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This video series written and narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents short 2-4 minute lessons about how Black people shaped American history. Here are a few videos to get you started:
There are almost 100 videos in all — what a treasure trove. I found this via The Kid Should See This, which has a great collection of entertaining and educational videos related to Black History Month.
“The basic problem with the conservative discourse around ‘parents’ rights’ is that it frames children as chattel — that is, as parents’ property.” This is about Canadian politics but rhymes with what’s going on in the US around the rights of trans kids.
Rubble From Bone by Tom Stevenson for the London Review of Books. “The war on Gaza is at its core retributive: an act of collective punishment.”
Rebecca Solnit with a cheeky & hilarious piece on How to Comment on Social Media.
1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. Listening/reading delays your reaction time, and as with other sports, speed is of the essence.
7) If you’re a man and that O.P. is a woman, her facts are feelings and your feelings are facts, and those forty-seven increasingly lengthy responses you fired off were clearly a rational reaction. If she reacted negatively to them, do not forget to rebuke her for being emotional.
I hate to say it, but the reason I am not enjoying Mastodon so much these days is because I see stuff like this on there regularly:
9) Which is why the person who said, or rather typed, offhandedly “people should bike more” really means all people need to bike everywhere under all circumstances and is callously indifferent to people who: live in Siberia and can’t bike through -40 blizzards; are physically unable to cycle; can’t afford bikes; and let us not forget those who have bicycle-related trauma. Which is why anyone who could say “people should bike more” is a fascist who needs crushing.
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“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Podcasting is “not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.”
An extensive collection of vintage Japanese hotel and ryokan luggage tags. You can see a curated selection at Present & Correct.
I listened to the latest episode of the Ezra Klein Show while driving last night then spent the second half of the drive thinking about it. So I guess I’d better tell you to go and listen to it. Klein interviews Rhaina Cohen, who is the author of the forthcoming book The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center (out Feb 13). They talked about loneliness, the changing definition of friendship (and family) throughout history, polyamory, co-parenting, and lots more.
How do we imagine many other possibilities for parenting, for aging, for intimacy, for friendship, for romance than what we have right now? Because the idea that what we have right now is a working norm and everything else should be understood as some deviation is wrong. It is factually untrue.
It is not a norm. It is a wild experiment in the history of human existence. We have never done this before for any period of time. It’s not how we raised children. It is not how we have met each other. It is not how we have lived together.
And it’s not working for a lot of people. So this is an experiment, and we should be trying more. And what Cohen’s book is about is these experiments, is looking at things people are already doing, and, in a sense, making clear that there are more relationships happening right now in the world around you, more forms of relationship, than you could possibly imagine.
A unified theory of fucks. “Give a fuck about yourself, about your own wild and tender spirit, about your peace and especially about your art. Give every last fuck you have to living things with beating hearts and breathing lungs and open eyes…”
Bluesky is opening up to the public this week. Hot take: I like Bluesky better than both Threads and Mastodon (currently a distant 3rd, I’m afraid). I’m on there as @kottke.org.
The USPS has released two new Priority Post stamps featuring imagery captured by the JWST: Pillars of Creation (NASA original) and Cosmic Cliffs (NASA original). From the USPS press release:
Captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, this extremely high-definition infrared image shows the magnificent Pillars of Creation formation within the Eagle Nebula. By assigning color to various wavelengths, the digitized image allows us to see a landscape otherwise invisible to the human eye. Red areas toward the end of the pillars show burgeoning stars ejecting raw materials as they form, while the relatively small red orbs scattered throughout the image show newly born stars.
This remarkable image from the James Webb Space Telescope is a digitally colored depiction of the invisible bands of mid-infrared light emitted by the Cosmic Cliffs of the Carina Nebula. Red and yellow flares scattered throughout the cliffs show developing and newly born stars. The orange-and-brown clouds in the lower third of the image are swirls of dust and gas. Additional stars, in our Milky Way and in distant galaxies, appear in the blue and black regions above and beyond the nebula.
Hurricanes Are Too Fast for Category 5. Climate change might necessitate a 6th category of hurricanes to warn against the much higher risks of wind speeds above 192 mph. “Adding a category better describes these rather unprecedented storms.”
I could watch Pong Wars allllllll daaaaaaaay. Here’s the source code if you want to make your own.
There’s a new translation of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital coming out this fall. “This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century.” Filing this under foundational texts that I should probably read.
Up until her death last year at the age of 93, Concha García Zaera wielded the relatively simple graphics editor Microsoft Paint like few others have.
See also The Excel Spreadsheet Artist.
How Quora Died. “The once-beloved forum is now home to a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical, straight-up hateful, and A.I.-generated entries along with a slurry of all-caps non-questions…”
Ceramic artist Monsieur Cailloux makes these cute little ceramic creatures that are members of the Cailloux tribe “straight from the stone planet MRCX”. I like these little creatures, but whatever you think of them, you gotta admire this guy’s commitment to the bit. (via colossal)
Cory Doctorow talks about how he got scammed into giving someone his credit card number. If Cory can get scammed, anyone can — all it takes is getting caught at a moment when your guard is down…a “miracle of timing”.
I’d missed that Randall Munroe has been doing videos based on his What If? website and books. The one I ran across the other day is about earthquakes:
Since we usually hear about earthquakes with ratings somewhere between 3 and 9, a lot of people probably think of 10 as the top of the scale and 0 as the bottom. In fact, there is no top or bottom to the scale!
There are three more short videos on the channel so far: What if Earth suddenly stopped spinning?, What if NASCAR had no rules?, and What if we aimed the Hubble Telescope at Earth? Good stuff.
How AI tools are helping people write “high-speed semi-automated genre fiction”. Finally, the assembly line has entered indie publishing! “It starts to make you wonder, do I even have any talent if a computer can just mimic me?”
On Beautiful Public Data, Jon Keegan highlights the extremely information-rich flight maps produced by the Federal Aviation Administration that pilots use to find their way around the skies.
Among all of the visual information published by the U.S. government, there may be no product with a higher information density than the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) aviation maps. Intended for pilots, the FAA publishes free detailed maps of the entire U.S. airspace, and detailed maps of airports and their surroundings and updates them frequently. The density of the critical information layered on these maps is staggering, and it is a miracle that pilots can easily decipher these maps’ at a glance.
Oh wow, this takes me back. My dad was a pilot when I was a kid and he had a bunch of FAA maps in the house, in his planes, and even on the walls of his office. I remember finding these maps both oddly beautiful and almost completely inscrutable. What a treat to be able to finally figure out how to read them, at least a little bit. And the waypoint names are fun too:
Orlando, FL has many Disney themed waypoints such as JAFAR, PIGLT, JAZMN, TTIGR, MINEE, HKUNA and MTATA. Flying into Orlando, your plane might use the SNFLD arrival path, taking you past NOOMN, FORYU, SNFLD, JRRYY and GTOUT.
Based on the waypoints near Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International, this airport must be home to some of the nerdiest air traffic controllers. There’s a crazy number of Lord of the Rings waypoints: HOBTT, SHYRE, FRDDO, BLLBO, BGGNS, NZGUL, RAETH, ORRKK, GOLLM, ROHUN, GONDR, GIMLY, STRDR, SMAWG and GNDLF.
I made this white bolognese over the weekend and it was so delicious. Subbed in fettuccine for the rigatoni, added more vegetables, put in some white miso paste for extra umami & depth, and finished on the plate with some truffle butter. YUM.
Precipice of fear: the freerider who took skiing to its limits. “Jérémie Heitz has pushed freeriding to breathtaking, beautiful new extremes. But as the risks get bigger, the questions do, too.”
The best way to start your morning is by watching Tracy Chapman sing Fast Car at the Grammys last night. Her voice…it’s only gotten better.
This is a video slideshow of some of the best images from the Mars missions — Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance — presented in 4K resolution at 60fps. These look amazing on the biggest hi-res screen you can find. (via open culture)
How to eat now: 16 rules of modern dining. A panel of critics, chefs, and writers weigh in on questions like “Dogs allowed in the dining room?”, “Should restaurants turn the music down?”, and asking for substitutions in dishes. (Me: no, yes, sometimes.)
Gastro Obscura’s list of 50 Places to Eat and Drink Before You Die, including a pizzeria w/ a volcano oven, a Bangkok bistro serving 45-year-old stew, a BBQ vending machine, and a farm serving moose milk cheese.
In June 2021 (pre The Bear), New Yorker cartoonist Zoe Si coached Ayo Edebiri through the process of drawing a New Yorker cartoon. The catch: neither of them could see the other’s work in progress. Super entertaining.
I don’t know about you, but Si’s initial description of the cartoon reminded me of an LLM prompt:
So the cartoon is two people in their apartment. One person has dug a hole in the floor, and he is standing in the hole and his head’s poking out. And the other person is kneeling on the floor beside the hole, kind of like looking at him in a concerned manner. There’ll be like a couch in the background just to signify that they’re in a house.
Just for funsies, I asked ChatGPT to generate a New Yorker-style cartoon using that prompt. Here’s what it came up with:
Oh boy. And then I asked it for a funny caption and it hit me with: “I said I wanted more ‘open space’ in the living room, not an ‘open pit’!” Oof. ChatGPT, don’t quit your day job!
Internet legend holds that the biggest possible PDF is roughly half the size of Germany. But this person made a “monstrously big” PDF that’s larger than the entire universe. “Admittedly it’s mostly empty space, but so is the universe.”
Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars (1993): “Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
The NY Times asked a bunch of their readers what their favorite airport amenities were. Their answers included libraries, pools, and vending machines for things like cupcakes and canned cheese.
I love an airport with an outdoor area and areas for napping and free showers (like at Incheon). But my favorite airport thing by far is the bonkers indoor waterfall and garden/forest at Singapore’s Jewel Changi Airport:
What about you? What are your favorite airport shops, facilities, and conveniences when you travel? (Let’s not do “faster security” and such — that’s a given.)
A study about online identity (using HuffPo comments) found that people using “‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names”. This jibes with my personal experience and is in line with the comment guidelines for the site.
Maybe they found Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane? “The shape of the object in the sonar images closely resembles Earhart’s aircraft, a Lockheed Electra, both in size and tail.”
“The majority of Oregon’s Republican state senators are prohibited from running for re-election as a result of their repeated boycotts of legislative sessions last year.” Good. Legislators are elected to legislate, not obstruct.
Yeah, you heard me: the 1993 video game Doom, which has been ported to every platform imaginable (an Apple Pippin, a jailbroken John Deere tractor, a Peloton), can now run on a display made of phosphorescent E. coli bacteria.
Ramlan’s paper doesn’t go to the enormous trouble of actually encoding all of Doom to run in bacterial DNA, which the author describes as “a behemoth feat that I cannot even imagine approaching.” Instead, the game runs on a standard computer, with isolated E. coli cells in a standard 32x48 microwell grid serving as a crude low-res display.
After shrinking each game frame down to a 32x48 black-and-white bitmap, Ramlan describes a system whereby a display controller uses a well-known chemical repressor-operator pair to induce each individual cell in the grid to either express a fluorescent protein or not. The resulting grid of glowing bacteria (which is only simulated in Ramlan’s project) can technically be considered a display of Doom gameplay, though the lack of even grayscale shading makes the resulting image pretty indecipherable, to be honest.
Technicalities aside, that’s still pretty cool.
I turned this blog comments thread into a job board and it’s full of people looking for work (and a few companies that are hiring). If your company is hiring, get in there and make some life-altering connections!
Infinite Craft, another fun, whimsical web game from creative coder Neal Agarwal. I made a unicorn!
Kyle Branchesi has created some fanciful “urban oddities” that imagine different locales in the UK being fully optimized for cars. For instance, here are Buckingham Palace and Westminster:
Writes Branchesi:
Amidst a political landscape where the ‘war on motorists’ is wielded as a populist tool, this series captures a future where this rhetoric has prevailed. The transformation of UK landmarks like Stonehenge into vast vehicular realms underscores the absurdity and danger of prioritizing short-term political gains over sustainable urban planning. These images mirror the contentious debates in the UK, challenging the narrative that prioritizes car ownership at the expense of public health and environmental sustainability.
Of course, in an America engineered by Robert Moses and his acolytes, many of those images don’t even look that far-fetched.
Man who leaked Trump’s tax returns sentenced to 5 years in prison. “Littlejohn had applied to work at the contactor to get Trump’s tax returns and carefully figured out how to search and extract tax data to avoid triggering suspicions…” O captain, my captain!
John Gruber on the Apple Vision Pro: “The virtual movie screens look immense, as though you’re really in a movie theater, all by yourself, looking at a 100-foot screen.” This is exactly why I would buy this: IMAX experience at home.
I don’t know exactly what this is, but it appears to be an ad for Lay’s potato chips made by Jimmy Kimmel Live? But whatever, it’s great: a Groundhog Day-inspired clip starring Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) himself that’s perfect for hawking a bajillion different flavors of potato chips. (via @ironicsans)
“If you are a webdev type person and lately the web has felt kinda dry and not fun anymore […] sit down in front of a code editor and hand code some HTML, CSS, and JS on your own.” I’ve been doing this recently and it has been fun!
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