There are 16,197 objects in low earth orbit at last count. All of these can be seen in Leo Labs' great visualisation of low earth orbit. The data visualisation can filter the objects by categories such as perigee, inclination, and country of origin, among others.
This week I watched My Octopus Teacher on Netflix. It's a narrated documentary by Craig Foster about bonding with an octopus in the ocean. The film is visually stunning and extremely heartwarming. If you are looking for a perspective reset and something as far away from the pandemic as possible, this is the film to watch.
You may have heard about the digital art NFT that sold for $69 million. NPR's The Indicator podcast has a good explainer episode on the sale of Beeple's Everyday Project which includes an interview with Beeple (aka Mike Winkelman).
Want to pass a few hours in the blink of an eye through shear frustration? Well today is your lucky day! :-p This regex crossword was created by Jimb Essler based on a puzzle written by Dan Gulotta for the 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt. I've unsuccessfully spent two late nights trying to solve this so far :-)
Intelivate published a useful list of eleven strategies for conflict management, including identifying and managing emotional triggers, deflecting emotional reactions, and using empathy and power of ownership statements.
Richard Peng and Santosh Vampala of Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new method of solving linear equations that is faster than matrix multiplication. Quanta magazine published an interesting article describing the new method, how it differs from standard matrix multiplication using coordinated random guessing, and how it can solve any sparse linear equation in n2.332 steps compared to the n2.372 of matrix multiplication.
El Pais published another set of informative Covid infection animations, this time illustrating how communial air extraction pipes in apartment buildings can facilitate the spread of Covid from different apartments in an air suction loop. Apartment buildings built prior to 1975 in Spain contain these communical air pipes in bathrooms.
This recent episode of NPR Shortwave is mind-blowing. As it turns out, the sperm race story of contraception that we all learn in school is not what happens in reality, and is littered with mysogonistic bias. The Shortwave team do a great job in this episode describing how the biological process actually works.