Hey ,

Keeping the newsletter up with the same format so far, though if you have comments or anything you like, don't like, or think could change, please keep in touch! Always happy to hear ideas and constructive criticism.I hope you had a great week and weekend! I don't know about you but this week felt like it flew by.I do my best to have a walk around during the day before the current 6pm curfew, and the Seine river is flooded and silly high at the moment. Here, this one from today should give you an idea. Obviously the usual water level is much closer to those river boats:If you would like sights and updated from Paris in the newsletter more often, just tell me!Before we move on to the links, last week on Teaching Tangents with my friend James D'Souza the question I was asked (and we discussed) was: How to remember things we learn at school (like lessons) on a long-term?We always need more questions, though the kicker is please send them to James, because I'm not meant to know the questions in advance of our recording! You can send any and all your questions to: [email protected] That's about it, enjoy Super Bowl Sunday for those watching!Cheers,Willem

 Weekly Combo Typically a mix of playful and strategy flavours. 

90s French SEGA Megadrive ad & The whole GameStop story (Youtube, 40 sec watch; Medium.com 6 min read)

Of course the 90s SEGA ads are mostly clickbait, but they're hugely iconic French 90s ads I grew up with and thinking of Gamestop I thought of the ads. The campaign features a Mad Max like character playing a SEGA Megadrive in a supposedly post-apocalyptic setting (for some reason, possibly because 16 bits graphics with a double processor was the future of video game consoles in 1991, and mohawks are punk and edgy - also possibly very unlike Nintendo. For more on that, check out the High Score Netflix documentary). The Medium article was written by James Surowiecki, who among other things wrote The Wisdom of Crowds. I also listened to his interview in the On the Media podcast episode, and the NY Times The Daily podcast also dedicated an episode to the story this week. It's all hugely worth checking out. In short if you haven't heard the news, a subreddit named Wall Street Bets seemingly organised a huge crowd operation to buy Gamestop stock, which had been steadily valued under $20 per share for a long while.The value had been rising for a few weeks, and rocketed to levels never seen before at a max of $369 per share, and big investment funds who had been shorting the GameStop stock lost a lot of money, and by now given it's fallen back to about $60 per share, it's likely that a bunch of small investors also lost money (and of course a bunch also made a lot of money). This story is not over yet, it's going to be interesting to see what else happens. There are big questions about if anything should be done or legislated, and if so, then what.

This fact is just the start, then it goes quite seriously in the huge challenge of climate change; the beautiful song of whales; tiny creatures and their ecosystems; the best way to have large populations of people empathise with huge and barely visible problems; machine learning and a language coding artificial intelligence; the possibility of translating animal language; and more. Totally worth it - and all other Invisibilia episodes if you don't happen to know about the show.