Useful Links

A growing, curated list of things worth keeping. Add new entries at the top of the relevant section.

Essays & threads

• Explaining our calendar to an alien — foone's viral 2022 thread: a human tries to explain Earth's timekeeping to a logical alien and it gets more absurd at every step (unequal months, 7-day weeks that don't fit months, base-60 minutes from one ancient civilization then base-10 milliseconds). Punchline: the aliens leave and never come back. foone deleted their Twitter, so these are the surviving mirrors:
  • Read it here as a chat → (prettified, alien vs human bubbles)
  • Clean full-text copy (nikhil.io)
  • Another copy (zachmanson)
  • Hacker News discussion

Art & design

• Some textile patterns from the 1920s — a small gallery of ~21 fabric pattern samples (designed in Austria, Paris, Munich, and Russia), photographed at a 2015 Chicago exhibit. Beautiful, hypnotic, good as "funky webpage background" inspiration. nikhil.io/log