Assorted links #40

1397. The best facts I heard this year: Zhengdong Wang's list of the best facts he heard in 2025. See also his post from 2024. And there is also Nancy Friedman's 52 things I learned in 2025. There are not a lot of facts in each post I find interesting, but the signal-to-noise ratio is still substantially better compared to most posts out there.

1398. C'était Paris en 1970: Pictures of Paris in 1970 segmented into 1,755 spatial squares making it easy to find pictures from your favourite arrondissements. I would like to see similar pages for most other European cities, but Paris is one of the interesting cities due to how things have generally improved (Paris is currently one of the most underrated cities to explore by bike). A great companion for the next time you are in Paris. And for some good contemporary footage from Paris, check out this skate video.

1399. Radical Feminist Reading List: If you are into feminist theory, this looks like a great resource. I have read Simone de Beauvoir years ago, but there is so much interesting literature to dig into. I am also not sure where it stops being non-radical feminist readings and starts being radical feminist readings, but I am confident that most people, on average, should read more radical (feminist) literature.

1400. Video Game Websites in the early 00s: It is impossible to look at these websites without feeling a bit nostalgic. For Counter-Strike you can see the webpage from any year from 2000 to 2025 (I remember a lot of these webpages from the early aughts, and I miss them). I would have liked for these websites to not only be screenshots but the actual code and assets of the respective websites (but maybe that is, alas, too much to ask for in 2026).

1401. Lines, Ranked: Another creative list, this one with different types of lines. "Bass. How else are we supposed to end an episode of Seinfeld? Sky. How else are we supposed to start an episode of Frasier?" Nice.

1402. The archaeological finds of the North / Southline: A collection of the various things, old and relatively new, found during the construction of the metro line in Amsterdam. You might have a good idea about what these things might be, but I am confident that you will still be surprised by some of these items.

1403. Refusing to use Twitter: I have a lot of former academic colleagues who are still using X, and while I think they should stop using it, I understand it is not necessarily easy (part of your academic profile is your outreach, and that is not necessarily easy to transfer directly to, say, Bluesky). I left Twitter back in 2023, i.e., before it turned into X, and I have not looked back with regret even once. While I do not need any convincing, it is good to get a reminder now and again about what a toxic place Twitter is (not only in terms of racism and sexism, but also general misinformation and fascist tendencies), and why it is good to simply avoid X, Twitter, Elon Musk, and the like.

1404. A lot of population numbers are fake: How many people are alive right now? I mean, not necessarily at the time of you reading this sentence, but what is the global population number. This might at first seem like a statistic we should have a pretty good estimate on, but the more you think and read about it, the more clear it is that there is no precise answer to this question. Other recent good posts on David Oks' Substack include Why I’m not worried about AI job loss and Seeing like a spreadsheet.

1405. Just the Browser: A resource that helps you get the required features of a browser and nothing more. Here is the description from the page: "Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers." I like that idea. There is no need for AI features and sponsored content in a browser by default. Just give me the browser, thanks, and let me add features as I deem them relevant or necessary.

1406. New York City Restaurant Archive (2002-2008): Pictures of more than a thousand restaurants and bars in New York City from 2002 to 2008. The interesting thing is that twenty years is both a short time and a long time. A lot of these photos look, when seen as individual photos, like they could have been taken today, and as such, little has changed. However, when you look at these photos put together, you realise that they represent a time that will never come back. Not necessarily a better time, just a different time.

1407. The Everdeck: A Universal Card System: A card game system that is designed to be able to play many different traditional and modern games. Not only does each card have a rank and suit, but also point values and unique names and values.

1408. Ian's Shoelace Site: Everything you need to know about shoelaces (including various shoelace knots).

1409. How to be Cultured: T's Guides to Art, Film, Literature, Food and More: A good collection of articles (covering everything from paintings movements and contemporary American art to different types of cheese and white button-up shirts). I have only watched one of the five movies on the list of overlooked films, so I would describe the article as accurate (relative to most other articles covering "overlooked" films). There are also some great recommendations on the lists with essential avant-garde films and books you should read at every age. The lists might seem esoteric at first but it is clear that they primarily reflect different personal preferences due to how they are being constructed (it is a bit of a joke, for example, that there is no mention of people like Nas or Kendrick Lamar in an article covering five decades of hip-hop in five albums).

1410. Optical Toys: I have always liked optical illusions and this is a great resource with examples on how the respective illusions are working. What makes this better than a lot of other resources with optical illusions is that it relies on interactive elements to show the illusions.

1411. Green’s Dictionary of Slang: A resource with the largest historical dictionary of English slang. If you ever feel like using terms such as 'double rough' both as a noun and as an adjective.

1412. How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding | War Stories | Ars Technica: The final part of this video goes into details with the difficulties of pathfinding in RTS games. If you find it interesting, check out Age of Empires: 25+ years of pathfinding problems with C++. It makes you appreciate all the work going into such games.

1413. The 50 Most Underappreciated Movies of the 21st Century: You will most likely find a lot of movies on this list that you have not yet seen. There is an article with how the movies were chosen, but I guess it is fair to say that there is not much of a method at play here. While the list includes some weird movies (e.g., Shortbus), and some of them are fully appreciated for what they are (e.g., The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), this is overall a good list.

1414. A Human on a Bicycle Is among the Most Efficient Forms of Travel in the Animal Kingdom: A visualisation of the 'energetic cost of locomotion in animals' (body weight relative to the cost of transportation, i.e., calories per gram per kilometre). It should not be a surprise to anybody but, hey, bicycles are great.

1415. Sizing chaos: Another great piece in The Pudding, this time on the size of women's clothing. Even as a man I find it annoying having to deal with small, medium, large, etc., but this is nothing compared to how it is for women. I did not know that over half of all adult women are excluded from standard size ranges. And for other recent great pieces in The Pudding, check out A Journey Through Infertility (on the experience of going through IVF) and Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise (an analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction).

1416. Attention Media ≠ Social Networks: This post succinctly describes how social media sites got worse from turning social networks into attention media. I have never been a big fan of infinite scroll, and when I used Twitter, I used Tweetbot to ensure that I did not have an endless feed of content from accounts I did not follow.

1417. Ed's Stratego Site: It's been a few years since I played Stratego, but this is a great website dedicated to the game. It reminds me of the old web (Web 1.0). See also his chess page and list of all-time favourite movies.

1418. The Missing Semester of Your CS Education: Good stuff for people interested in Computer Science, now in a 2026 edition.

1419. CAPphrase: Comparative and Absolute Probability phrase dataset: There is a 'very good chance' that you will enjoy this. Results from a survey on the probabilities people assign to different phrases. The data is available on GitHub.

1420. What I Ate as an Unpaid Intern at Noma: Interns should get paid for their work. I have never been to Noma, and the more I hear about the place, the less likely it is that I will ever go there.

1421. 25 Years of Eggs: I like data but I do not collect a lot of data, if any, on my consumption. This post is looking at receipts and using AI to explore the consumption of eggs. I expect - and hope - that AI will lead to several similar analyses in the future that would otherwise never have seen the light of day.

1422. Bus travel from Lima to Rio de Janeiro: If you are looking for some travel recommendations, and in particular want to travel by bus in South America.

1423. Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century: A list of great books from the 20th century (from a poll conducted in 1999). Seems like a good list for inspiration on some classics. I have only read nine of the books on the list, but several of the books are ones I hope to read within the next few years.

1424. Daniel-isms: 50 Ideas for Life I Repeatedly Share. A lot of good advice, or at least things to keep in mind, even from the beginning of the list: "Most things you feel, you will feel and think about very differently in 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, 10 years, etc." and "People often take rejection or failure as a personal indictment, but it typically is a statement about the universe that is worth learning from". There is also a part 2 here.

1425. Every iPhone Ever Made. An overview of all iPhones ever made, their specs and features, including information in the features that were removed over the years.

1426. Meningsmålinger har forandret, hvad det vil sige at repræsentere folket: A great piece (in Danish) on opinion polls, statistics, and democracy. I've had the privilege to read the thesis being covered here, and I learned a lot (most of my knowledge of opinion polling in Denmark is from this century). The core message of the thesis is that we cannot understand the history of modern democracy without also studying the history of statistics. Accordingly, the thesis is not only of interest to people interested in opinion polling and democracy, but also the history of quantitative bureaucracy and statistics in Denmark.

1427. TV Writing: A lot of scripts and bibles for different TV shows. A goldmine of content. I read some of the Seinfeld scripts (Larry David is one of the best comedy writers), and I read the script for the Californication pilot which made me feel old (it says HANK MOODY A man in his thirties.).

1428. Smithsonian Open Access: A collection of more than 5.1 million 2D and 3D digital items from the Smithsonian Institution.

1429. Tube Sound Quiz: A fun small quiz. Can you recognise the London Tube lines by their sounds? I (only?) got four out of nine. I was pretty sure that I would get the Circle line correct, and I got it right (but I also guessed that the District line and the Piccadilly line were the Circle line).

1430. Cave Story: A Lyrical Walkthrough: I have never played Cave Story but here are some dope rhymes by Lee=Emcee² walking you through the game. I know the game touches upon themes such as empathy and the nature of war (here is a great video about the game), and this album manages to bring the game to life in a unique way. It can best be described as Aesop Rock meets A Tribe Called Quest (the selection of beats is by no means a coincidence). It is an impressive and unique piece of art.

1431. Coffee with a splash of physics: how to make the most out of your brew: On how to brew coffee. Also with some interesting statistics, such as: it takes an estimated 155 people to make a cup of coffee, coffee is the seventh most traded commodity on the planet, it sustains the livelihoods of more than 25 million farming households, and more than two billion cups of coffee are brewed worldwide every day.

1432. The Most Important Charts In The World: Here is a good collection of charts. The irony of the writings by Zvi Mowshowitz is that it lost most of its relevance due to AI. It leaves it up to the reader (or AI?) to find the relevant bits and pieces, and nowadays it is mostly a series of links to what you can find on X if you follow people working with AI. But here is a good collection of charts.

1433. 3 constraints before I build anything: Some sensible advice. I submit to the idea that "One defining constraint must shape the product". Twitter was great due to its 140 character limit, Instagram due to the 1:1 aspect ratio, etc. The good idea is often about what a product cannot do, not what it can do. There is also the new book by David Epstein, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, which I have not read yet but that I expect to be good.

1434. Just Put It On Your Blog: I like the general message in this blog post (while I do not agree with all examples). Find something interesting? Share it on your blog. (I mean, that is the purpose of this blog post as well.) I would like for people to share a lot less on social media (including Substack) and share it on personal blogs instead. That being said, there are many reasons not to have a blog. There are other ways to use your time, you might share content that will not look great in the future, etc., but these are also arguments you can make against posting on social media. From the particular blog in question, I also found the question of useful Pokémon interesting.

1435. Category:Individual physical objects: Lists of various individual objects (not including buildings, humans, etc.). There is something fascinating about physical objects that are unique (hence, individual objects) to the extent they warrant their own Wikipedia page, especially if there is nothing special about the category (such as doors or rocks). Great potential for going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

1436. The 100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time: I do not know enough about the history of guitar solos to be the judge of whether this list contains the 100 greatest guitar solos of all time, but I am confident that you will find a lot of great guitar solos on this list.

1437. 70 years of love, empowerment, and freedom. Here's a look at Eurovision by its lyrics.: A fun data deep dive by Giuseppe Sollazzo on the lyrics in Eurovision. If you are into data analysis, do also read the methodology section.

1438. Guardian Blind Dates: 18 Years of Data: An analysis of almost 900 dates (at the time of writing) arranged by Guardian Weekend dating back to 2009. Most of these dates (~88%) take place in London, so do not expect anything that is representative even for the UK.

1439. The 100 best novels of all time: Are the 100 best novels of all time on this list? I am not convinced. Take it for what it is: a list of books authors, critics and academics like. Good as inspiration if you are looking for your next read. On a related note, I guess most people are familiar with Project Gutenberg (a library of over 75,000 free eBooks and clearly one of the amazing resources that make the world a better place), but they recently made significant updates to their webpage, making it easier to find good books to read (including books on the list here). A good place to start is the list of top 100 books downloaded over the last 30 days.