A Fistfighting Festival, Whiskey-Powered Trucks, and The Gini Index of OnlyFans
Oodles ‘o reading in my “Linkfest” for this week
It’s Monday. You’re only pretending to work.
So why not peruse this week’s “Linkfest”, where I scour the entire Internet, top to bottom, to find you the best reading material?
To begin …
1) 💥 The annual fist-fighting festival of Peru
Over in The New York Times, there’s a fabulous essay — written and illustrated with phenomenal photos, all by Mike Kai Chen — about Takanakuy, an annual festival of fist-fighting held in the Peruvian Andes. Tradition holds that the fights are for settling scores, but as Chen finds, some fighters appear to be doing it just for fun. Either way, the fights all end nicely …
The ultimate aim is to begin the new year in peace. For this reason, every fight — whether it involves men, women or children — begins and ends with a hug.
Interestingly, in recent years more women have been fighting. Chen’s photos are stunning: Go check them out, and see more at his web site too!
2)💰 Why OnlyFans is more unequal than South Africa
I’m coming late to this, but in early 2020 Thomas Hollands scraped a set of OnlyFans to try and deduce how much money people are actually making on the platform. Holland found that of the sample he scraped, it was a power law — the top 1% of the accounts were making 33% of all money on OnlyFans, and the top 10% were making 73%. (It’s not a watertight analysis, as Hollands notes; among other things, he had no way of estimating tips.)
The Gini Index is a measurement of inequality in wealth or income. Hollands calculated that OnlyFans’ Gini Index is .83, which makes it more unequal than South Africa, the most economically unequal country on the planet (which is .68)
Not that we needed it, but it’s another reminder of how dodgy are the winner-take-all economics of the creator economy, in a world governed by i) the built-in limits of socially-networked human attention (which seems to lead to power-law distributions on its own, even pre-Internet) with ii) the algorithmic juking of the corporate Internet, which often creates power laws by design.
3)⌚A dissolving smartwatch
Barely 20% of e-waste is recycled, by some estimates. That’s because manufacturers mostly do not build their electronic devices to be disassembled. We’ll probably need legislation and engineering standards to change that, frankly. But in the meantime here’s some very cool work pushing the frontiers of recyclability: A prototype smartwatch where the body can be dissolved in water, leaving the circuitry behind. (Here’s video of the prototype watch in action.)
4) 📐 Babylonians used the Pythagorean theorem long before Pythagorus
Back 3,700 years ago, a prominent Babylonian citizen had a dispute over property ownership with a wealthy female landowner. A land surveyor was sent out to try and resolve the dispute, and the surveyor wrote some calculations down on a clay tablet. A new study of the tablet finds that the surveyor was using “Pythagorean triples” — and this was 1,000 years before Pythagoras himself formulated his famous theorem.
“Nobody expected that the Babylonians were using Pythagorean triples in this way,” Dr Mansfield says. “It is more akin to pure mathematics, inspired by the practical problems of the time.”
Indeed, this is one of my favorite points — which is that historically, our understanding of science and math often evolved for utilitarian purposes. We needed to Do Something — like, fairly divide up land — and Doing that Something required us to develop new principles of math, or the ability to master some new chemical or physical process, or whatnot. Farmers and midwives and builders and moneylenders and cooks were utterly crucial to founding what we now think of as the “pure” sciences.
We now have a scientific method and scientific apparatus (universities, labs, etc.) that are devoted to “pure” science — i.e. pushing the bounds of human knowledge, without worrying whether anyone can make a buck off what’s learned. “Pure” science is deeply cool; indeed, the scientific method that underpins it is one of humanity’s most wonderful inventions. But discoveries made in the name of “pure” science often wind up being super valuable in the real world, too — closing the loop.
Or to put it another way: Pure science can lead to applied results; applied science can lead to pure results.
5) 🧮 A graphing calculator made in Minecraft
Check out this video in which mattbatwings shows off his latest Minecraft creation: A graphing calculator, composed entirely of redstone. It is grindingly slow, but it’s astonishing it works at all.
I’m often gobsmacked by the remarkable hacks people pull off using Minecraft’s redstone and associated building materials. They allow one — as I noted in this long piece on Minecraft a few years ago — to create machines using the very AND/OR/NOT/XOR-esque logic of which computation is itself woven. My friend the philosopher and technologist Ian Bogost once said that Minecraft isn’t so much a game as something akin to the Commodore 64: The personal computer for millenials and GenZ.
6) 🎨 Neanderthals’ gorgeous, geometric art
Over 176,000 years ago, neanderthals went into a cave — in what would, millennia later, be France — and arranged scores of stalagmites into two huge circles, joined at the hip like an infinity sign. In this terrific essay, Dean Kissick writes about this astonishing piece of Neanderthal artwork, and notes that archaeologists are now revising our long, snooty dismissal of Neanderthals as brute idiots devoid of culture:
“Because they lived so long ago, and the details of their lives have been lost, we have long thought of these predecessors as primitive. But the Rings of Bruniquel suggest that, as far back as we can see, ancient human cultures have had some kind of desire for transcendence, a wish to leave their mark on the Earth; and that our aesthetic sensibility derives from deep within our lineage.”
I really want to read Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ recent book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.
7) 📊 Graphing how COVID changed our daily behavior
Every year, the US government surveys Americans about what they’re doing all day long. Over at Flowing Data, Nathan Yau used that info to generate some cool dataviz on how things changed between 2019 and 2020 — or, how COVID changed our daily activities.
Green means we did more of it; purple, less. The dotted line is the median, going up or down.
This is just a sample; go check his site for the full viz of dozens of our daily activities. But basically, yeah — we stayed inside a lot more.
8)📍A final, sudden-death round of even more stuff to procrastinate with
Trucks fueled by whiskey. 📍This snack was sold widely for decades in India, yet scientists have no idea what it is. 📍Issuing “Forever Domains” using Ethereum. 📍No, oil doesn’t come from dinosaurs, but here’s how the myth began. 📍Why the “Sea Bear Swimming Club” is helping to pick Hong Kong’s next rulers. 📍“There is a right and a wrong way to tickle a rat”. 📍Putting solar farms in space and beaming the energy back to earth. 📍“Text sniper” grabs the plain-text of any words you see on your Mac desktop(via Mark Frauenfelder’s “The Magnet” newsletter.) 📍Behold the drone version of a “cyclocopter”, where the blades spin in a tube, like a combine. 📍How the Adirondack chair became synonymous with outdoor relaxation. 📍To make popcorn taste better, eat it with chopsticks. 📍In 1929, a philosopher wondered: “What is a question?” 📍How mesmerism spread in the late 18th century. 📍Using acoustic trapping to make “tweezers made of sound.” 📍Shrinking brain tumors with head-mounted magnets. 📍When doodlebots collide.
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.
