Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
“‘Take on Me’ is an ideal song for Song Exploder, because it’s so well known and beloved that it feels like a song predestined to be a massive hit, but the truth couldn’t be further from the case.”
In 1983, the BBC aired a six-part series called Fun to Imagine with a simple premise: put physicist Richard Feynman in front of a camera and have him explain everyday things. In this clip from one of the episodes, Feynman explains in very simple terms what fire is:
So good. Watch the whole thing…it seems like you get the gist about 2 minutes in, but that’s only half the story. See also Feynman explaining rubber bands, how trains go around curves, and how magnets work.
[This is a vintage post originally from Mar 2015.]
Tags: physics · Richard Feynman · science · timeless posts · video
For instance, there is an engraved stone erected at the Buddhist Kan’ei-ji temple to “console the spirits of the flies, crickets, and grasshoppers that had been killed in the production of a scientific text”.
Current status: looking through Atlas Obscura’s list of things to do in Tokyo.
Rapper 50 Cent, adjusted for inflation, is 109 Cent.
“The spread of dangerous infections that do not respond to antibiotics has been increasing by as much as 15 percent a year”, says the WHO. “The less people have access to quality care, the more they’re likely to suffer from drug-resistant infection.”
From director Kathryn Bigelow comes A House of Dynamite (trailer), starring Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, and Greta Lee.
When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.
A House of Dynamite is out in theaters right now and will be on Netflix in a couple of weeks.
Tags: A House of Dynamite · Kathryn Bigelow · movies · trailers · video
“The MUTE Series is a collection of one-take microfilms that report on the vagaries of human behaviour.” There are 3 rules for their films: no dialogue, no camera moves, one shot only.
“The smartest design move isn’t chasing trends, it’s planting the tree and letting time do the work,” writes Dave Snyder. “Trees don’t pay off tomorrow. They pay off in a decade. They compound quietly, making everything around them better…”
For the last-ever episode of his WTF podcast, Marc Maron interviewed Barack Obama. You can watch their hour-long conversation here.
Missed this from a few days ago: the winners of the 2025 MacArthur Fellowship. “I think this year, we see empathy and deep engagement with community figures prominently in this class.”
I love the synchronized waves that these Himalayan giant honey bees use against their hornet predators.
“ShadeMap is a global simulation of mountain, building and tree shadows for any date and time. ShadeMap calculates shadow positions in realtime and displays them on a map.”
If you google around, there are claims of people with a max vertical jump of 55+ inches, but the official record seems to be 51” by Darius Clark (he touched 12’4” w/ a standing reach of 8’1”). It’s incredible how high in the air he gets.
“It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive.” That line was written about the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing tool but I’d argue that the increasing power of individuals is the defining challenge of modernity.
Since launching in 2005, YouTube has changed the progress/volume/tool bar on their video player several times. Here’s what it’s looked like through the years:1
I don’t remember the first two or three at all, but that 2008-2010 version is a nostalgia bomb, albeit a deceptive one. You might be fooled into remembering that it used to be very simple, but the whole progress/tool bar is cut off in the graphic above; here’s the full version.
I’d love to see versions of this for iTunes/Apple Music, Spotify, and other players.