Before we start — i always feel a little awkward about publishing two link roundups in a row, and three especially is pushing it, so i wanted to assure everyone that i do have some more stuff in the pipe! In the coming months, you can expect (okay, hope) to see, in no particular order:

• A deep dive into why the Tyne and Wear Metro is the funny shape it is
• Several short multimedia articles on the Tupaians, Looking at the Big Sky’s closest thing to confirmed first contact with aliens
• Putting the final touches on a nice big wall map of Europe, to be given pride of place in the Cartothèque
• A dedicated page for the main characters of the furry smut i said i was writing ages ago, because i like them too much to consign them to the NSFW shadow-realm forever

And much¹ more! Anyway… back to the show.

Part One: In which not everything is necessarily computer

• Why paracetamol is safer than ibuprofen, and why nobody seems to know
• The Materials Library, a database of… well… materials used to make things. A delightful scroll.
• A “second coastline” for the Netherlands (suck it up and use Google Translate)
• A delightful find while working on the aforementioned map of Europe: The Blue Green Atlas, a collection of free relief maps of nearly every country. Lovely stuff.
• The house where Queen Elizabeth II was born (no longer exists)
• Why are movie taglines shit now?
• Modern Hindu Temples have bucked the trend towards simplification
• Erramatti Mangamma, the world’s oldest mother, gave birth to twins at age seventy-four(!) via IVF
• Quirks of human anatomy
• Desert Warrior, or, how Saudi Arabia’s first blockbuster turned into an unreleasable disaster
• “The future will belong to the mestiza”
• The Almaz programme: “In addition to reconnaissance equipment, Almaz was equipped with a unique Rikhter R-23 23mm rapid-fire cannon mounted on the forward belly of the station.”
• How disposable nappies conquered the world
• Quanta on ultrafinitism, the mathematical philosophy that infinity is fake and there are only so many numbers, actually
• We still don’t have a more precise value for G
• “Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places”
• Adam Cadre’s name tool — search a name and see how popular it’s been in the U.S. over time. Designed for authors who want generationally plausible names for their characters.

Part Two: In which everything’s computer!

• Humanoid robots race past humans at the Beijing half-marathon. I love living in The Near Future.
• Mozilla has a more optimistic take on Claude Mythos’ impending security-pocalypse: “The zero-days are numbered.” Let’s hope they’re right!
• aiaiai.art, a collection of ideas from a Dutch creative collective on how to actually wring art out of the machine
• The Freewrite Smart Typewriter, for people who want to write without the distraction of the internet. “Xanthe,” you might say, “this isn’t computer”. But is the deliberately introduced absence of computer not, in itself, very computer?
• Igaratype, a typographical… thingy based on the flow of the Amazon
• Flipdiscs
• Introducing Talkie, a language model trained exclusively on text from 1930 and before. I find it quite amusing to give it news stories from today and ask what it thinks about them, but that might just be because i’m boring.
• “The goblins were funny at first, but the increasing number of employee reports became concerning.”