sleep pattern has become incredibly erratic. Some nights I get three or four hours sleep, some times I crash out at like 7pm and just sleep straight through 12 hours. A couple of years ago I tried to train myself to need less sleep and just couldn't; I am an 8 hour sleep person and know that the key to good sleep is regularity. This also means I'm trying to drink less, normally I'm out three or four nights a week and I need to cut that down to a maximum of two or at least not drink every night.

I'm just going to post some links up and ahve done with it this week. I haven't read anything (because of the sleep thing) and you already know about the thing on Friday with natalie at the V&A? I learned about the Royal Game of Ur the other day which I guess is the world's oldest and longest-played game. There's a video from Tom Scott here on how the rules were kind of reverse engineered from correspondence hundreds of years after its first engineering.

Channel Recommendation

I already recommended this so it's not necessarily new but here's Standup Maths showing you how it wold take exactly 42 minutes and 10 seconds to fall through any object with the density of Earth, no matter how far you fell through. So weird.


There are so many good science communication channels out there I wonder what design and art have been doing wrong. I suppose 99% Invisible is about as close as you can get to a genuinely accessible and popular thing but it's still an audio podcast about design and there's something about the production values that I sometimes don't like; it's too shiny. I like Standup Maths and others because it's just someone who's really excited about something talking to other people about ideas. Should I do a design vlog?

I've been assembling a list of axioms I go by. I find I have quite a well self-articulated ruleset on how and why I do things which makes my life quicker because I hate prevaricating and waiting.