The word on the street
Plus: Fish, weird medical recipes, and wines
Hi!
It’s a very brief edition this week with no sections, and it’s mostly just some cool things I’ve seen. I’ve been pretty busy being The Best Auntie In The World™—I highly recommend watching goat racing at least once in your life—and trying to prepare for/navigate another life change. I’m coping with this by buying random things such as: A kettle that plays soothing music as it boils; a pillow that looks like it’s a pair of trousers for a giant? I should be shut out of my Instagram account for my own good.
What if you could search every visible word on New York City’s streets?
This is a really cool look at the words on the streets of New York—not just shop signs but graffiti, buses, t-shirts. Anything visible on Google Streetview. I really like the density maps for specific words/phrases.
Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
Pew Research looked at how people are using (or not using!) Google AI summaries. It found: “Google users were less likely to click on result links when visiting search pages with an AI summary compared with those without one. For searches that resulted in an AI-generated summary, users very rarely clicked on the sources cited.”
Curious Cures
This isn’t a thing right now, but Cambridge University has started digitising what it’s calling medieval medical recipes. In case you ever wondered what medieval folks would do to treat gout, cataracts, and any number of common ailments. Might want to make sure you’re not eating while reading. You can visit the exhibition for free as well.
Wine characteristics by grape type
This is a chart showing the body, acidity and alcohol content across 50 grape types. I was considering trying to use this to figure out if the wines I like are similar somehow, but I can’t remember what wines I like other than Malbec. The wine dataset is available here if you want to play around with it.
Draw a fish
Just delightful. I had a lot of fun doing this with the kids.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed Fair Warning, please forward to friends and tell them how great it is. If you REALLY liked it, you can buy me a coffee.
As always, you can get in touch with me on BlueSky at thatsoph.bsky.social or by replying to this email. You’re also welcome to send interesting stories or stories you’ve worked on, and while I can’t promise to feature them in future, I *will* take a look.
Have a great week!
Loved that wine dataset. Seems like it could be used to create a tool that would help people pick other grapes they like based on similarities in body and acidity.