site: pick of the day — The First Herculaneum Scroll, Read

daily-finds.log.md

@@ -2482,3 +2482,9 @@ Hero: the find's own hero.png (3600×1890, the issue's cover art) carried across
 Category: reading (existing).
 Fact-check (mandatory): **the find had a factual error** — it said Issue 05 "runs sixteen pieces deep"; it is **fifteen** (counted from the raw HTML, entries 01–15; corroborated by the archive page). Corrected in both the review and the find body. Both pieces the find named are real and correctly attributed — "Intersymmetric: Connect" (James Bradbury, Rian Treanor, Mark Fell) and "carecore" (Raphaël Bastide) — but both were misdescribed: Connect broadcasts *pattern data* between everyone on the page in real time (not "a shared audio survey"), and carecore is a *persistent shared garden* (plant a seed a day, feed others' plants, treat parasites, compost the dead), not merely "generative CSS botany." Journal verified: annual, published on the first day of Spring; five issues, Spring 2022 → Spring 2026, 74 pieces total; free, no account; edited by Shelby Wilson and Maxwell Neely-Cohen; submissions open Nov 1–Dec 1, $500 per contribution, contributors keep their work in perpetuity. Two further standouts named and verified: "Banner Highway 01" (Richard Lewei Huang, Yufeng Zhao) and "Kp'ọjọ kp'ọjọ" (Omayeli Arenyeka). Could not verify the journal's funding source — the About page names none, so the review claims nothing about it.
 Amazon: n-a.
+
+## 2026-07-13 — pick of the day: herculaneum-scroll-first-read
+
+Rotated from david-rumsey-map-collection (which had held since 07-12).
+Rationale: of the three reviews graduated this run it wins on every axis the pick is judged by. Hero — the "From object to text" figure (the blackened roll, the X-ray cross-sections, the flattened Greek) is the most arresting image published today and its virtue is legible from the tile without a caption. Audience — "a scroll buried by Vesuvius has been read for the first time in 2,000 years" needs no domain knowledge, unlike Zen Mode (Mac-only, and gated behind a Hammerspoon/Lua install) or The HTML Review (beautiful, but a niche art-literary audience). Benign — an archaeological and scientific result; nothing in it reads as endorsing harm.
+Freshness also argued for rotating: the map collection is a close thematic cousin (a browsable historical archive), and leaving it up would have made two consecutive days of the same note on the front page.

src/data/pick.json

@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
 {
-  "hero": "david-rumsey-map-collection"
+  "hero": "herculaneum-scroll-first-read"
 }