smart & curious
A list of intriguing things
The hottest font right now is Cooper Black—best known for its appearance in Garfield comics. And it’s having a moment again. This Vox vid on its history is for design junkies everywhere:)
The paternoster lift is a Victorian-era contraption designed to carry one person at a time. A group of London architects are pitching it as a pandemic-perfect solution for hotels. And they work kinda like this:
These two dots are exactly the same—as in the same colour. But why do we see them so differently? The answer lies not in our brain but within our eye—as proved by a study involving a group of congenitally blind children in India.
Depixelize yourself—or anybody else! A new tool can take highly pixelated images and recreate the original using—what else?—AI. There are amusing possibilities if you are playing around with gaming characters like Super Mario. Or scary implications for privacy and surveillance—unless, of course, you’re black (or likely brown)! Behold what it did to Obama below. Plus: take a spin on the depixelizer here.
A short list of good reads
- Haruki Murakami has just published a short story in the New Yorker. Enuf said.
- The Atlantic asks: Will sex scenes survive the pandemic? We certainly hope so!
- The News Minute has the story of one Kerala family that spent their entire savings on a Vande Bharat flight back home.
- Do you know about Alt Tik Tok? Not likely, if you are straight. Let Mashable tell you all about it. One of its most popular videos (below)—This is what I would look like if I was straight—sparked a deluge of similar videos.
