Part bank vault, part citadel. “They are part bank vault, part food store and part citadel.” In southern Morocco, these agadir (igoudar) were communal fortress granaries where families stored grain, jewelry, and documents behind thick walls and carved wooden locks. […]
The origin of Erewhon. I just learned that the name came from an old science fiction book. “In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness.” Samuel Butler’s 1872 satire flips medicine and morality, with doctors acting more like judges […]
You were training Google’s AI. “At peak, 200 million reCAPTCHAs were solved every single day.” Sharbel argues those clicks were free data annotation from people just trying to log in, and that it helped train computer vision for products like […]
NES Mario in Unreal Engine. “If Nintendo’s NES Super Mario Bros was made with Unreal Engine.” A quick little brain-bender clip that reimagines an 8-bit classic as glossy modern 3D. ~ learn more
Banned in California. “If I wanted to build a new car factory, I literally couldn’t paint the cars.” An interactive visualization of the industrial processes effectively banned by California ~ learn more
Naked swim class. “What seemed perfectly normal to one generation often becomes head-shaking at the very least and scarcely believable to later generations.” A writer remembers mandatory nude swimming in mid-1960s high school gym class, and the odd logistics that […]
My lobster lost $450,000 this weekend. An AI agent got a wallet, a Twitter account, and permission to do whatever it wanted, then promptly turned attention into money and money into chaos. ~ learn more
The largest survey dataset on human sexuality in the world. Follow the learn more link for some choice excerpts on X. To explore for yourself click here. ~ learn more
Words with spaces. “English is full of two- and three-word phrases that function as single semantic units effectively “words” but because they’re not fused into one orthographic word, they’re invisible to dictionaries and underappreciated as vocabulary.” The author built a […]
Man accidentally gains control of 7,000 robot vacuums. “the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps, and status data from nearly 7,000 other vacuums across […]