🔗 Finds #19

Hello everyone, and welcome to issue #19 of Finds — the articles, sites, and corners of the web I bookmarked this week:

📄 Articles

google.comWeird Museum MapJames Lees has pinned 869 weird, niche museums onto one world map — the British Lawnmower Museum, the Derwent Pencil Museum, a David Hasselhoff Museum. The layers let you filter by obsession: Toilet, Lobster, Bigfoot, Clown, Match.

shortoftheweek.comThe Alchemist's LetterA five-minute animated short by Carlos Andre Stevens, built by artists out of LAIKA and voiced by John Hurt: an estranged son inherits his late alchemist father's very strange machine, which carries him back through the family's times and places.

🌐 Websites / blogs

encyclopedia.uia.orgEncyclopedia of World Problems and Human PotentialThe Union of International Associations has been cataloguing the world's problems since 1972 — 50,054 of them, from “slavery” to “scientific misconduct.” The good part is the loops: it maps how problems reinforce and sustain each other, alongside strategies, human values, and integrative concepts.

chesstactics.orgChess Tactics ExplainedWard Farnsworth's entire book on tactics, free and in plain English: 20 chapters, about 200 topics, over 1,000 positions, assuming no prior knowledge. A companion trainer — the Chess Quizzer — serves the same positions back as puzzles, with hints when you're stuck.

📚 From Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.orgRegrowth inside ballast tanks — Ships take on ballast water in one port and discharge it in another; treatment kills most of what's living in it, and then the survivors multiply on the voyage. Bacteria rebound fastest — 18 hours to 7 days — feeding on the dissolved remains of everything the treatment killed.

📺 From YouTube

youtube.comProgress — Science Documentaries — 567 videos, most of them 45 to 50 minutes: full documentaries on aviation disasters, WWII tank battles, the invention of the submarine, and how Mercedes-Benz builds 470 trucks a day. Weekly, and long enough to actually be an evening.

youtube.comThe Principles of Design — Envato Tuts+ walks through the eleven principles behind compositions that work — balance, unity, contrast, emphasis, rhythm, movement, proportion, harmony, variety — in 22 minutes. Each one is chaptered and shown on real posters and flyers rather than described in the abstract.

🌱 Promoted to the wiki: these now live on their topic pages — Travel, Films, Global Issues, Chess, Ecology, Engineering, and Design — so they’re easy to find later. 🗂️ Catch up on past issues.