🔗 Finds #27

Hello everyone, and welcome to issue #27 of Finds — the articles, sites, and corners of the web I bookmarked this week:

📄 Articles

quantamagazine.orgWhy Are Rivers So Mathematical?Natalie Wolchover on Hack's law: from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, a stream's length scales with its drainage area to the power 0.6, the least wasteful way to carry rain downhill. In 2026 the same exponent turned up in river deltas.

museumofconceptualart.comA Dollar for Your Soul — Earl Vickers' 1990 short story about a smug classmate who bets he can buy every eleventh-grader's soul within a week, at a dollar each, on official-looking transfer forms. Buying one back costs ten dollars and three more souls, which is where it turns nasty.

📚 Books

pomax.github.ioA Primer on Bézier CurvesPomax's free book on the curve behind Photoshop paths, CSS easing and font outlines, maintained since 2011 and full of graphics you drag to reshape. The code is deliberately pseudo-code, so you learn the maths instead of copy-pasting it.

🌐 Websites / blogs

intofarlands.comInto Far LandsKevin, from San Diego, and Mary, from Wenzhou, writing up overland journeys from their base in Sichuan: the Tibetan Plateau, Xinjiang, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan. The stories come with interactive maps, including one tracing the Silk Roads from Europe to China.

selftaughtjapanese.comSelf Taught Japanese — Twenty years into learning Japanese mostly alone, the blogger behind it explains grammar points and reviews manga, novels and anime. A recent post untangles 'ikigai', which in Japan just means a reason for living: 'games are my ikigai' is a perfectly ordinary sentence.

📚 From Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.orgMussel — Mussels anchor themselves with byssal threads, the 'beard' you pull off before cooking, and use the same threads to tie down invading dog whelks until they starve. Some freshwater species grow mantle flaps shaped like minnows to lure in the fish their larvae will ride.

📺 From YouTube

youtube.comCalm Traffic Needs More Than Calm Driving — braintruffle on the stop-and-go waves that form with no crash or lane closure to blame, treating every driver as an oscillator that overreacts to the car ahead. It builds to why a handful of well-controlled cars, tested on a real ring road, can dissolve the waves for everyone.

🌱 Promoted to the wiki: these now live on their topic pages — Geography, Literature, Computer Science, Travel, Languages, Animals, and Engineering — so they’re easy to find later. 🗂️ Catch up on past issues.