Summer Solstice 2025 links
the best of the internet over the last season
- The Great Green Wall of Africa
- Why does an egg boiler require more water to cook fewer eggs?
- Two superb but also maybe slightly elitist write-ups about multiline editing in vi;
- Tony Narlock’s CV
- Masta Kink: The story of motorsport’s most dangerous corner
- Why have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
- A list of open problems to solve for the ambitious
- Against 3x speed by David Perell (this was sent to me by a friend as a response to my Javascript trick to go faster than 2x)
- A handwriting-recognition model that learns from only one example and related: colah’s old blog about generating new handwriting strokes based on user handwriting
- https://justfuckingusehtml.com/ - this is art, I love it.
- Terence Tao livecoding the formalization of a proof in Lean. Wow, just wow!
- TIL that we don’t really understand how the earth started rotating, and what set its rotational velocity.
- “The most plausible explanation is the hypothesis that a Mars-sized planet (which they named Theia) smacked us at a particular velocity/angle/location around 4 1/2B years ago–most likely twice, a few hundred thousand years apart.”
- “And our remarkably large Moon (relative to Earth) formed by this impact stabilizes Earth on its polar axis. Otherwise Earth’s axial wobble would be much greater.”
- “And Theia’s iron core merged with ours, giving us a stronger Van Allen belt, which prevents the surface of the Earth from being bombarded by anywhere near as much radiation as would be the case otherwise.”
- Related to the above, a very nice explanation about why the earth will never be tidally locked to the sun.
- Why does HTML think “chucknorris” is a color?
- What makes four dimensions special?
- “I remember attending two lectures by M. Gromov that began by the remark that not only 4 equals 2 plus 2, but this equality is true in 3 different ways (meaning that there are three equipartitions in two classes of a 4-element set). According to him, a lot of exceptional behaviors in math stem from this, especially from the fact that 3 < 4 (it definitely explains why the alternating group A(4) isn’t simple, but Gromov also mentioned the gauge-theoretic oddities in dimension 4).”
- Why Tom Cruise Will Never Die
- https://www.plasticlist.org/
- https://ayearindrawings.substack.com/
- How many women have beaten Super GMs?
- Borges on the two registers of English