Not normal: Lions are climbing trees in Botswana. “It appears that climbing...
Not normal: Lions are climbing trees in Botswana. “It appears that climbing trees can be a big advantage for hunting, resting, and beating the heat.”
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Josh’s Albums of the Year
My friend Josh LaFayette spends the very last part of the year making fan art for his favorite albums of the year and despite all the pieces being visually different there’s a through line which make all of them immediately recognizable to me as his art. He’s putting out a f...
Infinite Content
Animator & filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt on the difference between crate digging & streaming from a recent interview:
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient,...
Tetris Forever is, well, kind of hard to explain. It’s a documentary...
Tetris Forever is, well, kind of hard to explain. It’s a documentary about the history of Tetris but also a collection of playable historical Tetris games, from the very first Soviet-era version to a new multiplayer version called Tetris Time Warp.
NYT asks, “Is the Northeast Entering Its Wildfire Era?” “It might be...
NYT asks, “Is the Northeast Entering Its Wildfire Era?” “It might be time to do the kind of fire safety planning in the Northeast that is more common in California.” It’s raining today in Boston, finally, but it’s been droughty.
Neon, The Most Noble Of Signs
I loved this article about NeonWorks which seems to be the last neon artisan in the Bay Area. The owner, Jim Rizzo is a character, and the article is full of nuggets like:
“I think the love of neon is still there, but because budgets are tight, people are going to LED fa...
Flush is an app for finding public bathrooms. “Search through over 200,000...
Baker’s Chocolate Wasn’t Made For Bakers
I hope this doesn’t ruin your day, but Baker’s Chocolate wasn’t created for bakers, it’s chocolate originally produced in Dorchester, MA by John Hannon with his partner Dr. James Baker. Hannon sailed to the West Indies in 1779 and never came back, so Dr. Baker changed the na...
A world map of where you don’t need a permit to buy...
A world map of where you don’t need a permit to buy a gun. This belongs to a class of maps in which the US is (inexplicably, infuriatingly) highlighted and almost everywhere else isn’t.
McRib Sauce Ice Cream
No one.
Absolutely no one.
Not one single person.
Jason: HEY, AARON, WHAT IF YOU MADE McRIB SAUCE ICE CREAM AT YOUR ICE CREAM SHOP?
According to Food & Wine, McDonald’s will be selling half gallon jugs of McRib sauce alongside the annual limited release of the McRib sandwich.
The sauce goes on sale November 25th at 10AM and I will surely forget to buy some then, but if I don’t, I’ll make Jason some McRib sauce ice cream in December. We’ve already made pickle and Frank’s Red Hot ice cream so why not.
Tags: food · ice cream · McDonald’s
Missed the shuttle. “It was night but the tarmac was illuminated with...
Missed the shuttle. “It was night but the tarmac was illuminated with spotlights and lights from vehicles and planes. These giant jets were taking off real close on either side of me. I’ve never seen a plane that big up close at lift off.”
The World-Changing Impact of Vaccines
Back in 2015, Tynan DeBold and Dov Friedman created a series of graphics for the WSJ showing the impact of the introduction of vaccines in the US. Here’s the infographic for measles:
And for polio:
Vaccines are in the running for the greatest human invention ever. You can see the rest of the charts (for hepatitis A, mumps, pertussis, rubella, and smallpox) here.
See also The stunning success of vaccines in America, in one chart.
Tags: Dov Friedman · infoviz · medicine · science · Tynan DeBold · vaccines
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A great idea for a list: The 25 Most Important Recipes of...
A great idea for a list: The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years. Includes caesar salad, the last word cocktail, Marcella Hazen’s tomato sauce, Julia Child’s beef bourg, no-knead bread, and Kenji’s reverse-sear steak. What’s missing?
Augusta Britt, secret teenaged muse of a middle-aged Cormac McCarthy, sounds like...
Augusta Britt, secret teenaged muse of a middle-aged Cormac McCarthy, sounds like a fascinating person but this profile of her in Vanity Fair does not do her justice.
The winners of the National Book Awards were announced last night —...
The winners of the National Book Awards were announced last night — Percival Everett’s fantastic James deservedly took the prize for fiction. Full list of the winners here.
Cheese Crime
People like stealing fontina fortunes worth of cheese because it’s easy to sell on the black market and is hard to track. The mascarpone market probably doesn’t even have to be super dark for creamy criminals to launder their pinched cheese through conventional cheddar chann...
Cher’s New Memoir
Cher has a book coming out, Cher, The Memoir, Part One, and Vulture has an excerpt about meeting Sonny Bono.
In my mind I was thinking, Yeah, OK, this old line. But I must have had a look on my face because he shook his head and laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ve got twin beds,” he said. With a grin he added, “And honestly, I don’t find you particularly attractive.” I was both insulted and relieved. And that’s how I became the potty-mouthed sidekick to a man eleven years older than me who was in the middle of a divorce.
I hadn’t realized Sonny was so much older than Cher, who was 16 when they met, which, uh, yeah. (via @georgehahn.bksy.social)
Tags: books · Cher · Sonny Bono
A report from the European championship of tram drivers. This was one...
A report from the European championship of tram drivers. This was one of the tests: “Drivers had to come to a stop so gently that water did not slosh out of a bowl that was filled to the brim.”
Photos by Noah Kalina of the oldest forest in the world (a...
Photos by Noah Kalina of the oldest forest in the world (a 385-million-year-old forest in Cairo, New York) and the paleobotanist who discovered it. “Holy cats! These were roots and that’s where a tree stood 385 million years ago.”
Earth’s First Interstellar Transmission Is 50 Years Old
Oh wow, this is cool: an article in Scientific American about the Arecibo message, the first message purposely sent by humanity out into interstellar space. The piece is written by science writer Nadia Drake — the daughter of Frank Drake, who designed the message — and it di...
“Dental care supplier Henry Schein advanced in Monday trading as investors bet...
Today’s Work Music: A Groovy Autumn Mix
A few months ago, I posted about Lane 8’s seasonal mixes and I’m happy to report that the Fall 2024 Mixtape is now out. You can find it on Soundcloud, YouTube, and Apple Music. I’ve been listening for the past few days and it’s 🔥🔥.
Google & the US Forest Service are partnering to use machine learning...
Google & the US Forest Service are partnering to use machine learning to detect forest fires. “[FireSat] will provide global high resolution imagery that is updated every 20 minutes, enabling the detection of wildfires roughly the size of a classroom.”
Rafael Nadal has officially retired from professional tennis. One of the greatest...
Rafael Nadal has officially retired from professional tennis. One of the greatest to ever do it. “I’m not tired of playing tennis but my body doesn’t want to play anymore and you have to accept that.”
For the love of god, quit calling your newsletter “my Substack”. “You...
For the love of god, quit calling your newsletter “my Substack”. “You can talk about your work as *your work*. It’s your newsletter, or your email, or your blog. Or just your writing. But it sure as hell isn’t ‘your Substack.’”
Doomsday Fish
The oarfish is a very long fish people don’t normally see on account of it living deep, deep in the deep water, though three have washed up on the shores of Southern California in the last 3 months. The oarfish is referred to as the Doomsday Fish (a very cool name for a fish imo), because Japanese mythology considers seeing one of these fish, which can grow to be 30 feet, an omen of tsunamis or earthquakes. 12 washed up on the shores of Japan before the earthquake in 2011.
Don’t worry though because scientists looked into it and decided “the spatiotemporal relationship between deep‐sea fish appearances and earthquakes was hardly found.” Honestly, it’s a weird way to say “no the fish don’t mean an earthquake,” but it’s all we’ve got.
Tags: fish
25 years after the much maligned DK Rap premiered to scorn in...
25 years after the much maligned DK Rap premiered to scorn in Nintendo’s Donkey Kong 64, the composer, Grant Kirkhope, has released a remix with the rapper Substantial that whips.
Every day, people go out and do the kind of stuff you’ve...
Every day, people go out and do the kind of stuff you’ve never imagined being possible, but they imagined it, and that’s what’s important.
You still have a couple of days left to back Kelli Anderson’s...
You still have a couple of days left to back Kelli Anderson’s pop-up book about typography on Kickstarter. It looks incredible.
Purple Isn’t Real
So we all know the color purple has always been associated with royalty because the dye used to make it was extremely limited because you could only get it from the Phoenician city of Tyre where a tiny snail lived. Dye makers had to “crack open the snail’s shell, extract a p...