🔗 Finds #14

Hello everyone, and welcome to issue #14 of Finds — the articles, sites, and corners of the web I bookmarked this week:

🌐 Websites / blogs

complexity-explorables.orgComplexity ExplorablesDirk Brockmann's collection of interactive explorable explanations for complex systems — biology, physics, epidemiology, ecology, network and social science — where every model is one you fiddle with rather than read about. Turn up the variability in car speeds in “Berlin 8:00 a.m.” and watch a phantom traffic jam crawl backwards down the motorway.

beautifulpublicdata.comBeautiful Public DataJon Keegan's newsletter on the visually interesting datasets that local, state, and federal government agencies quietly collect and publish — the footprint of every building in NYC, San Diego street photologs from the 1970s, the USGS national geologic map, Cold War military slides from the DoD.

sabukaru.onlinesabukaruA digital magazine on Asian subculture that treats it as a subject worth reporting rather than aesthetic to borrow — sections for culture, manga and anime, film, music, art, and gaming, plus a neighbourhood guide to Ura-Harajuku and dispatches from the underground scenes of Seoul and Fukuoka.

philosophybits.comPhilosophy Bits — A long-running Tumblr that posts one philosophical quote at a time, always with its source attached — Merleau-Ponty on solitude, Kierkegaard on faith, Schopenhauer on whether life is better read as tragedy or comedy.

📄 Articles

github.comThe Wisdom Project — Merlin Mann's running list of things he had to learn the hard way, from “buy slightly larger shoes” to “whenever you're not sure what to say, either say nothing, or ask a question” — offered with the caveat that “it's only advice for you because it had to be advice for me.”

mathcentral.uregina.caA Geometric View of the Square Root Algorithm — The long-division square root method most people memorise and never understand, redrawn as areas: A. Grzesina decomposes 253² into squares and rectangles, then peels them back off 64,009 one digit at a time.

🎬 Videos

youtube.comThe origin of every European country's name — RobWords takes an etymological tour of the map, country by country — what each name meant to whoever coined it, and how often that has nothing to do with what the locals call the place.

🌱 Promoted to the wiki: these now live on their topic pages — Science, Data, Culture, Philosophy, Essays, Mathematics, and History — so they’re easy to find later. 🗂️ Catch up on past issues.