good stuff on the internet

a running list of corners of the internet i keep coming back to, or would like to. most of them were passed on to me by other people. some of them i need to start going through.

youtube

• jet lag: the game: a travel game show where friends race, hide and play tag across entire countries and continents. makes me want to book a train ticket every single time.
• fern: long, beautifully made documentaries about odd places, people and events you’ve probably never heard of.
• answer in progress: a few friends taking a silly question way too seriously, and learning something on the way.
• wendover productions: how the world actually moves: airlines, shipping, supply chains. from the people behind jet lag.
• half as interesting: wendover’s lighter sibling. short, funny videos about weird facts and stranger stories.
• tom scott: short videos about interesting places, ideas and things you didn’t know you wanted to know. one i’d like to start watching.
• 3blue1brown: maths explained with animations so beautiful it almost feels easy.
• powerpoint programming: a lecture by tom wildenhain, from a course called “great impractical ideas in computer science”, on doing actual computation in powerpoint. yes, including a turing machine.

geography & travel

• maptap: a quick daily geography puzzle. there’s a new one every day, and you can share your score with friends.
• travle: get from one country to another by guessing every country in between.
• worldle: guess the country from just its outline.
• mapcrunch: drops you somewhere random on street view. good for pretending you’re on a trip.
• window swap: look out of a stranger’s window, somewhere else in the world.
• atlas obscura: a guide to the strange, hidden and wonderful places of the world.

nerdy & computer-y

• overthewire: free “wargames”: security puzzles you solve level by level, mostly in the linux terminal. a fun way to learn the command line and a bit of security, one password at a time.
• advent of code: little daily coding puzzles, every december. i’ve never made it all the way to the end. maybe this year is the year i do?
• nicky case: small interactive games that explain big ideas, like trust and how networks behave. still slowly working my way through them all.
• bartosz ciechanowski: long, interactive explainers on how things work (mechanical watches, gps, bicycles, sound) with 3d diagrams you can drag around.

space & cosmology

• pbs space time: black holes, dark energy and the shape of the universe, explained properly and without dumbing it down.
• sixty symbols: physicists and astronomers at the university of nottingham chatting about their work, usually around a whiteboard.
• kurzgesagt: beautifully animated videos about space, science and the occasional existential crisis.
• astronomy picture of the day: one space photo a day, with a short explanation from an astronomer. running since 1995.
• nasa’s eyes: fly around the solar system and follow real spacecraft in 3d.
• stellarium web: a planetarium in your browser that shows the sky above you right now.
• ned wright’s cosmology tutorial: a plain-looking old page that explains the big bang and the expanding universe really well.
• zooniverse: help real research by sorting galaxies (and penguins, and old handwriting) from your sofa.

brains & neuroscience

• eyewire: a game where you trace real neurons to help map the brain.
• brainfacts: a friendly place to start with how the brain works, from neuroscientists.
• artem kirsanov: lovely animated videos on computational neuroscience and how neurons compute.
• neuromatch academy: a free, full computational neuroscience course, with all the material online.
• brain inspired: a podcast of long conversations where neuroscience meets ai.
• the transmitter: news and essays from the neuroscience world.

just fun to wander around

• quanta magazine: clear, careful writing about physics, maths, biology and the brain.

• neal.fun: tests your patience :)

• the pudding: visual essays about culture and everyday things.