Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #42, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads and Mastodon.

Snow + Prerna = Snowball-fight!

It snowed! There is a nice layer of fresh snow around our home.

We stayed home and cooked, this week. I made aloo-paratha over the weekend and it was perfect. I tried it again during the week and that one did not go as well as planned. So now, I am not sure if I am good at it or not. Prerna made ragi-roti. I prefer dosa, but that has more oil. It will be an acquired taste, if it gets acquired ever.

I continue working on the book. It will be out on 15th Feb. Pre-orders should be live by next week at the maximum. More to share on that soon.

/five things to share

1. Marc Scott - Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you — Coding 2 Learn

I have myself wondered if the new generation is better at technology then us. Sure they use phones, TVs, tablets, etc. more. But do they know how to fix things if anything goes wrong? I don't think so. Neither does Marc.

Technology affects our lives more than ever before. Our computers give us access to the food we eat and the clothes we wear. Our computers enable us to work, socialise and entertain ourselves. Our computers give us access to our utilities, our banks and our politics. Our computers allow criminals to interact with us, stealing our data, our money, our identities. Our computers are now used by our governments, monitoring our communications, our behaviours, our secrets. Cory Doctorow put it much better than I can when he said:

"There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears."

2. Dark Energy May Not Exist: Something Stranger Might Explain The Universe

Dark Energy is what is posited to explain why the universe continues to expand at a faster rate. More matter means more gravity, which means time passes slower there. So, in bubbles across the galaxy time might be passing slower than elsewhere, which would explain the observant expansion, when there might not be any.

Discrepancies in how fast time passes in different regions of the Universe could add up to billions of years, giving some places more time to expand than others. When we look at distant objects through these time-warping bubbles, it could create the illusion that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.

3. Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?

“The thesis is that we’ve been focussing too strongly on the individual nutritional components of food,” Hall told me. “We’re starting to learn that processing really matters.”

If the goal was to minimize processing, then a diet that includes butter might be healthier than one that includes margarine, and one that includes cane sugar might be healthier than one that includes zero-calorie sweeteners. The occasional whole egg, which contains more than half the daily recommended dose of cholesterol, might be preferable to packaged liquid eggs, which are protein-rich and sometimes cholesterol- and fat-free, but often contain preservatives and emulsifiers.

4. How a food crisis in India fed America's library collections

Signed into law by President Dwight D Eisenhower, PL-480 allowed countries like India to buy US grain with local currency, easing their foreign exchange burden and reducing US surpluses. India was one of the largest recipients of this food aid, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s when it faced severe food shortages.

5. No more needles! Tracking blood sugar on your wrist | Waterloo News

Non-invasive sugar tracking remains the holy-grail in consumer devices like Apple Watch. It seems to be something which is always five years in the future.

“We’ve developed radar technology that can now fit inside a smart watch and sense glucose levels more accurately than ever before,” Shaker said. “Just like you use glasses to improve your vision, our technology helps for better sensing of glucose levels.”

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

1. Sometimes all it takes is magic
2. Would you enjoy killing more human NPCs?
3. About glue work
4. Meta will not do fact-checking anymore
5. Chambers, Becky - The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
6. How to complain or how to work with your bosses

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.