The Sun had a bit of a meltdown on Tuesday, spewing massive streams of high-energy particles into space. Outbursts like this follow an eleven-year cycle, of which we’re just now nearing the peak.
Today’s one great thing is a new video from one of my favorite Youtube channels, Veritasium.
I didn’t know this was even possible but apparently you can travel across the entire United States by train.
Like an old infomercial claim (“It slices! It dices!"), this article’s title sounds too good to be true, but it is true – in one article, I’m going to explain how the web works and you will walk away a better informed human being. All you have to do is give me a few minutes of your time.
Great conversations flow effortlessly and collaboratively. I enjoyed this short piece about applying the rules of improv comedy to improve your conversations.
Imagine growing up in an English-only household, in a rural village in Japan, fully immersed, for your entire life, in two very different cultures.
Growing up surrounded by poverty and gang violence, this inspiring and mesmerizing short film tells the story of a young man who found his path to happiness on a surfboard.
What would an alien civilization think of us if the only record of our existence was Google Reviews?
Check out this fascinating thread on Mastadon, which is the distributed messaging app many people have migrated to since Twitter started imploding.
Another case where AI does things we can’t explain: apparently male and female retinas are different enough that a computer can guess your gender just by looking at your eyes.
I recently heard something amazing: July is the worst month in which to undergo a medical procedure because the risk of a mistake is higher in July than in any other month of the year. But why?
The best thing I read this week was this gripping and beautifully written story about a building engineer who, in 2013, fell five stories from a church attic, shattered half the bones in his body, and somehow managed to survive.
One of the most compelling reads of my week was this odd tale from the New York Times about a compulsion unlike any you’ve heard of before.
In what should surprise no one, human gender identity is more complex and nuanced than the conceptual frameworks on which most of us were raised. Expressing a preferred pronoun helps, but there’s a problem with that approach.
From longreads.com, I found this beautifully written short story, by William Torrey, about a man self-medicating his way through the pandemic, while attempting to keep his increasingly dysfunctional life intact.
By one second. On December 31, 2016, at 11:59:59pm UTC, one second was added to Universal Time Coordinated (UTC), which is the basis for the worldwide system of timekeeping.
I missed my Mom today. I think it’s the first time I’ve genuinely missed her since she died six months ago. That probably sounds harsh. Let me explain…
This short video from Vox reports on a phenomenon I’d not heard about but, as a central London resident, is apparently happening all around me.
Twitter’s 280 character limit raises an interesting question: how many tweets are possible before nothing new can be said?
This excellent story from Toronto Life profiles a brazen and prolific con man. Shawn Rootenberg serially romanced women, sometimes more than one at a time, and had a unique knack for scamming them out of their life savings. Modern dating apps seem perfectly designed for bringing together predators like this guy with needy victims.
Dear Smartphone,
We’ve had a great relationship over the years. You bring the world right to my fingertips. And you’re always there for me. Unfortunately, I’m a little too into you.
This is a beautiful letter from Richard Feynman to a former student on what constitutes “important problems”. I’ve always felt that important problems are those that advance your own knowledge, and ideally, the knowledge of others. But there’s an even simpler definition: any problem that brings joy in its solving is worth your time.
A man in Maryland got misidentified by twitter users as the perpetrator of a deplorable attack and he published an article about what the experience was like for him. The accusation was retreeted half a million times. This part jumped out at me:
I learned something important today. I had an idea to suggest to someone. But I wasn’t neutral about this idea.
Over twenty years ago, for the first time in history, the greatest living chess player lost to a computer.
The article linked below espouses a concept I’ve always found to be true but never fully appreciated as clearly as it is explained here.
Are you like me? Do you find yourself checking your Facebook news feed regularly and with ever increasing frequency? When you see a good movie, or take a cool photo, or experience something unique, is your first thought “I need to write a status update about that”?
Twenty nine years ago, I started my first and, up till now, only job, at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ (the lobby of which is pictured above). Bell Labs was a magical place in those days, sort of like a cross between a corporate think tank and a Grateful Dead concert.
The cost of memory over the past 30 years…
Airports are generally pretty boring places but, every once in a while, something amazing happens.
