I’ve been reading a fantastic article on the practical effects and CGI in Terminator 2, suddenly learned about the ancient living organism and marveling at how we can predict earthquake through phones.

The tech of Terminator 2

This story is built on a series of interviews with former ILM employees who created the graphical effects for the Terminator 2 movie.

The T-1000 was built by a tiny, emerging computer graphics team, inventing production methods as the film was already in production. They were literally hiring people to develop the tools they needed right away and by the end of the movie, ILM became a completely different team with the biggest expertise in VFX.

Android Earthquake Alerts

Google did a thing you’d expect to see from Apple first. They used accelerometers in Android phones as tiny seismometers.

When enough phones detect a fast P-wave, Google can estimate an earthquake's location and magnitude, then warn people before the slower, more destructive S-wave arrives. And they did exactly this in Venezuela.

Prototaxites

Before trees took over land, the tallest organisms were prototaxites. They stood up to 8 meters tall and 1 meter wide, towering over early plants that were often only a few centimeters high.

The fun part is that we still don’t know what they were. For almost a century, scientists argued whether they were plants, fungi, or something else.

Something else is the answer. The latest analysis confirms they were a completely different, now-extinct lineage of life.

Isn’t this crazy?

Silphium

Silphium was an ancient North African plant so valuable that Cyrene stamped it on its coins and Julius Caesar counted 1,500 pounds of its resin in the Roman treasury.

It had many uses, but the most important was contraception. The demand was so high that people used it up to extinction.

Fast

Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, has a page on his blog listing the speed of humanity’s past achievements. Very inspiring for our time when building one bridge in the West takes a decade.

• Apollo 8 went from decision to moon launch in 134 days

• Visa's predecessor launched from scratch in 90 days

• Lockheed delivered the P-80 jet fighter in 143 days

Bonus: Historical Map Collection

More than 149,000 historical maps, atlases, globes, charts, and city views are searchable across five centuries of visual knowledge. The collection turns old cartography into a living interface: text-on-map search, georeferencing, and AI-assisted browsing make it possible to hunt for ancient Rome, propaganda maps, compass roses, river systems, or the changing shape of a city.