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This is a great piece by Jamelle Bouie: Donald Trump Is Done With Checks and Balances. The first half is a short lesson on how our present Constitution came to be, which might differ slightly from the version you learned in school: It is important to remember that the Cons...

The Pixelmator blog: Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple. [...] Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmato...

The newest book from Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders. “Learn how dung beetles navigate by the stars, and trees communicate through their roots.”

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Isaac Schorr, reporting for Mediaite (with video, in case you don’t believe the following was claimed in all seriousness, which it was): Asked by his interlocutor, John Heers, if he thought “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good?” Carlson a...

A pair of physicists from MIT and Jefferson Lab and an animator have created a new visualization of the atomic nucleaus.

For the first time, the sizes, shapes and structures of nuclei in the quantum realm are visualized using animations and explained in the video.

The video also establishes what appears to be a new unit of measure with an adorable name, the babysecond:

To better define the velocities of particles at such small distance scales, we establish the baby second as 10^-23 seconds. A photon moving at the speed of light crosses three femtometers (a bit more than the radius of oxygen-16) in one baby second.

Tags: infoviz · physics · science · video

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Crows hold grudges. “When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.”

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I created a new photo journal entry.

The summer vacation in Annecy. Düsseldorf fun fair. A trip to the Eifel with Udo. And a trip to Berlin with Zoe.

Dan Moren returns to the show to discuss this week’s introductions of the first M4 Macs: iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pros.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/10/31/ep-412

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge: Claude, the AI chatbot made by Anthropic, now has a desktop app. You can download the Mac and Windows versions of the app from Anthropic’s website for free. Sebastiaan de With, on X: Big miss from Anthropic releasing a super clun...

While it’s true that after this week’s Mac announcements, every new Mac Apple sells now comes with at least 16 GB of RAM, Nick Heer reminds us that there remains a new Mac available with just 8 GB: the rather remarkable Walmart-exclusive $650 M1 MacBook Air.

Link: pxlnv.com/linklog/16-gb-ram-mac/

Apple: The Company posted quarterly revenue of $94.9 billion, up 6 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $0.97. Diluted earnings per share was $1.64, up 12 percent year over year when excluding the one-time charge recognized during the fourt...

Nintendo Music, an iOS app for “enjoying music from Nintendo games”. The extended playback option lets you “lengthen the duration of certain tracks to 15, 30, or 60 minutes to enjoy an uninterrupted listening experience.”

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It’s shocking, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this. What’s also shocking is Johnny Depp’s belly-free shirt. And of course all that blood and gore. I just like those sort of gory special effects. And this type of movie. It’s comfort food. This definitely deserves its reputation.

Game recommendation from Dan Sinker: UFO 50. “I’m doing a disservice in calling UFO 50 a game. Because it’s actually fifty games and, I think, a larger meta game or story that I still have yet to even scratch the surface of.”

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An oral history of HotWired, Wired’s original website. “We had a meeting to decide whether we should do writing that includes hyperlinks.”

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TIL that the dunk tank has extremely racist origins. Unbelievable but also not.

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Hey everyone. Since the membership program here at kottke.org is eight years old (tomorrow!) and the first anniversary of the new commenting system happened a couple of weeks ago, I thought it might be a good time to do another introduction thread. Here’s the prompt from the...

“If you were to modify the flash cooling process so that the toffee had more time to harden and work out its air bubbles, it’s possible we could get a type of Butterfinger bar that might be strong enough to be used as a makeshift building material.”

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So first of all, before you watch this analysis of Chris Marker’s fantastic La Jetée, you should watch the film itself if you’ve never seen it. It’s 28 minutes long, entirely in black & white, and is a “speculative fiction masterpiece” done with “422 photos, a voiceover, and a score”. You can find it streaming at Amazon, Apple, Criterion Channel, or Kanopy. You will not regret it. And then come back and watch this analysis/appreciation by Evan Puschak.

Tags: Chris Marker · Evan Puschak · film school · La Jetee · movies · time travel · video

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