NASA has released some 12,000 unseen photos from the recent Artemis II mission; here are some of the best shots.

Nowhere on XKCD’s map of The Contiguous 41 States does it say that you need to find the missing seven states, but that’s immediately where my mind went. And it was a little more challenging than I anticipated — all of New England is present & accounted for somehow?

The answer key is here, along with this tidbit:

The United States did have exactly 41 states for a few days in 1889, from the admission of Montana, the 41st state, on November 8, to the admission of Washington (the state, not DC), the 42nd state, on November 11.

See also this super-sized US map with 64 states.

And then after I wrote all of the above, I decided to check and of course I’d posted about this map before, soon after it came out. *sigh*

Tags: maps · usa · xkcd

A 55-minute mix of Boards of Canada B-sides and rarities.

“They Would Never Use the Death Star on Us”: Alderaan Residents Reflect on Their Support for the Empire as a Large Imperial Installation Enters the System. “The Senate was ineffective, and the liberal Jedi were out of touch…”

I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retiremen...

How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes. “The solution that ended up saving the movie wasn’t much less drastic, producing a 93-minute cut that excised most of Rambo’s dialogue.”

Ohhhhh dear, Richard Dawkins: Is AI the Next Phase of Evolution? Claude Appears to Be Conscious. “My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism.” 😬

Unruly Play: “A collection of 169 works of play in unlikely places. Games about unusual things. Unexpected encounters.”

Ada Palmer & Bruce Schneier: AI Learns Language From Skewed Sources. That Could Change How We Humans Speak – and Think. “Our sense of the world may become distorted in ways we have barely begun to comprehend.”

Using the NY Times Archive API, journalist Ted Alcorn built Below the Fold, a dashboard through which you can explore the last 25 years of Times coverage: 2.2 million articles containing 1.5 billion words. You can slice and dice this data in a bunch of different ways — it’s a fantastic resource.

One of the site’s sections is about obituaries. From that data, Alcorn produced this infographic of whose obits contained the highest word count:

As you can see, it’s a lot of world leaders, religious leaders, politicians, and white men. There only appear to be five women on the list. Notable non-politicians include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Muhammad Ali, and Charles Schulz.

The whole dashboard is fun/enlightening to explore.

Tags: infoviz · journalism · NY Times · obituaries · Ted Alcorn

Am…am I “alternatively influential”? Defined roughly as “public thinkers and tastemakers who have real clout in their own demesnes despite only modest internet followings”.

This is excellent: Jamelle Bouie explains why he thinks the Supreme Court is corrupt and what we (through Congress) can do about it. Not all video transcripts work as text, but this one does, so I’m including his full remarks here: The Supreme Court is corrupt. You migh...

For his latest video essay, Evan Puschak tells us about Un Chien Andalou, the pioneering surrealist short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film is particularly notable for a shocking shot in the opening scene, which, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely never forgotten. Said Buñuel of the film:

This film has no intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator; indeed, on the contrary, it attacks him, to the degree that he belongs to a society with which surrealism is at war.

You can watch Un Chien Andalou on YouTube:

One wonders what Buñuel and Dalí would have made of YouTube…

Tags: art · film school · Luis Buñuel · movies · Salvador Dali · Un Chien Andalou · video

I fixed a few bugs on the Rolodex yesterday — some of the feeds weren’t updating and modifying sites wasn’t working properly. (Members get the mini-feedreader view!)

“Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity.”

On the futility of border walls. “The Ozymandian ruins of many such walls litter our ancient and modern landscapes, because for as long as humanity has built hard borders, people have inevitably found ways to cross, topple or simply bypass them.”

The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’. “We find that in ­real‑world work, the more switches in attention a person makes, the lower is their end‑­of‑day assessed productivity.”

Adam Serwer writing about the yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that guts much of whatever remains of the Voting Rights Act: In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control — half of the Black American population resides in the South — lawmaker...

Come on everyone, we’re going to Cursor Camp!

Winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2026.

The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. “If universal basic income enables even one more Einstein to become Einstein over the course of the next century, it will have paid for itself a thousand times over.”

Who Are the Unexpected Friends in Your Life? “Little did I know that I would find this kind of friendship with my 70-something neighbor, Jesse.”

“There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive. I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.”

“Trump did not cause the attempts on his life. But it would be dishonest to deny that he is responsible for shaping the environment in which we live — for creating an atmosphere in which these kinds of events are more likely.”

On May 22, Boards of Canada is doing a handful of listening parties around the world (NYC, Tokyo, London, etc.) for their new album. “Tickets live Friday 1 May. Sign up for access by Thursday 30 April, 15:00 BST.”

Holy moly, DJ Shadow is doing a 30th anniversary tour for Endtroducing… Starts Sept 24 in San Diego. Endtroducing… is one of my all-time favorite albums.

I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It. “I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.”

A Georgia teen diagnosed with a rare cancer used his Make-A-Wish gift to help the homeless in his community. “I got out of my version of heck, and I want to help others who are in a similar situation, their own version.”

The intelligence of LLMs is “a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested”, and their widespread use will lead to a thinning of that complexity, “undermining the conditions for its own advancement”. (And ours.)

Teaser trailer for season four of Ted Lasso. Looks like he & Coach Beard are back in the UK to coach AFC Richmond’s women’s team. Premieres Aug 5 on Apple TV.