Wow, I'd never seen these before today! For the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, Wes Anderson created three promo spots, each one a staged re-creation of a nominated movie in the style of the Hollywood-inspired plays in Rushmore (Serpico & the Vietnam War one). All three shorts (Armageddon, Out of Sight, The Truman Show) star Jason Schwartzman as Max Fisher, along with the rest of the Max Fischer Players. (via open culture)
The top two comments on YouTube sum this trailer for Asteroid City up pretty well: "Just when you don't think it can get more Wes Anderson, it gets more Wes Anderson." and "You know a Wes Anderson movie is a Wes Anderson movie, but you can't really describe a Wes Anderson movie to someone who has never seen a Wes Anderson movie." Here's the synopsis:
The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention (organized to bring together students and parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition) is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.
Does it even matter to know this? At this point, you're either throwing money at the screen after watching this trailer (*raises hand*) or you're just not interested. For those in the former camp, Asteroid City opens in theaters on June 16.
Update: Asteroid City marks the first Wes Anderson movie without Bill Murray since Bottle Rocket — the actor came down with Covid-19 just before filming began and had to withdraw.
Kirby Ferguson has released the final and "definitive" full-length version of his fantastic Everything is a Remix video series (transcript).
Memes are remixing. You take a photo, you repurpose it, then someone else tries it, then there's a flood of everyone trying out combinations, including remixing other memes.
When you take something old and use it in something new, that's remixing. It might just seem like just copying, but it's actually something much more. Remixing can empower you be more creative.
Remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments, to create software without coding, to create bigger and more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas.
You don't need expensive tools to remix, you don't need a distributor, you don't even need skills or... good judgment. Everybody can remix and everybody does.
From our songs and games and movies and memes, to how we train computers to create, to the way we sense of reality, to the evolution of life itself, everything is definitely a remix.
(via matt haughey)
Hey, I just wanted to pop in with some reminders and a couple of new things. As I outlined in a post last month, 2023 has been busy around here:
The site celebrated its 25th anniversary last month. I built and launched a micro-site for the Kottke Ask Me Anything & spent a couple of sessions answering reader questions. I went on The Talk Show to discuss the early days of blogging with John Gruber and put some cool t-shirts out into the world. It's been fun to continue to build up a presence for kottke.org over on Mastodon. I rejiggered the Quick Links infrastructure (which has made it easier/faster for me to post them) and have been working on a couple of behind-the-scenes projects that will hopefully streamline & shore up things around here. Oh, and I also kept up the regular stream of posts and links you know and love. *phew*
And the hits keep on coming. In the last two weeks, I've added two additional ways to keep up with kottke.org: on Tumblr and Bluesky (web). My Tumblr posting bot stopped working a couple of years ago, so it was good to get that going again. So as of now, there are seven ways to read/follow the activity at kottke.org: on the website, full-text RSS, Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter (until they kick me off they kicked me off!), Bluesky, Tumblr, and Threads (kinda/sorta). And I'm adding one more (big one) to the mix, hopefully sometime in the next week, so look for that. (Also up next: focusing on some UI/UX stuff...) Oh, and regarding the social accounts, I'm only active on Mastodon and, for now, Bluesky...if you reply to stuff on Twitter or FB, I probably won't even see it and won't respond.
Last thing. I'm going to bug you one more time and then shut up about it for awhile: If you're not already a member (or are a former member) and you've been liking what's been going on here in recent months after my return from sabbatical and can manage it, please consider supporting the site by purchasing a membership. Everything I do here, including making it easy for readers to find the site wherever they choose to read web content, is only possible because of the financial support of members. Thank you so much for the support! ✌️
Hahaha you thought I was kidding about this being a Larnell Lewis fan site today, but I've got one more video for you. This is a live recording of a song by the jazz fusion band Snarky Puppy and — hold on, before you wander off having heard that collection of words, let me preface this by saying that I am not really a jam band person or a jazz fusion person and I thought this was pretty amazing.
So anyway, legend has it that Snarky Puppy were all set to record a live record in Holland and their regular drummer couldn't make it, so they called Lewis to fill in. He learns the music on the plane ride over to Europe and — what? yeah, he learned the music on the plane ride over and then when he gets there...just watch the video above to see what happens.
I admit I didn't quite get what was so special about this at first, but around the 4:20 mark things really start to get interesting and by the end I was grinning like an idiot. Cory Henry does the keyboard solo and Lewis backs him on it like they've been playing together for three lifetimes. As one of the YouTube commenters put it:
I just discovered this about 2 hours ago... I've been a musician for 20+ years... After watching this performance, I've now been a musician for about 2 hours.
(via @caleb, who noted the many reactions to this video on YouTube)
Over on Twitter, @smllwrlds is publishing a new tiny illustrated sci-fi story every day of 2023. (via linkmachinego)
Writing for The Atlantic, Sarah Zhang details how some people taking Ozempic for weight loss are reporting that the drug has also curbed their addictive impulses (to drink, to shop, to smoke).
Earlier this year, she began taking semaglutide, also known as Wegovy, after being prescribed the drug for weight loss. (Colloquially, it is often referred to as Ozempic, though that is technically just the brand name for semaglutide that is marketed for diabetes treatment.) Her food thoughts quieted down. She lost weight. But most surprisingly, she walked out of Target one day and realized her cart contained only the four things she came to buy. "I've never done that before," she said. The desire to shop had slipped away. The desire to drink, extinguished once, did not rush in as a replacement either. For the first time — perhaps the first time in her whole life — all of her cravings and impulses were gone. It was like a switch had flipped in her brain.
Not everyone experiences these effects, but there's enough anecdotal evidence at this point that scientists are interested and investigating.
Knit Grotesk is a typeface based on Futura that's designed specifically for hand knitting. It comes in three different weights and two styles: dots and stripes. Its designer, Rüdiger Schlömer, is also the author of a book called Typographic Knitting: From Pixel to Pattern:
Learn to knit a variety of typefaces modeled on digital designs by well-known type foundries including Emigre, Lineto, and Typotheque, and emblazon your hats, scarves, and sweaters with smartly designed monograms, letters, or words. Beginning with knitting basics, tips, and resources, and progressing through more advanced techniques, Typographic Knitting provides a systematic introduction on how to construct a variety of letter designs using different knitting techniques. This book bridges the gap between craft and design in a new way, and will delight typography connoisseurs, avid knitters, and makers looking for a novel medium.
(via print)
Almost 300 days out of every year, there are thunderstorms over Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo. Called Catatumbo lightning — "Catatumbo means 'House of Thunder' in the language of the local Barí people" — the phenomenon is caused by the unique confluence of warm air and water from the Caribbean Sea with the cold air flowing down from the Andes, which nearly surround the lake. The result is near-nightly storms with the world's highest density of lightning and up to 200 flashes in a minute. It sounds, literally, awe-some.
The short video above is a profile of photographer Jonas Piontek, who has captured some amazing photos and video of the Catatumbo lightning. The NY Times featured some of his photos in this piece about the lightning.
Less than half an hour after the first cloud forms, it starts to flash. It does this faster and faster - 200 flashes a minute is not uncommon. After that, the cloud becomes a giant bulb that lights up the night.
"You can read a newspaper in the middle of the night because it's so bright," said Jonas Pointek, a photographer who has documented the storms.
(via open culture)
The Apple Lisa was the more expensive and less popular precursor to the Macintosh; a recent piece at the Computer History Museum called Lisa "Apple's most influential failure".
Apple's Macintosh line of computers today, known for bringing mouse-driven graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to the masses and transforming the way we use our computers, owes its existence to its immediate predecessor at Apple, the Lisa. Without the Lisa, there would have been no Macintosh — at least in the form we have it today — and perhaps there would have been no Microsoft Windows either.
The video above from Adi Robertson at The Verge is a good introduction to the Lisa and what made it so simultaneously groundbreaking and unpopular. From a companion article:
To look at the Lisa now is to see a system still figuring out the limits of its metaphor. One of its unique quirks, for instance, is a disregard for the logic of applications. You don't open an app to start writing or composing a spreadsheet; you look at a set of pads with different types of documents and tear off a sheet of paper.
But the office metaphor had more concrete technical limits, too. One of the Lisa's core principles was that it should let users multitask the way an assistant might, allowing for constant distractions as people moved between windows. It was a sophisticated idea that's taken for granted on modern machines, but at the time, it pushed Apple's engineering limits - and pushed the Lisa's price dramatically upward.
And from 1983, a demo video from Apple on how the Lisa could be used in a business setting:
And a more characteristically Apple ad for the Lisa featuring a pre-stardom Kevin Costner:
The First Folio is a collection of 36 plays by William Shakespeare that was published in 1623. One of the most influential books ever published, only about 230 copies are known to have survived. The Victoria and Albert Museum has three copies, and in this video, they lead the viewer on a tour through one of them.
There are 36 plays by Shakespeare in this book and half of them had not been previously printed. So this book preserves really half of Shakespeare's complete works — plays that would probably have been completely lost to us include the Tempest, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, many others that are among people's favorites today.
(via aeon)
In a video from The Royal Society, Adam Rutherford shares five data visualizations that have changed the world, including Florence Nightingale's Crimean War mortality charts, John Snow's map of cholera outbreaks, W.E.B. Du Bois' data portraits of Black Americans, eugenicist Henry Goddard's notorious (and fictional) Kallikak family tree, and Ed Hawkins' climate warming stripes. (via open culture)
My post last week about The 13 Levels of Complexity of Drumming got me interested in Larnell Lewis, but I also started going back through Wired's Levels series to check out some of the ones I'd missed.
First up is DJ Shortkut explaining the 15 levels of turntable scratching. DJing is one of those things that I enjoy the output of but don't know much about, so it was fun to have it broken down like that. Beat juggling is incredibly cool and looks super difficult to master. 🤯
I've written before about the data visualizations created by W.E.B. Du Bois for the 1900 World's Fair in Paris. Apparently a selection of these infographics are on display at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in NYC until May 29.
Wish I could get down there to see these...
Ok this is kind of incredible: Brick Technology built a solar-powered Lego clock that will keep time for a billion years. It's got various displays in the style of an astronomical clock so you can keep track of seconds, hours, months, centuries, and even galactical years (the amount of time the Sun takes to orbit the center of the galaxy). The clock is powered by solar energy, and the solar cell is connected to the clock so that it tilts throughout the day to keep facing the sun.
This is a) an extremely accessible explanation of how clocks work, b) the nerdiest thing ever, and c) I love it so much. Even if you're not a Lego fan, you should watch this. (For more on how clocks work, check out Bartosz Ciechanowski's excellent explainer on mechanical watches.)
The obvious thing that sprung to mind watching this was The Clock of the Long Now, a 10,000-year clock being constructed inside a mountain in West Texas. But I also thought of Arthur Ganson's Machine With Concrete, which utilizes extreme gear ratios to turn an input of 200 rpm into a gear that turns only once every 2 trillion years. That's slow enough that the final gear is actually embedded in concrete and it doesn't affect the operation of the machine at all.
See also Here's What a Googol-to-One Gear Ratio Looks Like, 20 Mechanical Principles Combined in a Useless Lego Machine, and A Lego 5-Speed Manual Transmission.
I've featured the work of Mattias Adolfsson before, but I ran across some of his marvelously dense & vaguely steampunk illustrations again the other day and wanted to point you in his direction once again.
The fantastical & whimsical nature of Adolfsson's work reminds me of Mark Alan Stamaty, Richard Scarry, Shel Silverstein, and perhaps even a little Quentin Blake and Aardman.
I totally love these "evolved" drawings of the elaborate patterns of broken plates by Robert Strati. The project was inspired by a plate that broke in the Strati household:
This work was inspired by a plate from my wife's late mother, Barbara. One day it was dropped and shattered. Some time after, I picked up a pen and started working on the "Fragmented" series, exploring the possibilities of things broken and the stories that can evolve from them.
You can see more work from this project on Instagram and at this site.
See also Kintsukuroi and Martin Klimas' Porcelain Figures. (via my modern met)
Roxane Gay, writing in the NY Times about the recent killings and assaults of people who had the bad luck to run into self-appointed executioners (gift link).
There is no patience for simple mistakes or room for addressing how bigotry colors even the most innocuous interactions. There is no regard for due process. People who deem themselves judge, jury and executioner walk among us, and we have no real way of knowing when they will turn on us.
I will be thinking about Jordan Neely in particular for a long time. I will be thinking about who gets to stand his ground, who doesn't, and how, all too often, it's people in the latter group who are buried beneath that ground by those who refuse to cede dominion over it. Every single day there are news stories that are individually devastating and collectively an unequivocal condemnation of what we are becoming: a people without empathy, without any respect for the sanctity of life unless it's our own.
The whole piece is worth reading and sitting with.
Hand Talk sign language has been used by indigenous communities for thousands of years as a lingua franca between groups and tribes that didn't share a common spoken language. Hand Talk is an endangered language — the US government tried to eradicate indigenous languages starting the late 1800s — but it's still in use today.
This was fascinating. For example, as with all languages, Hand Talk vocabulary reveals how they thought about everyday concepts like time:
For example, let's take the simple question: "How old are you?" First, there's a single sign for "question." So for a question about someone's age, you'd use the motion for question with the motion for "winter". How many winters are you? That's what I ask. In PISL you measure months by moons, days by the sun. And to refer to different times of day, you would show hand placement according to the position of the sun in the sky. So this sign for morning, afternoon, or night.
Hand Talk was also one of the influences on ASL and the borrowing of vocabulary between the two language groups continues.
In a Memorial Day reflection, historian Heather Cox Richardson highlights a pamphlet distributed by the US War Department to Army soldiers during World War II on the topic of fascism: what it is and how to combat it.
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power "under the guise of 'super-patriotism' and 'super-Americanism.'" And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a "well-planned 'hate campaign' against minority races, religions, and other groups."
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. "In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations."
Third, fascists would insist that "the world has but two choices — either fascism or communism, and they label as 'communists' everyone who refuses to support them."
It is "vitally important" to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, "even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy."
See also The 14 Features of Eternal Fascism, How Fascism Works, Toni Morrison's Ten Steps Towards Fascism, and Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.
In his animated short film Five Cents, which was inspired by his student debt struggles, Aaron Hughes deftly (but gently) skewers modern consumerism, as his film's character navigates a series of escalating purchases with a little found money. (via the kid should see this)
No matter which side you come down on in the debate about using AI tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to create digital art, this video of an experienced digital artist explaining how he uses AI in his workflow is worth a watch. I thought this comment was particularly interesting:
I see the overall process as a joint effort with the AI. I've been a traditional artist for 2 decades, painting on canvas. And in the last five years I've been doing a lot of digital art. So from that part of myself, I don't feel threatened at all.
I feel this is an opportunity. An opportunity for many new talented people to jump on a new branch of art that is completely different from the one that we have already in digital art and just open up new way of being creative.
Earlier this week, the retired electronic duo Daft Punk released the 10th anniversary edition of Random Access Memories, their last studio album. The anniversary album includes 35 minutes of previously unreleased music.
Among the tracks is a demo of Infinity Repeating, featuring Julian Casablancas and The Voidz, which a recent interview w/ Casablancas on Daft Punk's YouTube channel called "the last Daft Punk song, ever". The music video for Infinity Repeating, embedded above, features a cool evolution-of-humanity animation (with robots!) and is highly re-watchable.
The first few sentences of the abstract for this paper from the scientific journal Renewable Energy contain a twist in the middle that's worthy of M. Night Shyamalan:
The USA is confronted with three epic-size problems: (1) the need for production of energy on a scale that meets the current and future needs of the nation, (2) the need to confront the climate crisis head-on by only producing renewable, green energy, that is 100% emission-free, and (3) the need to forever forestall the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. This paper offers both a provable practical, novel solution, and a thought experiment, to simultaneously solve all of the above stated problems.
If you don't know about the supervolcano lurking under Yellowstone National Park, now's your chance to learn more. Here's Bill Bryson from his book A Short History of Nearly Everything:
Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across — roughly the same dimensions as the park — and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about 1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining. According to Professor Bill McGuire of University College London, "you wouldn't be able to get within a thousand kilometers of it" while it was erupting. The consequences that followed would be even worse.
Back to the paper. The authors are proposing to generate massive amounts of energy from the supervolcano — "well over 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy" per year:
Through a new copper-based engineering approach on an unprecedented scale, this paper proposes a safe means to draw up the mighty energy reserve of the Yellowstone Supervolcano from within the Earth, to superheat steam for spinning turbines at sufficient speed and on a sufficient scale, in order to power the entire USA. The proposed, single, multi-redundant facility utilizes the star topology in a grid array pattern to accomplish this. Over time, bleed-off of sufficient energy could potentially forestall this Supervolcano from ever erupting again.
I mean, this actually sounds like a great idea if it could be done safely, without ruining the park and, you know, accidentally blowing shit up. As of 2016, Iceland generated 65% of its energy from geothermal sources — the US could certainly stand to lean more on geothermal.
A high school here in Vermont is located (temporarily) in an abandoned Macy's department store. A crew from the BBC recently made a short video tour, where you can see books on shelves designed to display fine china, an absence of windows, escalators, a lack of floor-to-ceiling walls, and fashion branding that remains on the walls.
Alexandra Lange wrote about the school in 2021 for Curbed.
The genre may be nearly dead, yet the building remains. And for economic, ecological, and social reasons, those buildings should be reused. "It's amazing to think that we are standing in what used to be a department store; that we're greeting people where we used to buy winter coats; reading books where they once sold fine china; taking phone calls in converted changing rooms; and learning science in the old suit racks," Burlington's school superintendent, Tom Flanagan, said at the ceremony. A school in a department store doesn't have to be a sad story. In fact, this should just be the beginning, both for the students and for a country once addicted to big boxes.
Vermont indie newspaper Seven Days published a writeup, video tour, and photo slideshow of the school when it opened two years ago.
I'm totally charmed by this collection of Japanese company buildings from Spoon & Tamago that are shaped like things related to what they sell. For instance, here's a chocolate factory that looks like a big chocolate bar:
You'll have to click through to see the rest, which include a building for a pet food company shaped like a dachshund and tanks at a brewery painted to look like beer glasses.
Hey folks, I have some sad news to share. Heather Hamilton (aka Heather Armstrong), who wrote the popular and influential Dooce weblog, died yesterday. She was 47 years old. My thoughts are with her children, her family, and those closest to her.
I'll see you back here tomorrow. In the meantime, hug your loved ones tight. ❤️
If you, like me, are currently reading David Grann's new book The Wager and are having trouble visualizing exactly what British Royal Navy ships of that era look like and how they work, you might want to watch this video. The 3D fly-through model ship in this video, HMS Victory, is larger and more recently constructed than any of the ships in The Wager (the biggest of which is HMS Centurion) but the basic layout and principles are the same.
If you're like me, sometime in the past 4-5 years you noticed that a lot of the films you liked (or, even if you didn't, you appreciated that they were getting made) were coming from the same place, A24. Moonlight, Uncut Gems, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Aftersun, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Eighth Grade, Lady Bird, The Lobster, Amy, Ex Machina. More recently, TV shows like Euphoria, Beef, and Erma Vep.
This video from Vox charts the rise of A24 from a small distributor to an Oscar-winning powerhouse that pumps out more movies each year than much bigger studios. See also The Cult of A24 (a good companion piece to the video above) and Every A24 Movie, Ranked.
I was keen to read that the debating method practiced by Trump, Putin, anti-vaxxers, and climate deniers of flooding the zone with a firehose of incorrect information has a name: the Gish Gallop. From Mehdi Hasan's piece in The Atlantic, adapted from his new book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking (ebook):
Trump may be the grand master of the Gish Gallop, but he is not its originator. That honor goes to the person who gave the method its name: Duane Tolbert Gish.
Gish was a biochemist at the Institute for Creation Research, a pseudo-scientific group that maintains all life on Earth was created in six days by the God of the Old Testament at some point in the past 10,000 years, with evolution playing no part. Gish publicized the ICR and its creed — and himself — by winning debates against evolutionists across the country.
During debates, after letting his opponent go first, Gish would "begin talking very quickly for perhaps an hour", overwhelming his opponent with factual-sounding nonsense. According to Hasan, there are a few tactics you can use to counter the Gish Gallop, but you've got to be prepared. For instance, you can call them out:
Don't let your audience be fooled into assuming that your opponent has special command of the subject because of all the "facts" they've just spouted. Explain to them what your opponent is doing, and that the Gallop is really just a sleight of hand.
From Kurzgesagt, this video is a good overview of the arms race going on in all human bodies between cancer cells and the defenses developed by our immune systems over the years.
Somewhere in your body, your immune system just quietly killed one of your own cells, stopping it from becoming cancer, and saving your life. It does that all the time. The vast majority of cancer cells you develop will be killed without you ever noticing. Which is an incredibly hard job because of what cancer cells are: parts of yourself that start to behave as individuals even if it hurts you.
What is cancer and how does your body kill it all the time?
Right now in the US, the majority of children are driven to school, even though many of them live within walking or cycling distance.
In 1969, about 48% of students walked or cycled to school in the United States. Today that figure is about 11%. And this decline wasn't just in the US — you can find the same trend in Australia, England, and Canada: today the majority of students are driven to school in a car. One of the larger studies we have on this issue in [British Columbia] found that 58% of 4th graders and 50% of 7th graders were driven to school by their parents.
There are various reasons for this shift, including that roads are unsafe for cyclists and pedestrians because of cars, a cultural shift towards greatly increased parental supervision of children, and inflexible parental work schedules.
Well this is some bizarre good fun — turns out that the campy goofiness of Star Wars and the campy seriousness of high fashion make for a pretty good combination.
See also Lord of the Rings by Balenciaga and Game of Thrones by Balenciaga. Oh, and Hipster Star Wars.
The arms race between the house and the gamblers over which they openly have the advantage is fascinating. I've read about all sorts of schemes involving card counting, dice shaving, covert signaling, computer analysis, and other shenanigans, but I hadn't heard about the possibility that some folks had figured out a way to beat roulette without actually cheating. This passage provides a few clues as to how they managed it:
But the way Tosa and his friends played roulette stood out as weird even for the Ritz. They would wait until six or seven seconds after the croupier launched the ball, when the rattling tempo of plastic on wood started to slow, then jump forward to place their chips before bets were halted, covering as many as 15 numbers at once. They moved so quickly and harmoniously, it was "as if someone had fired a starting gun," an assistant manager told investigators afterward. The wheel was a standard European model: 37 red and black numbered pockets in a seemingly random sequence — 32, 15, 19, 4 and so on — with a single green 0. Tosa's crew was drawn to an area of the betting felt set aside for special wagers that covered pie-sliced segments of the wheel. There, gamblers could choose sections called orphelins (orphans) or le tiers du cylindre (a third of the wheel). Tosa and his partners favored "neighbors" bets, consisting of one number plus the two on each side, five pockets in all.
Then there was the win rate. Tosa's crew didn't hit the right number on every spin, but they did as often as not, in streaks that defied logic: eight in a row, or 10, or 13. Even with a dozen chips on the table at a total cost of £1,200 (about $2,200 at the time), the 35:1 payout meant they could more than double their money. Security staff watched nervously as their chip stack grew ever higher. Tosa and the Serbian, who did most of the gambling while their female companion ordered drinks, had started out with £30,000 and £60,000 worth of chips, respectively, and in no time both had broken six figures. Then they started to increase their bets, risking as much as £15,000 on a single spin.
It was almost as if they could see the future. They didn't react whether they won or lost; they simply played on. At one point, the Serbian threw down £10,000 in chips and looked away idly as the ball bounced around the numbered pockets. He wasn't even watching when it landed and he lost. He was already walking off in the direction of the bar.
And I feel like there's a whole other essay to be written about how, with enough practice & repetition, humans can get into the flow (as in dance, music, sports) with devices, machines, and other mechanical & electrical objects, getting to know them on an almost unconscious level, an understanding that defies analysis.
He compared cerebral clocking to musical talent, suggesting it might activate similar parts of the brain, those dedicated to sound and rhythm.
This is just a small example, but a good mechanic can often diagnose what's wrong with a car, even the tiniest things, just by starting it up because there's so much information in how it sounds and the vibrations it's making — see Ken Miles in Ford vs. Ferrari for a dramatized example. (via damn interesting)
Earlier today, I posted a Quick Link to the 2nd-generation AirPods Pro on Amazon because they were $50 off, a good deal for an item that's rarely on sale. I've been using a pair of these for the past month or so after a strong recommendation from John Gruber, and I can't believe how much better they performed over the 1st-gen ones (which were fine...better than fine even). The sound quality seems better, Transparency Mode (where you can simultaneously hear your music and amplified sound near you) is significantly improved, and the earbuds themselves are more comfortable than their predecessors.
But the real star for me is the noise cancelling. I try to use my treadmill a few times a week during the winter to keep fit/active and generally listen to music or watch some TV on my iPad while I walk/run. With my old AirPods Pro, I could still hear the whirring of the treadmill behind the music even with noise cancelling on. But with these new ones, the treadmill noise is nearly gone, especially if I'm listening to something particularly energetic. I took an airplane trip recently and was amazed to find that nearly all of the airplane noise was cancelled out...even playing some quiet classical music at a reasonable volume felt like I was listening in a quiet room. I've even been wearing them to listen to music while I work...they just sound better than my HomePod mini speaker and keep me more focused on my work.
So anyway, I posted that link and then discovered via the ensuing thread on Mastodon that you can tweak AirPods Pro using the accessibility settings on your phone to do stuff like amplifying soft sounds and tuning Transparency Mode to further boost audio to focus on a person in front of you:
Turn on Custom Transparency Mode, then adjust the amplification, balance, tone, and ambient noise reduction to help you hear what's happening around you. You can also turn on Conversation Boost to focus on a person talking in front of you.
What an amazing feature for people who are hard of hearing or who have trouble focusing their audio attention (definitely me sometimes). And what's more, you can actually upload an audiogram to create a custom profile that adjusts audio levels specifically to how you hear. What? I had no idea. Here's Paul Lefebvre:
But, by far, the #1 thing for me is the hearing assistive features. I used the Mimi hearing app to take a hearing test and generate a hearing profile (I have slight high-end hearing loss). I then was able to apply this hearing profile to the AirPods and the sound got even better! I also turned on other settings to make sounds clearer in transparency mode.
Now I sometimes put these AirPods on with just transparency mode and use them to hear things from across the room or to better understand conversations.
And @mtwebb on Mastodon:
I also recently upgraded to the 2nd gen and imported my audiogram from a recent hearing test. They literally changed my life in certain noisy situations. I also recommend them, especially if you have some hearing loss but don't quite need hearing aids.
And Marques Brownlee's review is a good one:
To create an audiogram of your hearing, you can use the Mimi Hearing Test or SonicCloud Personalized Sound apps and then import it into your settings. I have no idea how good these audiograms are compared to an actual hearing test...you should talk to your doctor or head to a specialist if you're in need of something really accurate. But for many people, I bet these apps work just fine. I haven't done my audiogram yet - I'm gonna do the test after I publish this.
You can get the 2nd-gen AirPods Pro from Apple or at Amazon for $50 off (deal still valid as of 8am on 4/14).
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of the 2001 romantic comedy The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain, has recut his beloved movie into a cheeky short film that reveals that Amélie was actually a KGB spy.
Did no one ever wonder how a young waitress afforded such sophisticated decoration for a flat in Montmartre, one of Paris's most expensive districts?
Film editors are magicians. (via @pacanukeha)
Lego did not invent the stacking, interlocking plastic brick — Kiddiecraft did. So why did Lego's version win? As Phil Edwards explains in this entertaining video, the answer can be boiled down to two words: innovation and marketing.
The first Lego plastic mold was the same one that Kiddicraft used, and early Lego bricks were almost identical to Kiddicraft blocks, with a few minor differences. They slightly changed the scale and the studs, but as you can see, they were pretty similar. Early Kiddicraft blocks had little slots in the side for windows and other attachments. So did early Lego bricks. From top to bottom, these were very similar to Kiddicraft blocks. So with such a simple idea that had kind of already been done, how did Lego win?
See also Why Oreo Won and a fascinating look at plastic injection molding, including a bit on "how quietly ingenious Lego's injection molding process is".
As I've discussed previously, the Piper Super Cub is an amazing short takeoff and landing airplane that can, under the right conditions, takeoff and land in as little as 10 or 20 feet of runway.
In a recent stunt for Red Bull, Luke Czepiela landed a Super Cub on an 88-foot-wide helipad located on the 56th story of the Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai. Fantastic. And I love what he did right afterwards... (via digg)
Artist Amy Goodchild recently published an engaging article about the earliest computer art from the 50s and 60s.
My original vision for this article was to cover the development of computer art from the 50's to the 90's, but it turns out there's an abundance of things without even getting half way through that era. So in this article we'll look at how Lovelace's ideas for creativity with a computer first came to life in the 50's and 60's, and I'll cover later decades in future articles.
I stray from computer art into electronic, kinetic and mechanical art because the lines are blurred, it contributes to the historical context, and also because there is some cool stuff to look at.
Cool stuff indeed — I've included some of my favorite pieces that Goodchild highlighted above. (via waxy)
For an exhibition entitled DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, artist Duke Riley takes trash that he's collected on the beach and turns it into art — think mosaics made from bottle caps, bread bag clips, and tampon applicators. But his plastic scrimshaw creations are absolute genius:
Scrimshaw art was made by whalers in the 19th century by carving designs into the teeth, bones, and baleen of whales. Riley has cleverly adopted the practice using aesthetically similar white plastics, producing a series he calls the Poly S. Tyrene Maritime Museum. The NY Times:
As whalers often depicted the leaders and profiteers of their day, Riley portrays the C.E.O.s of chemical companies, plastic industry lobbyists and others he deems responsible for producing the devastating tonnages of single-use plastics that are engulfing our oceans and threatening our ecosystems. It's a downer, but if you look closely there's often a Riley twist of humor, like the seagull shown relieving itself on the head of a water bottle magnate.
You can see a few more of the plastic scrimshaw objects on the Brooklyn Museum's Tumblr,at Atlas Obscura, and in-person at the Brooklyn Museum until mid-April. (thx caroline)
So you've seen how an 18th century sailing battleship was built. But that was for a vessel 227 feet long that could carry around 850 people. This timelapse video shows the construction of a much larger ship: a modern-day, 1,100-foot-long cruise ship that houses 6,600 passengers. The size of this thing is just ridiculous, bordering on the obscene. It took me a second to realize that the giant thing they were constructing in the first minute of the video is in fact an engine, which, when compared to the rest of the ship, is not that big at all. Make sure you watch to the end to see the oddball paint job on the bow.
See also a timelapse of a second ship of this class being built, which focuses on different details. (via core77)
For his second Iconic Sans video, David Friedman tells us about an itinerant filmmaker who travelled the country from the 30s to the 50s making the same movie over and over again with different casts of local children.
Why would somebody remake a movie hundreds of times? Was he obsessed? Mad? Director Melton Barker was a traveling filmmaker (historians call him an "itinerant filmmaker") who went town to town from the 1930s to the 1970s convincing everyday folks to pay him to be in his movie "The Kidnappers Foil" over and over and over. He used the same script each time, with an all local cast. It's a fascinating bit of Americana and cinema history.
You can learn more about The Kidnappers Foil at this site from The Texas Archive of the Moving Image, watch several full-length versions on the film on YouTube, or use the script to make your own version.
What I like about the still image above, along with the rest of the images in a project called In Anxious Anticipation by Aaron Tilley & Kyle Bean, is that it makes a noise. It's so cool how your brain sees what's about to happen and then you hear eggs smashing on a hard surface — splat, splat, splat. More still art should make noise! (via moss & fog)
From Max Miller's informative & entertaining YouTube channel Tasting History comes this lesson on pemmican, a mixture of meat and fat/tallow that was invented by the indigenous peoples of North America. Pemmican's main attributes are its shelf-life (years), portability, and nutritional value, making it an ideal "power bar" to be taken on expeditions or long ship voyages.
See also Miller's videos on hardtack. (via open culture)
Loving scrolling through this collection of sci-fi movie logos from Reagan Ray.
As is the case with most of my logo posts, it's been fun to pick up on the trends. There's the trick where they remove the segments from the top half of the letters like Blade Runner, or the embossed brushed metal of Robocop. Glowing letters were a big trend that started in the late 80s, most likely set off by the Alien franchise. And I can never get enough of the 3D type in early films.
You can check out more of Ray's logo collections here.
I've always wondered about the process for making pieces of metal that appear to fit together perfectly, so perfectly that you can't see any sort of cut or seam. In this video, Steve Mould explains how wire EDM works, in part using cheese.
Based on data from a 2021 survey, FlowingData made these cool infographics of all of the different types of households in the United States. Here are the ten most common:
Single homeowners are the most common but look at #9: inmate. Shameful.
Finally: a full-length trailer for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, easily the movie I am most looking forward to seeing this summer. Dunkirk was one of my favorite films of the past few years, I've done quite a bit of reading about the Manhattan Project over the years, and I studied modern physics in college, so I am all the way in for this. Fingers crossed!
P.S. The movie is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Might have to read this one before the movie comes out.
Back in 2020, the Smithsonian Institution placed 2.8 million high-resolution images and 3D models of objects in their collection into the public domain via their Open Access initiative. Over the past three years, that collection has grown to 4.5 million images, an absolutely immense trove of objects that people are free to use and remix however they wish.
That last image is the mailing wrapper from when jeweler Harry Winston sent the Hope Diamond (currently valued at $200-350 million) to the Smithsonian through the regular US Mail.
Mailed on the morning of November 8 from New York City, the item was sent by registered (first class) mail — considered the safest means of transport for valuables at that time. The total fee was $145.29 (see the meter machine tapes). Postage only amounted to $2.44 for the package which weighed 61 ounces. The remainder of the fee ($142.85) paid for an indemnity of about $1 million.
(via my modern met)
Every day for three years, Iancu Barbarasa drew a flower for his partner and recently he compiled all the drawings into this lovely short film set to Chopin's Minute Waltz. I loved his acknowledgement of his sources and influences:
Questlove once said that "all creative ideas are derivative of another." My project would not exist (or at least not in this form) without the influences of: Katsuji Wakisaka, textile designer and founder of Sou·Sou, who has drawn over 10,000 postcards for his wife — Christoph Niemann's work and also his short film "A Tribute to Maurice Sendak" — "Beyond Noh (Masks of our world)" short film by Patrick Smith — "Plante" short film by Reka Bucsi — and Philippa Perry's "The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did)". Last but not least, the end credits are a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful "My Neighbour Totoro" film.
A set of postcards featuring the flower drawings are available from Barbarasa's shop.
This year, Kurzgesagt celebrates 10 years of making videos on YouTube and to mark the occasion, they've produced this video about their history, how their business works (their shop accounts for a large chunk of their revenue), and the values that guide their work.
Kurzgesagt's foundation was laid when Philipp, our founder, dropped out of high school as a teenager. Learning seemed daft and useless and he was not interested in anything. Until a very special teacher at a school for dropouts grabbed him by the neck. The way she taught was different. She talked about connections and the big picture. She told a story. For the first time ever, Philipp wanted to learn more without being forced. It was a key life experience.
Kurzgesagt tries to recreate this experience for you. "Nothing is boring if you tell a good story, and we try to tell these stories to spark excitement and make you want to go on and learn more. Because of the one teacher that could do this, Philipp got a high school degree, studied history and design and eventually started Kurzgesagt as a passion project, inspired by Crash Course World history.
Some of you might not be interested in something that seems pretty inside baseball, but I post a lot of Kurzgesagt's videos here and I've always admired the way they go about their business — their commitment to quality, painstaking research, an ability to admit when they got it wrong, non-extractive revenue streams with a heavy emphasis on direct reader support — and it was great to hear them talk about it.
I like these paintings by Spanish artist Lino Lago where traditional oil painted portraits peek through bright color fields. He calls them Fake Abstracts. (via colossal)
In this short video, Norwegian creative director Torger Jansen explains how he designed an unofficial transit map that combines all three of Oslo's public transportation networks (tram, metro, train) into a single diagram. His four main goals:
1. Showing all the lines on every network, thus making it easier to understand the service patterns.
2. Making it recognisable with the official line colours.
3. Compressing unnaturally long distances between stations.
4. Balancing aesthetics and accessibility. The diagram is clear and easy to read with minimal fuss.
As Jansen notes, this is not how a design process would work in the real world — there's no user testing or competing stakeholders to please — but from a purely aesthetic and functional standpoint, it's still an interesting challenge and puzzle to attempt to solve. (thx, david)
I have very high hopes for Greta Gerwig's Barbie. It would be incredible if it lives up to them and the first two teaser trailers are a good start.
Also, I love how completely and utterly thirrrrrrsty the video's description is to establish the bona fides and pedigree of the movie's cast and crew:
From Oscar-nominated writer/director Greta Gerwig ("Little Women," "Lady Bird") comes "Barbie," starring Oscar-nominees Margot Robbie ("Bombshell," "I, Tonya") and Ryan Gosling ("La La Land," "Half Nelson") as Barbie and Ken, alongside America Ferrera ("End of Watch," the "How to Train Your Dragon" films), Kate McKinnon ("Bombshell," "Yesterday"), Michael Cera ("Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," "Juno"), Ariana Greenblatt ("Avengers: Infinity War," "65"), Issa Rae ("The Photograph," "Insecure"), Rhea Perlman ("I'll See You in My Dreams," "Matilda"), and Will Ferrell (the "Anchorman" films, "Talladega Nights"). The film also stars Ana Cruz Kayne ("Little Women"), Emma Mackey ("Emily," "Sex Education"), Hari Nef ("Assassination Nation," "Transparent"), Alexandra Shipp (the "X-Men" films), Kingsley Ben-Adir ("One Night in Miami," "Peaky Blinders"), Simu Liu ("Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Ncuti Gatwa ("Sex Education"), Scott Evans ("Grace and Frankie"), Jamie Demetriou ("Cruella"), Connor Swindells ("Sex Education," "Emma."), Sharon Rooney ("Dumbo," "Jerk"), Nicola Coughlan ("Bridgerton," "Derry Girls"), Ritu Arya ("The Umbrella Academy"), Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Dua Lipa and Oscar-winner Helen Mirren ("The Queen").
Gerwig directed "Barbie" from a screenplay by Gerwig & Oscar nominee Noah Baumbach ("Marriage Story," "The Squid and the Whale"), based on Barbie by Mattel. The film's producers are Oscar nominee David Heyman ("Marriage Story," "Gravity"), Robbie, Tom Ackerley and Robbie Brenner, with Michael Sharp, Josey McNamara, Ynon Kreiz, Courtenay Valenti, Toby Emmerich and Cate Adams serving as executive producers.
Gerwig's creative team behind the camera included Oscar-nominated director of photography Rodrigo Prieto ("The Irishman," "Silence," "Brokeback Mountain"), six-time Oscar-nominated production designer Sarah Greenwood ("Beauty and the Beast," "Anna Karenina"), editor Nick Houy ("Little Women," "Lady Bird"), Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran ("Little Women," "Anna Karenina"), visual effects supervisor Glen Pratt ("Paddington 2," "Beauty and the Beast"), music supervisor George Drakoulias ("White Noise," "Marriage Story") and Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat ("The Shape of Water," "The Grand Budapest Hotel").
Is that....everybody? In the world?
The length of a human life is around 80 years. You might get 100 if you're lucky. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. The vast difference between a human lifespan and the age of the universe can be difficult to grasp — even the words we use in attempting to describe it (like "vast") are comically insufficient.
To help us visualize what a difference of eight orders of magnitude might look like, Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh have created a scale model of time in the Mojave Desert, from the Big Bang to the present day. This is really worth watching and likely to make you think some big think thoughts about your place in the universe and in your life.
This is a followup of the scale model of the solar system they built and a video they made about people seeing the Moon through a telescope for the first time.
See also a behind-the-scenes: How We Built a Scale Model of Time. (via colossal)
This was me a couple of years ago when I first started playing Fortnite, as satirized by Adam Driver and the SNL gang:
I found this sketch via a piece that Tom Vanderbilt wrote about playing Fortnite with his daughter (and her friends).
It's not as though Sylvie and I discussed the problem of free will as we dodged RPG rounds. For the most part, our interactions weren't nearly so high-minded. We stole each other's kills and squabbled over loot. She badgered me for V-Bucks so she could buy her character new baubles in the Item Shop. But sometimes, after playing, we'd go for a walk and analyze how we were able to notch a dub — Fortnite-speak for a win — or how we might have done better. We'd assess the quality of newly introduced weapons. (The best were OP, for "overpowering," but often the makers of Fortnite would later "nerf" them for being too OP.) She'd chide me for trying to improve by battling more, rather than by practicing in Creative mode — which suddenly made her open to hearing about the late Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson's theories of "deliberate practice." (Like many kids, she had a built-in filter against my teachable moments.) We actually were, per Adam Driver's character, bonding.
And in our Fortnite games I saw her cultivate prowess. I'm not talking merely about the widely discussed perceptual and cognitive benefits of video games, which include an improved ability to track objects in space and tune out cognitive "distractors." I'm talking about that suite of abilities sometimes referred to as "21st-century skills": imaginatively solving open-ended problems, working collaboratively in teams, synthesizing complex information streams. "Unfortunately, in most formal education settings, we're not emphasizing those very much," argues Eric Klopfer, who directs the Education Arcade at MIT. "Just playing Fortnite doesn't necessarily give you those skills — but playing Fortnite in the right way, with the right people, is certainly a good step in that direction."
This is the plain and perhaps embarrassing truth: During my sabbatical, I didn't pursue any activity (with the possible exception of mountain biking) as diligently as I did playing Fortnite. My kids have been playing it for awhile, both together and separately, and it was fun to watch them working together to complete quests and sometimes even win. I tried playing with them a few times the previous year, but the last shooter game I played was Quake III in the late 90s and so I was comically bad, running around firing my weapon into the sky or the ground and generally just embarrassing my kids, who left my reboot card where it landed after I'd died more often than not.
Early last year, even before I left on my sabbatical, I decided I wanted to learn how to play properly, so that I could do something with my kids on their turf. I played mostly by myself at first — and poorly. Slowly I figured out the rules of the game and how to move and shoot. I played online with my friend David, who was forgiving of my deficiencies, and we caught up while he explained how the game worked and we explored the island together. I finally got a kill and a win, in the same match — I'd found a good hiding place in a bush and then emerged when it was down to me and some other hapless fool (who was probably 8 years old or a bot) and I somehow got them. A friend who had arrived for dinner mid-game was very surprised when I started yelling my head off and running around the house.
Over the summer after I started the sabbatical, I played most days for at least 30 minutes. I got better and was having more fun. I won some matches and bought the Battle Pass so I could get some different skins and emotes. Even though I got a late start in the season, I grinded on quests to get the Darth Vader skin, which is amusing to wear while you're trying out different emotes. (You haven't lived until you've watched Vader do the death drop or dance to My Money Don't Jiggle Jiggle, It Folds.1) When the kids got back from camp, I was good enough to at least not slow them down too much and get a couple of kills in the meantime. I learned the lingo and how to work as a team, with my kids leading the way.1 I'm still not great, but it's become one of our favorite things to do together and I'm enjoying it while it lasts.
I am surprised but delighted that a huge media conglomerate like Disney allows their character/intellectual property (e.g. Vader) to perform the signature move of another character (Trinity's slow-motion spin kick from The Matrix) owned by a competing media conglomerate (Warner Bros. Discovery), and vice versa.↩
I know some parents have a hard time with this, but after having been surpassed by my kids several years ago in skiing prowess and now basically being a lowly private in their Fortnite squad, I am a firm believer that every parent should experience, as early as they can, the sensation of your kids doing something much better, like an order of magnitude better, than you can and then letting them lead the way with it. It will change your relationship with them for the better, remind you that you are not "in charge" (and never really were), and reveal that kids are often much more capable than we give them credit for.↩
Lego bricks and Impressionism are a natural pairing, and so Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has recreated Claude Monet's massive Water Lilies triptych with 650,000 Lego bricks. Spanning nearly 50 feet across, the Lego sculpture is part of Ai's upcoming show at the Design Museum in London. Here is a tantalizing behind-the-scenes view.
Ai has been creating Lego works for years now — including these Warhol-esque portraits and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — and was even denied from buying bricks from the company at one point.
Do you want to sit in on a 30-minute cinematography masterclass with Roger Deakins as he talks about the process behind some of his most iconic films? We're talking Sicario, The Shawshank Redemption, 1917, Fargo, Blade Runner 2049, and No Country for Old Men here. Of course you do. And when you're done with that, you can listen to all of these other filmmakers and actors talking about their films.
In 1976, the price per watt of energy generated by solar photovoltaic was over $100. In 2019, it was less than 50 cents per watt, a price decline of 99.6%. Even since 2009, solar has declined 90% in price. So what's behind that incredible drop? Industry played a part but the main driver was forward-thinking government policy and subsidy of solar by countries like the US, Japan, Germany, and China:
In the course of a single lifetime, solar energy has transformed from a niche technology to the cheapest way to bring clean, reliable power to billions of people around the world. But the markets that brought us these lower prices didn't just magically appear by some invisible hand. Political leaders in countries all over the world created these markets, then subsidized them for decades to the tune of billions of dollars. "By investing that money, you got the solar to come down in costs to the point where you don't need to subsidize it anymore."
One of the experts in the video, Gregory Nemet, is the author of a book called How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation if you'd like to read more on the development of solar.
This is just beautiful. This short animated film by João Gonzalez starts off slow but really pays off in the end. Ice Merchants was nominated for a 2023 Academy Award. Here's an interview with Gonzalez at Director's Notes.
