Welcome to another edition of “Vinita-dumps-her-brain” for the month.

• [Aviation] As an Avgeek, this seems like basic knowlege: How Boeing names its aircraft
• [Aviation] Considering my team can collect data as to how many times a toilet was flushed on a 787, I found this article on airplane toilets quite fascinating.
• [Aviation + Tech] This makes me slightly nervous but it was a matter of time: AirGuardian - AI copilot.
• [Design] The Noun Project released their list of top designers and illustrators of 2023.
• [Design] I have been following the Design Justice Network for a bit now and they just released their Digital Care Package on Grief. I love the application of design principles to life stages and larger planning. The Alter Ego Project was another one re confidence and goal setting.
• [Design] A throwback to Tufte-esque thinking: The visual language of dashed lines.
• [Design] For the data viz nerds, an easy way to create graphs online.
• [Design] Who Can Use is a great accessibility tool for choosing color.
• [Design] I’ve been trying to establish a research process within the flight ops side of Qantas for a while. I thought this article did a great job of outlining some of the basics.
• [Design] LOVED this as a design technique: Question Storming by the Business Design School.
• [Design] In Galileo’s Museum in Florence, I came across Vincenzo Coronelli’s globes. The art and craft of making globes (not just rellated to geography but the heavens and deities) was fascinating. I am looking for a (obviously used) copy of his book Epitome Cosmografica, where he describes how his made the globes.
• [Design + Psychology] Humanity Centered has touched on this before, but a research article covering design research as psychotherapy.
• [Psychology] Remember back in the day when we used to offer to drive people to and from the airport? It’s a ritual / courtesy that is lost. It used to be the mark of “closeness”. I enjoyed this article on why Nick Gray gives people free airport rides (which aren’t necessarily the reasons I originally thought).
• [Psychology] As someone with a “forever” reading list on GoodReads, I found it interesting that the development of an “antilibrary” can be helpful to our life progress.
• [Random] In Europe, I had a different kind of spritz everyday. And ode to the slowness of the culture, the Aperol Spritz was everywhere.
• [Random] After the recent storms in Hong Kong, I learned about the black rainstorm signals.
• [Random] As a amateur historophile, I loved looking at some of the manuals from the internet archive. CIA manual for sabotage has been my favorite for a while.
• [Random] Vision of Humanity is fun to have a clickaround re different indexes. Note: methodology varies.
• [Random] A little ways out of Florence is the Museo Piaggio, effectively the Vespa Museum. It’s high on my list when I go back to Italy, but you can take a virtual tour on the website.
• [Tech] Researchers Propose a Fourth Light on Traffic Signals – For Self-Driving Cars. ********???????? for change management techniques!
• [Tech] As Google has started pushing out their passkeys, I had a deeper read through 1Password. I love that articles like this even exist for developing high-level understanding of our personal cybersecurity.
• [Tech] Why I’m a huge fan of old-school cars despite having worked at a car company: modern cars with disappearing controls
• [Tech] It’s important to consider context. Rest of the World always provides it. Drive fast and carry a fake wallet: How Pakistan’s gig workers stay safe
• [Tech] A great example of how AVs coould actually be helpful! Honda made an airport robot to handle all the boring, repetitive tasks.
• [Tech] Ovetta Sampson’s Design Principles for a Pluralist Automated Future is insightful. I found her talk at Config 2023 to be a bit too brush-strokey but I enjoyed this one.
• [Tech] Always hopeful for new and better conscientious projects, but my jadedness hasn’t quite worn off even after 4 years of leaving the Bay Area.
• [Tech] WALTER for Autonomous cars. Very true and can see how one ripple (i.e. Cruise deaths) could cause problems for others. New vehicles are starting to be rated on how they make drivers stay alert. I wish this wasn’t reactionary.
• [Urban Design] As an architecture nerd and a transport geek, this combined my 2 loves. The 3801 locomotive went across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and they created a short film about it!

Finished Reading:

• Nothing because I’ve been lazy. I completed my GoodReads reading goal earlier in the year and thus am finding it difficult to keep going.

Finished Watching:

• Latest season of Upload
• Latest season of Gen V
• Never Too Small YouTube channel - it’s so satisfying and relaxing

New Vocab:

• Niksen: The art of doing nothing.
• Aphantasia: inability to create mental imagery
• Bleen: Of an object, blue when first observed before a specified time or green when first observed after that time. Really interesting re Japanese traffic lights.