Whitewood under Siege is a cracking good article in Cabinet Magazine on, as the subhead would have it, “the front lines of the pallet wars”. Pallets are one of those things most people seldom think about, except perhaps when they are on the lookout for cheap, hip-ish raw materials. And yet,

[M]any experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century. Studies have estimated that pallets consume 12 to 15 percent of all lumber produced in the US, more than any other industry except home construction.

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Part of my recent physical, office-adjacent spring clean was to look at the various spinning hard drives lying around the place. One represented an aborted attempt to add big-time file storage to my Raspberry Pi, abandoned because I just don’t need that.¹ A big USB stick is all I really need for f...

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To steal from William Gibson, Italian efficiency is excellent, it’s just not evenly distributed. That was running through my mind for the very brief time it took me to get my first shot of the Astra-Zeneca Covid vaccine yesterday evening. I was predisposed, I confess, because actually booking the appoinment (for which thanks to The Main Squeeze) had also been a miracle of efficiency and good fortune.

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A Blight on Soviet Science is a recently published long read about Nikolai Vavilov. It’s a good read too, a well-told account of the life of the extraordinary botanist and seed collector, his fight with Trofim Lysenko and eventual downfall and death in prison of starvation. Just one thing about it worried me.

The picture at the top of the article.

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A couple of weeks ago someone shared a list of things that people can’t help themselves but recommend to others, things that are so useful or worthwhile that you can’t imagine how you lived without them.¹ Of course I skimmed through it. There were things I’m already doing (plain text) and things I’m never going to do (children)². There were also things that elicited a masssive “Huh?”

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