Sparrow & Dove

(exceptionally mild spoilers for Jurassic World Dominion, a movie I myself have not seen, follow)

In the latest Jurassic World movie, genetically-modified dinosaurs – having escaped the island – are sold at a black market bazaar to depraved billionaires who want to gamble on them, eat them, or use them as weapons. The bazaar is coded as being Middle Eastern – it’s even graded with the “yellow filter” that Hollywood often uses to make non-Western countries seem dirtier and more threatening – but, technically, it’s not. It is, according to the script, in Malta.

Malta is an interesting country – a small Mediterranean island between Libya and Italy, speaking a language that is closely related to Arabic but with a vocabulary borrowing heavily from Italian/Sicilian (Maltese is the only semitic language written in the Latin alphabet) – but what Hollywood cares about here is that it has some of the aesthetic trappings of the Arab world while being European and majority white, meaning that if anyone says “Wasn’t that bazaar scene a bit racist?” they can say “Uh, nuh uh, this just a white European bazaar”.

But this got me thinking: if you wanted to smuggle dinosaurs into Europe (meaning in this case, primarily the EU, plus the UK and Switzerland), how would you do it? What would be the best place to set up your military-grade dino dealing fair? Here is every microstate, dependency and special territory (outlying bits of EU countries where customs and some other bits of EU law don’t apply), ranked by how good a place it would be for a Jurassic black market.

When you get an ultrasound during pregnancy, one of the things the doctor or tech will check is your baby’s heartbeat using something called “Doppler ultrasound”. Depending on the type of check-up you get, the ultrasound image they give you might include the heartbeat printed on it as a “waveform” – an image that shows the beats over time.

But, although they might play the heartbeat so you can hear it, they probably won’t give you it in an MP3 that you can listen to easily.

However, there is a way to convert the waveform into a sound on your own computer that you can save for yourself or send to friends and family. This will take a little bit of effort, but I’ll walk through it step-by-step. This can be done entirely with free software.