Matt Alldian

Four billion phones rely on the time zone database, a text file edited by just two people in their spare time.

The People Holding Up the Internet - incredible stories of individuals keeping the internet as we know it running - often without any payment. via kottke.org

If you prefer to source your own electrolytes instead buying LMNT, jot this down and grab a kitchen scale:

2,500 mg sodium chloride (for 1,000 mg sodium)

385 mg potassium chloride (for 200 mg potassium)

390 mg magnesium malate OR 265 mg di-magnesium malate (for 60 mg magnesium)

LMNT shares recipes for four flavors of their electrolytes.

As Iggy keeps talking about simple pleasures, Bourdain’s adam’s apple jumps. His eyes dart around as he asks his hero, “You’re the template for the rockstar. Other rock stars look to you to figure out ‘How should I behave?’ [...] Given that, what thrills you?”

Iggy smiles. “The nicest stuff right now, it’s really embarrassing,” he says, completely serene yet almost sheepish. “It’s being loved and actually appreciating the people that are giving that to me.”

Cailey Rizzo on meeting her hero.

BirdNET-Go listens on a mic and handles the classifier. Fugleramme polls its api, matches each species to an illustration, then packs them onto a page, and redraws only when the birds change

Fugleramme displays real-time detected birds on e-ink using 1800s illustrations.

The issue has even risen to the level of MAGA World. Last July, Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, sent a letter to Congress outlining the administration’s policy priorities for the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization bill. Tucked in the letter was a new concept called “the Freedom Car,” which Duffy described as Americans’ right to “drive disconnected and non-automated” vehicles. The proposal would ban the government from requiring that vehicles be equipped with automated driving systems or have the capability to transmit data wirelessly — which, to my knowledge, no one is trying to do.

Andrew J. Hawkins on automakers collecting and selling driver data.

Nearly all people in history existed with some integration with their neighbours and knowledge of the broader world. It’s shocking to learn of a group that lived on their own for 50,000 years, and sealed off from everyone else for the last 10,000, nearly completely divergent from the rest of humanity.

An overview of the book First Contact which documents 1930s discovery of one million isolated highland Papua New Guineans. Definitely reading this book.

New project! Sweather compares today's weather to yesterday at a glance.

It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.

But our lives today are a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same. It serves us, and honors them, to recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace.

Ordinary Abundance celebrates everyday miracles.

Maybe GDP per capita just has to hit a certain point before people even have time, attention and energy to think about new inventions that aren’t literally putting food on the table, a roof over your head, or a shirt on your back.

Jason Crawford asks why it took so long to invent the bicycle.

Far too many diseases are still untreatable. It’s painful to imagine gradually forgetting your children’s names, forgetting how to hold a conversation, how to recognize your own home, and eventually even how to swallow food, while your family watches someone they love disappear. But that’s the reality for over thirty million people with Alzheimer’s globally, and we have almost nothing to offer them. Part of the reason may be because the brain is so complex, or because it’s lined by the blood-brain barrier, a tightly sealed layer of cells which keeps out most pathogens and toxins, as well as most drugs. That makes it challenging to design a drug that can cross the barrier, reach the right cells, and do what it’s meant to do without any unexpected side effects.

A gorgeous WIP article on medical innovation. A good reminder that intelligence is rarely the bottleneck to progress.

Every dog license New York City has issued since 2014 — 819,323 license records, 34,663 distinct names. Search a name to see where it sits in the long tail, filter by ZIP code, and browse breed and name heatmaps. Counts are license records (dogs renewing across years appear more than once).

New project! NYC Dog Name Explorer shows licensed dog name popularity across the city. Inspiration for this from John Cook

We're breaking five stories today based on verifiable financial data which everyone missed for years.

Effort.News automates investigative journalism with five verified financial stories via marginalrevolution.com