June 2018
This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.
You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.
Architectural and Interiors Photographers
I’ve found myself going off the deep end of architectural and interiors photography in the last few weeks. Below are a few links to some work I’ve been admiring.
Zip It…
Don’t ever expect to see how zippers are made at YKK. Founded in 1934, Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha is the world’s zipper kingpin, and it keeps its manufacturing secrets under lock and key. As John Balzar explains in the Los Angeles Times, that’s partly because YKK makes everything—and we mean everything—on its own.
“YKK smelts its own brass, concocts its own polyester, spins and twists its own thread, weaves and color-dyes cloth for its zipper tapes, forges and molds its scooped zipper teeth, extrudes the monofilament for coil zippers, hammers and paints the sliders, clamps the stops, attaches the dangley pulls in a thousand varieties, and even fabricates the cardboard boxes in which zippers are packaged. Naturally, YKK makes the machines that make the components.”
Since YKK controls all aspects of its business, it’s widely viewed by design companies as the most dependable and consistent zipper brand on the planet. (Case in point: At Slate, Seth Stevenson points out that “When the Japanese earthquake hit in 2011 many supply chains were shredded, but YKK kept rolling along.”) For that reason alone, YKK is a major player in the (very niche) high-end zipper market.
I never knew there was so much to know about zippers.
Are you my friend?
Study reveals how many hours it takes to make friends.
In a new report published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Associate Professor of Communication Studies Jeffrey Hall found that it takes roughly 50 hours of time together to move from mere acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to go from that stage to simple “friend” status and more than 200 hours before you can consider someone your close friend.
This means time spent hanging out, joking around, playing video games and the like. Hours spent working together just don’t count as much, Hall’s study found.
Hall’s colleagues developed an ”Interactive Friendship Tool” to guess whether someone is an acquaintance, casual friend, friend or close friend.
Links
- The population of Manhattan, hour by hour
- VR Soccer
- An interactive map of the locations in Homer’s The Odyssey
- The Unseen Collection at the National Museum of Natural History
- The First 40 Years of Personal Computing
Sign Off
Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.
Thanks for reading. Have a great month,
Clay
How kind of you to make your way down here.
A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.