I hope you enjoyed last weeks collection of awesomeness from around the web, because I’m back this week with more! As always, if you’ve seen awesomeness as well, feel free to share in the comments! And if you do your own content curation post, share that as well.

Languages of the World

It’s the Youtube series we’ve all been waiting for. We all daydream about learning foreign languages, but let’s face it. That’s highly unlikely to ever happen to most of us. But that doesn’t mean you have to be ignorant when you come across a book written in something other than English! In this series Alexander Arguells expertly gives you a tour of a slew of Germanic languages–what they look like, what they sound like, and how to tell them apart from each other.

Clock of the Long Now

When you think of measuring time, you think of minutes, seconds, and hours. At most you maybe thinks of months, or years. But some people think we’re too focused on rushing around and making every second count, and they’ve started a project to make us think in the long term. The very long term. The Clock of the Long Now will tick once a year, and the chimes will ring once every millenium. It’s being built to last for ten thousand years. Now that’s a long clock!

The Long Now Foundation also features other projects, like creating a library of all known languages, and hosting seminars about thinking in the long term. It’s well worth checking out!

Christopher Rand and the Grecian Calender

Over on BoingBoing, Colin Marshall gives a haunting description of a room in the New Yorker offices that houses every article ever written.

But I found most haunting her description of the rows and rows of volumes filled by writers that not only didn’t she know of, but nobody in the office seemed to remember. I fear that one of my favorite writers of place — and indeed one of my favorite writers of any any kind — despite his eight books and 64 long-form New Yorker essays, has met with such a fate.

Of course we’re dedicated to not letting writers slip into obscurity, and Marshall gives links to archive.org where you can read “Grecian Calender” by Christopher Rand–a travel writer who explored the cities he wrote about first hand, on foot, giving a view not often seen by armchair adventurers. Check it out, and if you read it, let us know what you think!

Honorable Mention: No Big Bang?

This actually isn’t news. This is a theory that’s been worked on by fringe theorists for decades. Indeed, in Einstein’s time the idea that the universe had a beginning was not a popular one. Still, it’s been generally accepted as the most likely version of the origins of the universe for a while, so it’s surprising to see that perhaps mainstream science is shifting back.

Now it’s Your Turn

What cool stuff have you seen around the internet? New gadgets? New science? Writing ideas that blew your mind? Cool stuff was meant for sharing!