A weekly newsletter for all your intellectual, spiritual, and physical needs
Hello all! Welcome to Volume 148 of Dovi’s Digest.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I shop online, one of the first things I do is check the reviews – often before I’ve even looked at a product’s features. This extends onto ‘best of’ lists, detailed comparisons against other similar products, and agonising over pros and cons. All too often this can take me weeks, and by then the product is out of stock.
Same goes for restaurants or places to travel. I go straight to trip advisor to see the write ups and whether I should avoid certain places or foods (this has saved me from a ruined trip due to food more than once).
Reviews can not only be informative and save you from food poisoning, they can also be damn entertaining. There is a whole subculture of finding and posting well written and/or funny reviews. The two that most readily spring to mind is Veet hair removal cream and sugar-free Haribo gummies, both of whose Amazon reviews can keep you entertained for hours.
The platform that is most utilised though, is of course Google. If you search for locations or businesses on the internet its likely that you’ve read a Google review. Most of them are straightforward (the pizza is good, or I had a good haircut here). Some are bizarre and there is the darker side of it; where people purposefully downvote competitor’s businesses to ruin their reputation.
For the most part, it’s just people trying to do a little good and help out a stranger, even if it only involves clicking some stars. This week’s headline article is about exactly that: the strange beauty of Google reviews, and how they reveal the humanity in us all.
As a counterpoint, I’m also posting this article here, about why it’s getting harder and harder to spot fake reviews.
If you haven’t already, check out the Dovi’s Digest Facebook and Twitter pages for all new and interesting content!
Your something extra this week is a musical road in Hungary with rumble strips that play a song when you go at the speed limit.
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There were TWO correct answer to last week’s brainteaser. Well done to Chaim Ehrlich and Ariel Subotzky! The answer and this week’s puzzle are below.
If you rather just buy things or go places without checking them first (like a barbarian), you can keep yourself entertained other ways. Read about the parents who have turned their kids into online content (and the repercussions), what we can learn from the stray dogs roaming Chernobyl, an interactive article about making Notre Dame sound as good as it used to, a look into the top secret seed bank that could save humanity, a look inside a polar bear jail, and the rising demand for burials in space. Enjoy!
Keep those articles (and everything else) coming.
Have a great week,
Dovi
And now, the articles:
The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews
Glimpses of humanity in an unlikely corner of the internet.
Influencer Parents and The Kids Who Had Their Childhood Made Into Content
(Courtesy of Yisroel Greenberg)
“Nothing they do now is going to take back the years of work I had to put in.”
What The Dogs Of Chernobyl Can Teach Us About Life At The Edge
You’d think an irradiated wasteland would be a poor place to make a home, but some animals beg to differ.
The Quest to Restore Notre Dame’s Glorious Sound
(Courtesy of Josh Hovsha)
An interactive article (that you’ll want to use headphones for, trust me) about bringing back the glory of the “Cathedral of Sound”.
Finally, a Peek Into the Arctic Seed Vault That Could Save Humanity
The repository, designed to last forever, offers virtual tours for the first time.
Inside Canada’s Polar Bear Jail
The holding facility helps bears and people safely coexist in the remote northern town.
Heavenly Bodies
Space burials sell a shot at immortality.
Quote of the Week:
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” – JK Galbraith
Facts of the Week:
Dinosaur skeletons are increasingly bought by wealthy private collectors, because museums can't afford them.
The Kattenkabinet Museum in Amsterdam has works of art by Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Picasso – but only the ones featuring cats.
The tagline for the National Poo Museum on the Isle of Wight is “Have You Been?”
Berlin has a curried-sausage museum.
The smell of Play-Doh is trademarked.
Valium is present in potatoes.
Alcohol is 114 times as dangerous as marijuana.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was banned in Malaysia because Morphin sounded a bit like “morphine”.
Cartoon of the Week:
Tweet of the Week:
Headline of the Week:
Brainteaser of the Week:
What row of numbers comes next?
1 11 21 1211 111221 312211
Last Week’s Brainteaser and Answer:
What completes the following sequence?
Important info: The same consonants are represented by numbers 0–9, and all vowels are represented by *.
7**3*6
*41*2*
03**
25**4
9*33*8
*5*42*
?
Answer:
5*1, which indicates “red.” These are the colours of the rainbow in reverse order (violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red)