We’ve teamed up with our ice cream friends Häagen-Dazs to add a bit of magic to your lockdown. Over the next 8 weeks, we will bring you Secret Worlds you may have loved, may have missed or new ones we can explore together, directly to your home
Sign up to join Secret Sofa here
Countdown is a British game show involving word and number tasks. In the (online) word game you select vowels and consonants as you wish. You then have 30 seconds to find the longest word in the jumbled list. You can select “Solve” to see how you did.
Play the Countdown (Word) game here. Note there is also a link to the Number game and the Conundrum
Journey into the past and you’ll discover the secret history of the future. From the world’s first cyberattack in 1834, to 19th-century virtual reality, the Economist’s Tom Standage and Slate’s Seth Stevenson examine the historical precedents that can transform our understanding of modern technology, predicting how it might evolve and highlighting pitfalls to avoid. Discovering how people reacted to past innovations can also teach us about ourselves.
Find out more about the Secret History of the Future here
Un-put-down-able books, for me, have certain qualities: great characters, strong narrative drive, a premise that hooks me. The writing is often strong (though “serviceable” will suffice, if you know what I mean), and it can’t be so dense or challenging that I can’t read it while I’m sleepy, or mentally exhausted.
From the website, Modern Mrs Darcy (How to get more out of your reading life), here are Unputdownable: 17 books I read in 24 hours or less (because they were just that good)
Join their Summer Reading Club here
Reading an entire book in a matter of hours may seem daunting, but it all comes down to simple math. The average adult reads around 200-400 words per minute. The average novel ranges between 60,000 and 100,000 words total. If your reading speed is right in the middle of the pack at 300 words per minute, and you’re reading a middle-of-the-pack novel at around 80,000 words, you’ll be able to knock it out in around five hours or less.
Find out more in Lifehacker’s article How to Read an Entire Book in a Single Day
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is on Hawaii Island (the Big Island). At its heart are the Kīlauea and Mauna Loa active volcanoes. The Crater Rim Drive passes steam vents and the Jaggar Museum, which features volcanology exhibits and a viewpoint overlooking Halema’uma’u Crater.
Take the Virtual Tour here
You have 80,000 hours in your career.
The 80,000 hours podcasts is a show about the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them.
Find out how to listen to the podcast at the 80,000 hours site here
The Palace of Versailles was the principal royal residence of France from 1682, under Louis XIV, until the start of the French Revolution in 1789, under Louis XVI. It is located in the department of Yvelines, in the region of Île-de-France, about 20 kilometres southwest of the centre of Paris.
Take a Virtual Tour of Versailles
Watch the International Space Station pass overhead from several thousand worldwide locations. It is the third brightest object in the sky and easy to spot if you know when to look up. Visible to the naked eye, it looks like a fast-moving plane only much higher and traveling thousands of miles an hour faster!
The tracker shows where the Space Station is right now and its path 90 minutes ago (-1.5 hr) and 90 minutes ahead (+1.5 hr). The dark overlay indicates where it is nighttime in the world.
View the Live Space Station Tracking Map
