Life and Land in Anglo-Saxon England
Curious Loop
The Pen, Mightier
We care about what our words look like because we somewhere believe that this says something about who we are beyond font or scrawl.
The Czech illegals: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe
GRU Unit 29155, Russia’s assassination and sabotage squad, blew up ammunition warehouses in Czechia. It had help from Elena and Nikolai Šapošnikov, a family of deep-cover spies working as arms dealers.
Issue 55: Personal Computing Paves the Way
How the past of Personal Computing gives us a hint into the future of Personal Library Science
When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
When does our taste in music stagnate?
How to Juggle Priorities: Decide Which Balls Are Glass and Which Are Plastic
You can't keep all your balls in the air all the time but that's ok! Learn how to decide which to drop and which to keep in the air.
The Beautiful Dissociation of the Japanese Language
An extra dimension that you can play with.
How a Photographer Captured His Spectacular Dream Eclipse Photo
An incredible eclipse photo years in the making.
The Overlooked Importance of Boredom in Our Lives
My earliest childhood friend, Steven. All photos by John P. Weiss
No one buys books
Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.
The failure of the Domino’s 30-minute delivery guarantee
A spate of deaths and lawsuits ended the famous pizza marketing ploy. Is delivery any safer now?
NASA Veteran’s Propellantless Propulsion Drive That Physics Says Shouldn’t Work Just Produced Enough Thrust to Overcome Earth’s Gravity - The Debrief
A veteran NASA scientist says his company has tested a propellantless propulsion drive technology that produced one Earth gravity of thrust.
Daniel Vassallo on Twitter / X
The deadline for YC S24 is tomorrow. Here's why you SHOULD NOT APPLY TO YC:YC seems like a reasonable proposition. They give you some money to help start your business, and they promise you access to a community of people that can help you along the way. In exchange, they don't… pic.twitter.com/8FJOc8SxWq— Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) April 20, 2024
Measuring personal growth
My founder friends constantly think about growth. They think about how to measure their business growth and how to get to the next order of magnitude scale. If they’re making $1M ARR today, they think about how to get to $10M ARR. If they have 1,000 users today, they think about how to get to 10,000 users.
Cyc: history's forgotten AI project
Since 1984 a secretive AI project has been building a massive knowledge base to enable human-like reasoning. Will it work?
Does light itself truly have an infinite lifetime?
In all the Universe, only a few particles are eternally stable. The photon, the quantum of light, has an infinite lifetime. Or does it?
Why Feathers Are One of Evolution’s Cleverest Inventions
Fossil and living birds reveal the dazzling biology of feathers
Flying Aircraft Carriers
From the flying British aircraft carriers in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to the helicarriers of S.H.I.E.L.D.
The Forgotten War on Beepers
30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers Through the 1980s pagers became increasingly popular with teens, and also:
Cow Magnets | Stanford Magnets
Cow magnets are very popular with farmers, ranchers, and veterinarians since they are a well-known method of preventing hardware disease in cattle.
Rebirth of a Legend: Reviving an 800-Year-Old Tea Farm
The city of Uji in Kyoto has been famed for tea for more than eight centuries, but much has been lost in the depths of that time. Now a group of locals are working to revive Asahien, one of Uji’s seven famed tea farms of the past, with plants discovered on the grounds of a city temple.
The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication
The how, where, why, and when we communicate. Long form asynchronous? Real-time chat? In-person? Video? Verbal? Written? Via email? In Basecamp? How do we keep everyone in the loop without everyone getting tangled in everyone else’s business? It’s all in here.
A Lego Model of Financial Capitalism
Unboxing the dark arts of finance
Philly Typewriter
Welcome to the home of the world's largest typewriter company.
The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics
or How a Rebellious Youth Briefly Conquered the World
Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
Tips for Linking Shell Companies to their Secret Owners
At a recent panel at the 2024 NICAR conference, Karrie Kehoe, deputy head of data and research at ICIJ, offered a series of tips for investigating the true owners of shell companies.
Making Old Orchards New Again - Modern Farmer
Wherever you find an old homestead—a house and barn with a little bit of land that has stood from sometime in the 1800s or early 1900s—you’ll find an
Saffron: The Story of the World’s Most Expensive Spice - JSTOR Daily
Appearing in the written record as early as 2300 BCE, saffron can be traced in foodways around the globe, despite the finicky nature of its harvest.
The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon
As miners ravage Yanomami lands, combat-trained environmentalists work to root them out.