I decided to write this episode after I found out about emoji hacking and thought it might make a good story for my Patreon series, Found in the Margins (stay tuned for that to be the topic of the next Margins episode). It was just so strange. It got me
I came across the Voder while looking into encryption and messaging tools used during WWII. I had been working on Tidal Forces and a series of Wikipedia rabbit holes and subsequent Google searches landed me on this photo from the 1939 World's Fair: I could not get the
I used to run the library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and while I was there I had the chance to stumble across so many stories about space and astronomy that sometimes it's hard to not just make every episode be in that narrow channel.
Camera Traps, Waiting, and Seeing I think it's a very common frustration to wave your hand under a soap dispenser and have nothing happen. The little sensor struggles to recognize you and do its job. This episode started for me at that soap dispenser while I was delayed
I swim in open water. I used to swim in the ocean all the time, but for the last two years it's been mostly lakes. Even with this shift though I never deleted the app on my phone that tells me the tides and the phase of the
I had planned to have more to share here before getting into what didn't make it, and to share it sooner, but this week my writing time got cut short. I got bitten by a dog and ended up in the ER, and spent the week before that
When I started this show, I knew I wanted "internet history" to be part of it. But what goes in that category isn't always obvious. I often get this feeling like the more I learn about something, the less confident I am in my understanding of
For about a week, I was utterly convinced I was going to ruin this episode. After a stretch of stories that felt heavy and often tragic, I really wanted to write about something else. On my list, I had "MIDI" and I thought it fit the bill. To
This episode started because I wanted to know where the microchip manufacturing process actually begins. I had been watching Instagram reels where people were putting small electronics components under microscopes and I got curious about how we make things that small. The answer I got was that we start by
I had all of these CDs stuck to my bedroom wall when I was a kid. I do not remember asking for them. They were just there. Shiny and everywhere. I remember getting them in the mail, and I know I once saw a kid try to melt one with