LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #76:

ONE ISSUE THAT IS NOT ABOUT (NEW) WORK

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”

~ Leo Tolstoy

Where did you grow up, and where do you live now?

A really nice comparison of the environments you live in can be made with this little tool that allows you to draw all the streets in a town.

I grew up in Elsbethen (but I’m showing the Glasenbach part because this is where we lived), lived in Salzburg, then in Vienna, and currently, I’m living in Andelsbuch.

Quite a contrast, eh?

The maps are not to scale, but you can tell from the street density how big the difference in size is.

Create your own maps here, you can also order mugs and whatnot.

A Map of the Solar System (to scale)

Here over at the Kathrein-Riegersperger household, we’ve been binge-watching The Expanseuntil we ran out on episodes to catch up on, and now we’re back to boring television watching (once a week).

It’s interesting that even a show that tries to portrait society, culture, the political struggle and technology without resorting to Space Opera needs some kind of magical trick to make it work. The space ships in The Expanse use trusters to navigate, slingshot around planets and moons and are generally zero G - just how our own, contemporary space-faring vehicles operate. But they have one magical thing ours are lacking: An extremely efficient fusion drive that defies our understanding of physics that can produce vast amounts of thrust (leading to vast accelerations), and a magic white “juice” that allows people to withstand that sort of accelerations. (And some magic that allows them to avoid interplanetary dust particles that would rip the ships apart on impact at those speeds.)

Why is this so? Why do virtually all Science Fiction universes need some sort of mind-bending technology that makes ships go really fast?

Because space is really “nothing”. And I’m not talking about “Outer Space”, but also space inside our solar system.

Check it out for yourself on this great map of the solar system: The Moon is represented by 1 pixel, and everything else is to scale.

All the Cows

Speaking of maps, here’s one showing all the cows in the world. Or, to be more precise, all the places where all the cows live. But now I want a map of all the cows as well.

Longest known Exposure Photograph ever

In 2012, Regina Valkenborgh placed a pinhole cameramade out of a beer can with a small hole in it to capture the sun - and forgot about it.

8 years later, someone found it, and here we have the longest exposure photograph ever made: 2.953 arched trails of the sun, in one picture.

How do people spend their time?

How much do people work, how much do they sleep? How much time do they invest in education, or leisure?

Here’s a cool graph that compares a bunch of countries, and oh wow, Norwegians, you seem to have figured it out!

What the Eff did I just find?

This started out as a joke between me and one of my best friends. We were talking about esoteric programming languages like Brainfuckwhen one of us though it would be really fun to have a programming language that is based on Emojis.

Of course, such a thing already exists: It’s called Emojicode, is probably not Turing-complete (but who am I to judge?), makes no sense, and therefore of course has to exist.

That’s it for this edition of Let’s Be Fwends, this time just a bunch of nonsense that maybe, just maybe, tickles your brain a bit to get off to a great start into a new year! May it be as awesome as the last one was strange! 🧠