🔗 Finds #16

Hello everyone, and welcome to issue #16 of Finds — the articles, sites, and corners of the web I bookmarked this week:

🌐 Websites / blogs

brilliantmaps.comBrilliant Maps“Making sense of the world, one map at a time.” Every post is a map plus the argument it makes: how many US Supreme Court justices were born in your state, Europe's declining robbery rates, Harlem vs Haarlem, and the most misspelled word in each American state. Half the fun is the interactive stuff — a Mercator-vs-true-size comparison tool, and minefield games that ask you to name countries with the borders wiped off.

openculture.comOpen Culture“The best free cultural & educational media on the web,” collected since 2006: 1,700 free university courses, 1,150 films, 1,000 audio books, 800 ebooks, and language lessons in 48 languages, all indexed and all legitimately free. The daily blog is the other half of it — recent posts cover Christopher Nolan's 15 picks from the Criterion Closet and where Europe's countries got their names.

electronicstheory.comElectronics 101A free 75-lesson electronics course written by Ray Dall over several years, which started life as a series of emails and ended up as the basis for two published books and the syllabus at a few actual schools. Lesson 1 opens on what matter is and walks through the history of electricity — Thales rubbing amber with fur, Gilbert coining the word in the 1600s — and every technical term is a link to the glossary. Dall's promise up front: “while electronics is a math intensive science, it needn't be as math intensive as most scholars try to make it.”

hhroses.artH.H.RosesClick the enter button and you boot into a full Windows 98 desktop — draggable windows, a Start bar, a working MS Paint, an iPod playing the owner's own tracks, and a guestbook rendered as an illuminated manuscript. The icons are the point: Minesweeper, Solitaire, Connect Four, Tic Tac Toe, a sliding puzzle, a dress-up game, a Game Boy, a Magic 8 Ball, and something called The Backrooms, alongside 2D and 3D art pages. Made by H.H.Roses (a.k.a. hailee.jpeg) — artist, author, stagehand, dev — and best opened on desktop, as the site itself warns.

chandoo.orgChandoo.org — Chandoo has been writing Excel tutorials from Wellington since 2007 with one stated mission: “to make you awesome in Excel and Power BI.” Formulas, pivot tables, charting, dashboards, and VBA, taught through concrete problems — merging multiple CSV files, building a pivot from another pivot, getting XLOOKUP right — backed by 200+ downloadable dashboard examples and a library of VBA samples.

logicmatters.netLogic Matters — Category Theory — Peter Smith's hand-picked shelf of free and legitimately available category theory resources, sorted by how hard they are: the first three chapters of Goldblatt's Topoi as the gentlest entry, then Leinster's Basic Category Theory, then Riehl's Category Theory in Context. His own Introducing Category Theory (3rd ed., 510pp) is a free PDF and deliberately slow — products and limits, then functors, natural transformations, the Yoneda lemma and adjunctions, then a little on toposes.

🎬 Videos

youtube.comWhy does every mammal get 1 billion heartbeats in their life? — Veritasium on the hidden maths of metabolic scaling: it opens with how much LSD you should give an elephant, arrives at Kleiber's law, asks why the fraction ¼ keeps turning up everywhere in biology, and ends on whether cities obey the same rule as animals.

🌱 Promoted to the wiki: these now live on their topic pages — Geography, Learning, Electronics, Time Wasters, Spreadsheets, Mathematics, and Science — so they’re easy to find later. 🗂️ Catch up on past issues.