The Dann Chronicles: March 🦁

Alien earworms, exposing a scammer girlfriend, revisting unexplained drones, Firefox's big problem, and a fun way to visualize your entire life

Mar 24, 2025

March 2025

Hey all,

There was a summer, about fifteen years ago, where I rode my bike into work every day. I was living in Brooklyn's Prospect Lefferts Gardens at the time, and my work was in Manhattan, on Broadway just north of Houston. The ride took 40 or 50 minutes and carried me over the Manhattan Bridge.

All on a single-speed bike.

I've been feeling the urge to bike into work again (especially now that I live closer to my office). But the thought of tackling that bridge every day on the same single-speed doesn't seem quite as appealing as it once did.

This month, I bought a new bike as a birthday gift to myself. I rode it into the office for the first time last week, and it was glorious. Biking over the bridge is still work, but now I don't feel utterly destroyed at the end of the day.

After enduring these freezing temperatures all winter, I'm looking forward to a summer full of fun bike rides, both for commuting and for pleasure.

Bring it on!

-Dann

🐛 Untapped earworm phenomenon

I know what it's like to have a song stuck in my head. If a song is catchy enough, I might have it playing in my head for weeks after only hearing it once. The only way to release the earworm from my brain sometimes is to listen to it over and over again until it finally fades.

What seems completely alien to me, however, is having a song stuck in my head that I've never heard before. Where did it come from? How did it get in there? What does it mean?

When it comes to making new music, there are songwriters and there are hitmakers. Songwriters form bands, craft the melodies and lyrics, and may even have a successful music career. Hitmakers, on the other hand, often work in the background, helping artists place song after song at the top of the charts.

One such hitmaker savant is Benny Blanco, who has amassed a total of 29 number-one hits in his career, including "Diamonds," "Moves Like Jagger," and "Perfect" by Ed Sheeran.

This interview with Blanco is more like an 80-minute monologue interspersed with never-before-heard early demos of super famous songs. The stories he tells are riveting, even for someone like me with only cursory knowledge of pop charts.

More than anything, I walked away from this video with a sense that producers like him are tapping into something universal, intangible, and out-of-reach to most people. It almost feels like this level of musical intuition is like a form of synesthesia.

I'm yet again left wondering what it's like to live inside someone else's brain.

🐷 Lipstick on a butchered pig

It starts with a seeming mistake—an innocuous text from an unknown number meant for someone else. But if you reply, you may be sucked into a scam that the FBI estimates has tricked over 4,300 victims in the past year.

I'm talking, of course, about romance scams, otherwise known as "pig butchering." Scammers view their victims as "pigs" to be "fattened up" before slaughter, slowly gaining trust over time while encouraging larger and larger transfers of funds until the final throat slit—when the money is all gone.

Ben Tasker decided to play along with one such scammer to break down exactly how these scams work:

At its heart, romance fraud relies on social engineering and I was curious to see what techniques were actually being used. I'm no particular stranger to scam baiting, so I decided to masquerade as a mark and see how the campaign was run (as well as what, if anything, I could engineer out of the fraudster).

What follows is an in-depth analysis of the scammer's tactics, which went so far as to include phone calls to build trust. It's no wonder people fall for these schemes.

As uncovered in 2023 by P.J. Vogt, many of these operations are actually run by organized crime and staffed by trafficked slaves, so even just "playing along" can put these vulnerable humans (victims themselves) in further danger.

If you get a text message from an unknown number, the only correct response is to block and report. Be safe out there...

👀 Eyes to the skies

Last November/December, the Internet was all aflutter with theories about drone sightings in New Jersey. The mania has since died down, but there are still significant gaps in information regarding the weeks-long incident.

The news program 60 Minutes recently released a segment about the drone incursions over restricted Air Force bases, and it certainly doesn't make me feel any better about the situation.

General Gregory Guillot, the current NORAD and NORTHCOM commander:

I think the threat got ahead of our ability to detect and track the threat...the threat in the US probably caught us by surprise a little bit.

When asked a follow up question, about whether we could detect a swarm of drones flying over into the airspace at Langley Air Force Base, he replied:

At low altitude, probably not with your standard FAA or surveillance radars

Military officials seem to believe that these drones 1) may be conducting surveillance and 2) we don't have the technology to sufficiently detect and monitor these incursions.

Plus, if you believe the reporting, we still can't identify the operators of these drones.

The flurry of sightings and news coverage late last year is now mostly explained away as either confirmation bias or mass hysteria. But that doesn't address any of the serious security concerns that were brought to light during this incident.

🧯 Putting out Fires

If you're still using Firefox as your browser, it might be time to consider a change.

Looking at an archived version of the Firefox FAQ from Janurary 2025, you'll see reassuring language regarding privacy:

Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.

This text disappeared last month, as part of a larger privacy policy update that, apparently, now includes some version of selling user data. So much for promises.

Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, claims the change in language is due to the fact that "some jurisdictions define 'sell' more broadly than most people would usually understand that word." But it still feels questionable to me.

What should you use instead? I've been a happy Orion user for over a year now. I also hear great things about Arc, but if you make that switch, be prepared to update your browsing habits entirely.

📏 Seven rotations

Back in 2014, Tim Urban published a fun blog post called Your Life in Weeks. It's a cool visualization of a human life broken down into tiny squares, each representing a week in time. It's an interesting way to view a life that at some moments can feel incredibly long and other times way too short.

Now, you can build your own Life in Weeks, customized to include all the meaningful life events you want to include.

It's a strangely compelling way to remind yourself of your mortality.

End note

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I send these newsletters once per month, and I'm happy you're along for the ride. I'm trying to make it one of the best things that arrives in your inbox each month, so thoughts and feedback are always appreciated. You can just reply to this email.

Also, if you find anything interesting, send it my way.

The Dann Chronicles