This week’s Five Things…

1. The art and science of advanced bubble making

2. Alex Hern (The Guardian's UK technology editor) writes one of my favourite newsletters. His recent post on statues and history is a good read: “Statues don't create history, and they barely represent it.”

3. A great episode of Talking Politics on US policing and the practicalities of defunding the police. Talking Politics is consistently excellent.

4. Ever wondered what a scallop looks like when it swims? Wonder no more.

5. A fun collection of hand-cranked machines by LA-based artist Federico Tobon.

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This week’s Five Things…

1. Where's Wally? in the age of social distancing

2. I very much agree with this graph and Tim Urban's follow up tweet: "every day I've become more knowledgeable, more aware of my previous misconceptions and biases, and less opinionated as the true complexity of all this is revealed."

3. An amazing collection of photos of Lake Baikal: "as ferocious winds and cycles of melting and refreezing build and sculpt works of structural beauty—stones supported on wind-worn pedestals, undulating surface ice, encrusted beaches, crazy icicles, frozen methane bubbles, and more"

4. Following on from Five Things #196 I have another episode of the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast to recommend. This one is about building a digital society that works for everyone.

5. Musical genres ordered by overall positivity or negativity. There are some entirely predictable rankings but also a good number of surprises!

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This week’s Five Things…

1. "A bloody rocket, landing itself, on a moving ship in the middle of the bloody ocean! Insane." That was my reaction too — Space X rocket landing

2. An interesting episode of the Exponential View podcast on building better cities — Building Better Cities After Covid-19

3. The best Rube Goldberg Machine you'll ever see — The Swish Machine: 70 Step Basketball Trickshot

4. Who'd have thought penguins were such big art fans? — https://www.insider.com/penguins-visit-art-museum-for-the-day-2020-5

5. A handy iOS app for musicians and anyone learning an instrument. Perfect Tempo allows you to change the tempo or loop sections of any song in Apple Music. — Perfect Tempo

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This week’s Five Things…

1. I've just got back into listening to Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd's podcast Reasons To Be Cheerful. I particularly enjoyed these two recent episodes — People Are Good / A Mission For Sortition

2. Who'd have thought a 25 minute video of someone solving a seemingly unsolvable sudoku would be this entertaining (I thoroughly enjoyed writing that sentence) — Solving the “The Miracle Sudoku”

3. I did not know this was a thing: "A calendar house is a house that symbolically contains architectural elements in quantities that represent the respective numbers of days in a year, weeks in a year, months in a year and days in a week." — Calendar house wikipedia entry / Twitter thread of calendar buildings

4. We watched two great films this week. I recommend them both — The Two Popes / I, Tonya

5. I've shared this before. One of my favourite albums of 2019 — Miss Universe by Nilüfer Yanya

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This week’s Five Things…

1. “An enormous aquarium with perpetually crashing waves has popped up amidst an urban landscape in South Korea, but don’t expect to hear the water sloshing around if you walk by . . . the elevated tank is actually a massive anamorphic illusion.” Very cool — A Massive Wave Crashes in a Seoul Aquarium as Part of the World’s Largest Anamorphic Illusion

2. Need to know how big a thing is? This clever website will show you the size of an object in augmented reality. Clever! — Visualise Dimensions in AR

3. I loved last week's free National Theatre Live performance. It's showing until Thursday — Official Barber Shop Chronicles by Inua Ellams

4. I didn't want this book to end — All the Light We Cannot See

5. That's some funky music and Nate Smith is one funky drummer — Nate Smith is the Ace of Aces

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