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Howdie!
I had a beautiful last couple of weeks.
This Monday, I spent the whole day visiting 3 museums: the National History one, the Natural History one and Louvre Abu Dhabi. I don't even remember the last time I visited a museum but it was really a calm and soothing experience.
I don't know what it is, but the smell, high ceilings, spot lights, the typography and many other things at museums just puts me in some sort of a weird flow state.
The weather has been getting better here in UAE, so I’m slowly getting excited about winter.
The week before, I did a fun challenge with 2 friends to sort of kickstart the fitness journey and fall into a groove.
The challenge was to walk 100k steps in 7 days. Simple and fun, but brutal considering most of us have desk jobs. I lost some weight, and the whole process of tracking stuff, trying hard to hit ~14k steps a day for 7 days was really fun.
The challenge was to walk 100k steps in 7 days, a simple fun challenge, but it was brutal considering most of us have desk jobs. I lost some weight, and the whole process of tracking stuff, trying hard to hit ~14k steps a day for 7 days was fun.
I'm planning to do one again starting 5th Oct, so if you are reading this before that and want to join the challenge(free ofcourse!), reply to this email. No complex tracking, works on the honor system. Just send me the steps you walked and I shall log it!
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
🏡 Are We Really Free?: A working dad reflects on what it would take to escape modern life by buying land and building a cabin off the grid. But you can't build on your own land without permits, you can't homeschool your kids in many European countries, and you don't really own most of what you buy digitally. So how free are we really?
✍️ --verbose: I wrote after a long time and it's a rant on things being too verbose. More than half of the things I have to read, be it an email, a doc someone sent or even a presentation, are filled with unnecessary fluff thanks to AI. My advice is think clearly, write short, don’t be afraid to make mistakes when you write.
🌳 One Minute Park: This project by Elliott Cost takes you to a random park somewhere in the world for one minute! So far 110 people have contributed 250 minutes from parks globally and the goal is to have a park for every single minute of the day.
🐦 Avian Visitors: Teddy Warner had an interesting idea. He set up a Raspberry Pi with a USB mic on his balcony that uses a machine learning model by Cornell to identify birds. He then displayed them on an e-ink frame in a beautiful Japanese woodblock print style! The whole thing is open source and he even sells kits if you want to build one yourself.
📝 Compulsive Writers: In this beautiful piece, Brennan Kenneth Brown writes about writers throughout history who just couldn't stop writing. Chesterton averaged an essay a day for eleven years, Corin Tellado delivered a 76-page novel every week, and writers in China's web fiction industry do 10,000 words a day. Really makes you think about what that kind of obsession looks like.
🎵 Air Theremin: This cool website lets you play a theremin using just your hands by accessing your webcam! Spread your hands apart for volume, raise them for pitch, lean back to soften the tone. It all runs locally in your browser with no video leaving your machine and is open-source.
📚 Thinking, Fast and Slow: A few weeks back this new AI model called Jev made the news calling itself a "System One" model. It borrows the concept from Daniel Kahneman's book and I thought of re-reading it this week. The book is about how our brain has two modes: one that's fast and instinctive, and another that's slow and logical. I wouldn't say it's a fun read, but it's packed with dense info, so pause, reflect and read.
🏺Line: Potters don't design bowls and vases, they design one curve and that becomes a cool vessel. This cool tool lets you draw a single line with a few control points, and it rotates it to generate a whole family of vessel shapes. Really fun to play with.
🔧 Wax Motors: I was browsing Wiki and came across this page on wax motors! It's a motor that uses melting wax to create mechanical force and can generate up to 900 lbs of force. Applications range from washing machine door locks to airplane fuel controls. Never knew these existed.
📸 Eternal Lifeline: Alastair Philip Wiper is a unique photographer who photographs factories, laboratories and scientific facilities around the world. In this series he explores Alcor, a facility in Arizona where over 200 human bodies and heads are cryogenically preserved, hoping future technology might revive them. You can preserve your whole body for $200k or just your head for $80k. Fun fact: bodies are stored upside down so if anything goes wrong, heads are preserved the longest.
🏚️ Mole People: I was shocked and a bit terrified watching this documentary by Ruhi Çenet. He goes deep into the 200 miles of flood tunnels under Las Vegas where around 1,500 people live in complete darkness. In the video you can literally see the famous Caesar's Palace(casino) through the grates while people are surviving on scraps just below. Wild.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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See you next week!
With Love,
Rishi
“To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life."
~ Life Magaazine