A cartographer posits that our maps should be messier. “The idea that we must have a crisp line dividing one country from another is often inaccurate when it comes to what states are actually claiming.”
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This is a diabolical phishing attack. “That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers.”
This is hilarious. A man was pictured in two different photos on the same front page of a local newspaper: one of him painting a holiday sign and a gs station security cam still of him taking a wallet.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full list“Some countries are better positioned to weather this energy crisis than they would have been just a few years ago. That’s because of the rapid growth of renewable energy, battery systems and electric vehicles…”
Britain Has Invaded All but 22 Countries
Of the current 200 nations in the world, the British have invaded all but 22 of them. The lucky 22 include Sweden, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Bolivia, and Belarus. The full analysis is available in Stuart Laycock’s book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded.
Stuart Laycock, the author, has worked his way around the globe, through each country alphabetically, researching its history to establish whether, at any point, they have experienced an incursion by Britain.
Only a comparatively small proportion of the total in Mr Laycock’s list of invaded states actually formed an official part of the empire.
The remainder have been included because the British were found to have achieved some sort of military presence in the territory — however transitory — either through force, the threat of force, negotiation or payment.
Incursions by British pirates, privateers or armed explorers have also been included, provided they were operating with the approval of their government.
The US currently has military personnel stationed in all but 43 countries.
For instance, as of Sept. 30, 2011, there were 53,766 military personnel in Germany, 39,222 in Japan, 10,801 in Italy and 9,382 in the United Kingdom. That makes sense. But wait, scanning the list, you also see nine troops in Mali, eight in Barbados, seven in Laos, six in Lithuania, five in Lebanon, four in Moldova, three in Mongolia, two in Suriname and one in Gabon.
But the presence in most of those countries is due to diplomatic usage of military personnel. (thx, aaron)
The words shark (the animal) and shark (a predatory scoundrel) may have two different origins. “This would make ‘shark’ possibly the only word borrowed from a Mayan language into English directly.”
Parachord is “a new kind of music player that invites all your streams, local audio files, and playlists scattered across multiple services to the same party”. Interesting!
Every Fashion Designer, Explained. If you don’t know anything about fashion, this video will get you up to speed quickly. Vivienne Westwood, Nigo, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, Dapper Dan, Hubert de Givenchy, etc. etc.
300+ issues of the UK music magazine NME from 1969-1983. The ads alone are incredible.
“The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”
Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. There’s the 1631 Bible that says “thou shalt commit adultery” but James Joyce resisted some of his corrections: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”
Paris now has a cycling network bigger than Amsterdam and “more daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car”.
The Human City
Photographer and drone pilot Pio Andrea Peri captured this overhead photo of a Sicilian city called Centuripe. Perched atop hilltops, the city looks like a person from above — even on Google Maps. (via daily overview)
Gender Play in Nineteenth-Century Theater. “The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and Iago…”
A study pitted adults vs little kids to see which was better at making paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock. “The researchers found that the kids’ paintings made in this manner resembled genuine Pollocks more than did those from adult painters.”
Dawn Wilcox’s quest to chronicle the life & death of every woman in the US killed by a man. “Did women have no choice, Wilcox wondered, but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?”
Checking in with Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, kinetic machine sculptures that move under their own power along the beach. Some of the most recent versions are quick fast and can even tow humans along behind them.
Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8 billion. How good of a person do you expect her to be? “I got to thinking about all this the other day while mulling the curious, oft-repeated fact that Miuccia Prada was, in her 1960s youth, a Communist.”
“Birds in the United States are not only declining, but they are declining faster, especially in areas with intensive agriculture, according to new research.”
A generator for VHS slipcovers, cassette tape inserts, CD labels & inserts. You can paste in Spotify URLs, search for movies, etc. Really cool and fun.
The Delta Air Lines Seatback Chess Bot Will Destroy You
The chess program available on Delta Air Lines’ seatback screens is an ELO monster that can beat almost all opponents on easy mode. This guy used a series of increasingly powerful bots to see just how good the Delta chess bot is. Can it beat a grandmaster-level bot? (via clive thompson)
What does it feel like to be struck by lightning? “Some have to relearn simple things, things they’ve done their whole life — how to read, how to sing, how to ride a bike.”
The Fascinating Engineering of the Titanic: How the Great Ocean Liner Was Built. “Issues of the journal The Engineer published between 1909 and 1911 contain detailed photographs of the construction of both the Titanic and Olympic…”
Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years. “Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977.”
Riding the Subway to Coney Island in 1987
This is a mindblowing time capsule of ordinary life: video of a group of friends taking the NYC subway to Coney Island in 1987. Because it was before mobile phones, they had to arrange to meet one of the group members in the first car of the train along the way.
The film was shot by Nelson Sullivan, a videographer who recorded the arts, music, and LGBTQ+ communities in NYC in this same ur-vlogging style.
Viewed today, Sullivan’s video record of his life represents a pre-Internet form of vlogging, while his frequently used technique of turning the camera to face himself clearly anticipates the modern selfie.
You can watch hundreds more of Sullivan’s films on YouTube, including a trip to McDonald’s (the most popular video on the channel), several RuPaul videos, a holiday party at Michael Alig & DJ Keoki’s apartment, and Keith Haring’s NYE party. Sullivan sadly died of a presumed heart attack two years later at the age of 41. (thx, caroline)
Jamelle Bouie says the SAVE Act will take us back to Jim Crow South: “a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.”
“This is an interactive story about In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) told from two perspectives: Parent and Child. Select one to continue.”
The Mysterious Redditor Who’s Changing the Way We Do Laundry. “Most of the world uses powdered laundry detergent, which allows for more enzyme flexibility; Americans generally prefer liquid, which doesn’t always contain these precious enzymes.”
Vertical Societies
Am I a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images by Richard Nadler because I am a fan of Richard Scarry books and Wes Anderson movies or am I a fan of Scarry & Anderson because I’m a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images? (Or is it because I’m aphantasic and require external imagery for this level of detail?)
See also Mark Alan Stamaty’s NYC Illustrations and Infinite Illustrations.
Twin adventurers are cleverly testing modern vs. historic gear. “If they went on an expedition, and Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas, any difference in performance…could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.”
The teaser trailer for Dune: Part Three. I am nonplussed by this trailer, both in the traditional and modern senses.
Extreme Macro Photos of Insect Wings. Hundreds of images are stacked to create a deep depth of field that’s impossible to do optically, ensuring everything is in focus.
Planets and Bright Stars ID Chart
I love this planet & stars chart from XKCD because it’s technically correct but also completely useless.
Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity. “You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.”
Battery prices continue to fall. “Lithium-ion battery prices don’t get constantly discussed the way crude is, but these declines add up to a decisive shift that will determine the energy landscape of the next decade.”
“The US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey”. The Varieties of Democracy Institute: “Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever…”
Gullible, Cynical America. “They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.”
“In today’s new Gilded Age, the 900-plus billionaires in the US have far too much influence over our elections, our economy, our government policies and our news media, and it’s urgent for Americans to create a movement to curb their power…”
The Holocaust History Podcast: “In this episode, I talk with Andrea Pitzer about the long, global history of the concentration camp and its evolution over time. We talk about what the definition is, what qualifies something as a concentration camp…”
The Louvre has the Mona Lisa. Here’s what other institutions consider their Mona Lisas. For instance: the National Portrait Gallery in London has a portrait of William Shakespeare and MoMA has the Gold Marilyn Monroe.
The 20 Best Food Scenes in Movies. Ratatouille, Big Night, When Harry Met Sally, Tampopo, etc. What’s missing?
Tiny Puppet Sound
Would you like to watch a puppet DJ a chill set of French house music in a cool workplace meeting space? Trick question because of course you would. This went right into my Underscore collection. (via undermanager)
“Pay enough, and you can jump to the front of the queue for almost anything.” Concierge Nation: Welcome to White-Glove America. “Exclusivity — even if it comes at the cost of social cohesion — is the business model.”
“This Is Not The Computer For You”
Maybe it’s because I’m a little bit allergic to hype, but I just now got around to reading this review of the Macbook Neo by Sam Henri Gold that absolutely everyone has been recommending and, well, this might be the best product review ever written?
The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you are thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” The people saying this are not wrong. It is also not the point.
Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.
Gold captures something here about every single person I’ve ever known who fell in love with computers as a kid in the 70s, 80s, and 90s experienced — the sense of tremendous possibility represented by these machines paired with the glorious struggle to push them beyond their limits. For many of us, it was our first glimpse of infinity — as long as your curiosity & obsession remained, you could keep going forever.
Unrelatedly-ish, it is also really interesting that Apple’s answer to the AI gold rush is a $499 laptop (Neo price w/ educational discount). I don’t know if it suggests that the multi-trillion dollar, multinational corporation that Apple has become retains some institutional memory of what computing used to mean to people, but it’s something.
The Trump regime is deliberately destroying the scientific community in the US. “This is not efficiency. This is not streamlining. This is the systematic elimination of scientific stewardship at the world’s largest biomedical research funder.”
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