In 1977 NASA put a gold record on Voyager to tell whoever finds it about Earth. This one holds the things that fascinate me.
How to play: drag anything to turn it
A1 · 1630
Shivaji was born here in 1630, when sultanates ruled the Deccan and his father served one of them. At 16 he decided his people should have Swarajya, their own rule, and took his first fort. At their peak the Marathas held most of India, and in 1758 reached Peshawar, in today’s Pakistan.
A2 · 2019 · WANT ONE · SINCE MY TEENS
In 2019 Hasselblad made its smallest medium format body, and its 100-megapixel back still fits the cameras it made in 1957. You shoot it the old way, at your waist, looking down into the screen, and it makes you slow down and see the world differently.
A3 · 1957 · WANT ONE · SINCE MY TEENS
Omega made it in 1957 for racing drivers. In 1965 NASA put three chronographs through heat, cold, vacuum and 40 G shocks, and it was the only one to pass. In 1969 it went to the Moon and back on Buzz Aldrin’s wrist.
A4 · 1964 · HIST 115
The CIA expected its U-2 spy plane to be shot down within a couple of years, so Lockheed’s Skunk Works built one that could outrun missiles at three times the speed of sound. At that speed the skin got so hot that its panels were made to sit loose on the ground, and they leaked fuel until flight heated them shut.
A5 · 1995 · SINCE MY TEENS
Under the ETOPS rules of the early 1990s, a new twin-engine jet had to prove itself for a year before it could fly far from land, so long ocean routes went to planes like Airbus’s four-engine A340. Boeing bet the 777 could get ETOPS-180, three hours from the nearest runway, on its first day, and GE built the biggest jet engine yet for it. I love that bet, and the growl of that engine.
A6 · 2010 · SINCE MY TEENS
Lexus spent five years on an aluminium supercar, decided it wasn’t good enough, and rebuilt it in carbon fibre woven on a loom they made themselves. Yamaha helped build the V10 and tuned how it sounds inside. Ten years after it started, they only made 500.
Side B
B1 · GOOGLE, 2003 · CMPUT 481
In 2000 Google’s index went five months stale, and the cause was a single bit flipped by cheap memory. The obvious fix was the best hardware money could buy, with backups for everything. Google kept the cheap machines, wrote software that expected them to fail, and swapped them out when they died. I love how elegant that is.
Read the paperB2 · TONY FADELL, 2022 · READ
Tony Fadell’s work at General Magic and at Philips failed before Apple hired him in 2001 to make the iPod. Later he couldn’t find a thermostat he liked, so he co-founded Nest to make one. What stayed with me is how many times he tried, at how many companies, before it worked.
B3 · CHARLIE MUNGER, 1995 · SKIMMED
In a 1995 talk at Harvard, Charlie Munger listed 24 ways good minds go wrong, and put incentives first. His example was FedEx, whose night shift sorted every package at one hub and kept running late. They were paid by the hour, so the slower they worked, the more they earned. FedEx switched to paying by the shift, so finishing early meant going home early, and the delays stopped. People’s actions show their incentives, and incentives are a compression of what makes someone tick.
Read the talkB4 · ARCHIMEDES, ~250 BCE
People had used levers for thousands of years when Archimedes proved how they work. A weight balances one ten times heavier if it sits ten times farther from the pivot. He was so sure of it that he said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.” Today code is a lever like that. Once it’s written, its marginal cost is minimal, so it can make a fortune.
B5 · RICKLES ET AL., 2007 · FROM YASHAR
This changed how I look at the world. A single neuron just fires or doesn’t, and about 86 billion of them make a mind. That’s an emergent property, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. LLMs, especially the larger ones, arguably have them too.
Read the paperThe original · 1977
A committee chaired by Carl Sagan filled it with 115 images, greetings in 55 languages and 90 minutes of music, from Bach to Chuck Berry. Its cover shows how to play it, and where to find the Sun. Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in 2012, and it’s still going.
Voyager 1, right now
Shivneri’s shape is NASA SRTM elevation. The SR-71 is by spark_customs and the LFA by yokatann, both CC BY 4.0. The rest are drawn for this page, the cover after NASA’s engraving. Last changed November 2026.