I’ve long been a huge fan of The Great Courses. These are the best university courses on all manner of diverse subjects, taught by the best university professors, recorded for home consumption. Years ago the courses started out as very expensive audio sets on cassette tape (I audited many courses while commuting), then migrated to CDs, then to audible files, and now are on video. All along, they were premium priced, if not a bit over-priced, but I found them to be worth it without exception. There’s a lot of history and science. I have enjoyed and benefited from too many courses to list, including a memorable one of 48 lectures on Ancient Egypt by Bob Brier, and another on appreciating classical music by Robert Greenberg. Now, yeah!, select courses are available free on Amazon Prime video. A search on Amazon will bring up all the current Great Courses. But to my frustration, courses will be free for limited times and then revert to paid episodes. For instance the really tremendous course on the Ancient Civilizations of North America is free now. It methodically describes the vast and sophisticated civilizations that existed in my backyard, which I was not taught about. But it will only be available until January 31, 2021, so watch now. (Or I could subscribe to the new Great Courses channel on Amazon for $8/month.) So far I’ve happy to watch the excellent ones that come up free each month. — KK

I was inspired, surprised, and entertained by Tom Whitwell’s list of 52 things he learned in 2019. He now has a similar list for 2020. Here are some of my favorites. — MF

• All of the ten best-selling books of the last decade had female protagonists. [Tyler Cowen]

• When Ibn Battuta visited China in 1345, facial recognition was already in use. All visiting foreigners had their portraits discretely painted and posted on the walls of the bazaar. “If a stranger commits any offence… they send his portrait far and wide.” [Ibn Battuta]

• Money makes people happier than psychotherapy. [Johannes Haushofer & co]

• In just eight years, the British National Grid went from being 40% coal powered to 2% coal powered. [Simon Evans]

• Developing and launching the iPod in 2001 took just 41 weeks, from the very first meeting (no team, no prototype, no design) to iPods shipping to customers. [Patrick Collison]

• In Warsaw’s Gruba Kaśka water plant there are eight clams with sensors attached to their shells. If the clams close because they don’t like the taste of the water, the city’s supply is automatically shut off. [Judita K]

• A micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death. Just being alive is about 24 micromorts per day, skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump. [Matt Webb]

I’ve been listening to Japanese stories on Beelinguapp, a smartphone app that reads stories in 14 different languages. I set the speed at 50% so I can read along as a native speaker tells a simple story. Beelinguapp is free for iPhone and Android, and you can get the premium version (which has more stories and other useful features) for $40. — MF

Journey to the Microcosm is a YouTube channel that uses high quality microscopic video to explore lifeforms invisible to the naked eye. The narration includes interesting stories and histories, too. — MF

Google’s Ngram is a nifty tool for researching historical word use, such as the first use of a word/phrase, or how its popularity changes over time. Ngram is 10 years old, but it got a significant upgrade last year so now it includes a lot more old books. I use Ngram to visualize — to a first approximation — the relative importance of a concept over time. Its cool interface lets me click on a date range, and then it will show me excerpts from the historical books from that date with that word or phrase. — KK

Kiddle.co is an illustrated, large-font search engine designed specifically for kids . It’s powered by Google Safe Search so only family-friendly results are returned. If any “bad” words are entered you get an “Oops, try again!” I tried to break it by searching for whatever “adult” words I could think of. “Death” told me to try again, “Dying” directed me to a Death facts for kids page, which is interesting. I don’t have a kid, but if I did this would be their homepage. — CD

Asknature.org is a free online tool where you can search thousands of nature’s solutions to various challenges. Like how a decentralized society helps ants to recover from a food shortage or how maple tree seeds twirl in a tornado-like vortex to increase the reach of where their seeds are planted. You can also discover nature-inspired ideas like this design for a thermos inspired by polar bear fur. Just ten minutes a day exploring this website will get you thinking differently. — CD

I like having The Measure of Things handy for those really random moments when I want to visualize the size of something, like how big or how much, in units I might understand better. For example 4 fluid ounces is about three-fourths as big as a tennis ball, and 500,000 acres is 1.075 times bigger than the size of Maui. — CD

Two Minute Papers is a YouTube channel featuring short videos (sometimes 5 minutes long) created by a professor who reviews new research papers in visual programming, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer graphics, simulations, and other state-of-the-art computer science. He explains the research’s significance, while running very cool graphics demo-ing the results. I find it a painless way to keep up in this fast moving field.  — KK

The most recent “drop” of MSCHF (which deserves it’s own deep dive) is masterWiki. They claim to have stolen MasterClass’ content and paired it up with wikiHow’s iconic visuals. I’m not sure how accurate or effective these summaries are, but as someone who prefers to read rather than watch video tutorials, I appreciate this little unauthorized sneak peak into the MasterClass series. I’m not sure how long this website will be up, so I’ve taken screen captures of the ones that interest me. My favorite is RuPaul’s How to Be Your True Self. — CD 

Google hosts one of the best virtual museums in the world. They’ve scanned many thousands of the world’s masterpieces at super high resolution. So from my home I can visit their “Arts and Culture” site and by scrolling get very very close to the art — much closer than I could in a physical museum. I’ve seen many of the originals in their home museums, and I feel I was seeing them for the first time here. — KK

As someone who is on the never-ending quest to learn how to draw, I really appreciate NYT’s How to Draw in Six Steps. The visual clips and tips are encouraging. Here is a sketch of Pablo’s face (my dog). — CD

For the entire month of May, the National Trust for Historic Preservation is sending out a daily email unlocking one historical site that you can explore virtually. On Friday, I toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House in Virginia and fell in love with the Mayan-inspired motif and yesterday morning, the National Trust released a 27-minute concert video filmed at Nina Simone’s childhood home in North Carolina. There are still 29 more days to go. You can sign up here. — CD

The Beginning Japanese Kanji Language Practice Pad looks like a daily calendar. On each tear-off page is a different Japanese kanji character, along with its definition, pronunciation, sample use, stroke order, and space to practice writing it. — MF

YouTube is way underrated as an educational institution. You can learn literally anything, including how to do surgery. The challenge is the uneven quality of the average video. One solution is YouTube’s own channel called The Learning Playlist. YouTube hired experts to curate the best learning videos they could find on a particular subject, and make a playlist for it, all on one channel. I am a happy subscriber. It’s also a good place to begin a search for how to study for a test, to how to organize a community group, and so on. — KK 

I study Japanese, so I use this plug-in to watch Terrace House in Japanese. It allows me to read the kanji and kana as they are spoken by the characters and use the control buttons to play sentences over and over again if I’m having trouble understanding what someone is saying. I can also click on a kanji to translate it into English. I can also configure it to pause at the end of every subtitle so I can study them before moving on. This is a language learner’s dream. — MF

I enjoy browsing this website of 500+ words that don’t translate, because I’m always intrigued by the concepts I had no idea existed, like “qarrtsiluni,” a North Alaskan Inupiatun word for sitting in the darkness, waiting for inspiration to strike you, or “ razbliuto,” a Russian word to describe the feeling for someone you used to love but no longer do, or “vellichor,” which I think may be made up but is a much needed word to address “the strange wistfulness of used bookstores.” It’s weird how once I learn a word for something I was hardly aware of before that I can instantly recall feeling it in the past. I would like to know the word for that. — CD

Tom Whitewell put together a list called “52 things I learned in 2019,” and I was interested in all of them. Examples: “Each year humanity produces 1,000 times more transistors than grains of rice and wheat combined” and “Worldwide, growth in the fragrance industry is lagging behind cosmetics and skincare products. Why? ‘You can’t smell a selfie.’” — MF

This hand-drawn book is the best course on art and drawing I’ve seen. The cartoonist Lynda Barry has been teaching non-artists to draw, and she has somehow magically captured her class into this book called Making Comics. This guidance is particularly aimed at people who think they can’t draw. It will teach you how to draw, more importantly how to see, and even more importantly how to create with originality, by taking yourself out of the way to see what shows up. It refreshed my very concept of art. I’ve already given two copies of it away. — KK

After ruining a keyboard years ago, I took a long break from cleaning my laptop. Turns out I just needed someone to instruct me, like this article, on “How to Properly Clean Your Gross Laptop.” I had all the supplies at home: microfiber wipes, compressed air, cotton swabs and 90%-100% isopropyl alcohol. — CD