You’ve probably heard there was a pandemic in the 1918-1920 time frame, which wiped out on the order of 50 million people. This interview with Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, provides some insights into what we can learn from that event.
Imagine a country where paid maternity and paternity leave was not just something left to the discretion of employers, but was mandated by the government.
Check out these simple, yet profound rules.
Check out this haunting black and white video of Strand of Oaks performing Bonfire from 2010.
Check out this repository of 16,000 sound effects from the BBC, made freely available for personal, educational, or research use.
Check out this beautiful and oddly compelling collection of intentionally inconvenient objects.
Check out this informative and well designed summary of election simulations from the consistently great Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight.com.
Check out this cool visualization from The Pudding. It’s an interactive map of the most viewed people pages on wikipedia keyed by number of views and arranged by locations that person is connected with.
We could use more of this in 2020…
This site purportedly uses AI to measure the visual aesthetics of your website. I tried it with the one you’re now reading and was told what I knew all along: I’m visually average.
Check out this excellent New York Times profile of Erno Rubik, the man who invented one of the world’s most challenging and beloved puzzles.
Today Bill Gates published this moving tribute to his father. Anyone whose father was their role model can relate to these words.
Check out this amazing interactive visualization of what our planet looked like throughout 750 million years of history.
Global pandemic, authoritarian regimes, wildfires, climate apocalypse - 2020 has been an epically bad year. But according to historians, it’s not the worst year ever.
What proportion of current book sales, would you guess, is represented by ebooks?
Since the onset of the pandemic, not only is my short term sense of time distorted (e.g. I’ve sort of lost hold of the boundary between weekdays and weekends), but I’ve also noticed my sense of long term timing is obscured.
Mark Zuckerberg is now arguably the most powerful person on earth. I don’t remember voting for him. Do you?
Can we talk about the fact that the vast majority of people convicted of domestic and sexual violence are men (96% and 99% respectively, according to a recent study).
Have you heard of unpaired words? They’re words that seem like they should have a partner but don’t. For example…
From the New York Times, a beautifully photographed and moving portrait of one family’s struggle with Covid-19.
Nigel Richards just won the French National Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French.
It’s amazing how much you can learn about real aircraft by studying paper airplanes. John Collins is an accomplished aviator, at least on paper (pun intended). He’s also a great teacher. Watch him break down the art and science of paper airplanes.
This is from a small (50 subjects) but seemingly rigorous study on the mitigating effect of high doses of Vitamin D on Covid-19.
Looking to spruce up your document, slideshow, newsletter, or website? Check out the Noun Project, featuring over two million icons crowdsourced by designers from all over the world. It’s one of those amazing resources that reminds us the internet is not all bad.
A Google Summer intern, Vibert Thio, created this marvelously soothing interactive experience.
Are you using two-factor authentication (2FA) on your most important accounts? You should be, because a simple username/password combination (regardless of how well chosen the password) is simply not strong enough to protect your assets nowadays.
Check out this nice summary of common ways we go wrong interpreting data, including one of my favorites, Simpson’s Paradox.
Here’s another video from the Tiny Desk (Home) Concert series. I particularly love the second song in this set, Everything I Wanted, featuring beautiful harmonies with Billie Eilish and her brother and collaborator, Finneas.
Check out this amazing performance by a French dance troupe, recorded in Berlin in 2016. The piece is entitled Celui Qui Tombe (“The One Who Falls”) and the entire performance takes place on a tilting and rotating stage.
