🔗 Finds #1

Hello everyone, and welcome to the very first issue of Finds — the articles, sites, and corners of the web I bookmarked this week:

📄 Articles

theshamblog.comThe Secret Garden of Rock Paper Scissors — The game you think is pure luck hides a whole mathematical garden: allow ties and lopsided odds and you get a family of balanced games where every move has a real strategic reason to exist.

🌐 Websites / blogs

fieggen.comIan's Shoelace SiteTwo decades of one man's obsessive, proudly no-AI expertise: 100+ lacing tutorials, 25 knots, and his own "world's fastest" Ian Knot. The internet at its most wonderfully specific.

animatedengines.comAnimated EnginesHand-built animations of ~24 engines, from four-stroke and Wankel to Stirling and steam beam engines. Click any one and watch it run until it finally clicks.

📚 From Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.orgWar of the Heavenly Horses — In 104–102 BC, Han China marched 60,000 troops across the desert to seize a legendary Central Asian horse breed — and came away controlling the Silk Road trade routes. History is stranger than it lets on.

en.wikipedia.orgPythagorean tiling — The two-square floor pattern you've walked over a hundred times quietly contains a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. Once you see the right triangle in it, you can't unsee it.

🌱 Promoted to the wiki: the standouts above now live on their topic pages — Engines, Shoelaces, Mathematics, and History — so they’re easy to find later. 🗂️ Catch up on past issues.