🏃 Building pace.
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How are you doing?
I had a hectic work week and a great week in terms of fitness.
On the work side, I run a small side project called FormBeep. It’s a small tool that sends a notification to your phone when someone fills a form on a website. Super useful for small businesses or businesses where lead time matters!
I’ve been running it for a while and it was quite sustainable with a generous free tier. But starting 1st October, Meta changed some of their WhatsApp rates, which meant I had to restrict the free tier and bump prices. I had to let go of 2 paid customers, but closed a new one this week. Bittersweet!
Onto fitness, I have decided to run a half marathon at the end of December. So I’ve been running consistently now.
One thing I realised was the heat stress. I thought something was really wrong with my health when my heart rate was shooting up a lot during outdoor runs. I googled and AI-ed a bit and realised heat stress is real and when you run at 37°C (~98°F) at 80%+ humidity, your body takes a toll. So now I’m doing my long runs and easy runs indoors to account for that.
Winter is right around the corner, hopefully I get to run outdoors in full swing soon!
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
🧠 Mental Gyms: Julie Zhuo wrote this beautiful piece on what happens when AI takes over the mental heavy lifting! A farmer never needed the gym because labor was built into the job. Now we lift weights by choice. She argues that the same shift is coming for our brains, and imagines ‘mental gyms’ with chess, philosophy debates, and puzzle rooms. A great read!
⏰ Trash Clock: A beautiful writeup on how Niklas built a fully functioning mechanical clock out of trash during an artist residency at a watch manufacturer in Germany. He used paperclips for gear teeth, a paint can filled with scrap metal for energy, and a glass bottle as a gong. He even invented a new time standard called GTC!
🧩 Perpetual Puzzle: I’ve been running this puzzle on my blog for a while now. One puzzle at a time, it stays open until someone solves it, then a new one goes up. I have a few in the pipeline ready, but no one’s cracked the current one yet. If you’re up for a challenge, give it a shot. Please don’t use AI for this!
📷 The First Photograph: I read this fascinating deep dive on the world’s oldest surviving photograph, a pewter plate from 1827 that’s nearly invisible to the naked eye. The exposure lasted several days, and even the famous version you’ve seen in textbooks was hand retouched!
🍎 Lost Apple Project: You all seem to like obscure wiki pages, so here's a cool one. The Lost Apple Project is a project by two guys who search abandoned farms and orchards in the Pacific Northwest to find apple varieties thought to be extinct. They use old county fair records and newspaper clippings to track them down. There were once 17,000 named varieties in the US and only about 4,500 exist today. They've rediscovered 29 so far.
🐢 Oldest Animal: Jonathan is the world’s oldest living land animal at 194 years old. Scientists recently sequenced his genome and found that parts of it look almost identical to a five year old tortoise. He was born before the Civil War and is still just hanging out on a tiny island!
📚 Invisible Cities: This week I'm reading the 1972 novel by Italo Calvino called Invisible Cities. It explores a thread where Marco Polo describes 55 fictional cities to Kublai Khan. I'm very early into the book, but it's really beautiful so far!
“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
~ Resurfaced by ReadWise💥 Destroy Any Website: This cool website lets you visit any URL and blow it apart as a stickman! You can select from 10 weapons, from a flamethrower to a neutron star. There's even a multiplayer mode where everyone fights on the same page. I tried it with the Apple website and it was fun to destroy iPhones!
🏔️ Old Mountain Diagrams: This beautiful roundup by Duncan Bradley looks at various 19th century diagrams that compared mountain heights by placing them all in a single landscape scene. Artists like John Emslie turned data into something that looked more like a painting than a chart! Some of these are quite cool, I might print a few.
🚶 Walking Men: I was awestruck when I saw this project by Maya Barkai. She collected pedestrian traffic icons from around the world and turned them into large scale public art installations. It started in Manhattan in 2010 and has since been displayed in Sydney, Buenos Aires, Taipei, and many other cities. Such a simple idea but so striking!
🖼️ Lenticular Prints: I came to know about lenticular images recently and was watching a lot of videos when this tutorial popped up. It goes through the entire process of making one at home. Other than the special lens on top, all you need is a printer and some glossy paper. Super cool to watch.
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
“Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones.
But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.”
— Henri Poincare