Yesterday, I found myself sitting on a cliff with a brisket sandwich, wondering when this would end.
Thankfully, today it's Friday!
The Vela Incident
This is one of my favorite stories.
In 1979, an American satellite designed to detect nuclear detonations observed a double flash of light that was consistent with a nuclear explosion in the Indian Ocean.
To this day, we do not know for sure who did this. Since there's a South African island nearby, the most commonly accepted theory is that it was a nuclear test jointly organized by Israel and South Africa as part of their alleged nuclear program.
Notably, South Africa is the only country that has successfully developed, produced, and eliminated its nuclear capability. And Israel, well... Nobody knows.
Human eyes are inverted
This week, Twitter suddenly became interested in all the little shortcomings of our bodies that resulted from millions of years of evolution.
Eyes are a good example. The retina is behind the blood vessels and nerves. Our brain has to filter them out. So these nerves have to do even without the usual myelin sheath, which further drops their speed. And there's a hole in the retina to let the nerves out.
In fact, we only see about 3% of our entire sphere of vision well. The brain reconstructs the rest.
How mechanical watches work
This page is a testament to the modern web. It is a fantastic animated guide to the mechanism inside mechanical watches, with demos.
The rise and all of SF parking tickets map
This guy used the API for the San Francisco parking ticket system to make an app that helps people find parking officers in their area.
The most remarkable part is how the city officials closed down the API in just four hours.
There even was a leaderboard of the most product officers, some of whom would issue $20,000 in fines.
The person leading Meta RayBans was hired because she wrote down her criticism
You can just complain about things and if you do this right they will hire you to fix them.
And then you will have to fix it. Yourself.