It’s not Friday, but if I’m going to write a coolstuff blog post for the end of the week, I may as well write one for the end of the year 🙂

The Nixie Tube Story: The Neon Display Tech That Engineers Can’t Quit [text, images, video] – a colleague of mine brought a Nixie tube clock in the office, so I looked into it, because it DOES look cool.

Chernobyl Dice – A quantum random number generator with a Cold War aesthetic [text, images] – going further in previous rabbit hole, a very cool “advanced DYI” project that generates random numbers from a weakly radioactive source and displays them on said Nixie tubes 🙂

darktable 3.0.0 [text] has been released last week. I’ve been using it for all my photography processing for the past few years, and I’m thoroughly impressed by what it can do and by the people behind it.

The Motions of Kayaking and Canoeing Recorded through Light Painting on Canadian Waterways [images] – what happens when you stick leds to kayak paddle? You get pretty pictures, that’s what happens.

We Learned to Write the Way We Talk [text] – I thoroughly enjoyed Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet this year, where she looks at Internet communication from a linguistics perspective – this article is a nice taste of what’s in the book, and an interesting view on writing styles.

Copperplate Study Session [text, images] – I’ve been playing with Copperplate calligraphy a bit last year, and it’s in my objectives for next year to master that, and I think this series of Reddit posts on the topic may just be what I was looking for 🙂

I’ve recently learnt about figurate numbers [text, images] by way of learning about heptagonal numbers [text, images] (via some middle school math homework), and I spent enough time on Wikipedia to warrant their entry in coolstuff 🙂

Quanta Magazine has run a few articles about what happened this year: The Year in Math and Computer Science [text], The Year in Biology [text] and The Year in Physics [text]. I had seen almost everything in the “math” article, so it was a nice trip down “memory lane” on things I thought were cool at the time (and a few that I had missed); the “biology” and “physics” ones were nice entry points to stuff I had mostly missed.

Woman Pushes The Limits And Creates Unbelievable Sculptures Out Of Gingerbread [text]- if the gingerbread xenomorph is not called Gigerbread, this would be a good reason to flip tables.

Swiss Police and Star Wars Christmasspot [short video] – I did giggle a lot at this video from Bern Kantonpolizei. It has stormtroopers.

My problem with metric recipes [short video] – the title of the video let me fear the most trollful content, but that would be selling Adam Ragusea short – it’s actually quite insightful, and he’s making great points about recipe translation.