Stranger Things 4

Hello there!

This week, I watched Volume 1 of Stranger Things 4, and it was some of the best content I have ever seen. I can’t wait for the last two episodes of this season to land on July 1.

If you would like to read the previous issues, you can do so at https://pranshugaba.com/newsletter.

Recent updates

Here’s what’s new with me:

• I shared a simple but tasty recipe of a tomato cheese sandwich.
• It has started raining in Mumbai! The first showers of rain fell on Thursday. It reminds me of a photopoem I wrote last year titled torrent. Here’s the photo

  

  and here’s the poem →
• I had gone to see the Gateway of India two weeks ago, and it looked pretty in purple.

  

  It looked like a gateway (get it? 😏) to the Upside Down.

Curated content

Reading

I read a New Yorker article titled The Strange and Secret Ways That Animals Perceive the World by Elizabeth Kolbert. In this article, Kolbert talks about how there’s so much that we don’t know about animals: we don’t know how they sense things, how they communicate with each other and with us. For instance, a researcher named Roger Payne found out about whale songs. He discovered that whales tend to repeat a sequence of sounds–that were 7 to 30 minutes long–over and over again. He thought of these as songs sung by the whales. He recorded this and released it as an album called “Songs of the Humpback Whale”. NASA even included these on Voyagers 1 and 2, which are now floating in space. Any alien that encounters these space probes will get a glimpse of what whales sound like. You can listen to these whale songs on YouTube.

Related to this is another New Yorker article that I had read a while back: Why Animals Don’t Get Lost by Kathryn Schulz. How do mammals, birds, and even insects such as butterflies navigate long distances and still reach at their intended destinations without the aid of a GPS? We are starting to understand this better with recent advancements in data collection, but there is still a long way to go. Both of these articles are humbling to read.

Speaking of whales, here’s a news segment where Julianna McKannis asks a panel of experts: Should we be teaching our children more about whales?

YouTube videos

• Shane of Stuff Made Here posted the culmination of his Can’t Miss basketball series. He uses maths, camera tracking and on-the-fly physics calculations to make sure that no matter how you throw the basketball, it goes in the hoop. Follow his journey as he builds and improves his design and tackles more and more difficult challenges.

  • Part 1: My curved basketball hoop always goes in.
  • Part 2: Automatic hoop, unless you’re my wife.
  • Part 3: Moving hoop won’t let you miss.
  • Part 4: I made a 100MPH flying hoop.

• Watch Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things play Box of Lies with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show.

• Watch Finn, Gaten, Priah, and Joseph from Stranger Things play a DnD adventure.

Songs from Stranger Things

Here are some songs that were featured in Stranger Things 4.

• Pass the Dutchie by Musical Youth
• Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. This song is topping the charts once again thanks to Stranger Things.
• Never Ending Story by Limahl: Here’s the original version from 1984, and here’s a rendition sung by Gaten and Gabriella from the show.

That’s all for this week! See you in the next one.