Five Things: Late Morning edition
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Dang, it’s cold. The temperatures dropped from 39° Celsius to 19 or so and the rain doesn’t make it any better. Why can’t they just set the thermostat at 28°C and leave it there until October?
The USA is currently elebrating the 250th anniversary by largely ignoring the festivities Donald Trump and his croonies planned. This is well deserved and continues to give me hope that the MAGA idiocy will come to an end soon. Now would be a good time to figure out who the leader of the Democrats could be who unites and heals the people.
Speaking of well-deserved: the German national team had to pack their bags after just four games at the World Cup. For Germany, this is a major crisis and of course 84 million head coaches could have done a better job than Julian Nagelsmann, who spectaculary failed and has had to step down. He won’t be missed as he so overpromised and so underdelivered. Everybody is still baffled how a team packed with so many star players who get traded for absurd amounts of money could so underperform. This is not the summer fairy tale we hoped for.
Speaking of hope: last evening I had hoped to get this newsletter done before my best friend came over and I assumed he’d be late, but he was way too early, so I had to stop writing this newsletter and had to resume it in the morning. “Where’s Five Things?” was the first message I got from my wife this morning, which means that I have at least one reader, but I assume she just reads it as she fears I might write something snarky about her, which I’d never do, of course.
Anyhow, here’s Five Things, a little later than usual, but very much worth reading!
But first, coffee: The drink that energized the American Revolution
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
I studied American history at university and while I am sitting here, sipping my coffee, I am trying to recall if coffee was ever mentioned in any of the books I read or lectures I attended. Fascinating. Also, bonus link: The Coffee Belt Runs Through Hamburg’s Roasters - Hamburg is still the coffee place to be…
Germany were once World Cup kings. Now they’re simply not that good
When Germany beat Argentina in 2014 to claim their fourth World Cup title in 17 attempts, it capped a four-tournament run since 2002 that had seen them finish second, third, third and then first. It also came five days after they beat the hosts Brazil in arguably the World Cup’s most shocking final score: 7-1.
At that point, only the most shameless Brazilian would have argued with the idea that Germany were the World Cup’s top nation. OK, Brazil had one more star on their jersey than Germany but Germany had also been runner-up four times and had won four third-fourth play-off matches.
Add all that up and Germany have finished on FIFA’s podium 12 times — three more than any other nation. So, their highs were higher than almost every other nation’s and their lows were higher than everyone’s.
There are two truths we have to face: the rest of the world has gotten so much better at football and that Germany is no longer a “Turniermannschaft” - a tournament team, that excels under pressure and succeeds due to a rare combination of luck and talent. I guess now we just have to win the Euro 2028!
On the origin of continents
In other ways, plate tectonics is a very unusual paradigm. It was discovered twice: first intentionally by geologists in Europe and its colonial sphere, and second, accidentally, by North American geophysicists. The two paths offer opposite lessons on the secret of scientific discovery. There is no lone genius who can claim the majority of the credit. The theory went from fringe to total acceptance over the course of ten years, with nary a funeral in sight. And it all came together much later than one would think: around the time of the first moon landing in 1969. This is the story of how two separate groups of scientists near-independently discovered plate tectonics with wildly different approaches, and what this can teach us about paradigm shifts.
Do you know how sometimes there are familiar names and you just don’t know (or bother to look up) who that person was and what he did? Of course I knew the Alfred Wegener Institute, but had no idea who Alfred Wegener was. Until recently, when I read the wonderful book Traversal by Maria Popova. Fascinating stuff.
We Need A Way To Prove Personhood Online
Media coverage of the rise of political bots in the mid 2010s alerted the public to the downsides of automatons among us — they could be deployed en masse to harass people out of conversations, to manufacture consensus and to kick off fake “trends,” making the public believe that more people cared about a thing than actually did. They were interlopers in a human environment, but they tended to be primitive, easily detectable and largely manageable.
That is no longer true. Generative AI has transformed bots from mediocre copypasta accounts into chatty, Large Language Model (LLM)-powered avatars with visuals tailored to appeal to their targets’ aesthetic preferences. And now, we have agents like Rathbun: software that doesn’t just generate content but takes autonomous action — writing code, posting, negotiating, booking and sometimes … attacking.
This is a really interesting debate. I am writing this newsletter all by myself and I also read all the articles I write about all by myself. But how can you know for sure? And while humans have ID cards, I sure want people to be able to stay anonymous when they are online, just as we can stay anonymous when we are offline. It’s a topic that is so hard to wrap your head around, but we need to find solutions that are not total surveillance. At least that’s what my agent suggests…
Are Crows Really Our Friends?
As we’ve moved to urban areas, crows followed, and like coyotes, they’ve found that city dwellers are less likely to trap or shoot them. Ever savvy, crows have learned new habits, such as nesting on utility poles, and as with many types of urban wildlife, they seem to be growing less wary around us. Such changes may be cultural, with birds passing down knowledge over generations. Behavioral shifts could also become baked into their DNA if birds with an inborn interest in, say, eating fries or nesting on a high-rise are more likely to survive to reproduce.
Over millennia of following us into new habitats, crows also learned that we are a fickle species. Humans provide food, but sometimes we harass or kill them. Our settlements can be alternately deadly or sheltering. To “avoid danger and take advantage of riches,” Marzluff says, “they can’t not be interested in people.” So they’ve evolved to watch closely what humans do. And their keen attention may be key to a friendship that’s singular.
We have crows in the tree in front of our house and my wife has turned into a bird-watcher. So basically I picked this article so she could tell me “see, I told you so!” all Sunday long, which is something that she normally would never do.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico