Articles
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How I Reverse Engineered Google Docs
James Somers explains how he dug into Google Docs revision data to replay any document keystroke by keystroke, and shows…
How I Take Math Lecture Notes with LaTeX and Vim
A famous write-up on typing live mathematics lecture notes in LaTeX using Vim snippets, with animated demos of how fast…
How I'm (re)learning math as an adult
A reflective post on passing 100 days of daily math practice, covering the resources, routines and mindset that helped o…
How Intelligent Are Cats?
A long essay from the sprawling Messybeast cat archive on how cats think, learn and solve problems, and why they do not…
How Jerry Pournelle Got Kicked Off the ARPANET
A short, funny piece of early internet lore about how a science fiction author managed to get himself banned from the AR…
How Kerala Got Rich
An Aeon essay asking how Kerala went from one of India's poorest states fifty years ago to one of its richest, and what…
beckmw.wordpress.com
Education
How Long Is the Average Dissertation?
A grad student scrapes university records to chart how long dissertations run in each academic field, from compact math…
How Lossless Data Compression Works
A Quanta Magazine story on how one student's wish to skip a final exam led to Huffman coding, the algorithm that shrinks…
How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
Paleoanthropologist John Hawks looks at a Reddit post of an ancient jaw fossil spotted in travertine tile and explains h…
How Much Does it Cost to Climb Everest?
A veteran mountaineer breaks down what an Everest expedition really costs, from permits, oxygen and Sherpa support to ge…
How Much Would It Cost To Build The Death Star?
A playful back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much steel the Death Star would need and what it would cost, concludin…
How My Images Are Dithered
A personal-site walkthrough of how the author turns photos into crunchy dithered images for the web, with before-and-aft…
advaitsarkar.wordpress.com
Gaming
How My Online Gaming Addiction Saved My Ph.D.
A researcher recounts how obsessing over Cookie Clicker taught him lessons about interaction design and led to a doctora…
How New York Is Zoning Out the Human-Scale City
Roberta Brandes Gratz argues that New York's zoning rules favor big towers over the small-scale streets Jane Jacobs cham…
How Passive Radar Works
An illustrated explainer of passive radar, which detects aircraft by listening to reflections of existing FM and TV broa…
How People Actually Lie With Charts
A research write-up showing that most misleading charts shared online are not doctored axes but correct graphs used to s…
How Pitfall Builds its World
An approachable deep-dive into how the Atari 2600 game Pitfall squeezed 255 jungle screens into a few kilobytes using a…
How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
A reverse-engineering deep dive into how the 1994 game Pizza Tycoon moved dozens of cars around its city on tiny hardwar…
How Samba Was Written
Andrew Tridgell's famous 2003 account of reverse engineering a proprietary network protocol, told with a witty analogy a…
How Serious Sam Handled Masses of Enemies on 56k Modems
An analysis of the Serious Engine 1 source code explaining how Croteam synchronized hundreds of enemies over slow dial-u…
How Silica Gel Took Over the World
The surprising story of the little silica gel packets in packaged goods: their wartime origins, chemistry and how they e…
How Slide Rules Work
An illustrated explanation of how the logarithmic scales on a slide rule turn multiplication into addition, with diagram…
How the Soviet Circus Blended Art and Ideology
An illustrated essay on how the nationalised Soviet circus became an ideological tool, from training schools and circus…
How the Soviets Put a Lander on Venus
How Soviet engineers, after repeated failures, built Venera probes tough enough to survive crushing pressure and furnace…
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