👋 Old friends.
10+1 Things is a reader-supported publication.
If you enjoy this, you can support by buying me a coffee ($1).
I had a fun weekend to start with!
It was a long weekend here in UAE and a classmate from uni had planned to come stay with us. Last minute, another friend from Delhi who was flying to Istanbul had his flight delayed and decided to visit us too! Then on Saturday, two more friends who live in the same city dropped by. So it was a weekend full of nostalgia, but it still feels the same even after not seeing each other for 10 years.
I don’t work for a company now, so most of the time it’s just me and the screen. I enjoy it honestly, but weekends like this remind you how much you need people around once in a while.
Speaking of friends, another friend from uni is doing an epic bike trip all the way from China to Europe, following the Silk Route trail. He’s currently in Kazakhstan and has told me to join him. I have to figure out a lot of logistics including visa and stuff. Let’s see!
I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. About just pedaling with no destination, no deadline, just road.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
✍️ Life Without A Destiny: A beautiful reflection by Susan Fowler on wanting to be a physicist, a novelist, a philosopher, a computer scientist, and a mother, all at once, while her husband has one singular destiny: building a quantum computer. Her list of what she wants in life is worth reading on its own. I think a lot of us feel this.
🎒 The Lost Art of Carrying Loads: At first glance, I thought this was just another SEO/AI junk, but this piece by Carryology is genuinely fascinating. It covers how different cultures solved the problem of carrying heavy loads, from Japan's furoshiki (a single square of cloth that becomes anything) to Himalayan porters carrying weight from their foreheads.
📚 PlotLines: I found this cool project where classic novels are mapped as actual journeys on period maps. You pick a book like Dracula or Huck Finn, press play, and watch the characters move across real roads and sea lanes of the era. Some locations are guessed and they are marked. I explored the entire journey of the Moby Dick crew and it was fascinating.
🔵 Cyanometer: I came across this wiki page on the cyanometer, a 225-year-old instrument for measuring the blueness of the sky. It's just a circle of paper squares dyed in graduated shades of blue that you hold up and match against the sky. Love that someone felt the need to quantify this.
🔧 Y-Zipper: In 1985, Bill Freeman patented a three-sided zipper. A zipper with three strips that, when zipped up, becomes a solid rigid structure that can bear load. His idea was rejected, but after 40 years, MIT finally built it (he's a professor there now!). It's hard to explain in words but the applications are infinite. Think flat-packed camping tents that become rigid with one pull.
🛩️ Apocalypse Tracker: This site tracks how many private jets are in the air right now and compares it to what's normal for that time of day. The idea is simple: if rich people with access to information start fleeing cities all at once, something might be up. You can even signup for email or SMS alerts!
🔪 Perfect Sharpener: After trying multiple cheap sharpeners and stones, I think this is the perfect knife sharpener if you don't want a complex setup. It's super simple, just slide your knife 6 times on the coarse side, flip and do the same on the ceramic side for finishing. It's small enough to carry in your pocket and costs under 10 bucks!
🫘 1 Kidney: This Al Jazeera investigation covers a village in Bangladesh where many residents have sold their kidneys. Locals call it the "village of 1 kidney." Brokers take these villagers to India on forged documents, pay them around $2,500 for a kidney that recipients pay $22,000+ for!
🗺️ Misconceptions: This interesting visualization by John Nelson covers how wrong our mental picture of the world map is. Like how two-thirds of Africa is actually north of the equator, Venice is as far north as Minneapolis, and London is at the same latitude as Calgary, Canada.
🌿 Weeds: This week I explored Weeds, a project by Mona Caron, a Swiss-born artist based in San Francisco who paints urban weeds as large-scale murals. She started after watching a dandelion in the Tenderloin keep growing back no matter how many times a neighbor kicked it. She's since painted them in Athens, Barcelona, and Ahmedabad to
✂️ Duct Tape Typography: This short video covers Shuetsu Sato, a 72-year-old security guard at a Tokyo train station who makes signage out of duct tape. He started when he had to help route people during construction at Shinjuku station. He now has his own named typeface and has even collaborated with Nike.
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
“I stand on the shoulders of the Internet, Wikipedia, Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, LibGen, YouTube, Hacker News, Reddit, and Sci-Hub."
~via HN