Roadmap

One of the best things about the internet in the late 2000s (that got me hooked on it) was how the content was raw, unpolished but yet crazy and unique. I somehow, find the current state of the internet to be dull (and too materialistic). This series is my humble attempt to manually curate a network (a 'roadmap') with interesting content from the internet over the years, along with my own commentary as needed. This will hopefully serve as a compass to those who wish to navigate its treacherous seas.

* Please report any broken links in the comments. Post submissions welcome. Thanks!

Physics and Mathematics

  1. Visualizing standing waves in a microwave  
  2. A note on what makes solutions discretized?
  3. CYMATICS: Science Vs. Music - Nigel Stanford 
  4. The humanity of calculus | Jim Fowler | TEDxColumbus 
  5. The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation 
  6. Water is Diamagnetic: A simple experiment  
  7. Tangential and radial components of acceleration using complex numbers 
  8. A Smoking Revelation 
  9. On the zeroth law of thermodynamics 
  10. Powers of ten 
  11. Optics 
    1. Diffraction Grating 
    2. A classy refraction gif  
    3. Total Internal Reflection with a laser and a wine glass 
    4. Demonstrating Ray Diagrams 
  12. Astronomy
    1.  How to use the hubble legacy archive (HLA) - 101  
    2. Communicating and downloading data from the James Webb Space Telescope
    3. Spiral Galaxy Rotation Curve Builder 
    4. A rising Orion on a cold December night  
    5. Shape of Earth is an oblate spheroid 
    6. Stars
      1. Sunspots and the butterfly diagram
      2. Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. 
      3. Some of the things binary stars do... 

 

Biology

  1. The Secret Social Life of Plants
  2. The Asteroid That Made a Mouse Into a Man

 

Code and Technology

  1. Python
    1. matplotlib's add_axes and windows lagscreen 
    2.  It is ridiculously easy to generate any audio wave signal in Python
    3.  Data visualization using grammar of graphics and plotnine 
    4.  Python decorator: Example 1 
    5.  globals() and creating 100 global variables at once  
    6. Zotero to Tiddlywiki5 
    7. svglue: Templating using inkscape and python 
    8. beautifyPlot: A simple matplotlib wrapper to avoid writing ‘plt.’ statements on many lines 
  2. Linux
    1. Setting default applications in Ubuntu  
    2. Exploring /dev/input directory
    3. Configuring XP-Pen drivers on Linux   
    4. gnuplot: Tips and tricks    
    5. .desktop files on Ubuntu 
  3. Javascript  
    1. Text Fragments   
  4. Others
    1. Disabling YouTube shorts
    2. The New York Times v/s OpenAI, Microsoft lawsuit  
    3. Giving up on PDF annotations 

Engineering

  1. Explorations in Photoelasticity 
  2. Fluid Mechanics
    1. Visualizations
      1. Flow Galleria (#1): Oil film viewed using Polarizing Filters 
      2. Flow Galleria (#4): Hot water under Thermal camera 
      3. Flow Galleria (#5): Thermal mixing of cold Milk with hot water  
      4. Flow Galleria (#6): Magic of a bright striped background
  3. 3.5mm headphone jack
    1. Preparing a headphone jack for hacking
    2. Every speaker is also a microphone
    3. The Anatomy of a headphone jack
    4. How does a computer know that you have plugged in a jack ?
    5. Testing basic headphone jack functions (Android)
    6. Don’t do this! – Headphone jack
    7. Speaker Impedance and the Headphone jack
    8. The Ultimate Guide to using LEDs with headphone jack
    9. Vibration motor meets the headphone jack
    10. LiFi using solar panel and headphone jack
    11. LiFi using IR sensor, Arduino and headphone jack
    12. Really simple “mobile phone detector” using headphone jack
    13. Lightning detector with nothing more than a simple headphone jack
    14. Headphone jack meets a spark gap
    15. Detect switching ON/OFF of Tube-light with a simple headphone jack
    16. Cigarette Lighter spark detection using headphone jack
    17. Transmitting in the RF range using the headphone jack
    18. Listening to radio signals from a remote control car using a headphone jack
    19. Obstacle detector “with audible feedback” using headphone jack, IR sensor and 555 timer
    20. Wireless Drawdio and Body Coupled Communciation using the headphone jack 
       

Others

  1. Dotted lines on blackboard with chalk | 1000 fps
  2. Burning matches with laser | 1000fps 
  3. Plasma globe | 4k 
  4. S curve growth of technology 
  5. Devaluation of information in a consumer lifestyle society   
  6. chatGPT and research abstracts 
  7. The leap year complication 
  8. Academia
    1. Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty 
    2. Richard Feynman’s Letter on What Problems to Solve
    3.  Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
    4. When universities are theme parks   
    5. Chaos in the brickyard 

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