Potoooooooo was an 18th-century British racehorse whose name was pronounced like “Potatoes” (Pot-eight-Os).

“Presolar grains” (microscopic crystals that are older than the Sun) harvested from meteorites may help determine how our solar system was formed.

Bradley Barber remixes Lego sets into other things, e.g. the Millennium Falcon from Back to the Future DeLorean parts, an AT-AT into the USS Enterprise, and a Pirates of the Caribbean ship from the parts of a Lego bonsai tree set. He is not alone in this pursuit; you can find tens of thousands of custom Lego designs at Rebrickable, including dozens of Barber’s designs. Tags: Bradley Barber · lego · remix

This is great: Channel Surfer is “a retro TV guide that turns YouTube into live cable TV. Each channel plays videos on a deterministic schedule — like real TV, you tune in mid-show.”

coulou’s vinyl cafe (no. 4) - rainy day selections. “what’s up lovely humans, super excited to be sharing this new vinyl sessssion with you all.”

The Void Would Very Much Like You to Stop Screaming Into It. “I think we can both admit at this point that the screaming isn’t working. The screaming isn’t making you feel any better.”

Clive Thompson wrote about coding with AI agents. “Software developers point out that coding has a unique quality: They can tether their A.I.s to reality, because they can demand the agents test the code to see if it runs correctly.”

A pair of hounds chase a hare across a snowy plain — will it get away? In Mario Kart terms, the dogs have the weight and max speed advantage while the hare is maxed out in acceleration, handling, and traction.

Tags: dogs · video

“We took an ancient vice…put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong?” I *hate* the extent to which gambling has infested everything; it’s not going to end well.

Ballot Guessr: “GeoGuessr for politics. See a Google Street View image, guess how the county voted in the 2024 presidential election.” (633/1000 on my first try…but I borked one of the guesses bc I forgot there was a time limit. 🙃)

AI Is Rewiring How the World’s Best Go Players Think. “Players now train to replicate AI’s moves as closely as they can rather than inventing their own, even when the machine’s thinking remains mysterious to them.”

A printable zine: 50 Ways To Meet Your Neighbor. “32. Picking up trash, generally, is a good way to meet neighbors. People notice. 33. Winter: Shovel someone’s sidewalk. It’s also great cardio.”

Missed this earlier in the week: The Tournament of Books is underway! “Every March, the Tournament of Books is a month-long battle royale among the year’s best novels.”

This photo of an Icelandic glacier is really something.

The People Who Shun Super-Popular Pop Culture. “Some people are early adopters; others are late adopters. I’m simply a weirdly resistant one.”

There are at least 60 Pizza Hut Classics (red roofs, checkered tablecloths, salad bar) in the US…but the company does nothing to promote them. “They are like wormholes in the chain restaurant galaxy, portals to the past found by serendipity.”

From There I Ruined It, a version of Toto’s Africa but the lyrics are a listing of every country in Africa. They should teach this in American middle schools, not even joking.

See also Coach from Cheers singing Al-ban-i-a (a song that pops into my head every time I read or hear about that county):

Tags: Africa · geography · remix

Steve Scherer was a Reuters’ bureau chief in Canada. Then he got laid off, had to leave the country, and now drives for Uber in Virginia, in a country he doesn’t recognize anymore after working for 28 years abroad.

Wow, KDO pal and explorer Ariel Waldman has her own show on PBS! “LIFE UNEARTHED with Ariel Waldman is a science-driven docu-series revealing Earth’s ecosystems through radical shifts in scale…”

Georg Cantor is celebrated for revolutionizing mathematics by proving that there are different levels of infinity. But he didn’t do it alone and evidence has emerged that he plagiarized the work of a collaborator.

“8 in 10 AI chatbots were regularly willing to assist users in planning violent attacks including school shootings, religious bombings, and high-profile assassinations. DeepSeek went as far as wishing the would-be attacker a ‘Happy (and safe) shooting!’”

GOLIKEHELLMACHINE has an interview series called Work is Four Letters he describes like this: Most people think their jobs are boring or pointless or bullshit, but I don’t; if you look around you, everything you see was made by someone, somehow, and that’s really interesti...

Draw your own constellations.

John Baskerville was an influential 18th-century printer and type designer; you’ve probably used (or at least heard of) the Baskerville typeface. Cambridge University has the original punches1 used to create his signature typeface and has made high-res digital photos o...

Amount Of Water Man Just Used To Wash Dish To Be Prize Of Hand-To-Hand Combat Match In 2065.

Jessica Burbank: A new world order is here. States (countries) are no longer the highest form of power globally. Power has shifted to wealthy individuals who work in groups and operate across borders: syndicates of capital. Syndicates of capital cannot be categorized as le...

Everyone knows Yuri Gagarin was the first person to go to space. What this article presupposes is…maybe he wasn’t? It all boils down to what your definition of space is.

Another recent HyperCard discovery (that isn’t somehow in the Internet Archive): an “expanded book” version of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive).

“Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues invented a new vaccine that protects mice from respiratory viruses, bacteria and allergens — the closest yet to a universal vaccine.”

Ghost Elephants is a new documentary film directed by Werner Herzog for National Geographic. Here’s the trailer. For over a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, has been in search of a mysterious, elusive herd of Ghost Elephant...