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.”
“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.
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