Hello!

I have been thinking a lot about my second website this week. My first website was, of course, “Hank Green’s Mars Exploration Page” which I think I first started working on in 1997. But my second big foray onto the internet all began with what I believed at the time to be theft. I started stealing those “We Buy Houses” signs that you sometimes see on the side of the street in certain cities. It turns out that those signs are placed illegally and are basically litter, meaning stealing them is actually cleaning, but I didn’t know that then.

Then I took those signs home, painted over them, and stenciled “IHATEI4.COM” on them. Then, I put them back out on a bunch of Interstate 4 exits in Orlando. People hate that road, and so a lot of them came to the website I had built. It was about transportation and carpooling and how to not be so car-dependent in our lives.

But that’s not what people actually wanted. I had installed a bulletin board program on the site, and people came on and they did not want to discuss transportation policy. They wanted to discuss, mostly, the other people on the road and how they were bad at driving and shouldn’t be there. I had created a community of haters, and it sucked. I learned from that, I think, and when I got other chances to help create communities online, I thought pretty hard about how to have those spaces be about building something rather than tearing it down.

But I’ve also been thinking about my first website because, back then, my toolkit was very limited—just the internet, a domain name, paint, and stolen roadside signs. I think one of the most important things in life is doing what you can with the tools you have, but I also think seeing a tool where other people don’t see it is always very fun.

And it leaves me wondering if you have examples of spotting something valuable where others didn’t see much value. If you do, please send them to me. I am very curious!

Hank

You can always email us at [email protected]

This Week in Stuff

• Jared Henderson explained why we can’t focus.

• A third grader successfully brought strawberry milk back to his school lunch.

• Hank was introduced to a non-human army created to argue.

• Orcas have revived a 1980s fashion trend by wearing dead salmon hats.

• Stuff Made Here built a camera that can see around walls.

Please send us stuff you think we should feature to [email protected]

Measles vaccines have saved over 90 million lives in the last 50 years

Simon van Teutem

Measles vaccination has saved 94 million lives globally since 1974. Of those, 92 million were children.

The chart shows the number of lives saved by different childhood vaccines in the last 50 years. These estimates come from Andrew Shattock and colleagues and are based on global data on diseases, causes of death, vaccination rates, and vaccine efficacy.

Measles vaccines rank the highest in the total number of lives saved.

Measles is especially contagious and deadly. The virus depletes immune cells, making it harder to fight off measles and making other infections much more life-threatening. It can also erase immune memory to infections and vaccines that children have already encountered.

Before vaccines, almost all children caught measles, and it was a common cause of disability and death. With high measles vaccination rates, millions of lives are saved globally each year.

Our World in Data is a UK-based non-profit organization that publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. You can find more of their data insights here.

This Week at Complexly

What did life look like when the Amazon watershed flowed backward? How did its direction shape the evolution of life around it? And what force could have possibly been strong enough to up-end one of the world’s mightiest rivers between then and now? Eons has the answers!

Call them stick bugs, walkingsticks, leaf insects, or phasmids, insects in the order Phasmatodea are masters of disguise. But why would an insect want to look like a plant? Bizarre Beasts went to the Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium to find out.

Some Games to Play!

SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress)

Nerdy Connections (by Hank Green)

Download Gubbins on iOS or Android!

If you post your results on social media, we’d love it if you post a link for folks to subscribe to “We’re Here” (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/subscribe)

Last chance for December 24th shipping!!

Hey, did you have your eyes on some Good Store products? If you want to give a Good Store gift by the 24th of December, make sure to get your order by December 8th for the best chance for your order to arrive by Dec 24th for United States-based customers.

Community Gratitude Journal

Last week, we asked what you were grateful for. Thank you to everyone who filled our inbox with gratitude!

And that’s the end of the newsletter!

Close your eyes and draw a random squiggle. Turn that squiggle into a drawing and send us your finished product!

Send your art to [email protected]

We're Here is the newsletter of Nerdfighteria; the community of people that sprung up around Hank and John Green's YouTube videos. That community has many focuses and has spawned many projects but the overarching theme is that hopelessness is the wrong response to imperfection. What makes the world better is groups of people trying to understand and solve problems, and people can only do that for an extended period if they're having at least a little bit of fun.