1 Flag, Hydrant Directory, Notes Art & Trophic Memory
#81 of 10+1 Things | Kerala, India
🔄 Found rhythm.
10+1 Things is a reader-supported publication.
If you enjoy this, you can support by buying me a coffee ($1).
Last week was full of work, while staying at my home in Kerala. With the frequent monsoon rains, it’s all lush green around me. And with the World Cup going on, most places have been covered with huge cutouts, banners and flags of favourite teams amidst the greenery.
I’ve been reflecting on something Herman wrote about active recall. “I write for you all, but I guess I also write for me.”
While I don’t write a lot of original stuff, this newsletter has been a part of my life for a few years now. When I read and share things here, I unknowingly learn new things and they stay in my memory. For example, the fact about the Palakkad Gap I shared last week? I would never forget that now.
I’m not a trillionaire yet, but I’m in a great headspace with this newsletter. At some point earlier, there was a lot of friction for me to write this. It became some sort of a tedious task and I hated it. I’m glad I found my rhythm again.
So I write for you all, but also to stay inspired, to share knowledge, and to have fun.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
💻 Inside Thoughts: Preston Thorpe wrote a beautiful narrative on his journey from being in prison for 10 years to slowly teaching himself to code from his cell. Maine’s prison system gave him a laptop and limited internet, and he ran with it. Went from writing his first lines of code to leading a dev team while still locked up.
🚒 Hydrant Directory: Day Lane created this cool directory of fire hydrants as a design resource. Each hydrant is photographed and processed into a color palette, all public domain. Many of them were hand-painted by residents in their neighborhoods, so the colors have a real street-art quality to them.
🍛 Notes on Belonging: This beautiful essay by Tamanna Rafique traces her inheritance through taste. She grew up in Assam with a Garo Christian mother and an Assamese Muslim father, where Christmas chicken curry and Eid pulao sat on the same table. The kitchen became where these worlds met and somehow made it all work.
📓 Renote Snap: This cool product is a reusable aluminium notebook that snaps onto your phone via MagSafe. You write on it, erase and reuse. It also doubles as a card holder, phone stand, and a ruler! I would buy this when I get a new phone!
🌡️ Space Cooling: This is a bit nerdy but I always thought having data centers in the sky meant they wouldn’t need cooling. This post explores why they absolutely do and how you’d actually pull it off with no air around you. Spoiler: it’s totally doable.
🦌 Trophic Memory: Michael Levin wrote an interesting post about a wild fact about deer antlers. If a deer injures its antler at a specific spot, the whole thing falls off as usual, but next year’s antler grows an extra branch right where the damage was. The body somehow remembers, and nobody really knows how.
🌍 One World Flag: Thomas Mandl asked a simple question: why is there no flag for the world? So he designed one. It's a blue dot on a transparent background, which means the flag looks different wherever you fly it. You see your own surroundings through it. Such a clever design choice.
🏛️ Roman Names: A few weeks back I posted about Roman Roads, and here's another one. This cool project maps around 250,000 personal names from inscriptions across the Roman Empire. Zoom into any spot and see the actual names of people who lived there thousands of years ago.
🎓 Illustrated Guide to a PhD: This illustrated guide by Matt Might explains what a PhD really is using simple circle diagrams. You start with all of human knowledge as a circle, and by the end, your PhD is a tiny dent on its edge.
🎨 Notes Art: These daily drawings by Chris Silverman using just the iPhone Notes app have been stunning. He's been making them since 2021 using just his finger, no stylus, with tools that were actually designed for annotating documents, not making art. As the old saying goes, for a true craftsman the tools don't matter.
🏠 Nazrani Home: Nazranis are Syrian Christians from Kerala, one of the oldest Christian communities in India. In this interesting video they showcase their heritage home almost 300 years old. It’s made in traditional Hindu-Dutch architecture and even has books from the 1800s. Cool part, you can actually stay here.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
Leave a comment or reply to this email.
This newsletter is FREE, but not CHEAP. It takes effort and time from my end (~ 2 hours) to deliver this newsletter every week. You can help me in keeping it going by forwarding it to someone you like, buying me a coffee ($1 or ₹75), sending me some crypto, visiting my blog, signing my guestbook or following me on X.
I also have an AMA section on my blog where you can ask me any questions. Plus, I’m available for a chat during my Unoffice Hours.
See you next week!
With Love,
Rishi
“Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space.”