A weekly newsletter for all your intellectual, spiritual, and physical needs
Hello everybody! Welcome to Volume 161 of Dovi’s Digest.
This was a momentous week in my parents house: There were not one, but two (!!!) new phones unboxed. I remember the very first phone I got. It was a Nokia 5410, and I was over the moon. It was water and dust resistant, and it had a VGA camera. I was the coolest kid in school. While getting the phone was exciting, the actual unpacking was quite meh. It was a plain box, with a moulded brown insert which showed the phone, the charger, and the manual. For my parents the experience was different. One got an iPhone, one a Samsung. The unboxings were similar – a slimline box, just the phone being shown once the lid is off, and then the extras (just a cable these days, maybe a pin to remove a sim) hidden underneath. Thing is, Samsung totally ripped Apple off when doing this. My first apple product was an iPod, and unsealing the plastic, the top slowly sliding off, and seeing it in all its glory was a multisensory experience. The process hasn’t changed much, the box has just got slimmer.
There are three things for this week’s added extras. First you can see one writer’s inventions of tech features that no one wants (my fave is the Facebook feature that tells you if someone read the article before sharing it). Then you can bend your mind with the winners from The Museum of Illusions best illusions of 2023. Finally, you can watch this very short, very heart-warming story of a man who found a frog who lived in his fence, and the ensuing extreme home makeover.
The Dovi’s Digest Facebook and Twitter pages will keep you sated between editions, with all new content. Check it out at the links below (or scan the insta code):
Do you enjoy the Digest? Would you like it to get better? Then please consider sharing it, as the more articles I’m sent, the better it is. It only takes a few seconds, and all you need to do is click here 👇. Thank you!
There were THREE correct answers to last week’s brainteaser. Well done to Chaim Ehrlich, Hazel Levine, and Yaakov Goldfein! The answer and this week’s puzzle are below.
Aside from the majesty of box design, you can learn about the people who still used Netflix to rent DVDs (yes, past tense, Netflix recently closed that division), see (or I guess hear?) why voice ID is far from secure and foolproof if you have access to AI, find out why there are no female late night hosts, marvel over the story of the Jewish ice hockey star who survived in Nazi Germany, have a look at the design and artistry found on fruit stickers, and dive into the wild story of hidden indentured servants living in America. Enjoy!
Keep those articles (and everything else) coming.
Have a great weekend,
Dovi
And now, the articles:
Total Package: How Apple Made Unpacking The iPhone A Ritual Rather Than A Chore
The latest iPhone has half the packaging of the original, but still makes a big impression.
The People Who Still Love Renting DVDs From Netflix
It’s not just tens of thousands of classic films being left behind by the move to ditch DVDs—it’s people too.
How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice
Banks in the U.S. and Europe tout voice ID as a secure way to log into your account. I proved it's possible to trick such systems with free or cheap AI-generated voices.
A Dude And A Desk: Why Women Really Don’t Get To Host Late-Night TV
Salon talks to comedians, producers and execs about how women-helmed shows have been passed over and left out.
Rudi Ball: The Jewish Ice Hockey Star Who Represented And Survived Nazi Germany
(Courtesy of Michael Glass)
In the spring of 1945, Major Gordon Dailley drove his Canadian Army jeep 500 miles from the Netherlands to Berlin in a single day. He passed a line of civilians queuing for soup being distributed by Allied troops. One dishevelled chap caught his eye. It was Rudi Ball, a man who less than a decade before he had seen in very different circumstances.
The Surprising, Overlooked Artistry of Fruit Stickers
Kelly Angood curates an online museum of little, adhesive marvels.
The Fugitive Heiress Next Door
How a reclusive woman’s past in suburban D.C. sparked a true-crime sensation in Brazil — and a national reckoning over the status of household servants.
Quote of the Week:
“By my age, my parents had a house and a family, and to be fair to me, so do I - but it's the same house and it's the same family.” – Hannah Fairweather
Facts of the Week:
Dead salmon is a paint colour: “salmon” is a shade of pink and “dead” is a synonym for matte.
Farrow & Ball paint colours include Savage Ground, Smoked Trout, Mouse’s Back, Mole’s Breath, Setting Plaster, Railings, and Pigeon.
Paint name suggested by an AI algorithm include Clardic Fug, Snowbon, Bunflow, Bank Butt, Caring Tan, Grass Bat, Stoner Blue, Stankey Bean, and Turdly.
Taupe is a colour of a French mole.
Naked mole rats have the same chance of dying at the age of one as at 25.
Scientists prepare pet parrots for their return to life in the wild by staging parrot murder scenes and making them watch.
Falcons are more closely related to parrots than to hawks or eagles.
There are 550 wild parrots living in New York City.
Cartoon of the Week:
Tweet of the Week:
(Courtesy of Tanya Perel)
Headline of the Week:
Brainteaser of the Week:
‘Eleven trillion’ has an interesting property. It consists of 14 letters and when written out is 11,000,000,000,000, which consists of 14 digits.
What is the lowest number to have this same property, namely that the number of letters when written as a word equals the number of digits when written in numerals?
Last Week’s Brainteaser and Answer:
Place each letter from the word CULTIVATE onto the blank spaces below to spell a three-letter word, a five-letter word, and a seven-letter word. Each letter can only be used once.
_ C _
_ O _ N _
_ A _ I _ N _
Answer:
ICE
COUNT
VALIANT