Shardul’s guide to the web
Typography
- Latin
- Text for Proofing Fonts – A farewell to The Quick Brown Fox by Jonathan Hoefler, Hoefler&Co.
- Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces by Erik Demaine et al.
- CSS: em, px, pt, cm, in… by Bert Bos, W3C
- The Equilateral Triangle of a Perfect Paragraph (“A web typography learning game”) by Matej Latin
- Butterick’s Practical Typography, online textbook
- Devanagari
- A New Font Based On Pu. La. Deshpande’s Handwriting by Kimya Gandhi, Mota Italic, Jun 12, 2020. News coverage: Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Punekar News, Times of India.
- Design of a Handwritten Devanagari Typeface by Kimya Gandhi
- Designing Devanagari Typefaces, Design with FontForge
- Devanagari – the makings of a national character by Karthik Malli, Typotheque
- EkType, Indic type foundry
- Matra Type, Pooja Saxena’s Indic typography work
- LaTeX
- DeTeXify, find the LaTeX command for a handwritten symbol
- The LaTeX WikiBook
- The LaTeX Font Catalogue
Math (and other) programs
- MathILy (and MathILy-Er), an enriching and very fun math camp; the same people run an REU-style program called MathILy-EST
- SPARC, the Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition
- Panini Linguistics Olympiad, linguistics contest for Indian high schoolers, feeding into the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL)
- Monsoon Math Camp, an Indian math camp for high schoolers
- Euler Circle, math circle in the SF Bay Area
- Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana, math circle and other math activities in Pune, India
- The Recurse Center, “a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers”
- MIT Educational Studies Program, educational programs for Boston-area middle- and high-schoolers
Language and linguistics
- Language Log, linguistics blog
- IPA keyboard
- IPA chart with sounds
- Khandbahale, online Indian multilingual dictionary
- Webster’s 1913, digitized and fully searchable version of Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, ed. Noah Porter, pub. C. & G. Merriam Co., Springfield, MA, 1913; “[c]onnoisseur’s reference to American English — a dictionary for writers and wordsmiths”
- Pink Trombone, interactive sound-producing model of the vocal cavity
- Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, fully searchable; Marathi ones are quite good (I haven’t used any others)
- learnsanskrit.cc, online Sanskrit dictionary
- Panini Linguistics Olympiad, linguistics contest for Indian high schoolers
- Different possibilities to write words with voice by Tran Quang Hai
Webcomics
- Questionable Content (no, it’s not NSFW) sitcom-style but with sentient robots
- Wondermark, absurd humor with Victorian visuals
- Strong Female Protagonist, superheroes and supervillains and moral dilemmas (the protagonist is a female who is strong)
- Subnormality, extremely detailed artwork with often deep social commentary, not your typical comic
- The Perry Bible Fellowship, charming art and offbeat punchlines
- xkcd, very nerdy
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, also nerdy and often dark
Webserials
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR) by Eliezer Yudkowsky. The only fanfic of any kind that I’ve ever liked. ‘What if Harry Potter was a rationalist?’
- Worm and Pact, two webserials by wildly successful debutant Internet author ‘wildbow’. The premise of Worm is superpowers in a very imperfect, human world, from city blocks to planetary politics; the premise of Pact is dealings with the supernatural, who have a polity of their own.
- UNSONG: ‘What if Kabbalistic Judaism were true, in a power-hungry capitalist world?’ By Scott Alexander, roughly in the genre of rational fiction, very engaging.
- What football will look like in the future – 17776, football but also science fiction.
- SCP Foundation, a sprawling, wiki-style collection of stories set in a universe with mysterious supernatural artifacts ‘secured, contained, and protected’ by the Foundation.
Newsletters/blogs I “read”
- The Browser
- Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok)
- Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander)
- The Baffler
- Aeon and Psyche
- EFFector
- Free Software Supporter
- MIT Technology Review
- MIT Weekly
- Experimental History (Adam Mastroianni)
- Escaping Flatland (Henrik Karlsson)
- The Map is Mostly Water (Simon Sarris)
- James Somers
- On Words and Up Words (Jack Shepherd)
- Monomythical (Nadia Asparouhova)
- Hillel Wayne
- Shady Characters (Keith Houston)
- I Spy with my Typographic Eye (Pooja Saxena)
Music
- Rajan Parrikar’s Music Archive is both a curated archive of thousands of rare, old, Hindustani classical music recordings, and a large collection of artful blog posts about Hindustani classical music from a seasoned connoiseur.
- SwarGanga has handy tools to search for raags or bandishes by their notes.
- Aathavanitli Gani has a huge collection of lyrics and metadata about Marathi songs.
- The Darbar Festival YouTube channel has high-quality recordings of modern classical artists.
- Rahul Deshpande has an audioblog about Hindustani classical music: facts, opinions, and stories interspersed with short vocal demonstrations. (This used to be on his now-defunct website.)
- Renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner
- Ah, yes, jazz
- Credit card machines
- Ah, yes, rock (listen until at least 1:18 for the full experience)
- Renditions of Pachelbel’s Canon in D
Inspirations
Far from a complete list…
- Lockhart’s Lament, a cogent piece about mathematics education
- Bret Victor, purveyor of impossible dreams
- The Little Prince by Antoine de St. Exupéry