the last law of thermodynamics

is to have fun and be yourself <3

hello!

If you are like, “why is this in my inbox,” I am the depths of wikipedia girl and perhaps you signed up for this email because you wanted Wikipedia facts. Best I can do today is some unfettered rambling with a few good Wikipedia links. I spent June catsitting in Berlin and now I am staying in Amsterdam for a few days to investigate my great-great-great-great grandpa’s niece Jurjentje Rauwerda. She was a 19th century brothel owner rumored to have had an illegitimate child with King William III. Juicy! Then I’ll be in London and Dublin (for the Wikipedia+Libraries conference) then Barcelona and Paris. I am doing a show in Los Angeles on Monday, August 8th and the tickets are on sale. I’m also doing a show in Seattle on Tuesday, August 16th. You should come. Let me know if you’re around and want to hang out (or if you have a room I could rent for a few days to avoid airbnb).

So far my silly season has been pretty boozy (1 euro beers) and exciting (Debbie Ryan of Disney Channel fame said in an interview “I never went to college but I follow Depths Of Wikipedia on Instagram”). Life is good. I have no needs. I have no wants. I should mention that yesterday, Gizmodo included @depthsofwiki in its“10 Delightful Twitter Bots to Cleanse Your Timeline of Elon Musk” listicle which made me furious because I am not a bot!

Good stuff

• MEL wrote about the time the official Twitter account for the country of Sweden let random citizens run its account for a week at a time

• the inimitable Matt Levine sent a Saturday newsletter about Elon trying to pull out of the Twitter deal. He also did a nice interview on the Longform podcast a month ago and his LinkedIn makes me laugh — it includes “gardening leave at Goldman as well as the time he “was an M&A lawyer” and “did M, and sometimes A. All of the time. Also shareholder proxy proposal defense.”

• The dude from the “the worst person you know” memes speaks out and he’s some random guy from a town outside Barcelona who didn’t really know he was a meme

• A website called “literature clock” finds a sentence from the literature that mentions the exact time it is. It’s delightfully impractical unless you’re hosting a literature festival without clocks and need to project the time onto the wall, in which case it would be very useful

• This Quanta profile of Fields Medal-winning mathematician June Huh made me laugh and nearly cry. He dropped out of high school to become a poet; he once stapled squares of fabric together from the Ann Arbor CVS because buying a blanket felt like too much work; he works for three hours a day; he is getting “better and better at ignoring deadlines”; he works in the noisy children’s section of the library so he doens’t get sleepy; he is a fellow Wolverine (go blue). I always find these Quanta profiles of academics so moving — such earnest curiosity, such ordinary excellence. Here’s another one I loved

• Computer engineering pioneer (he’s the co-inventor the ENIAC machine!) J. Presper Eckert said “Nothing is trivial. Life is made of a whole concentration of trivial matters. Certainly a computer is nothing but a huge concentration of trivial matters.” I read this in the book The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

• Neal Agarwal (who has a few dozen goofy games on his website) made an “absurd trolley problem” game with increasingly bizarre trolley dilemmas. By the end, my kill count was 69. The question that was hardest for me to answer was the one that asked if I’d rather kill 5 people now or send the trolley 100 years in the future to kill 5 people then.

• I’m getting reallllly into the 1 minute speed games on chess dot com

• I’m not a very good programmer: I just took a few classes in college and occasionally attempt hobby projects. But I sometimes use regex to find certain strings text from data files. This godsend of a website uses natural language processing AI to translate English (a phrase like “all words starting with the letter n and ending with g, case insensitive”) to the gnarly regex that’ll get you what you need (“/nw*g/i”)

• I’ve been Baader Meinhof-ed so much by the Habsburgs lately. Not sure why everyone in my life keeps mentioning this medieval Austrian and Spanish dynasty

• I love fellow Annies (Annes and Annas too, to a lesser extent) so I was excited when Annie Hamilton wrote a cheeky tribute to fake tears for NYMag

• I like everything by Maggie Koerth and I want to be her when I grow up. Here’s her article about synesthesia and alphabet fridge magnets in National Geographic

• bot that replaces the text from Garfield comics with song lyrics

• bot that replaces the text from Heathcliff comics with random text from Pornhub comments

All your Substack “likes” and comments and replies made my inbox such a delight last time (thank you!). I am sorry if I did not respond to you — a few slipped through the cracks. But I still want your emails and comments! I want to know what I should do in Barcelona, your tips for learning chess strategy, your favorite audiobook, what you want to name your children, whether you think it’s unethical to take a sneaky photo of a love interest you meet on a train and put it in the subscription facial recognition website Pimeyes to learn their name, your favorite law of nature, whether you’d like to try a little bit of human flesh given the opportunity, your favorite magazine (I just subscribed to The Economist and love it), something that recently devestated you, something that recently delighted you, whatever else is on your mind.

After the last newsletter, a few of you asked if I allow money tips as thanks for cluttering your feed with Wikipedia screenshots. I’ve never expected a dime but it doesn’t feel right to refuse, so Venmo @annierau or Paypal annierau@umich.edu if you feel generous. You can also donate to Wikipedia or — better yet — start editing!

depths of wikipedia @depthsofwiki

i am obsessed with the beach chairs in the wikimedia deutschland office