Isn’t it sad when a site you periodically visit goes offline? I grew up in the 90s and 00s when sites were expected to randomly shut down without any notice. It is nothing new, but it’s always a little depressing.

When a big community like Geocities, one of the first places where users could create their own web pages for free, went offline in 2009 it didn’t really bother me. There were preclosure announcements, a closing day celebration, and proper postmortems made by bloggers and tech giants around the world. Also, big sites like these typically become stagnant over time and begin to stink up the Internet. It’s for the best when the creators/maintainers of such sites take out the trash.

“Imagine that you are floating comfortably above an alien planet observing the really insane species that lives there. We’ll call these beings Sheeple, because their incredible tendency to follow the herd even if it is running right off a cliff is quite similar to the behavior we see in sheep here on Earth. Almost everything an individual of this species does is heavily influenced by the Sheeple around it. Despite the potential for incredible intelligence, they rarely stop to evaluate why they are doing what they do each day.” - Mr. Money Mustache

There’s a quote that I’ve always remembered due to it’s ability to reduce something that’s almost unimaginable into something actually tangible. There was a recent discovery by NASA, via the Hubble telescope, that indicates there are 10 times more galaxies in our observable universe than previously thought. [1] This discovery made me immediately think of this quote.

In the current days of fast Internet speeds and extensive free content, it is very easy to entertain yourself and find exciting things to do. Yet, I see so many people who can’t find anything interesting to do online. Why are people so bored? I’m going to take a wild guess and say it probably has to do with how they are spending their time.

I was listening to Arthur Benjamin speak on Cara Santa Maria’s podcast “Talk Nerdy” about his passion for mathematics. [1] In it, he discusses a way to teach Algebra to students by first presenting them with a mathematical (mathemagical, if you will) trick. It goes like this: