Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else.

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. Mime artists are great at policing traffic

In 1995, Bogotá's new mayor Antanas Mockus dismissed the city’s entire traffic police force and replaced them with around 400 mimes.

The mimes spent their shifts mimicking and mocking traffic offenders while demonstrating proper behaviour. The strategy worked - deaths from traffic dropped by 50% in the city centre. Normal traffic police did eventually return to the streets, but only once their entire training had been overhauled and the city’s traffic was bearable.

The scheme was later replicated in Caracas in Venezuela, Lima in Peru, and Tegucigalpa in Honduras (click any of the links to see news footage). If only this were the norm for traffic police everywhere all the time. Also, I’d like it if riot police wore friendlier clothes.

2. The USA was saved by government benefits

After WWI, there was mass unemployment and economic depression, and the US government wanted to avoid that happening again when WWII rolled up. So they introduced the so-called GI Bill, which gave returning WWII veterans loads of state-supported benefits, including full educational funding, paid living expenses and low-interest home loans.

It ended up funding the education of 22,000 dentists, 67,000 doctors, 91,000 scientists, 238,000 teachers, 240,000 accountants and 450,000 engineers, fuelling an era of economic growth and the wholesale creation of the famed "American Dream", namely homeownership and a cushy middle-class lifestyle.

So, I guess the USA has to thank socialism for its post-war strength and self-image 🤷‍♂️

3. AI is being used to make new Nirvana songs

With only a handful of proper albums before Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, it seems Nirvana’s millions of fans have been getting impatient. There are now several fan-made albums of Nirvana songs thanks to improving music technology. It's a bewildering phenomenon that makes you wonder where this will all lead. It's happening with many bands, but there is a bit of a cult around it when it comes to Nirvana.

Many are new songs entirely, but others are remakes of out-takes and demos that never got past the draft stage. It seems like the remaining Nirvana members aren't against the latter idea, but they're already being pipped to the post by prolific fans if they're considering bringing out anything official themselves.

It's all very well for bands to knowingly get AI involved in fixing lost songs, like The Beatles famously did last year. But there's a creeping sense of chaos if anybody can make a new song that sounds like any specified band.

You could argue it's a bit like the literary phenomenon of fan fiction, which is huge but lacks commercial power since copyright stops fan writers from charging for their stories. I don’t think they’re even allowed to monetise the YouTube videos, where most of these songs can be found.

Where will this all lead? I expect to a world of audio deepfakes, with nobody clear on who made what anymore. There’s a certain irony to this since we all have such massive digital footprints, but unless blockchain really does fix the problem of authenticity on the Internet, it does feel like the chaos will only grow larger and louder.

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 tip to improve your language learning skills

Change your phone or computer's settings to the language you're learning

When I first saw my wife’s laptop, I was confused about why everything was in Spanish. But then I realised how clever she was being.

Not only does changing a simple setting force you to use your desired language in lots of tiny moments throughout the day, but it will confuse other people who might be trying to unlock your tech and use it for themselves 😅

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading. Here’s a photo of a pink fairy armadillo.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff
Currently reading: Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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