🔗 Finds #17

Hello everyone, and welcome to issue #17 of Finds — the articles, sites, and corners of the web I bookmarked this week:

📚 Books

pbr-book.orgPhysically Based RenderingPharr, Jakob and Humphreys' rendering textbook, free online in full — and holder of a 2014 Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement for being “a widely adopted practical roadmap for most physically based shading and lighting systems used in film production.”. It's written as literate programming, so the theory and the actual pbrt source are one document: 17 chapters running from geometry and radiometry through Monte Carlo integration, reflection models, and volumetric scattering, each arriving with the code that implements it.

📄 Articles

moserware.comA Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)AES explained as “a play in 4 acts,” drawn in stick figures. Act 1 is the fall of DES and the crowning of a new king of the crypto world; Act 2 lays out confusion, diffusion, and why security has to live in the key rather than the algorithm; Act 3 walks the state matrix through SubBytes, ShiftRows, MixColumns, and AddRoundKey; Act 4 goes down into the polynomial algebra and finite fields underneath. Before Act 3 you're asked to sign a “Foot-Shooting Prevention Agreement” promising not to ship your own AES.

worrydream.comAnalogy as the Core of Cognition — Hofstadter's case that analogy isn't a special variety of reasoning but the whole of thinking — "every concept we have is essentially nothing but a tightly packaged bundle of analogies." He opens on two riddles (why babies don't remember what happens to them, why each year passes faster than the one before) and answers both with chunking, then works outward to the mental lexicon, lexical blends as a window onto the mind, and Sapir-Whorf.

📚 From Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.orgProportion (architecture) — How buildings decide their own ratios. Vitruvius took his from the human body — the face about 1/10 of total height, the head about 1/8 — medieval masons laid out churches ad quadratum and ad triangulum, squaring circles and rotating triangles into hexagons, and Le Corbusier's Modulor spliced anthropometry onto the golden ratio around a 1.83 m man.

🗯️ Comics

webtoons.comThe Regressed Mercenary Has a Plan — 8/10Cecil Perdium, the Mercenary King, is killed in battle before he can avenge his family — and learns on the way out that Duke Delphine, the man who ruined them, wasn't working alone. Then he wakes up as his teenage self. The regression setup is standard; the pleasure is in the “has a plan” half, rebuilding a house whose own soldiers and knights are already defecting. 89 episodes so far, new one every Wednesday.

📺 Completed

en.wikipedia.orgThe Odyssey (2026) — 8.5/10 — Nolan's Homer, and the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70 mm film — 91 days across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and Malta, over two million feet of film through Hoyte van Hoytema's cameras, and a 36-foot Trojan horse built for real. Matt Damon's Odysseus, Tom Holland's Telemachus, Anne Hathaway's Penelope.

📺 From YouTube

youtube.comPractical Engineering — Civil engineer Grady Hillhouse on “infrastructure and the human-made world around us” — the stuff you walk past without seeing, usually explained by building a scale model of it and then breaking it on camera. Recent episodes go under New York City's streets, into the levee breach that flooded New Orleans, and through why demolishing a bridge is so complicated. New videos the first and third Tuesday.

---

🌱 Promoted to the wiki: these now live on their topic pages — Computer Science, Cryptography, Psychology, Architecture, Comics, Films, and Engineering — so they’re easy to find later. 🗂️ Catch up on past issues.