FeedCity

Why Do Wind Turbines Have Three Blades? Why not two? Or five? Or eight? Turns out that three is sort of a Goldilocks sweet spot for blade count due to physics, engineering, and aesthetic reasons.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time. “An emotional research team became tearful as they described how data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Enigmatriz uses ASCII art to punch up and blow out public domain photos and illustrations — I love their style. From It’s Nice That: Using the Image to ASCII tool available online, Enigmatriz found a new way to play with digital assets. “Everyday, I sit on my co...

Historian Thomas Zimmer has left academia, Substack, and the US; now he’s launching his new career as an indie writer with a newsletter about “the ongoing struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America”. Recommended!

My guest today is Chef David Chang. He founded Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004. That was just the start of his incredible career – he’s opened several restaurants, winning awards and Michelin stars along the way, and becoming a fixture in the upper echelon of food. He’s the host of the Netflix shows Ugly Delicious and Dinner Time Live, as well as his own podcast, The Dave Chang Show. For this episode, I talked to Dave about the song “I See a Darkness.” It's the title track on the album by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka Will Oldham, which came out in 1999. Later, Johnny Cash would cover “I See a Darkness” in 2000, as a duet with Will Oldham, as part of Johnny Cash’s acclaimed American series.

You can get Bonnie "Prince" Billy’s "I See a Darkness" on vinyl or digital here.

For more info, visit songexploder.net/david-chang.

Using Cesium-137 testing to find counterfeit wine. “Cesium-137 did not exist on this planet until we exploded the first atomic bomb.” The technique was used to test the legitimacy of some wines said to belong to Thomas Jefferson.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Is the New York Times finally getting real about Trump? “In the last 10 days or so, several Times articles have been considerably more straightforward – and honest – about the way Trump lies and spreads division.”

Steve Mould is always informative and entertaining, so I started watching his video on building the world’s tallest siphon, nodding along to what I thought was the reasonable conclusion. And then the video kicked into another gear — because with science, the simple solution is not always the whole story when extreme conditions are in play. (via the kid should see this)

Tags: physics · science · Steve Mould · video

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In Jimmy Kimmel’s words: What the late-night host said upon his return from suspension. “I was not happy when they pulled me off the air.”

McSweeney’s didn’t even need to lampoon Trump’s comments about vaccines, autism, & Tylenol…they just printed them verbatim and it reads like the most unhinged parody. “They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies. It’s a disgrace.”

We visit an underground chamber in Upton, Massachusetts, that’s puzzled some New Englanders – while others long knew its ancient origins. All this week, we’re heading underground to discover the stories beneath our feet.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Qwen3-VL: Sharper Vision, Deeper Thought, Broader Action I've been looking forward to this. Qwen 2.5 VL is one of the best available open weight vision LLMs, so I had high hopes for Qwen 3's vision models. Firstly, we are open-sourcing the flagship model of this series: Qwe...

GPT-5-Codex OpenAI half-relased this model earlier this month, adding it to their Codex CLI tool but not their API. Today they've fixed that - the new model can now be accessed as gpt-5-codex. It's priced the same as regular GPT-5: $1.25/million input tokens, $10/million out...

An excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s new book Will There Ever Be Another You. “But the soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The style of ShouXin’s drawings is a perfect match for their subject matter — cats are simultaneously wild and carefully composed. (via colossal) Tags: art · cats · ShouXin 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A tantalizing peek into the massive 90,000-item archive left behind by David Bowie.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In the most recent episode of Howtown, Joss Fong explains how above-ground nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s left a signature in all life on Earth that can be used as a forensic tool for catching art forgers, shady ivory dealers, and even fraudulent wine sellers/cellars. ...

Conservative White Christians Will Worship Anyone But Jesus. “Seeing White Evangelicals build idols out of people whose lives and public work are the antithesis of Jesus is something we’ve grown accustomed to.”

Didn’t think I was interested in a profile of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but Sam Anderson can write. “It is a smile that makes you feel as if the sun is setting over an undiscovered tropical beach on which 10,000 baby sea turtles are about to hatch.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Hey folks. I’m very excited to be heading to Japan for the first time next month. I’ll be there from mid-October for 3-4 weeks. The current plan is Tokyo, Kamakura, Kanazawa, Kyoto, Osaka, Koyasan, and perhaps Hiroshima — change my mind? If you’ve been there, please leave your recs in the comments below or drop me an email. If you live there or will be visiting at the same time, let’s meet up!

The photograph above is from Koya Bound by Craig Mod & Dan Rubin. The companion website to the book is great.

Tags: Craig Mod · Dan Rubin · Japan · Jason Kottke · travel

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →