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Arthur Ganson is a kinetic sculptor who builds “Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes”. One of his works is called Machine with Concrete, which demonstrates the magic of gear ratios

According to a piece in Make, the input shaft spins at 200 rpm, which is reduced by gearing down to 1 revolution every 2 trillion years by the time you reach the gear on the end…which is so slow that even embedding the final gear in concrete doesn’t make any difference to the machine’s operation. (via interconnected)

[This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2015.]

Tags: art · Arthur Ganson · timeless posts · video

Chef Saves 78-Year-Old Man’s Life After He Stopped Showing Up for His Daily Dinners at Local Restaurant. “Mr. Hicks don’t miss no days. I knew, then, something was wrong.”

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[Trailer] The Muppet Show is returning! It’s a one-time event, hosted by Sabrina Carpenter, to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary. “It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights…”

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Nature magazine has chosen its favorite science images of the year. I’ve featured a few of these on the site already — Skydiving the Sun, red sprites in the New Zealand sky — so I picked a couple of other favorites to share: The first was taken by Francisco Negroni of the Villarrica volcano in Chile (check out his site for more amazing photos of volcanos & lightning). The second is by 13-year-old Grayson Bell of two green frogs fighting; Bell named his photo “Baptism of the Unwilling Convert”. Tags: best of · best of 2025 · photography · science 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Astronomy Picture of the Day for Dec 12: a red fox beneath a swirling aurora. “In a Finnish myth, when an arctic fox runs so fast that its bushy tail brushes the mountains, flaming sparks are cast into the heavens creating the northern lights.”

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The Devil You Know is an 8-part podcast series from the CBC and Sarah Marshall (host of You’re Wrong About…) about the Satanic Panic. “These thousands of alleged Satanists were nowhere to be found…”

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In a recent bombshell piece for the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv explored the personal journals of the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. What she found was shocking: he had fabricated and embellished some of his most well-known work — like Awakenings and The Man Who...

The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025. “Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book.”

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Planning to Visit the US? Take It From This American Citizen – Don’t. “If I were a tourist, though, I’d pick a less totalitarian place to travel.”

The band Air is a duo from Versailles, France. Their first EP came out in 1995, followed by their critically acclaimed debut album, ‘Moon Safari,' which was an international hit. Then they made the music for the film ‘The Virgin Suicides,‘ which was written and directed by O...

Matt Webb reports on going to algoraves. “There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, and it plays in a loop even while you’re coding.”

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firefox parser/html/java/README.txt TIL that the HTML5 Parser used by Firefox is maintained as Java code (commit history here) and converted to C++ using a custom translation script. You can see that in action by checking out the ~8GB Firefox repository and running: cd parse...

Ragú Unveils Sensory Deprivation Marinara Tank. “The detoxifying marinara is slowly simmered to the exact temperature of the user’s body, allowing the mind to drift freely into a meditative gravy state, just like Nonna used to make.”

The letter is typeset in Papyrus, the typeface for which James Cameron’s affection inspired not one but two classic SNL shorts starring Ryan Gosling — which Cameron has a good sense of humor about.

Terrence Malick’s letter accompanying Tree of Life in 2011 was plainly and humbly set in Helvetica. David Lynch’s accompanying Mulholland Drive was also in Helvetica, but in a very Lynchian way. And then there is Stanley Kubrick, whose letter to projectionists that accompanied Barry Lyndon was typeset in Futura — quite the feat in 1975. (It was almost certainly IBM’s Mid-Century typeface, a beautiful adaptation of Futura for their Executive line of typewriters.) Cool custom letterhead on Kubrick’s as well.

Link: x.com/avatar3news/status/2000390070256418915

The new ChatGPT Images is here OpenAI shipped an update to their ChatGPT Images feature - the feature that gained them 100 million new users in a week when they first launched it back in March, but has since been eclipsed by Google's Nano Banana and then further by Nana Bana...

Over his storied career, Steven Spielberg has made only four studio films about aliens: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — the outsized influence of the first two gives the impression that he’s made many more.

Over the past 20 years, Spielberg has favored more realistic fare (Lincoln, Munich, The Fabelmans) but this summer he’s back with an alien movie, Disclosure Day, based on an original story no less. Very excited for this! In theaters on June 12, 2026.

Tags: Disclosure Day · movies · Steven Spielberg · trailers · video

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ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP The team at Astral have been working on this for quite a long time, and are finally releasing the first beta. They have some big performance claims: Without caching, ty is consistently between 10x and 60x faster than mypy a...

s3-credentials 0.17 New release of my s3-credentials CLI tool for managing credentials needed to access just one S3 bucket. Here are the release notes in full: New commands get-bucket-policy and set-bucket-policy. #91 New commands get-public-access-block and set-public-ac...

Poe the Poet I was looking for a way to specify additional commands in my pyproject.toml file to execute using uv. There's an enormous issue thread on this in the uv issue tracker (300+ comments dating back to August 2024) and from there I learned of several options includin...

Seven Voting Laws Every Blue State Should Enact Right Now. “1. Enact a statutory right to vote for every eligible citizen. This may surprise you, but there is no general federal constitutional right to vote.”