Category Archives: Around the World

It’s still one wheel per person

Ed Pratt: 1000km on a Tandem Bicycle! | Ep.1 | Cycling England’s Hilliest Coastline. (YouTube, 25:22min) “In this episode my girlfriend Aishola and I travel to the UK to begin preparations for a new two wheeled cycling adventure…”

I wrote about Ed’s unicycle world tour before, and he has since released the last video series of his world tour: Unicycling Across America Ep.1 // 6000km Cycle Through The USA.

During the lockdowns I used his videos as a way to travel around the world in my imagination while it was impossible to do so in real life, and I re-watched the whole series via this handy playlist of all 131 episodes.

9/11 twenty years on

Of course this is all over the news, so I’ll share just a few links.

Fray: Missing Pieces, which was published just a few days after the attacks.

“On September 11, 2001, an unthinkable act of terrorism occurred in New York City and Washington DC. It left holes in our lives, holes in the skyline, holes in our spirit. These are some of the stories of those who were there. These are our missing pieces.”

History: 102 Minutes That Changed America. (YouTube, 1 hour 36 minutes)

“History’s Emmy® Award-winning, and critically acclaimed documentary chronicled the terror of 9/11 in real-time. It is a minute by minute account of the catastrophe unfolding, using footage from numerous sources, including personal camcorder footage, police and fire department recordings, and in-the-moment commentary from first responders and witnesses. This anniversary edition includes interviews and perspectives from those featured in the film, and people who can speak to the events that followed the attack.”

Anil Dash: Twenty is Myth.

“Every year, for twenty years now, I’ve written an observance of this day. Sometimes it’s for myself, sometimes it’s for the small cohort of folks who’ve checked back in with me on this day every year since then, a group which has shrunk a bit over the years. But this was the first year I thought, “maybe I shouldn’t do this anymore”. Because the events of that day are not remembered in society, or honored by our culture, in a way that resembles the feelings that I, and so many others, had in the moment. It’s degenerated fully into myth, some parts good, most of it pretty awful, and even taking part in the observances feels like amplifying this larger, destructive myth that’s been constructed.

It’s impossible to accurately represent the grief, the confusion, the absurdity of that day, let alone the months that followed.”

Please get vaccinated if you can.

The Washington Post: They rejected coronavirus shots in vaccine-rich countries. In the hospital, they changed their minds.

““I should have gotten the damn vaccine,“ 39-year-old Micheal Freedy of Las Vegas texted his fiancee, Jessica DuPreez, shortly before he died of the coronavirus, which put him in an intensive care unit last month.

Freedy was not opposed to vaccination, DuPreez told The Washington Post this week. But like many Americans who have yet to get their shots, the father of five wanted to wait and learn more about how people reacted to the vaccines before he got inoculated.

“I would take a bad reaction to the vaccine over having to bury my husband. I would take that any day,“ Freedy’s fiancee, who is now an avid campaigner for people to get vaccinated, told CNN.”

More than you ever thought you wanted to know about submarines

Smarter Every Day: Nuclear Submarine Deep Dive is a series of nine videos that Destin Sandlin filmed while aboard a US Navy Nuclear Submarine in the Arctic (ICEX 2020) and released over the course of a year. The last one came out yesterday. They’re all worth watching!

Here are the episodes:

  1. How I Boarded a US Navy Nuclear Submarine in the Arctic (ICEX 2020) (Episode 237, 34:39min, June 14, 2020)
  2. Boarding a US Navy Nuclear Submarine in the Arctic – Smarter Every Day 240 (Episode 240, 29:24min, July 26 , 2020)
  3. Crawling Down A Torpedo Tube -US Navy Nuclear Submarine (Episode 241, 20:32min, August 16, 2020)
  4. How to Fight Fire or Flooding on a Nuclear Submarine (Episode 244, 27:00min, October 4, 2020)
  5. How to Make Pizza on a Submarine (Episode 246, 16:28min, November 1, 2020)
  6. How Sonar Works (Submarine Shadow Zone) (Episode 249, 26:41min, December 26, 2020)
  7. How Do Nuclear Submarines Make Oxygen? (Episode 251, 29:33min, February 21, 2021)
  8. How to Poop on a Nuclear Submarine (Episode 256, 23:24min, May 9, 2021)
  9. How to Surface a Submarine in the Arctic Ocean (Episode 260, 42:01min, July 30, 2021)