Yet Again, Here's How To Meet The Idiot Writing This Newsletter

All that can go wrong is absolutely everything, but let's not dwell on that.

Hi. It’s Mike from Everything Is Amazing - and I’m wondering if we can talk (in a fun way, I mean)?

But first, two things.

A while back I posted this startling image, which shows how no recorded tropical storm in human history has ever crossed the equator:

“In theory one could, if it grew big enough to overcome….well, whatever is stopping such storms from crossing the equatorial boundary. Atmospheric scientists seem to still be chewing this over, but the Coriolis Effect might be a major factor? If you know more on this than I do, please correct me!

(They also don’t seem to form within 5 degrees of latitude of it. So, if you suffer from Lilapsophobia - that’s a fear of hurricanes and tornadoes - then moving to somewhere smack on the equator and never straying 5 degrees of latitude in either direction might be worth a try? Here are some countries you can pick from.)”

(Or you could just build yourself a home on Null Island.)

Just a few weeks ago, our planet served up a perfect demonstration of this chart on a colossal scale:

To the north was Super Typhoon Sinlaku, whirling counter-clockwise - while just south of the equator Cyclone Maila perfectly mirrored its movement, whirling in the opposite direction. [Hat-tip CosmicRami.]

It’s an elegant demonstration of atmospheric physics - and alas, in Maila’s case, a deadly one. (Remarkably, despite Sinlaku causing widespread damage in the Northern Mariana islands, no deaths have yet been reported. 🤞)

As our planet continues to warm and extreme weather events increase in frequency, understanding & modelling them accurately will become even more vital - making funding cuts like this look shockingly boneheaded. Here’s hoping future administrations will be quick to turn things around.

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Secondly, if you were wondering what Scotland’s contribution to the recent Artemis II mission was, this photo should clear things up:

(Explanation and credit.)

Yes, this is very foolish - and I, an allegedly credible science communicator, should be ashamed of myself for posting it.

I’m not, though. Not in the least. But I certainly recognize I should be, which is maybe worse.

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Anyway, and to business!

Here’s a thing that I’ve genuinely lost a bit of sleep over:

I genuinely hate how many of you I’m never going to meet.

If you just rolled your eyes, I get it. That statement sounds like fatuous virtue signalling, even to a social klutz like me.

But - isn’t the power of having a platform like this mostly in its ability to spark actual conversations afroth with constructive ideas, instead of me sitting alone in a room going waah waah waah into my keyboard all day as if that’s sensible behavior for a human being?

There are now around 32,000 of you signed up to Everything Is Amazing - and if my Open rate can be believed, around half of you are reading it regularly.

This is a ridiculous number, and it causes me some discomfort. Not just in a self-deprecating way which I’m Britishly disposed towards (“why are YOU reading ME and not the other way round?”) but also in the horrible knowledge of what I’m missing out on.

I used to be a travel writer - a person whose job it was to strike up conversation with random strangers, to discover that most (not all, but most) people are grand company, and that no stranger is “random” because everyone is doing something uniquely interesting with their lives, even if they’re not fully aware of it.

(Not aware until, perhaps, they chat to some “random” stranger who writes about travel for a living. I really loved this about conducting travel interviews - the way someone lights up when they hear their own story coming out of them in their own words, and learn it’s well worth paying attention to.)

I would dearly love to tour the world, buying 16,000-ish coffees and sitting down 16,000-ish times with all of you kind enough to read EiA, to learn who you are and what you’re curious about. That’s a lovely thought.

But alas, that’s not happening right now - unless you visit my local beach and stroll past me enough times, of course:

The Science Of Oh Hello There

Instead, here are two things I can do:

1. I can point you towards the Great Spring Chit Chat Challenge currently being run by Rubi McGrory and Rob Walker:

“The Great Spring 2026 Chit Chat Challenge. Rob Walker of The Art of Noticing and I triple-dog-dare you talk to a stranger every day for ten days. Easy peasy. Bonus points for sharing your stories.

Starting Thursday April 23 for ten days, you will initiate a conversation with a person unknown to you. About anything. Or nothing. The particulars are totally up to you: fellow dog walkers, plane seatmate, the mail lady; the weather, the footie, the meaning of life.”

2. I can bring back my Curiosity Calls, one of the most fun things I’ve been able to do with this newsletter - which I’m restarting in May, beginning just with EiA’s paid subscribers:

   “The general idea is: you may have a specific thing you want to ask me, or you may want to correct me on something I’ve written about - or you may just have a powerful urge to tell me to stop all this nonsense and get a real job. All are valid! But equally valid is turning up and not knowing what we’re going to talk about in advance - because, isn’t that what normally happens between two strangers, the kind you get chatting to on public transport, or at the pub? Isn’t that the default interaction between human beings in the ‘real world’?

   
   …I did the first back in the British lockdown of mid-2020, posting a Calendly link on all my social channels in an attempt to Zoom-chat with total strangers.

   
   Around a hundred calls later (most of them absolutely delightful), I had a full notebook of new ideas to read and write about, and a wonderful re-appreciation of the fact that no, random strangers generally aren’t a bunch of terrifying lunatics, and Hanlon’s Razor usually applies.

   
   (My friend Jodi Ettenberg, who has a flair for engineering conversations in the unlikeliest places, did something similar a few years previous to this, so I probably stole the idea from her - and also from comedian Dave Gorman, who famously went in search of other versions of himself.)”

This time round, we have a question to hang on. It’s the same as the one powering my very first discussion thread - “What do you wish more people were curious about?” - but you can completely ignore it if you’d rather chat about something else or pick my brains about something.

(However, if you do answer the question on our call, I might include your answer in a round-up newsletter sometime soon, so I can help infect everyone else with your own unique nerdy fascinations.)

If you’re a paid subscriber to Everything Is Amazing, you’ll be getting the link to sign up for a call in another newsletter by the end of today.

Cheers!

Mike