The Monday 6 – October 4, 2021

Happy Monday and happy October, friend.

2022 is only 89 days away. 🤯

Here are the 6 for this week:

I’m of the personal belief that mitigating the effects of climate change will take small, incremental efforts across broad swaths of society.

Researchers from Purdue University created something exactly in this direction:

Creating really white paint isn’t exactly sexy, but if it can 100% passively cool buildings, that’s the sort of progress that can make a difference at scale. +1 to this!

Did you know much of the internet is possible because of oceans-long, undersea physical cables connecting continents? This network of cables has exploded in the past decade, and you can visualize them with this interactive website.

These are incomprehensibly long and are the backbone of the internet as we know it.

And check out this Vox explainer video to learn more about these cables.

I’ve been trying out the app Refind for a few weeks now and recommend it for those looking to get a handful of high-signal articles to read every day.

It’s a pretty straightforward app: It delivers the five most relevant links from around the web, with summaries & highlights.

As you read more, it learns your preferences, serving up more and more relevant content as time goes on. Give it a try!

On the National Mall in Washington, D.C., local artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg created a powerful display of over 670,000 white flags, symbolizing the 670,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States.

In an attempt to capture the magnitude and depth of the art installation, a National Geographic photographer created a composite image from over 4,800 individual images shot over the course of 2 days, in his continuing “day to night” series.

Here’s the timelapse of the composite image being captured.

And he’s the final composite. Click it below to see it in more detail.

In case you didn’t know, Gmail (by far the most-used email service in the world) has a nifty trick you can use to manage your inbox AND potentially provide some privacy benefits, although this last claim is more theoretical.

Say your email address is [email protected].

By simply adding a + symbol at the end of your username, you can add whatever you want (minus spaces or special characters) after it and still receive an email to that same inbox.

Example: [email protected] can become [email protected] and you’ll still receive the email just as you usually would.

Where this becomes truly useful is filtering: for example, if you want to bypass a soft paywall on a news site, you often need to give up your email address to do so. Give the publication [email protected] then create a filter to send all emails sent to [email protected] to the trash.

Although some services have caught on and won’t allow the + symbol to appear, this is also a helpful hack to sign up for free trials.

And from a privacy perspective, adding the additional characters often breaks the matching algorithms of email systems, making it more difficult to associate it directly with your email address. However, I wouldn’t rely on this tactic to truly hide your email address as it’s still visible before the + sign.

Finally, any periods in a Gmail address are wholly superfluous and don’t affect delivery at all. So even if you signed up as [email protected], you can tell people [email protected] (or vice versa) and it will still work just fine.

The blog post below dives in with a few more details/examples, but give it a try next time you’re giving your email address away!

Sometimes I think I’ve seen every trippy optical illusion. Nope!

That’s it for this week. If you found anything useful or fun, let me know! And if you have any suggestions, shoot them my way. 😊 See you next week!