Flipso @flipso

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? - Thomas Nagel’s classic essay on consciousness and subjective experience, arguing that some aspects of experience can’t be fully captured by objective physical description. (🔗 Link in Bio)

Texas city sells donated parkland for data center development - A 1999 land donation in Taylor, Texas, meant for parkland was later sold for $10 million to a data center developer, setting off a legal fight with nearby residents. The city says the project could b… (🔗 Link in Bio)

Why Britain’s most expensive house stands empty beside a homeless man’s porch - 2-8A Rutland Gate, once Britain’s most expensive house, has sat empty for years despite its 45 rooms, indoor pool and gold-plated fittings. On its porch, Anders Fernstedt has lived in… (🔗 Link in Bio)

Meet the Maker: Kate Alger - Kate Alger is an artist-printmaker and freelance tutor based in Surrey. She works across multiple printmaking techniques, often starting from photographs but making each piece by hand. Her work explores woodland scenes, animals, plant… (🔗 Link in Bio)

Who’s the Smartest Corvid? - An excerpt from Louis Lefebvre’s A Bird’s IQ, examining how crows, magpies, and ravens solve problems, use tools, and display surprising foraging tricks. (🔗 Link in Bio)

Sequoyah’s Cherokee Syllabary Changed Literacy Forever - Sequoyah’s syllabary, created from scratch in the early 19th century, gave Cherokee speakers a practical writing system that spread quickly after a public demonstration. It helped preserve language, support… (🔗 Link in Bio)

Organic foods are not healthier or pesticide-free - Organic farming still uses pesticides and generally does not produce more nutritious food than conventional farming. The article argues that “organic” is often marketed as a health and safety shortcut, but the l… (🔗 Link in Bio)

L'Affaire Siloxane - How antiperspirant fumes, wet wipes, and hair conditioner nearly contaminated the International Space Station's water supply—and forced NASA into a long, awkward cleanup. (🔗 Link in Bio)

Mercedes-Benz Media - Mercedes-Benz’s media portal for digital live PR, exclusive insights, and individual offers. (🔗 Link in Bio)

How JPL Keeps the 13-Year-Old Curiosity Rover Doing Science - Ingenious software and operational workarounds have kept Curiosity exploring Mars for 13 years, despite aging hardware, worn wheels, and dwindling power. (🔗 Link in Bio)

Spain’s astonishing cave paintings at Altamira - For tens of thousands of years, these Palaeolithic artworks lay hidden underground. A leading expert guides the writer through Altamira and other caves, where vivid bison, deer and handprints are still revealing ho… (🔗 Link in Bio)

The fascination of buying second-hand (and how to do it) - Erik Ostling reflects on why second-hand clothing is compelling, comparing it with bespoke, and sharing practical advice on where to hunt, what fabrics and construction details to look for, and how to jud… (🔗 Link in Bio)

The Really Big One - The Cascadia subduction zone could produce a magnitude 8.7–9.2 earthquake and tsunami, threatening the Pacific Northwest with one of the worst natural disasters in North American history. (🔗 Link in Bio)

How Movie Taste Changes With Age - Using MovieLens ratings, the piece finds that movie-watching volume declines with age, younger viewers skew toward horror, comedy, animation, and action, and older viewers lean more toward drama, war, and romance. It also shows… (🔗 Link in Bio)

I Hate (Most) Keyboard Fn Keys - A rant about keyboards that repurpose F1–F12 for awkward secondary functions, especially when the Fn lock resets unexpectedly and turns shortcuts like Alt+F4 into sleep instead of close. It contrasts that with better implementatio… (🔗 Link in Bio)

150 years of Japan, drawn in stations - Interactive map of Japan’s railway stations from 1872 to the present, showing each station by opening year. Play through time to see the network spread from the first line between Shimbashi and Yokohama to more than 9,000 m… (🔗 Link in Bio)

The Politics of the Playground - How playground design has changed over time—and what those changes reveal about shifting ideas of childhood, safety, risk, and play. (🔗 Link in Bio)

Insurers Aren’t the Main Villain in U.S. Health Care - Explains why private health insurers capture so much blame for high U.S. medical costs, arguing that most of the excess spending comes from providers rather than insurers and that insurer profits are relative… (🔗 Link in Bio)

More Molly Guards - A collection of accidental-prevention “molly guards” in hardware and software, from industrial machines and camera warnings to Finder, iPhone alarms, Chrome, and early iTunes. (🔗 Link in Bio)

How do you design a $30,000 electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks. - We tour Ford’s top-secret Electric Vehicle Development Center in California. (🔗 Link in Bio)