7 Climates, Dopamine Fracking, Password Card, & Silent Poems
#83 of 10+1 Things | Kerala, India
🐘 Wild week.
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Last week was a mix of work with some travel!
I worked during the weekend and on Monday traveled to Thirunelli in the Wayanad district of Kerala, nestled between the Western Ghats. We stayed at a mutual friend’s place enjoying the weather, sipping some tea and going around.
Highlight of the week was when we were driving around in a jeep and saw a group of elephants charging towards us. That was something unexpected.
Something unexpected was happening across India last week too.
To set some context, in many parts of India there are a lot of e-rickshaws which can be a hassle due to the way they drive. While most of these are marketed as made in India, they’re built with off-the-shelf components and battery management systems from China.
One video went viral where a guy connected to an e-rickshaw’s BMS through a Bluetooth app and turned it off. This created chaos across parts of India with vehicles stopped in the center of the road.
The Government of India has directed Apple and Google to take down these apps, but removing the apps doesn’t make the batteries any more secure. The real issue is that these manufacturers shipped vehicles with zero authentication on their Bluetooth modules, and that’s still not fixed.
These are daily-wage workers driving in scorching heat to make a living, and someone’s idea of fun is shutting their vehicle off in the middle of traffic. Not cool.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
🧠 Dopamine Fracking: This essay puts a name to something I've been feeling for a while. How we pump massive resources into optimizing everything, music, movies, hobbies, food, just to squeeze out the purest dopamine hit and destroy the complexity that made it special. There's a strawberry analogy in there that just hits hard.
🎧 Kyoto, in Sound: I’ve been obsessed with Japan lately and stumbled upon this guided sound walk in Kyoto. Simon hands you recording equipment, walks you through shrines and temple gardens, and mixes your recordings into an audio postcard you take home. You can even read the experience of someone who took it recently.
✨ Silent Poems: This interactive site renders text messages as abstract letters you can't immediately read. Each letter has its own unique design, and if you spend enough time you can actually learn the language and decode the message. A clever little statement on how we fail to communicate, even when we're trying. Desktop only.
🤝 How to Ask for Help: Pradyu Prasad writes about asking strangers for help and why most people get it wrong. The core idea is simple, put yourself in the other person's head. Show proof of work over credentials, keep the ask specific and small, and always make it easy for them to say no.
🌱 POTR Helix: This plant pot from a Glasgow startup is so cool. It expands as your plant grows using origami geometry inspired by NASA's deployable space structures.It self-waters for up to two weeks and ships flat-packed from recycled materials!
🔐 Password Card: The site is in Swedish but this cool little card lets you encode simple passwords into complex ones using a lookup table. Think of a word, run each letter through the card, and you get a password with letters, numbers, and symbols that's actually hard to crack. Small enough to hang on your keychain or keep in your wallet.
🌡️ 7 Charts: BBC put together this cool visual breakdown of this summer’s record-breaking heatwaves across Europe. The UK hit 37.7°C in June, over a dozen countries smashed their June records, and Europe is warming faster than any other continent. The charts on tropical nights and sea surface temperatures are especially striking.
🧬 Synthetic Cell: Some awesome news from science! For the first time, researchers built a cell entirely from non-living components and watched it grow, replicate its DNA, and divide. It’s not alive and needs constant feeding, but it’s the closest anyone has gotten to creating life from scratch.
📝 Small Penis Rule: Here onwards I'll be sharing an interesting Wikipedia page every week. This one is a real legal strategy used by authors to avoid libel lawsuits. If you base a character on a real person, give them a small penis. No man is going to come forward and say, "That character with the very small penis, that's me!"
🐱 Artful Cats: This collection of cat-inspired art and artifacts from across the Smithsonian is a truly delightful set to browse through. Paintings, sketches, ceramics, centuries of artists who just couldn't resist drawing cats. You could easily lose an hour in here.
🎮 Son of Thanjai: This gameplay trailer of Son of Thanjai, an upcoming action-adventure game, is truly fascinating. It takes you to the Chola dynasty in ancient South India, and the game features a surul vaal, a flexible whip sword, which is so cool to see in a game. If you want to learn more about the Chola dynasty, this is a good read.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."