FeedCity

Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates drawings of fish. There’s an option to slow the animation down so you can watch it draw the fish line-by-line.

The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter. The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the soun...

How many shots are in the average movie? How does it compare to the past? “You might expect the editor to be the most important factor in the number of shots, but in fact, knowing who directed a film accounts for 70% of the variation in its cutting pace.”

Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey, and Aaron Schaffer, reporting for The Washington Post (News+ link; Archive.today link): A list obtained by The Washington Post reveals all the major donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project, including previously u...

"This year's winning photographs demonstrate the extraordinary power of wildlife photography to help us see nature differently," says Dr. Doug Gurr, Director of the Natural History Museum.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article The Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 Winners Showcase Nature’s Power and Vulnerability appeared first on Colossal.

Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World. “The epic story of how a handful of surprisingly simple mathematical ideas have sparked today’s technological breakthroughs — from Netflix’s recommendation algorithm to medical imaging to AI…” Interesting!

"These women's abusive partners died by suicide. They felt both relief and grief. The NHS didn't know what to do with them."

"Fishing for trouble in the Antarctic."

I ran across this post on Instagram by Bobby in Space (who posts about design and the psychology of place) and wanted to pull it onto the actual internet. Here are some snippets of his “5 hills I will die on as someone who studies the psychology of place”. I don’t think thes...

Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Maybe this isn’t the best show in the world, but I have been enjoying it. I thought s02 was better than s01 so at least the trajectory is promising.

Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO The phrase "told investors" appears four times in this FT article, which reports on Anthropic's day of hosting investors on Wednesday. Lots of details in here from "people with knowledge of the...

"We are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending."

Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts and no server that holds your work. Every document lives in the address of its page… Copy the link and you have copied the document.” Includes a word processor, spreadsheet, calculator, etc.

By studying fire scars in ancient wood, many scientists have become convinced that Indigenous people transformed North America long before European colonizers arrived. M.R. O’Connor spends time with dendrochronologists, who study tree rings, and other experts to understand what they’re learning: Anthropologist Omer Stewart, who began documenting Native American burning practices in the nineteen-thirties . […]

Among a collection’s many skulls, a grieving son learns how to live in a world that keeps going.

Explanation: The city lights outshine the stars in the City That Never Sleeps. Who would have thought that the Milky Way could be visible in this sky? This image was taken with a filter that blocks most visible light, capturing instead only light in the near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum (with lower energy than visible light). The astrophotographer's clever setup blocks most of the light pollution from the city: old incandescent light bulbs and some neon lights are still bright in the near-infrared, but fluorescent and LED light bulbs are not. Of course, stars are also bright in the near-infrared! This image is a reminder that we all live under the same sky, and astronomy allows all of us to learn more about humanity's place in the Cosmos.

Tomorrow's picture: Chasing the ISS

Today we're powering up our metal detectors and keeping a very close eye on the surface of the earth as we set out in the hunt for meteorites with Steve Arnold, who’s been in the game for more than three decades. If you want to learn more, check out Steve’s website, and read this profile of the meteorite hunting community.

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Tool: Tree Appreciator

Another game experiment with Claude. This one used the default Claude iPhone app (chat mode, not Claude Code mode) where I prompted Claude Opus 5.5 Max with:

Build a three js game called "Tree appreciator" - it shows you two algorithmically generated trees and the game mechanics is about appreciating the differences between them. Think hard about how to make sure it is both fun and beautiful.

Somewhat embarrassingly given my recent talk, I've found that telling Opus 5.5 "make sure it is fun" works uncomfortably well. In this case Claude crunched for 3 hours and 7 minutes before retuning a cosy little spot-the-difference game with music and animation and achievements that's quite compelling to play.

Tags: game-design, javascript, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, vibe-coding, three-js

From a 2014 article on The Dark Power of Fraternities by Caitlin Flanagan, this is one hell of an opening paragraph: One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West...

Now on view in Austin, the Haas Brothers' mid-career retrospective plunges visitors into their fantasy world.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Welcome to the ‘Uncanny Valley,’ the Haas Brothers’ Fantastic and Cheeky Universe appeared first on Colossal.