Today’s the day: One year of writing an email every week.

This started out as a collection of interesting links, prefaced with an essay on a certain topic. But this time, I’m going to try something a bit different: Instead of text followed by a few links, you’ll get less text on one topic, but more for each link. And since this newsletter just turned one, you’ll also get some interesting facts and figures of one year Squid Links.

Two weeks ago, I linked a guy forging a knife out of some aluminium foil. Well, did you know you could also make sharp knives out of wood and pasta? No, really: The sharpest pasta kitchen knife in the world (YouTube).

This newsletter enjoys an average open rate of 75% — much higher than the industry average of 18% (or so Mailchimp tells me). Thanks!

The female hormonal contraceptive pill was approved by the FDA in 1960, and promptly revolutionized women’s sex lives. But more than half a century later, the only contraceptives available to men are basically condoms or a vasectomy. Where’s the male pill?

Squid Links #17 enjoys the distinction of having two of the most-clicked links (so far): A Google Street View tour of the ISS on Google Maps, and What football will look like in the future, one of the weirdest, but still mesmerizing stories you can find on the internet (just keep scrolling).

Many large institutions use “security questions” to allow users to recover their accounts if someone loses their password. The problem is that the answers to such questions aren’t really secret — especially if people just post the answers on social media: Don’t Give Away Historic Details About Yourself.

Third and fourth most clicked links? That distinction goes to Formula 1 e-sports now more exciting than the real thing—and that’s a problem in issue #34, and 52 things I learned in 2017 in issue #43.

Meet Doris Jones, a 90-year-old armchair space archaeologist. She works by spotting potential archeological sites using satellite imagery.

The most popular section on average is the unicorn chaser.

The Myth of the Boy Genius. Giving millions of investment to the Marks, Travises, and Jacks of the world so they can “move fast and break things” (and laws) hurts our society, as they lack maturity and empathy. Yet it continues to happen, since western society seems to value youth over everything.

A quine is a program that prints out the source code for itself. For example, this Ruby program will print itself if you run it: eval s="print 'eval s=';p s". An ouroboros quine is one extends this concept to multiple languages that print out the source codes for each other. And then there’s this: An uroboros quine with 100+ programming languages.

📖 Weekly Longread 📚

Printing has always been fraught with problems. Dry ink cartridges, expensive toner, and paper jams. And the latter won’t go away: Why Paper Jams Persist (~16m reading time).

🦄 Unicorn Chaser 🦄

Ben Folds Composes a Song LIVE for Orchestra In Only 10 Minutes (YouTube)