David Epstein, author of the recent Inside the Box (a book about the value of constraints), did a fascinating video on “anticipatory skill” and “chunking” and how players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (who can accurately head the ball even in the dark) use them to slow down a fast, complex game.
And this is the skill that Messi, Ronaldo, and Pujols all share. They’re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what’s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what’s happening and to predict what’s coming next.
So when Messi walks, he’s not resting. He’s chunking the entire field. Every position, every shift, every gap in the backline is feeding a pattern library that he’s been building since he was 5 years old. By the time he decides to move, the map is already drawn. And when Ronaldo heads a ball into the net in total darkness, it’s because he’s seen that angle of another player’s leg and that ball’s trajectory a hundred times over and knows the pattern it follows.
I love this kind of thing and even though I am not a world-class boxer or football player, I can see it in action as I’ve gotten better over the years downhill mountain biking (where I’m able to go faster on the bike while still being able to react to terrain in what feels like the same amount of time), playing Fortnite (which I’m still not great at, but the game seems to move at a much slower pace, allowing me to keep up), or doing the crossword puzzle (you get an instinctive feel for answers just by how questions are posed). I’m sure this shows up in my work too — I read so damn much online that sometimes it takes me only 2-3 seconds to figure out if something is worth my while — but it’s easier to observe in sports or gaming.
BTW, Epstein just started his YouTube channel a few months ago, but it’s already filled with great stuff like Why The Fastest Way To Improve Is To Subtract, Why The Smartest People I Know Set Constraints, Not Goals, and Why The Best Kids Are Rarely The Best Adults. I’ve got some catching up to do.
Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. “This book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts…, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented.”
British political news: Nigel Farage is facing competition for his parliamentary seat from “a man with a trash can on his head, better known as Count Binface”. From the country that brought you Boaty McBoatface…
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
City’s Beautification Initiative Hamstrung By Commitment To Local Artists. “I’m pretty sure when the mayor promised residents a revitalized arts district, he didn’t mean a couple of wonky fish sculptures haphazardly nailed to a tree…” Bwhahaha.
From The Public Domain Review, The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man, a diagram found in many medical texts beginning in the early 1400s.
Living on today in libraries from Copenhagen to Munich, the strange figure of the Wound Man gives modern viewers a glimpse of the worrying injuries that the medieval body could receive through war, accident, and epidemic. But at the same time, it shows that medieval people did not think of themselves as helpless victims in the face of these assaults. Far from reinforcing the common perception of the European Middle Ages as a backwards and bloody period of human history, the Wound Man reminds us that it was in fact a period busy with innovative medical treatments, a vital link between the long-standing cures of the classical world and developments that were to follow in early Renaissance medicine.
If Only There Had Been a Sign That the Face-Melting Nazi from Indiana Jones Wouldn’t Make a Good Senator. “Marion Ravenwood said he trapped her in a room and physically assaulted her. But I decided to keep supporting Toht anyway.”
Marcos Paulo has been making all sorts of phone-sized wallpapers for the World Cup and posting them to Threads. You have to poke around to find them in his account, but here are a few direct links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization. Suggestions: “artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation” & “AI agent → probabilistic, unverified software manipulator”. Seems like the horse is out of the barn on this though…
Mister Rogers visits Eric Carle’s studio and paints with him (full episode). Carle wrote and illustrated The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other children’s books.
Over the past few centuries, humans have decimated bird populations — you can hear it in the thinning of the dawn chorus — but it’s difficult to notice sometimes because of shifting baseline syndrome.
Martin Timko (aka matogolf) cut this video of the best musical moments from Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert. He plays a number of pieces from various soundtracks, including Dunkirk, Gladiator, Interstellar, Dune, and The Dark Knight. Great to hear live performances of these iconic pieces.
Sloan on Fable: “This is literally the core muscle of any/every language model: ‘I need to quickly and accurately understand what kind of document I am inside.’ Yet the sensitivity of that orienteering, the subtlety of it, has gotten so much better.”
New Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books: A Tradcath Wedding. “He pronounced the word ‘nuptial’ as noopt-see-all. If that’s correct, never tell me.”
Just dropped a couple of days ago: Lane 8’s Summer 2026 Mixtape (4 hours long). Also available on Soundcloud.
If you are anything like me, your soul let out a big “oooooof” while reading this: The Year Is 2063 and You Were Never Interesting.
But wait. You are 70 years old. You’re sitting in your home. Your grandchildren ask you what your 20s were like, and you honestly can’t tell them. You have no heirlooms; Temu doesn’t last. You never moved to Paris or quit the toxic job or booked the Spanish lesson. You were too nervous to get that tattoo, never went back to school. You were too awkward to go to the nude drawing class, you never did learn how to make dumplings. Your feed was so full of people living lives so full you never stopped to consider yours.
The great love affair of your life is… this. Sitting in the dark, your nose 6 inches from the screen. You have never separated, never taken a break. It started slowly, rockily. But by 25, it had its claws in you. By 30, it fills the dead spaces in your life. And you’ve never relented. It has consumed you wholly and the math has compounded. By this age, at 7 hours a day, 15 years of your life has been a screen.
👀 Craig Mod interviewed by Debbie Millman on Design Matters. (I guess those eyes should be ears but an ears-bugging-out emoji doesn’t exist.)
vintage post from Aug 2018
· gift link
TIL that the hieroglyphic hobo code probably wasn’t used as extensively as the internet suggests. However, hobos and tramps did tag bridges, water towers, and train cars with tramp writing, which usually consisted of their moniker (i.e. their hobo name), the date, and the direction they were heading in.
Hobos, or tramps, were itinerant workers and wanderers who illegally hopped freight cars on the newly expanding railroad in the United States in the late 19th century. They used graffiti, also known as tramp writing, as a messaging system to tell their fellow travelers where they were and where they were going. Hobos would carve or draw their road persona, or moniker, on stationary objects near railroad tracks, like water towers and bridges.
More on hobo graffiti from CityLab.
Traces of hobo graffiti from the early 20th century have become almost totally obliterated, destroyed by natural forces, torn down along with old buildings, or painted over with new graffiti. So when anthropologist Susan Phillips came across a rare one scribbled underneath a bridge near the Los Angeles River, she knew it was a remarkable discovery.
(via open culture)
The Fun Shortage Is Real, and It’s Making America Miserable (gift link). “With fewer places to relax and socialize, and steeper prices for entry, having fun is quantifiably harder than it used to be.”
I love this short little video montage of actresses during Charlie Rose interviews. No dialogue, just quiet reactions. Musical accompaniment by Laurie Anderson (O Superman).
One of the great things about the World Cup and the US: In the United States, Every World Cup Team Is a Home Team. “Soccer fans from all over the world, many now making their homes in America, have packed bars, restaurants, living rooms…”
To celebrate the 250th anniversary of our great nation, The Onion has produced a Ken Burns-esque film called Birth of a Nation (“the only movie ever named this”).
250 years ago, a group of illiterate men would gather in these hallowed halls to scribble down what historians can now only assume were words. Words that would one day be assigned meaning. Words and pictures. Pictures mostly. That would serve as the founding principles for a grand new experiment that would forever change the course of human history. An experiment that would produce a monstrosity so powerful it would soon be known to the whole world by just one name. America.
In 1937, the NYT ran a piece about the last living son of a Revolutionary War soldier. “Many times Constant said his father spoke of meeting George Washington…” The Great Span in action.
Hey all. It’s Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend and the weather is glorious here, so what better (worse) time to unleash a new feature on KDO? I’ve been working on a new wysiwyg comment editor for the past few days and it’s finally ready to go. Asking you folks to deal with HTML while leaving a comment was always a bit of a kludge, but now you can include links, blockquoted text, lists, and bold/italic text formatting in your comments and know exactly what it’s going to look like before posting.
You can try it out by sharing something worthwhile you’ve seen, heard, or learned recently. Feedback and bug reports welcome!!
As it was foretold: the Trump regime gutted the NOAA and now weather forecasts are less accurate. An atmospheric scientist: “The forecasts I’m able to offer you are less accurate than they would otherwise be.”
“Dictionary of the Illegible proposes illegibility as a strategy for navigating a world increasingly governed by visibility, efficiency, and total surveillance.”
“The average paid newsletter costs $10 per month or $100 per year, according to analysis of thousands of publications hosted on Beehiiv.” KDO memberships start at $3/mo. and I haven’t raised prices since 2016. You folks are getting an incredible deal!
Hank Green interviews Ze Frank, who kind of invented the modern YouTube format (aka vlogging). “At the episode’s end, Ze lays down some of the best advice Hank’s ever heard.”
Will America Ever Give White-Man Rights to Everyone Else? “These documents…were written by rich white men for the benefit of rich white men, and this country has never for a day recovered from their failure.”
The US Constitution Is for Simple Folk Still Burdened by the Belief That Words Have Meaning. “The true Constitution is not a document. It’s more of a gut feeling. It is a shimmering legal gas that settles wherever conservatives need it most…”
Rebecca Solnit: What Is the United States of America Now? “The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked.” But also: “It is the country that gave the world jazz…”
Report from a cruise full of celebrity impersonators. “A woman sat a toddler down beside us, while another, larger toddler tugged at her capris. At this point, every child was starting to look like Wallace Shawn.”
My Family Has Been Here Since 1621. That Is Not What Makes Me American. “We are a nation of immigrants that has watched as immigrants arrive, assimilate and begin pulling the ladder up behind them.”
There’s been so much crazy to pay attention to over the past few weeks that I missed this: Midjourney, the AI image-maker that you access through Discord, is making a medical imaging machine. “It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light…”
A graphic of a floppy disk hamburger was created on an early Amiga computer, photographed, and then deleted (more specifically, it couldn’t be saved). Stuart Brown set out to recreate this image as accurately as possible, including colors, dimensions, etc. This is deliciously nerdy. Here’s the resulting image (with some horizontal padding I added):
(via unsung)
I love the aesthetic of Fresco, a video game where you play as a character embedded into Egyptian wall paintings. In many ways, these wall paintings are ancient precursors to side-scrolling games.
For the latest episode of Howtown, Adam Cole and Joss Fong look at wildfires and how investigators go about determining and proving how they start. The backdrop of video is the investigation into the Palisades Fire and the related arson trial that just concluded.
What started the Palisades Fire, and why did the LA arson trial fall apart? This Howtown episode investigates the deadly Pacific Palisades wildfire, the smaller New Year’s Eve Lachman Fire, and the federal arson case against Jonathan Rinderknecht. Prosecutors argued that the Lachman Fire became a hidden holdover fire, smoldering in roots and dense vegetation before reigniting during Santa Ana winds and becoming the catastrophic Palisades Fire. We examine how ATF fire investigators determine fire origin and cause using wildfire forensics, burn patterns, fire behavior, wind direction, topography, fuel, surveillance camera footage, ALERTCalifornia cameras, cell phone location data, ignition source testing, and lab experiments.
The episode also looks at competing theories in the Palisades Fire investigation, including fireworks, cigarette ignition, open flame, accidental fire, intentional arson, smoldering roots, and reignition. At trial, prosecutors pointed to Rinderknecht’s location, behavior, searches, messages, 911 calls, and alleged motive, while the defense argued there was no direct evidence, no smoking gun, no recovered ignition source, and serious uncertainty in the wildfire investigation. The LA arson trial ended with a deadlocked jury, a mistrial, and a 10–2 split, raising questions about reasonable doubt, negative corpus, forensic science, ATF methods, LAFD response, the Skull Rock trailhead, the Lachman Fire origin, and why proving wildfire arson is so difficult after the evidence has burned away.
You know sometimes you learn some ancient lore and suddenly some contemporary pop culture thing snaps into place? Anyway, I found out how Isadora Duncan died and now I better understand the “no capes” thing in The Incredibles.
Saya Irie’s Intricate Sculptures Recomposed from Eraser Shavings. “The Japanese artist erases images & then uses those eraser shavings to recompose the images into three-dimensional form, transforming the byproduct of erasure into delicate works of art.”
The Last Astronomers. “Many fear that if unleashed in all parts of the scientific process, AI tools could lead to nothing less than the death of astrophysics as a human endeavor.”
Idris Elba, knight of the realm and forever Avon Barksdale’s right-hand man in my heart, has been a DJ since he was 14 years old. He recently DJed a house party for Black House Radio and it looks like everyone had a lot of fun.
You can also find this mix on Soundcloud, along with many more of Elba’s mixes.
Playwright Georgica Pettus has written a play called Truck, which is based on the excellent documentary Hands on a Hardbody. “I thought, ‘This is the best premise for a play, because all the attention goes to the dialogue.’”
What is queer typography? “I think that covers a lot of what queerness means: an attitude in the face of conformity, an attitude in the sea of passivity, an attitude to say yes when others say no.”
Great piece by Andrea Pitzer on how lost Ezra Klein is in this current moment, newly relevant because he interviewed fascist activist Christopher Rufo on his NYT podcast (JFC!) “If you don’t know what your core beliefs are, you’re going to get played.”
I found this AI Compass quiz genuinely useful for pinpointing how I actually feel about various aspects of AI. At the same time, I don’t think my result (“The Kontextmaschine”) quite fits…
Older posts
Socials & More