Happy Friyay Sebastian,

The Edinburgh Fringe opens today, so somewhere in Scotland a man is about to perform an hour of improvised opera to four people and a dog.

In this edition: the pie chart that took a death rate from 42% to 2%, a duck hiding in a Barcelona staircase, and what Jay Kay was reaching for all along.

It's International Beer Day too, so pour something cold and enjoy today's Weekend Reads.

As always, big love,

Chris and the 42courses team x

P.S. We're celebrating 10 years of 42courses, so if you're thinking of getting a course or a membership, use the code 4224 at checkout for a lovely surprise.

What Jay Kay Was Reaching For All Along · Thirty years after Virtual Insanity, Jamiroquai and Beefeater 0.0 put Jay Kay back on Jonathan Glazer's sliding room set to settle it. No CG, no AI: nine physical rooms, a floor that moves instead of the walls, choreographed by Jay Kay himself.

The Pie Chart That Saved Thousands Of Lives · Florence Nightingale had the data on why soldiers were dying in Crimea, and knew no MP would read it. So she invented a version of the pie chart. Parliament looked, and the death rate fell from 42% to 2%. Dave Trott on why impact comes first.

How An F1 Team Turned DHL Yellow · DHL was red and white until 2002, when a contract clause left Eddie Jordan unable to paint his cars anything but yellow. So he talked DHL into repainting the whole company instead: vans, planes, uniforms. He is said to still collect royalties.

The Duck Hiding In A Barcelona Staircase · Stand at the bottom of the stairwell in the El Avenida Palace hotel, look up, and a duck appears. Move three steps and it is gone.

The Wooden Machines That Cannot Sit Still · Jakob Grosse-Ophoff builds wooden machines that hug, kiss, drill and endlessly fidget. Human gestures made from cranks and motors, both very funny and quietly unsettling.

Happy Accidents That Were Never Really Luck · Fresh from our blog. Three inventions the world files under fluke, and how much of the work was done by the person who noticed.

The Boys Who Cried AI · An archive of confident forecasts about things AI would never manage, kept for posterity. Fuel for anyone who enjoys watching certainty age badly.

Five B2B Marketing Tips From The Buyability Study · Also new on our blog. Five practical things to do differently if you sell to businesses, drawn from the Buyability research.

1420 · Work begins on Brunelleschi's dome in Florence. The cathedral had been designed with a hole in the roof that nobody yet knew how to cover 🧱

1888 · Theophilus Van Kannel patents the revolving door in Philadelphia, keeping the warm air in, the street noise out, and everybody moving 🚪

1909 · Alice Huyler Ramsey rolls into San Francisco after 59 days and 3,800 miles, the first woman to drive across America. Eleven punctures, and three passengers who could not drive 🚗

1944 · IBM formally hands Harvard the Mark I, fifteen metres of clicking relays and the first American machine able to run a long calculation on its own 🖥️

1947 · The balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki reaches a reef at Raroia, ending Thor Heyerdahl's 101 day, 4,300 mile drift across the Pacific 🛶

1959 · Explorer 6 launches, and a week later sends home the first photograph of Earth ever taken from orbit, a fuzzy grey smudge of the Pacific 🛰️

1974 · Philippe Petit steps onto a wire strung between the Twin Towers and crosses eight times, stopping to lie down on it. The charges were dropped on condition he performed for free in Central Park 🎪

1976 · Viking 2 slides into orbit around Mars and starts scouting the ground for somewhere soft to land 🔴

1982 · Dexys Midnight Runners take Come On Eileen to number one in the UK, where it sits for a month and becomes the year's best selling single 🎻