Entries for February 2023
The promise of 3D movies is that they are supposed to draw the viewer further into the world of the film — the all-important immersive experience. In this video, Evan Puschak argues persuasively that the 3D effect actually has the opposite effect, for four main reasons:
1. The different focus and convergence points.
2. The darkness of 3D movies
3. 3D glasses shrink the screen
4. 3D forces you to look at only what’s in focus
I’ve long disliked 3D movies so Puschak’s explanation makes me feel vindicated about my stance. I’ve only ever seen two of them that were any good: the original Avatar and Tron: Legacy. Tron in particular was one of my peak movie-going experiences: I saw it, nearly alone, in a 3D IMAX theater from the best seat in the house. When the lightcycle match started, the 3D effect brought the playing field right into the theater a few inches from my nose and I just gaped in wonder like a little kid for the rest of what is essentially a 125-minute Daft Punk music video (nothing wrong with that!). If all 3D movies were like that, sign me up! But otherwise, I’m gonna stick to 2D.
Genetics determines most of how tall children will grow as adults, but environmental factors affect it too. As the wealth of many countries around the world has increased over the past 100 years, living conditions and access to nutrition have improved and people have gotten taller.
A century ago, humans were quite short. For example, the average South Korean woman was about 4-foot-7, or 142 centimeters, while the average American woman was about 5-foot-2, or 159 centimeters. Humans were fairly short by today’s standards, and that was true throughout nearly all of human history.
But in the past century, human heights have skyrocketed. Globally, humans grew about 3 inches on average, but in South Korea, women grew an astounding 8 inches and men grew 6 inches.
South Korea is almost unique in how quickly their population has gotten taller because they went from a relatively low-income country in the 1950s to well on their way to being a rich, industrialized country by the 90s. And the difference is particularly stark when you compare the heights of South Koreans with those of North Koreans, where the living standard is much lower and access to nutrition is restricted.
I really like the show-your-work vibe of this video, along with this recent one on the greatest unexpected performances in the NBA. These videos are not only relating something interesting to the audience, they’re showing us how the data analysis works: where the data is from, how it’s analyzed, and what it all means, which builds data and statistical literacy in a society that desperately needs it.
The Mauritshuis museum has loaned out Girl With a Pearl Earring to the Rijksmuseum for its blockbuster, once-in-a-lifetime Johannes Vermeer exhibition. While she’s out of the building, they’re digitally displaying dozens of renditions of the artwork submitted during an open call for entries last year. If you can’t make it to the museum in person (*sigh*), they’re showcasing some of the entries on Instagram and you can see what the in-person display looks like in this video.
Regular readers might remember that I have something of a thing for Girl/Pearl remixes. Here are just a few from the archives: Corn with a Pearl Earring, Girl with the Grande Iced Latte, Rihanna with a Pearl Earring, Girl with a Schmeared Earring, at the beach with Mona & Vincent, Girl with a Pearl Earring and Point-and-Shoot Camera, and Lego Girl with a Pearl Earring. (via colossal)
How to create a hologram by hand. Before watching this, I didn’t really know how holograms worked or how they were made and now I do.
The Ukrainian postal service has released a stamp featuring artwork by Banksy to mark the first anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion. The artist painted the image on a wall in the town of Borodianka in November 2022 and has apparently given his permission for use on the stamp. From The Guardian:
The image draws inspiration from the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, known to be a black belt in judo, and depicts a young judoka representing Ukraine knocking down a grown man.
The phrase “FCK PTN” in Cyrillic has been added to the lower left part of the new stamp.
You can buy your own sheet of these stamps directly from the Ukraine postal service — they ship worldwide, in the midst of a war!
See also: you might remember that the postal service ran a contest to design a stamp that illustrated “Ukrainians’ determination to defend their land” shortly after the invasion, which resulted in several eye-catching entries.
Rocky Bergen makes papercraft models of vintage computers like the original Macintosh, Commodore 64, the IBM 5150, and TRS-80. The collection also includes a few gaming consoles and a boombox. And here’s the thing — you can download the patterns for each model for free and make your own at home. Neat!
The American car has gotten bigger in the past few decades but parking spot size has not kept pace.
Regardless of the cause, the end result is roughly 50 percent of the American car market switched from sedans and wagons to SUVs, especially midsize and large SUVs, chunkifying the average American car. Consider someone who switched from a Honda Civic to a Honda CR-V. This added about three inches in width. A CR-V to a Pilot, a large SUV, would add five more inches in width. This may not sound like much, but repeat for half the cars in a parking lot and it adds up. For example, in a 700-space garage, if each car is four inches wider than its predecessor, that is 233 additional feet in car width-from the goal line to the opponent’s 23 yard line on a football field-that needs to be accommodated.
The local community mailing list in the small town I live in has been discussing this issue recently. Over the past 20 years (and in my opinion, it’s really escalated in the past few years), it’s become more and more difficult to park in the lot that serves the more popular of the town’s two grocery stores, 3-4 restaurants, and a few shops. Length is more the issue here than width: we’ve got many more massive pickup trucks, SUVs, and sport utility wagons around here than we used to have, and it’s become much harder to navigate the increasingly narrow aisles between rows of parked cars. I hate parking there now — getting into or backing out of a spot often requires multiple tries and just clogs things up for everyone.
BTW, before I get any feedback like “ban cars!”, you should know that I’m a very reluctant car owner — the amount of resources America devotes to cars over better alternatives is one of the many reasons why — but biking and public transportation in rural areas with cold winters are not viable options. I try to drive as little as possible and consolidate trips, but it still ends up being thousands of miles a year. (via curious about everything)
Note: The image above from Carsized compares the size of a 1955 Fiat 600 with a 2020 GMC Yukon.
The Case For Shunning. “People like Scott Adams claim they’re being silenced. But what they actually seem to object to is being understood.”
The Oscar voters haven’t always gotten their top picks right, but there’s no denying that this visual showcase of Best Cinematography winners from 1967-2021 contains some fantastic work. Just to call out a few of the films recognized: Bonnie and Clyde; Barry Lyndon; The Killing Fields; Schindler’s List; Titanic; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Master and Commander; There Will Be Blood; Inception; Blade Runner 2049; and Dune.
There’s an interesting shift in the winners (presaged by Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977); they move away from historical realism and towards fantasy, sci-fi, and the future: Crouching Tiger (2000) and Lord of the Rings (2001) and then, more definitively, Avatar (2009) and Inception (2010). But the shift is not by any means total: The Revenant (2015), Roma (2018), 1917 (2019), and Mank (2020) are all firmly in the realist realm.
So, it’s been a few months since I’ve been back to work here and perhaps some of you have noticed that I haven’t really written about my sabbatical at all. It wasn’t my intent to skip out on it, but life outside of work has been much busier than I’ve wanted or planned for and I just haven’t had the bandwidth to do it. Plus I’ve just wanted to get back in the flow here — and any extra site time has gone into shoring up some things on the backend, dealing with the Twitter API idiocy, getting in the flow on Mastodon, and thinking about how I might want the site to look/work/feel differently (all stuff that you folks don’t necessarily see day-to-day but do feel the indirect effects of).
Anyway, I thought with the sabbatical in the rear view mirror yet largely unmentioned here in detail and the upcoming 25th anniversary of the site (!!!), it would be a good time to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything). I’ve set up a form at Google to collect questions and sometime in the next couple of weeks (exact date TBD), I’ll spend an entire day answering them right here on the site (exact method of answering also TBD).
So, what would you like to know? I imagine there will be questions about the sabbatical, media diets, 25 years of blogging, membership stuff, editorial policies, my fiddle leaf fig, Mastodon, parenting, Fortnite, etc., but you can also ask about anything you might be curious about or that I might have an opinion about. It would be neat to get some questions that I’m not usually asked — but I have no idea what they would be. I don’t mind hard questions — as long as they’re thoughtful (gotcha questions will be ignored). I probably won’t get to every question, but I will answer as many as I can. Thanks and ask away!
Update: A bunch of great questions so far! Keep them coming!
Shetland Islanders, descendents of Jamaican immigrants living in London, and African Americans all tend to say “axe” or “aks” instead of “ask” when speaking. Linguist Geoff Lindsey traces the history of differing pronunciations of ask/aks from all the way back to the beginnings of written English up to the present day.
See also Ask or aks? How linguistic prejudice perpetuates inequality and linguist John McWhorter on The ‘ax’ versus ‘ask’ question.
First, it’s important to understand that, as English goes, “ax” is a perfectly normal thing to have happened to a word like “ask.” Take the word “fish.” It started as “fisk,” with the same -sk ending that “ask” has. Over time, in some places people started saying “fisk” as “fiks,” while in others they started saying “fisk” as “fish.” After a while, “fish” won out over “fiks,” and here we are today. The same thing happened with “mash.” It started as “mask.” Later some people were saying “maks” and others were saying “mash.” “Mash” won.
With “ask,” some people started saying “aks,” and some started saying “ash.” But this time, it wasn’t “ash” that won out. Instead, for a while “aks” was doing pretty well. Even Chaucer used it in “The Canterbury Tales,” in lines such as this one: “Yow loveres axe I now this questioun.”
There is an element of chance in how words change over time, and we will never know why “aks” and “ash” lost out to “ask.” All we know is that the people whose English was designated the standard happened to be among those who said “ask” instead of “aks” - and the rest is history.
(via @peterme
ASMR videos don’t really do anything for me, but I could watch videos of gears and mechanisms doing their thing all day long. I watched this video of 20 mechanical Lego widgets being combined into one useless machine, absolutely rapt. Bevel gears, rack and pinion, camshaft, worm gear, universal joint, Schmidt coupling — this thing has it all.
See also Gears and Other Mechanical Things and a Treasure Trove of Over 1700 Mechanical Animations. (via the kids should see this & meanwhile)
The Best Mac Gaming Experience Is a PC Sitting in a Dallas Data Center. My son uses NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW streaming gaming service to play Fortnite on his Macbook - it’s not as good as on his gaming PC but it’s better than you’d think.
The Surprising Greatness of Jimmy Carter. “The Carter administration prioritized human rights to an extent that no previous president had done, and this was an extraordinarily important thing.”
A rule of thumb for me in evaluating what movies to watch with my limited free time these days: I will often go for something visually impressive or inventive over other options. So this short reel featuring the nominees for Best Visual Effects Oscar talking about scenes from their movies — All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Batman, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Top Gun: Maverick — is right up my alley. (via @tvaziri)
Phil Vance creates these wonderful typographic portraits of notable people like Audrey Hepburn, Albert Einstein, and Johnny Cash constructed from hand-painted type consisting of their own words. For instance, his portrait of Cash was created using the lyrics from his cover of God’s Gonna Cut You Down. You can check out more of Vance’s work on Instagram.
Ok this video from The Pudding is cool for two different reasons. First, you learn about which NBA player had the most unexpectedly great performance since 1985 (e.g. when a guy who is usually good for 6-8 pts inexplicably drops 50). But, you also get a fun little tutorial in how statistical analysis works and the importance of paying attention to the right data in order to get an answer that’s actually meaningful and relevant. How to interpret data in this way is an under-appreciated aspect in the bombardment of data and statistics we see in the media these days and teaching more people about it doesn’t have to be boring or stuffy.
The Pudding also sets an example here by working in the open: the data they used for their analysis is available on Github.
The American climate migration has already begun. “More than 3 million Americans lost their homes to climate disasters last year, and a substantial number of those will never make it back to their original properties.”
Open Circuits is a book that takes you inside the electronic components that power the modern world, with cross sections and close-up views of things like headphone jacks, chips, circuit boards, cables, etc. Lovely images — it’s like a whole little urban world down there. Buy it now at No Starch Press, Bookshop.org, or Amazon. (via clive thompson)
A visualization of which generation controls the Senate. “A middle-of-the-pack Senator in 1947 was maybe 55 or 56-ish years old. Now, the middle seems to be 65 or 66, a whole decade older!”
Whoa! A24 is auctioning off props from Everything Everywhere All at Once, including the fanny pack, Raccacoonie, the hot dog fingers, and buttplug trophy. Proceeds go to Transgender Law Center, Asian Mental Health Project, and Laundry Workers Center.
I don’t know how kottke.org isn’t going to turn into a JWST-only blog — it seems like there’s some never-before-seen imagery released every other week that just absolutely knocks my socks off. Like these unprecedented images of nearby galaxies that were taken to help study how individual stars affect galactic structure.
The saying goes, ‘From a tiny acorn grows the mighty oak.’ This is accurate not just here on Earth, but in our solar system and beyond. Even on a galactic scale, where individual stars and star clusters can sculpt a galaxy’s overall structure. Scientists say NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is perfectly primed to study these phenomena, and the first data is astounding astronomers.
New imagery from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument is revealing never-before-seen details into how young, newly forming stars influence the structure of the gas and dust of nearby galaxies, and therefore how they evolve over time. Areas of galaxies that once appeared dim and dark in visible light, now under Webb’s infrared eye, are glowing cavities and huge cavernous bubbles of gas and dust.
A California company is repurposing old electric vehicle batteries for electric grid storage. “Even after a battery no longer meets the needs of a car, however, it can still store enough energy to be useful on the electric grid.”
You’ve probably never heard of Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse, even though it’s one of the most well-known songs of the 20th century. Powerhouse is the slapstick “the chase is on!” and relentless “assembly line” music that you’ve heard in many Looney Tunes shorts and other cartoons, including The Simpsons and Spongebob. Here it is in the 1946 ‘toon, Baby Bottleneck:
From Cartoon Brew’s appreciation of Powerhouse on the 86th anniversary of its recording:
I’m sure Raymond Scott never would’ve guessed that he was sealing his legacy when he sold his publishing rights to Warner Bros. Music in 1943. This little transaction gave genius composer Carl Stalling free reign to plug Raymond Scott’s melodies into his scores for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. The propulsive energy of Scott’s quirky instrumental jazz compositions made perfect fodder for the likes of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and Stalling found immediate use for his new library; Stalling’s first quotation of “Powerhouse” appears in the Frank Tashlin classic Porky Pig’s Feat (1943).
The peculiar strains of Raymond Scott’s music and the screwball slapstick of the Warner Bros. cartoons were a match made in heaven…
That CB post has a bunch of embedded videos of different uses of the song, along with this gem of Scott and his “Quintette” playing Powerhouse on TV in 1955:
(via @tcarmody)
A 4K restoration of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is back in theaters. Go see it if you can - I’m gutted that it’s not playing anywhere near me.
In 1986, a team led by Bob Ballard went down in a submersible to explore the wreck of the Titanic, marking the first time since its sinking in 1912 that the ship was seen by human eyes. When some of the photos and video footage they shot were released to the public, it caused a sensation. But much of the video footage has never been seen by the public — the video above is 1h 21m of “rare, uncut, and unnarrated footage” from that initial dive. (via open culture)
Hey everyone — at the end of the day tomorrow (Feb 22), I’m going to shut off ordering for these stylish Kottke.org Hypertext Tees, so if you want one and haven’t ordered one yet, now’s your chance. Here’s what I wrote about the shirts earlier this month:
For much of the nearly 25-year lifespan of kottke.org, the site’s tagline has been “home of fine hypertext products”. I always liked that it felt olde timey and futuristic at the same time, although hypertext itself has become antiquated — no one talks of hypertextual media anymore even though we’re all soaking in it.
And so but anyway, I thought it would fun to turn that tagline into a t-shirt, so I partnered with the good folks at Cotton Bureau to make a fine “hypertext” product that you can actually buy and wear around and eventually it’ll wear out and then you can use it to wash your car. If you want to support the site and look good doing it, you can order a Kottke.org Hypertext Tee right now.
A huge thank you to everyone who has ordered a shirt so far! They have proven remarkably popular — I’ve sold more than twice as many as my top-end estimate and way more than I sold the last time around.1 A few of you have tagged me on social media with shots of your shirts…keep ‘em coming!
P.S. If you want a shirt but your budget doesn’t allow for it right now, I have a small number of discount codes for free shirts (the discount covers shipping too, I think). Let me know and I’ll hook you up, no questions asked (while supplies last). Free codes are all spoken for, sorry!
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