The 46 Best Pens for 2025: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens | JetPens

Elk jaar opnieuw wil ik dan twintig van die dingen kopen.

We draw on years of testing to crown the best beginner fountain pen, best gel pen, best pen for note-taking, and more. Each recommendation includes links to related guides so that you can evaluate the competition for yourself.

Did Tintin Prevent World War II? | Goldwag’s Journal on Civilization

Een fijn onderwerp voor een hele althist-wereld, denk ik.

The first volume of The Adventures of Tintin–the controversial, maligned, and obscure Tintin in the Land of the Soviets–was published in 1929. The final book, Tintin and the Picaros, was published in 1976. Between those two bookends, our intrepid young Belgian reporter and his friends travel the length and breadth of the world, and become involved in every conceivable form of international intrigue. And yet, despite the fact that the series takes place in a version of 20th century Europe that is mostly identical to ours, at no point do our heroes ever experience the events of the Second World War. Given Hergé’s meticulous attention to detail and fascination with satirizing and commenting on contemporary politics, what can explain this? Is it a simple oversight–or is there a deeper story to be found here?

The Curious Gems of the River Thames – Atlas Obscura

ON THE BANKS OF THE River Thames, when the tide is low, a person walking along the shore can see all kinds of things. With a keen eye, you can spot blue-and-white shards of 19th-century pottery, delicate stems of 18th-century clay pipes, brass buttons from coats, and coins dating back to the Romans. And if you look in the right spot on a sunny day, you might see something special: the wink of tiny, dark red stones, shining like pomegranate seeds against the pebbles. If you see these, consider yourself lucky—you’ve found one of the river’s little-known treasures: a Thames garnet.

Life on a closed timelike curve – IOPscience

We study the internal dynamics of a hypothetical spaceship traveling on a close timelike curve in an axially symmetric Universe. We choose the curve so that the generator of evolution in proper time is the angular momentum. Using Wigner’s theorem, we prove that the energy levels internal to the spaceship must undergo spontaneous discretization. The level separation turns out to be finely tuned so that, after completing a roundtrip of the curve, all systems are back to their initial state. This implies, for example, that the memories of an observer inside the spaceship are necessarily erased by the end of the journey. More in general, if there is an increase in entropy, a Poincaré cycle will eventually reverse it by the end of the loop, forcing entropy to decrease back to its initial value. We show that such decrease in entropy is in agreement with the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. The non-existence of time-travel paradoxes follows as a rigorous corollary of our analysis.

Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth – The New York Times

Ik wist niet eens dat ze “overlooked” was. Haar atlassen zijn een deel van mijn jeugd.

She was a novice cartographer who landed a dream assignment: to create an atlas of the setting of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

Mercator: Extreme

An interactive playground to explore the extreme distortions of the Mercator projection. Set any point on Earth as the new North Pole. Warp the map in real-time. See the world in a whole new way.

417-Megapixel Andromeda Galaxy Panorama Took Over a Decade to Make | PetaPixel

The Hubble Space Telescope’s latest image is a 417-megapixel panorama of the Andromeda galaxy. It took over a decade to create.

The British Micro Behemoth – by Bradford Morgan White

In 1961, at just 21 years old, Sinclair started his first formally organised company, Sinclair Radionics. He’s reported to have been a rather irascible boss, but he didn’t hold grudges often. Despite his temper and occasional micromanagement, his employees reportedly had some fun working for him. A year after founding, his company released the Sinclair Micro-Amplifier.

Men lose half their emotional support networks between 30 and 90, decades-long study finds

Emotional support networks among men shrink by 50% between the ages of 30 and 90, reflecting an average decrease from two to one emotional support providers, according to research published in Psychology & Aging.

Gnosticism – Cathars and Catharism: Historical Fact or a Delusion of the Inquisition?

Eén van de vele dingen waar we tegenwoordig meer over weten dan we zelfs een paar jaar geleden dachten dat we het allemaal wel wisten.

The Cathars represent a Gnostic survival into the Christian Middle Ages. They were dualists who argued for an egalitarian church founded on angelic purity, apostolic poverty, and through a single sacrament sought to release the soul from it’s physical prison. The Catholic Church saw them a utterly heretical and sought to systematically destroy their popular strongholds in southern France through 20 years of Crusader Violence and Inquisition. There’s only one problem with this story: recent, maverick scholarship has forcefully argued that the Cathars and Catharism, quite simply, never existed at all.

The Old Family Photos Project: Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep | by Esther Schindler | Medium

Ultimately, we all take family photos to help ourselves remember the moments we want to recall forever. Nothing suggests that those memories must last beyond our own lifetimes. But if you want your children’s children to recall who you are-and-were, these tips might help you achieve that.