I’m Annie Rauwerda and you might know me from “Depths of Wikipedia.” But maybe you know me as one of the children in this 2010 YouTube video about my dad’s snow fort, or from this article where I wrote about internet stalking the people from Wikipedia’s high five photos, or from this 2004 Michigan reading commercial. Or from real life. Anyway, here are some links I’ve enjoyed lately that might be worth a click
Click clack moo
It’s a good day to read about the Fermi paradox
Every single day at noon I play Redactle, the Wordle variation where you guess words one by one from a heavily-censored Wikipedia article until you can eventually guess the article’s title.
Stanford computer science professor and father of analysis of algorithms Donald Knuth wrote about why he hates email: “I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”
Pretty much all I listen to now is NTS radio for live online DJ sets
On April 1st, some astronomy researchers released a paper on arxiv called “COWS all tHE way Down (COWSHED) I: Could cow based planetoids support methane atmospheres?” which made me smile
The Infamous ‘Worst Roommate Ever’ Was My Dad’s Childhood Nemesis from Gawker is very funny
Oldestsearch.com reverse orders search results so that you see the oldest webpages first
By popular demand, I made a Depths of Wikipedia Discord a few weeks ago for discussing trivia. Come on in, the water’s great.
I wrote an article about “jubyla.com” a few months ago and never really promoted it. But I probably should have because it’s a cute story and only takes ~2.5 minutes to read!
Maybe a fun project would be to detect bird sounds with a Raspberry Pi using BirdNetPI
Lucas made this 17-minute documentary about the sounds of Star Wars in honor of May the 4th!
My favorite Instagram follows right now is @left4rat, a post-cringe gallery of the 2010s internet from an intrepid anonymous admin who shares my age (22). But overall, I’ve been scrolling Instagram less and less as it deteriorates into a TikTok knockoff, you know?
I talk about this a lot, but The Pudding’s map of the US by each city’s most Wikipedia-searched resident could occupy me for days
I really love gail.com, the last good website. There’s no better place to land when you misspell gmail! According to this archived version of the site, Gail was a NASA engineer who worked on Mars rovers. And her husband Kevin owns kevin.org. Love them
Other things
I have been trying to read about the economy more and have been having a lot of anti-eureka moments where I realize how stupid I am. I have been tumbling off the peak of Mount Stupid daily
“Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog!” is a palindrome
I’m going to Berlin for the month of June
Ciabatta was invented in 1982 by Italian bakers who wanted to rival French baguettes. Maybe you already knew this
Depths of Wikipedia had a bizarre media blitz this spring— New York Times, New Yorker, NPR… and it got its own Wikipedia article. Some day everyone is going to figure out that all I do is take screenshots!
I graduated from college
I’m in New York for a week and I only brought one tote bag. I feel like a minimalist; I feel like Johnny Appleseed carrying around his little behind-the-shoulder knapsack on a stick thing; I feel so free
This reminds me of a page in Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire about how the catchphrase “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” sprung up in the late 1800s as temperance-associated agribusiness propaganda. At the time, temperance activists would literally chop down apple trees to combat the evils of drinking and were keen on shifting public perception of apples from hard cider to health food
I’m in a coffee shop sitting next to a really cute group of friends and suddenly I’m so lonely I would join a pack of stray dogs. Reply to this email with your mid-day musings or favorite links or current clipboard! Or just say hi!