Kottke.org Posts and Links for Sep 6, 2024
Hi, Jason here. This newsletter is a digest of posts and links from kottke.org, published every Tuesday and Friday. It's not absolutely everything from the site, but it's durn close. Unsubscribing is easy if you'd like to get off this ride. As always, you can read kottke.org on the web, via RSS, on Bluesky, on Mastodon, and in several other ways. Ok, onto the links!
Tom Gauld (and Richard Scarry) on cars of the future. [newscientist.com]
Hokusai-heads: one of the Art Institute of Chicago's three copies of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is on display at the museum until Jan 6, 2025. [kottke.org]
The Open Book in Wigtown, Scotland is a rental place (available on Airbnb) where you can stay and help run the bookstore downstairs. "There's no better feeling than somebody buying a book that you put on display." [bbc.com]
"Harris and Walz, intentionally or not, are projecting something different: a sitcom vibe. And not just any sitcom — the multi-camera family shows of the 1980s." Blended families, cool woman/dorky guy, and woman in charge were all 80s sitcom staples. [politico.com]
I know some of you are K-12 educators — the excellent The Kid Should See This is holding a free virtual workshop on how to integrate their library of 7000+ engaging and educational videos into your lesson plans. [tksst.beehiiv.com]
The Obstruction of Action by the Existence of Form is a performance art piece of two full hockey teams playing in a rink 1/10th regulation size. This is definitely a metaphor for something... [kottke.org]
"Dark energy, which most physicists have long held to be unchanging, may in fact be weakening." And now cosmologists are trying to figure out what this means for our conceptions of the universe. [quantamagazine.org]
Elite athletes are using a new baking soda formulation to boost athletic performance. A recent study showed "a 1.4% boost for cyclists in a 40-km time trial, which works out to a gain of roughly a minute over the course of an event lasting an hour". [outsideonline.com]
The Harris campaign posted a TikTok of Donald Trump talking about his stance on abortion in a split-screen next to a gameplay clip of Subway Surfer for low-attention-span viewers. This is genius. "Top-tier information conveyance." [dailydot.com]
Detailed Miniature "Sculptures of Urban Decay" (like dumpsters, stores, newsstands, photo booths, and run-down old buildings, all covered in grime and graffiti). Meticulous doesn't even begin to describe how realistic these are. [kottke.org]
An introduction to the latest iteration of Dynamicland's Realtalk, a prototype of a communal computing environment that makes use of physical materials to make collaboration easier & more powerful. (Hard to explain, just watch the video..) [dynamicland.org]
Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad. "On average, America is an ugly country. The median American scene...would be an exhaust-choked roadway flanked on both sides by fast food restaurants and big box stores." [hamiltonnolan.com]
A working thumper from Dune built out of Lego. (Working as in it thumps...I have no idea if it actually summons Shai-Hulud.) [youtube.com]
Going to auction next week: a copy of "arguably the single-most influential letter of the twentieth century" written & signed by Albert Einstein in 1939 to President Roosevelt warning him of the possibility of German nuclear weapons. Estimate: $4-6M. [kottke.org]
This is a website you can only visit once. (I mean, technically you can visit many times. But embracing constraints is worthwhile.) [onlyvisitonce.com]
Crash Course Art History, a playlist of 22 episodes with topics like What Makes an Artist "Great"?, What's the Difference Between Art and Design?, and Should We Separate Art from the Artist? [youtube.com]
Diary Comics, June 25, plus a "goodbye for now" from Edith. 😭 [kottke.org]
'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. 🤬🤬🤬 [theonion.com]
Lies by scientists can kill people — falsified research on beta blockers may have killed 800,000 people. "In cases where research dishonesty is literally killing people, shouldn't it be appropriate to resort to the criminal justice system?" [vox.com]
I Never Expected To Run For Office — Here's What I Learned. "An election wasn't really a contest with a prize. It was a course of study. It was the process of trying to become the world's premier authority in what my neighbors wanted and needed..." [offmessage.net]
I've been enjoying listening to these seasonal mixtapes from Denver DJ Lane 8. He's been doing these for 11 years now and it's good upbeat music to work to. [kottke.org]
100 tiny tricks for sorting out your life. I did this one recently: "Take 10 minutes to tackle the inevitable plastic boxes and lids situation in your kitchen." (All this advice all at once was kinda overwhelming tbh.) [theguardian.com]
A long jumper performed a front flip in a 1974 competition in an attempt to jump further and the technique was promptly banned for being too dangerous. "Many experts think it could have broken the 30-foot mark." [kottke.org]
This video is notable for its intuitive visualization of our speed through spacetime (special relativity). "Your speed is constant. So the faster you move through the space dimensions, the slower you move through the time dimension, and vice versa." [kottke.org]
Realized I often use "Forgetful Jones" when describing my tendency to forget things but had forgotten where I'd picked it up from. It's from Sesame Street, of course. [youtube.com]
A new scientific analysis suggests that the Altar Stone at Stonehenge (weighing several tons) was transported to the site from more than 450 miles away in Scotland (likely by sea). [nature.com]
If you (or someone you know) has hiked the Appalachian Trail since 1979, it's likely that a photo of that person exists in the ATC's online Hiker Photo Archive. Some folks in these photos have never seen them before & forgot they even exist. [athikerpictures.org]
"They're just different kinds of human operating systems." Steve Silberman in a 2015 interview about the need to reconceptualize "disorders" like ADHD, autism, and dyslexia "as human resources that we have not learned to tap fully". [kottke.org]
"Tim Walz has tonic masculinity. Confident. Decent. The kind of man who...would start his job at the White House 'being asked about national security and the tax code and end with him wearing a headlamp up in the attic fixing some old wiring.'" [fritinancy.substack.com]
The last coal-fired power station in the UK will close down on Sept 30. Coal literally fueled the Industrial Revolution in the UK and now it's all but vanished from the country. [theguardian.com]
David Attenborough on Cybertruck behavior. "Here we see the Cybertruck has formed a peculiar symbiotic relationship with the larger Flatbed Trailer species." [threads.net]
From Rolling Stone, the 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time, including Forks (The Bear), San Junipero (Black Mirror), Fleabag season two opener, Middle Ground (The Wire), The Contest (Seinfeld), and Last Exit to Springfield (The Simpsons). [kottke.org]
A Navajo weaving of an Intel Pentium processor and how it relates to the history of Silicon Valley and Native Americans. "The weaving is accurate enough to determine that it represents a specific Pentium variant, called P54C." [kottke.org]
Atul Gawande: Tuberculosis is still the world's #1 infectious disease killer (1+ million people per year) but "the are new advances in screening, prevention and treatment, however, that now make significant progress possible — if we tap them." [nytimes.com 🎁]
New School Year Drop-Off and Pick-Up Rules. "Approach the White Zone at exactly 2.6 mph. Staff are standing by to launch your student into the window, Dukes of Hazzard style, with a trebuchet handmade by the LARP Club." [mcsweeneys.net]
America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny. "Few things symbolize our national dysfunction more than the inability to stop minting this worthless currency." It costs 3 cents to make a penny. 🙃 [nytimes.com 🎁]
Here's a newly released remix of The Postal Service's The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by Sylvan Esso. [kottke.org]
Even if autonomous vehicles work perfectly, they will likely not decrease emissions or crash deaths because so many more people will use them. "How do people respond when an activity becomes less onerous and more fun? They do more of it." [theverge.com]
Why TV Is Wrong for Tolkien. "I'm skeptical that the Lord of the Rings, or any other story from Tolkien's mythology, can really work as a TV series. TV as a form just doesn't play to the strengths of Tolkien's vision." [kottke.org]
I'd missed that Ray Nayler, author of the excellent The Mountain in the Sea, came out with a short novel earlier this year called The Tusks of Extinction. "Now, her digitized consciousness has been downloaded into the mind of a mammoth." [amazon.com]
Is My Blue Your Blue? A visual perception test that judges what you call blue and green and compares it with others' results. I am "bluer than 68% of the population." Now do red/pink, red/orange, and blue/purple! [ismy.blue]
Colossal, one of my all-time favorite sites on these here interwebs, has launched a spiffing new redesign. Go take a look. [thisiscolossal.com]
Ted Chiang on Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art. "it's by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise." [kottke.org]
What are we going to do with abundant, free, renewable energy? "[By 2030] solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year 'pretty much everywhere.'" [nytimes.com 🎁]
👀 👋 🎉
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