Entries for November 2023
This is the cover to the just-released United Nations Environment Programme Emissions Gap Report 2023 (full report here). Perfect title, perfect graphic, perfect subheadline. No notes.
Amazing that an official UN climate report has this much biting personality. You can just sense the no-fucks-givenness of the people who put this together. After all:
Humanity is breaking all the wrong records when it comes to climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions reached a new high in 2022. In September 2023, global average temperatures were 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels. When this year is over, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, it is almost certain to be the warmest year on record.
The 2023 edition of the Emissions Gap Report tells us that the world must change track, or we will be saying the same thing next year — and the year after, and the year after, like a broken record. The report finds that fully implementing and continuing mitigation efforts of unconditional nationally determined contributions (NDCs) made under the Paris Agreement for 2030 would put the world on course for limiting temperature rise to 2.9°C this century. Fully implementing conditional NDCs would lower this to 2.5°C. Given the intense climate impacts we are already seeing, neither outcome is desirable.
The report credits Beverley McDonald with the cover design — her website is here.
For her new album Rockstar, Dolly Parton has covered a number of “iconic rock anthems”, including Heart of Glass (feat. Debbie Harry), Stairway to Heaven (feat. Lizzo on the flute), I Hate Myself For Loving You (feat. Joan Jett and The Blackhearts), and Every Breath You Take (feat. Sting). She also recorded a lovely rendition of Prince’s Purple Rain, embedded above. The entire Rockstar video playlist is here.
See also Prince’s cover of Radiohead’s Creep. (via anil dash)
I loved Questlove’s review of André 3000’s “departure album” of instrumental music. “All you newbie meditators/microdosers/”time-out-for-me-before-I-hurt-someone” people who are trying to do better - THIS is good medicine music for you.”
In what’s been voted the greatest BBC musical performance of all time, David Bowie appeared on Top of the Pops in 1972 to sing Starman and changed the course of musical history.
The performance launched Bowie to stardom. Thursday 6th July, 1972, is said to be ‘the day that invented the 80’s’ as so many musicians who went on to be household names saw the performance and it changed their lives. Those watching that night included U2’s Bono, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Boy George, Adam Ant, Mick Jones of the Clash, Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, Morrissey and Johnny Marr of the Smiths, Siouxsie Sioux, Toyah Willcox, John Taylor and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode and many more.
Here’s more from Colin Marshall at Open Culture, who does a great job contextualizing the performance:
“It’s deceptively easy to forget that in the summer of 1972 David Bowie was still yesterday’s news to the average Top of the Pops viewer, a one-hit wonder who’d had a novelty single about an astronaut at the end of the previous decade,” writes Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie. But his taking the stage of that BBC pop-musical institution “in a rainbow jumpsuit and shocking red hair put paid to that forever. Having made no commercial impact in the two months since its release, ‘Starman’ stormed up the chart.” As with “Space Oddity,” “the subtext is all: this is less a science-fiction story than a self-aggrandizing announcement that there’s a new star in town.”
(via open culture)
A cold-oven Thanksgiving turkey recipe from Helen Rosner. You start the bird in a cold oven and gradually raise the temperature in order to help ensure a crispy skin.
Reminder: the Squiggle t-shirts remain for sale and are proving quite popular. I’m wearing one of mine right now!
Monaspace is a mix-n-match “superfamily” of monospaced fonts designed by Github for coding.
Wow, what a lovely, inspiring story this is: in 2022, Gary McKee ran a marathon every single day. On weekdays, he got up early and completed his run before work. And along the way, he inspired a bunch of people to join him (one work colleague ran 92 marathons w/ him) and raised £1 million for Macmillan Cancer Support.
Meanwhile, 100s of OpenAI employees are threatening to quit and join Altman at Microsoft unless the remaining board members resign. Turns out, if you sell AI-idealistic people on bettering the world, they don’t want to wait to do so (and get rich in the bargain).
After OpenAI tried all weekend to hire former CEO Sam Altman back, Microsoft hired him and fellow co-founder Greg Brockman. Altman will be CEO of a new AI research team. Great move by MS — and obvious in retrospect…didn’t see many pundits predicting this…
Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter Passes Away at Age 96. President Carter: “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished. She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it.”
Well, it has been a loooong week and this made me laugh a stupid amount, so now you’re seeing it. ✌️
Sam Altman is out as CEO and a member of the board of directors at OpenAI. “A deliberative review process by the board […] concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board…”
This video from MoMA follows master printer Jacob Samuel as he makes his final print before he retires.
As he inks, hand wipes, and rolls his final print through the press, he reflects on his philosophy. “My goal is to leave no fingerprints,” he says. All you see is the artist’s work. I’m just another pencil. I’m just another brush. But I want the pencil to be sharpened really well. I want the brush to be sable. And to do that and be completely spontaneous, I trust the materials.”
Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot? “The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home. It’s funny to observe the similarities between the two models.”
Jonathan Hoefler thoughtfully considers how generative AI might change how type designers work. “In this context, AI is no less threatening than the Bézier curve, the photocopier, or the ruler.”
A developer combined an AI vision system with a voice cloning AI to produce a program that narrates his behavior with David Attenborough’s voice. “Here we have a remarkable specimen of Homo sapiens distinguished by his silver circular spectacle…”
The winners have been announced in the Natural Landscape Photography Awards for 2023. The competition rules are worth a look — they are pretty hardcore on the types of editing and retouching allowed. I posted some favorites above; from top to bottom by Jeroen Van Nieuwenhove, Xavier Lequarre, Blake Randall, and Jay Tayag. (via in focus)
The Siena Galaxy Atlas 2020 is a massive online database of 383,620 nearby galaxies. The web still excels at the purpose for which it was created: sharing scientific information.
Remember Batkid? 10 years ago, the Make-A-Wish Foundation transformed San Francisco into Gotham City so cancer patient Miles Scott could suit up as Batkid and save the city. Today, Scott is a cancer-free high school student.
Astronauts accidentally dropped a tool bag on a spacewalk, and you can see it with binoculars. “This isn’t even the first tool bag to reach orbit.”
I love these busy, wordy, and brightly colored sweaters from Kendall Ross. From her about page:
Kendall Ross, aka “I’d Knit That”, is an Oklahoma City based fiber artist. She is best known for hand-knitting colorful, wearable art pieces. She uses intricate hand-knitting colorwork methods like intarsia and fair isle to illustrate images and incorporate her original texts into the fabric of her work. Each stitch on every sweater, vest, mural, and textile is painstakingly planned and knit over countless hours using two needles and wool.
You can check out more of Ross’s work on Instagram.
This Dutch webapp uses AI to reimagine what any street on Google Street View would look like as a bike- and pedestrian-friendly street.
In the early days of the telegraph, station operators began sharing the local weather with each other. As the practice became more widespread, people started to realize that what happened in one location translated to later events in another location. Modern weather forecasting and the concept of weather systems were born.
The operators had discovered something both interesting and paradoxical, the writer Andrew Blum observes in his book The Weather Machine. The telegraph had collapsed time but, in doing so, it had somehow simultaneously created more of it. Now people could see what the future held before it happened; they could know that a storm was on its way hours before the rain started falling or the clouds appeared in the sky. This new, real-time information also did something else, Blum points out. It allowed weather to be visualized as a system, transforming static, localized pieces of data into one large and ever-shifting whole.
This is probably the weirdest thing you’ll see all week: Bobby Fingers (who you might remember from his diorama of Michael Jackson on fire) made a rowboat shaped like the head of Jeff Bezos. The head is super-realistic and the head/boat is big enough to hold at least one person. What a delightfully odd mixture of exacting craftsmanship, performance art, comedy, and just plain WTF. Slightly NSFW (hairy butt cheeks). (via waxy)
From a recent Pew Research report: “A majority of Americans say they would tip 15% or less for an average meal at a sit-down restaurant.” 2% say they tip nothing. Quality of service is a major factor in most Americans’ tipping practices.
In their latest video, Kurzgesagt takes a break from their more serious topics to consider a scenario from the realm of science fiction: interstellar combat. Using technology that is theoretically available to us here on Earth, could a more advanced civilization some 42 light years away destroy our planet without any warning? They outline three potential weapons: the Star Laser, the Relativistic Missile, and the Ultra-Relativistic Electron Beam.
Here’s what I don’t understand though: how would the targeting work? In order for an alien civilization to hit the Earth with a laser from 42 light years away, it has to not only predict, within a margin of error of the Earth’s diameter, precisely where the Earth is going to be, but also have a system capable of aiming across 42 light years of distance with that precision. Is this even possible? How precisely do we know where the Earth is going to be in 42 years? And if you’re aiming at something 42 light years away, if you move the sights a nanometer, how much angular distance does that shift the the destination by? And how much does the gravity of matter along the way shift the trajectory and is it possible to accurately compensate for that? Maybe this should be their next video…
What I Read to My Son When the World Is on Fire. “Children’s books, which present subtle truths in simple terms, offer a valuable tool in retaining our moral bearings, especially amid a maelstrom of grief and rage.”
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft. “I suspect that non-programmers who are skeptical by nature, and who have seen ChatGPT turn out wooden prose or bogus facts, are still underestimating what’s happening.”
Philip Glass is coming out with a new album early next year called Philip Glass Solo. It was recorded during the early days of the pandemic at Glass’s home on his piano.
This is my piano, the instrument on which most of the music was written. It’s also the same room where I have worked for decades in the middle of the energy which New York City itself has brought to me. The listener may hear the quiet hum of New York in the background or feel the influence of time and memory that this space affords. To the degree possible, I made this record to invite the listener in.
The video above is a lovely clip of him, in his home, playing one of the songs off the album.
Can’t Think, Can’t Remember: More Americans Say They’re in a Cognitive Fog. “Adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s are driving the trend. Researchers point to long Covid as a major cause.”
Darrin Bell, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, wrote a graphic novel called The Talk about the conversation that parents have to have with their Black children in America about police, racism, and safety.
Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn’t have a realistic water gun. She said she feared for his safety, that police tend to think of little Black boys as older and less innocent than they really are. Through evocative illustrations and sharp humor, Bell examines how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood.
Deirdre Sugiuchi talked with Bell about the book for Electric Lit. I think this question & answer was particularly interesting:
DS: In this book, you’re delving into this dichotomy between how your Black father and grandfather addressed racism, versus the way your Jewish mother advocated for you. Can you discuss how being biracial contributes to your understanding of how whiteness and power operates in America?
DB: Well, first of all, I got to see how both sides of my family censored themselves for different reasons. The Black side of my family would say things around each other that they would never say if a white person was around, not for fear of offending white person, but for fear of the white person doing something to them. White people inherently have power. If they said something offensive, a white person could somehow figure out how to ruin their career, how to get them fired, how to get the police to come over. They could lie. They could twist their words and it would have real, concrete effects on their lives.
The white side of my family, I think sometimes they would forget that I was there. As part of the family, I would see casual racism. They’re Jewish — I’m sure it’s worse with people whose family are white and aren’t Jewish. I’ve heard from a lot of those people directly in the form of hate mail. I know what kind of things they say. But Jews are a little different, because they’ve been discriminated against too. They’ve had atrocious things happen to them, barbaric things. So, they know that what they’re saying is wrong, but they sometimes say it anyway. But whenever my grandmother would seem to realize or remember that I was in the room, she censored herself, but I could tell it was only to preserve my feelings. It wasn’t because she was afraid I would ever do anything to her. She knew I didn’t have any power over her.
See also: Black Parents Talk to Their Kids About the Police.
The David Rumsey Map Collection is one of the true gems of the web: a massive trove of maps & related images from over 40 years of collecting.
Rumsey began building a collection of North and South American historical maps and related cartographic materials in 1980. Eventually the collection expanded to include historical maps of the entire world, from the 16th to the 21st centuries. His collection, with more than 200,000 maps, is one of the largest private map collections in the United States.
Italian filmmaker Andrea Gatopoulos has made a documentary film called A Stranger Quest about Rumsey’s passion for maps. Here’s the trailer:
And because I can’t resist, a few maps from the collection:
That last one is a screenshot of the results for “lighthouse” from their new Text-On-Maps search capability.
The Protagonist Is Never in Control. “I hate him. It’s a plea at first, and then simply a statement, calcifying into the primary fact of your life. The bad man will define the rest of your childhood.” (CW: family abuse)
From Far Out magazine, the 100 best movies of the 1970s. Jaws, Barry Lyndon, and Taxi Driver all make the top 10 but The Godfather, Network, and The Conversation do not. So much on here I haven’t seen though!
“Data on police domestic violence…suggests that police officers in the United States perpetrate acts of domestic violence at roughly 15 times the rate of the general population.”
This is a map of how people in different geographic regions of the US refer to athletic footwear, courtesy of Josh Katz, author of Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk and co-creator of that NY Times dialect quiz that went viral 10 years ago.
Growing up in northern Wisconsin, we said “tennis shoes” or “tennies” most of the time (even though very little actual tennis was being played) and “gym shoes” less often. I hadn’t really heard of “sneakers” as a kid and never used it. (Shoes for sneaking? Huh?) My kids were born in NYC and they give me shit every time I tell them to put their tennies on. 🤷♂️
What do you call athletic shoes? Tennies? Sneakers? Kicks? Trainers? Gym shoes? Some other weird thing? (via @dens)
This fascinating and well-produced video from Vox introduces us to what happens to materials that are put under vast amounts of pressure — I’m talking center of the Sun pressures upwards of 100 billion atmospheres. Scientists are just beginning their explorations of the strange things that happen “when you keep squeezing”.
Tens of thousands of kilometers below Jupiter’s surface, physicists think hydrogen will go through another change becoming a shiny conductor of electricity. It’s thought that a lot of Jupiter is made up of this metallic hydrogen.
We think of high energy density materials as completely inverting the periodic table. So your metals become transparent and your transparent materials become metals. And all these gases become solids…
Water transforms into ice that conducts electricity: Black, Hot Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water. Hydrogen can be compressed into a metal: Metallic hydrogen finally made in lab at mind-boggling pressure. Sodium can turn clear: Metal Discovered To Become Transparent Under High Pressure. So weird and interesting!
Jamelle Bouie: “Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.”
Michael Bierut: “Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything.” Also true of writing, photography, etc. Reminds me of this Dale Carnegie quote: “To be interesting, be interested.”
I love this otherworldly shot of Stonehenge from Reuben Wu. It’s a variant of his cover image for the August 2022 issue of National Geographic. The monument is lit from above and behind with drones, which created some logistical issues:
[We] had to call the Royal Air Force each time we launched the drone, and spent months getting permits and approval to do this. Even then we still couldn’t fly it above the stone circle (for fear of damaging the stones).
They had to call the RAF because the monument is in military airspace. This short behind-the-scenes video has more:
While we were making these images, something that was always very present was the sound of the traffic on the nearby A303 highway, and I was certain that passing motorists would have been alarmed to see what looked like an alien spacecraft flitting around above the 5,000 year old megalith.
9 viral phrases that explain China’s work culture, including “let it rot”, “involution”, “lying flat”, and the philosophy of “run”.
Oh wow, James Burke is back with a new season of his pioneering series Connections. “Connections was the science documentary series for compulsively curious people who weren’t necessarily drawn to more traditional science and nature documentaries.”
Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline. “Among both Democrats and Republicans, trust in scientists is lower than before the pandemic.”
About ten years ago, after a long campaign by Navajo Nation member Manny Wheeler, Disney/Lucasfilm released the first Star Wars movie dubbed into the Navajo language. In this clip from the PBS series Native America, the Navajo version of Star Wars is shown at a drive-in in Arizona, with some of the voice actors who contributed to the dub in attendance. Some Navajo feel a strong connection to some of the themes in the movie:
The Force and the universe is all interconnected. When you put that in the Navajo language, especially for an elder to hear that, they’re going to just be thinking, like, yeah, of course. It’s not just a movie. That’s stuff we really believe.
You can watch the Navajo version of Star Wars on Disney+ (Finding Nemo too!) and catch the second season of Native America on PBS. Oh, and here’s a movie poster for the film:
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