Walmart is busy building out their fast EV charger network in the US…currently 73 locations in 17 states. Their eventual goal is install chargers at “thousands of its locations by 2030”.
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see full listSome Interesting Apples
Something that still blows my mind is that every apple seed produces a new variety. Every single one.
This is a lovely short documentary about a project called Some Interesting Apples, which aims to find apples growing in unusual places (i.e. not commercial orchards but in places where people tend to discard apple cores):
The last three years I have been involved with a project called ‘Some Interesting Apples’, the primary aim of which is to record and, where characteristics make desirable (and sometimes where they don’t), preserve wilding apples, i.e., domestic apples growing on their own roots as the result of a discarded core.
Some of the best apples are then cultivated in an orchard dedicated to wild apples:
The ‘Some Interesting Apples’ project collects apples from wild trees that have been grown using cores thrown away — many from car windows or dropped from walkers and animals.
The wild trees or ‘wildlings’ are trees that grow from those apple cores discarded in hedges and along train tracks, footpaths and roadsides.
Their fruit often goes uneaten or rots — but have now instead be used to create a unique orchard.
The orchard has been developed from dropped fruit from more than 600 apple wildings in Cornwall.
It has now created Wilding Mother Orchard - the first ever orchard in the UK solely dedicated to cultivating wild-grown, chance-seedling apples.
The discovered apple varieties are named for their what3words locations; they have names like Horse Wish Gossip, Panes House Taxi, and Autumn Mushroom Spoke.
Apples are super interesting. I read it years ago now, but I still often think of Michael Pollan’s chapter on apples in The Botany of Desire.
Participants in a recently published study spoke 28% fewer words per day in 2019 than they did in 2005. (People are spending more time alone and more time digitally communicating.)
OnlyMarms: Funding Science Research on OnlyFans
This is an extremely 2026 story (derogatory): because of the Trump regime’s assualt on scientific funding, a group of scientists who has been studying marmot populations in Colorado since 1962 turned to OnlyFans to fund their research this year.
In June, Daniel Blumstein, a biologist, sat in a field in Gothic, Colo., waiting to see a marmot. The rodent was elusive, leaving his thoughts to wander.
He lamented a lack of funding for his work amid federal cuts to scientific research. Then he alighted on the television show “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” and that’s when the epiphany came.
Perhaps the show’s plot, about a single mother who, unable to find conventional work, turns to the adult-content site OnlyFans to support herself, could be applied to marmots and research funding.
Back at his lab, Dr. Blumstein pitched the idea (with a wholesome spin) to his colleagues, who offered mixed feedback. But then one of his graduate students suggested naming the profile OnlyMarms.
Here’s the G-rated OnlyMarms account on OnlyFans; you can also donate to the project directly. More from Live Science:
OnlyFans is a subscription platform that allows users to pay creators to see exclusive photos and videos. The platform has become popular with adult-only content creators, but it hosts others too, including musicians, athletes and celebrities — and now marmots.
“We’re trying this out of frustration with an extremely challenging funding environment,” Blumstein said. “If we’re lucky, it can help raise money for supplies and some expenses. But unless we are very lucky, it won’t replace the federal funding that has driven discovery in the US since the 1950s.”
We’ve got GoFundMe for healthcare and now OnlyFans for science funding. The privatization of the United States is coming along nicely and the future looks bright!
Study: Dinosaurs Were Charbroiled After Chicxulub Impact. “The impact would have produced an immense cloud of dust that superheated the upper atmosphere, charbroiling living organisms unable to take shelter and igniting widespread wildfires.”
Why Do We Tolerate Elon Musk’s Racist Commentary? “Musk’s virulent racism and vicious, disturbing views are no secret. He does not hide them. They sit in plain view, easily accessible on the social media website he owns…”
On the experience of the long haul flight. “The meal cart appears two hours in. You can hear it banging into passengers’ knees before you see it, and the sound causes the entire cabin to sit up slightly, like meerkats detecting motion on the savanna.”
“The Booker Prize 2026 longlist has now been announced…” Among the authors nominated are Marlon James, M. John Harrison, Emma Cline, and Elizabeth Strout.
Please Use AI. “Be sure to use AI when planning that next camping trip, the last one you will take with this particular child. Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail…”
Where Do European Country Names Come From?
Word nerd Rob Watts explains where the names of all the European countries come from.
Which country is the “land of the rabbits”? Why does Germany have so many different names? Where do the Dutch actually live? What links Croatians and neckties?
(via open culture)
30 notable sales of rare books by AbeBooks over the past 30 years, including first editions of Moby-Dick, Winnie-The-Pooh, and Leaves of Grass.
19th Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Creatively Illustrate the Inner Workings of the Human Body. Love these.
All US Cities Which Used to Have More Than 100,000 People But Don’t Anymore
Here’s a map of the 21 US cities that used to have a population of 100,000 people but don’t anymore. Many of these are Rust Belt cities, in which manufacturing employment fell steeply during the latter part of the 20th century.
The thread at Reddit mentions Detroit and St. Louis as two other cities whose population has dropped during that same time period. Detroit went from 1.85 million in 1950 to 639,000 in 2020 and St. Louis dropped from 857,000 to 300,000 over the same time period:
St. Louis was once the country’s 4th largest city. Worlds Fair and Olympics in 1904. Two Major League Baseball teams. It didn’t boom as much as the Great Lakes cities in between the wars and it declined just as much after.
How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed, and What That Says About Us. “The shifts reflect a life that moved further from its own making: less tied to tools, animals, food…; more tied to global institutions, categories, systems…”
Don’t use AI until you’re 40. “We have been so quick to treat access to new technology as an inevitability that we have failed to question whether every powerful tool should be placed in the hands of every developing mind the moment it becomes available.”
We Used to Be Able to Buy Things in This Country. “Locking up toothpaste was a warning sign that our executive class was crazy.”
A Shortlist of Potential Future Euro Banknote Designs
The European Central Bank is providing a sneak peek at the next design of the Euro banknotes. From a shortlist of 10 designs created by artists and designers from across the EU, one will be selected as the basis of how Euro banknotes from €5 to €200 will look in the future. Here are a few I pulled out from all of the designs:
It’s notable (*cough*) that some of the banknotes are designed vertically vs horizontally. The influence of portrait mode on smartphones?
“Datatype is an OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no rendering library — just type the syntax and Datatype’s ligature substitution does the rest.”
The Batman Effect: people in an experiment acted more altruisticly when the caped crusader was present.
Once Upon a Time in Space
From the filmmakers who made the excellent Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland comes a four-part series on space exploration, Once Upon a Time in Space. A short trailer is above; here’s a synopsis:
Drawing on intimate, unseen archive and powerful first-hand testimony, this landmark 4-part series tells the human stories behind our quest to explore space, offering a unique perspective on our changing world and where we are headed.
The series first aired on the BBC and the first two episodes are now available on PBS. (thx, mitch)
An Uncomplicated Man, Emily Wilson’s review of Nolan’s The Odyssey. “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script. Sadly, Damon’s Odysseus isn’t complicated or wily or artful.”
Astronauts returning from long missions report a “jet lag of the self”: “a sense of watching their own lives from a half-step outside the frame”.
Trump’s Assault on Science Continues
I appreciate the plain speech of Science magazine’s Derek Lowe in his recent piece, The Assault On Science Funding Continues.
When I talk to people about this subject (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I’m about to at the end of this paragaph I am sometimes met with disbelief. But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.
That’s it. That’s the story. They are naturally not putting it in those words, but instead talking about “gold standard science” and the “reproducibility crisis” and funding “bold inquiry” for “transformational breakthroughs”. This is all bullshit, and it’s important to realize that. Shameless hand-waving bullshit, delivered in a how-dare-you-think-otherwise manner is the defining style of the entire Trump administration. You can see it in every appointee, in every part of the executive branch, and in the pronouncements of all of Trump’s supporters. I realize that this is a simple heuristic to apply, and a very unambiguous and unflattering one, but I find it to be all too useful and all too accurate. Give it a try.
Yep. He’s the mob boss president — everything is about favors, taking his cut, deals, tough guy-ness, bending the world to his will, power, and white male supremacy.
Welp, right at the top of the CDC page on autism and vaccines: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” 🫨
New orca behavior unlocked. They’ve been known to sink boats and wear salmon for hats; now they’re ramming fish so hard they explode. “Orcas were observed to hold sunfish in their jaws while a second whale smashed into the target at high speed…”
It’s our ethical duty to understand large numbers. “Our world is increasingly moving towards extreme values: Damages from climate change, deaths due to genocide, wealth that knows no bounds. We can’t tackle them if we can’t wrap our heads around [them].”
A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out. “Once everyone was back at school on Tuesday, the high schoolers lawyered up during their lunch hour.”
“A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.” (AI bots and prediction market dipshits.)
“In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.” On the good and bad types of nostalgia.
Rebecca Solnit on the Tate brothers, The Odyssey, and the misogyny of classical literature & the contemporary world. “Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.”
What’s On the Sandwich Named After You at the Local Deli?
Following a prompt from Joanna at Cup of Jo… The local deli or sandwich shop names a sandwich after you. What would be on it? Perhaps another way of asking the question: what’s your favorite sandwich that’s a little bit unusual?
I love a classic BLT, banh mi, or jambon beurre, but a sandwich that is fairly unique to me is tuna salad (made with pickles, pickle juice, and scallions), havarti, lettuce, and tomatoes on good white bread or a kaiser roll. I think that would be The Kottke at the local deli. Either that or something chopped?
Why are American ambulances so expensive? In part because Medicare pays only a fraction of the actual cost of an ambulance ride and the uninsured often don’t pay at all, so the privately insured get bills of $13,000 for a $2600 ride.
We’re Squandering LEDs’ Potential to Save Our Night Skies. “Our main failure isn’t a technical one. It’s that we have yet to revise our thinking about lighting at night. We use LED technology just as we did the old sources of light.”
A Matter of Form (1984)
In addition to leading the animation studio at the National Film Board of Canada, René Jodoin made several animated films that explored geometric forms and motion, including the one above, A Matter of Form from 1984.
Set to the rousing notes of Schubert’s Military March, this animation film is an ingenious example of how a single point can be the building-block for a multiplicity of shapes and configurations. Lines and forms grow out of the point, eventually covering the entire screen in splashes of colour. This is geometric wizardry at its colourful best. A film without words.
I’m not saying my affinity for such animations is because I watched so much Sesame Street as a kid, but I’m not not saying it either.
Here’s another of Jodoin’s films, Dance Squared:
You can watch more of Jodoin’s work in this YouTube playlist. (via the kid should see this)
An online edition of all 85 of the Federalist Papers, presented as they were originally serialized in newspapers, with on eye on good typography and readability.
“This map shows the predicted density of underground networks created by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These networks form one of Earth’s circulatory systems, moving massive amounts of carbon, nutrients, and water across plant communities.”
Oh wow, The Verge made a 70-minute video on how The Clapper became a viral sensation. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a Clapper, no one I knew had one, and I couldn’t understand why every single household didn’t have one of these magical devices.
Frozen Polygon Waves
Well, this is just absolutely lovely: photographer and artist Jan Erik Waider shot these videos of cracked-but-unbroken Baltic Sea ice undulating with the gentle motion of the sea. Mesmerizing…I could watch these for hours.
What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America? “A menu describes what a restaurant serves — but a menu also describes who is being served. They reflect the class, gender, political, technological, and environmental shifts of history.”
A list of Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail, including an Apple Powerbook 100, a SGI R4000 Indigo, the Motorola Envoy (PDA), and some Thinking Machines CM-5s. “This is a Unix system, I know this!”
There is nothing more I love in this world right now than these two lunch ladies performing Firestarter by The Prodigy.
Unclassifiable Artists
Using William Blake (aka “the patron saint of unclassifiable artists”) as an example, Evan Puschak’s latest video explores how society often rejects artists whose work doesn’t fit neatly into established categories and frameworks of criticism and commerce.
What you’re seeing here, these are not paintings. They’re prints of engravings from Blake’s illuminated books, which he designed, wrote, etched, colored, and printed himself using a technique that he invented. These extraordinary books are works of art that mix and synthesize categories. And as a result, the art world of the late 17 and early 1800s didn’t really know what to make of them. And Blake never sold more than a handful.
A digital museum of video game levels…you can move freely around each level using your keyboard. Heavy on Nintendo games (Mario Kart 64, Wii Sports, etc.) but also includes Portal, Halo, Katamari Damacy, GTA III, and World of Warcraft.
I have lived more than two score and twelve years on this Earth and somehow I didn’t know that there are two copies of the Gettysburg Address written in Lincoln’s own hand in the Library of Congress (and five overall).
The Cassette Tapes of the Great Migration, a collection of oral histories recorded in Michigan in the 1970s of Black people who had previously escaped the Jim Crow South. “If we don’t get it from those individuals, then we can’t get it from anyone else.”
“Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest — and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days.”
Brian Eno on the Cherished Sounds of Failure
Near the end of 1995, the artist and producer Brian Eno wrote the following about new media in his diary, which entries were later collected in a book called A Year with Swollen Appendices.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.
Nailed it.
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