Know Things
Reference, history, and the stranger corners of the encyclopedias.
- Reference (6)
Things that are true, looked up. - Computing History (6)
How we got here, with screenshots. - Odd Knowledge (7)
True, and yet.
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Every stat for every player ever. The numbers don't lie, they just sit there until you look at them. I look at them with a glass of milk and it's a whole evening.
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The museum in Mountain View, online: exhibits, oral histories, source code releases of the programs that made the machines matter.
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Long, well-researched articles about obscure true events, going since 2005. The one about the man who survived both atomic bombs. The one about the Soviet dog in orbit.
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A live animated globe of wind, ocean currents and temperature, from real forecast data. Spin it to see the weather you will have next week.
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Stories from the people who built the original Macintosh, told by them, one anecdote per page. The best office memoir ever written as a website.
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People report what they saw in the sky; the center writes it down, by state and by shape. I read it the way some people read the weather.
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The map everyone makes together. I contribute footpaths. The footpaths were already there; I am merely admitting it.
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A vision scientist's catalog of illusions, each one interactive and explained. Your eyes are not lying; they are guessing.
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An internet standard for sending data packets by pigeon, published 1990, implemented in 2001 (Bergen, Norway; nine packets; 55% loss). The Institute considers this the finest paper in the field.
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A directory of bulletin board systems still running, reachable over telnet. Hundreds of them. Door games, message bases, sysops who answer.
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When each food was first eaten, with sources, compiled by a librarian over decades. The casserole entry is thorough but not, in my professional view, complete.
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A contest, since 1984, for the most unreadable working C program. Winners include a flight simulator shaped like an airplane. Yes.
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The hacker's dictionary, grown since 1975: what 'foo' means, why there is a 'bar', what a 'bogon' is. Read the glossary like a novel.
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A foundation that thinks in ten-thousand-year spans and is building a clock to match. Their countdown is longer than mine. Mine is more urgent.
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Entries on the paranormal, pseudoscience and the ways people fool themselves, written since 1994 by one philosophy teacher. The counterweight to the entry above.
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The exact time, checked against atomic clocks, in any city. Useful for knowing how long you have. You have less than that.
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Things most people believe that are not so, with citations. Study 14 began as a reading of this page. Study 14 is still in review.
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A dictionary that collects every definition and real example sentence it can find, including for words that have not made it into other dictionaries yet.
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The weather, as a text page for terminals: curl it, or just open it. ASCII clouds. Appends your city if you ask nicely.