Prompting as Self-Portrait . “We need the blank page and the silence to go deeper into our thoughts and our understanding of ourselves and of the world.”

Nearly 4M Records of Enslaved People in 20 Former British Colonies Now Searchable Online . “ The Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers contains about 300,000 pages recording enslaved people across former British colonial dependencies…”

Why I Did Not Leave Nazi Germany in Time . “Many of us feared the shock of being uprooted and tried to avoid it if at all possible. But to understand this reaction…I say that nobody could possibly have foreseen the ‘final solution.’”

The Worst Way To Get To Space . I’d never heard the story of the manhole cover possibly propelled into orbit by a nuclear blast — it was estimated to be moving at ~42 miles/sec. “Some speculated it became the first manmade object to enter Earth’s orbit.”

I 100% love this video of every time someone says a percentage on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the word “percent” has lost all of its meaning due to semantic satiation . (thx, caroline) Tags: language · Star Trek · TV · video

My friend Matt was recently here for a week in Tokyo and wrote up his experience and observations . “I don’t think humans were ever meant to experience that many eyes and faces at once, so it was a unique experience.”

Crossword Clues Where It’s Clear the Puzzle’s Creator Got Themselves into a Jam Letter-wise . Incl. “Could be found on the second to last line of an optometrist’s vision chart” and “The sound a cow might make when spanked”.

Unseen Places: Rediscovering the Art of Observation by Anna Kodé. Looking forward to this one…Kodé is one of my favorite journalists covering urban culture. “Observation…is not a passive act, but a powerful and radical way of connecting…”

This video from Practical Engineering was very illuminating to me, a naive person who thought there were only three types of electrical outlets used in the US — the two-prong, the three-prong, and the 240V — and not the real number, which is more than 35 types of electrical outlets! Oh and “two-prong”? Not that plug’s actual name! (via unsung ) Tags: electricity · engineering · video

Japanese book rave . A club in Tokyo spread carpets on the dance floor, played ambient music, and invited daytime clubgoers to chill out and read. Would 100% frequent a bookstore/cafe that did this regularly.

Weball allows you to roll up websites into a Katamari ball. You can even roll up KDO . This is too much fun. See also Destroy Any Website .

It might be that this text-only quiz game from 1993 is the most challenging F1 video game of all time . Here are a couple of the 23 questions from Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz: 3. Which team was the best in the 80’s? Statistically, it’s McLaren, but that’s not a correct answer. The correct answer is “Mc Laren.” 4. Who is the youngest champion of ever? The correct answer in 1993 was Emerson Fitt

I just went down a rabbit hole of incense seals . So cool.

Bill McKibben: I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This. The human nervous system wasn’t designed for the polycrisis. “Among all the other dangers these developments represent, they’re simply wearing us out.”

In 1996, the Blondin family drove all around the US, blogging about it all before “blog” was even a word . “We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.”

Agustín Ferrando Trenchi became a little obsessed with the moon as a kid. As an adult, he’s taken tons of photos and hundreds of hours of footage of the moon. After seeing an airplane fly close to the moon while he filmed, Trenchi began a quest to capture a plane flying across the face of the moon . Over the course of 10 years, he took photos and videos of birds and statues silhouetted by the moon

Abolish Frat Culture . “This is going to be uncomfortable for anyone with a kid in a fraternity to hear: If your son finds himself in a group that would send a ‘free pussy’ text, it’s too late. The group is the disease, the text is the symptom.”

Any Human Ever randomly picks an average person from some point in human history and tells you about what their life was like. Mine was a woman born in 1547: “Of all the sounds of her life, the loudest were thunder and the church bells.”

Mamdani’s “Richard Scarry Socialism” Can Make City Life Simple Again . “It is an astonishing indictment of our times that the cities of our picture books can seem like a radical utopia.”

Late in his life, the prominent English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was subject to an attempt in the early 1960s by Oswald Mosley to provoke him into a debate about the merits of fascism. Before WWII, Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists. BUF had a corps of paramilitary personnel, nicknamed “Blackshirts” for their uniform color, at its disposal and Mosley “publicly e