Web game: list as many animals as you can in 1 minute (but you get more time with correct guesses).

In 2017, city planner Jeff Speck gave a talk on the four ways to make a city more walkable: In the typical American city, in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk tha...

Legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth: “Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6.”

“The entire Sun oscillates in a globally coherent way, and the oscillations are formed by sound waves trapped inside the Sun that make it resonate just like a musical instrument.”

From late January, a 40-minute talk by Rick Steves on “how lessons learned on the road can help Americans better understand and meet the challenges facing Democracy in the USA.”

Timothy Snyder on strongmen. “Once you accept that Trump is strong, you are accepting that you are weaker than Trump. And once you accept the strongman form of politics, you no longer have recourse to laws, or norms, or even basic ideas of decency.”

Ok, you know this is going to be a good one: De La Soul plays a Tiny Desk Concert.

The humor of De La Soul has always been one of its calling cards. When DJ Maseo tells the Tiny Desk crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a new group called De La Soul,” he means it as a joke. But, in so many ways, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop is new: the duties have been reassessed, the focus has shifted and the newness of The Plugs is laid plain here at the Tiny Desk.

Here’s the setlist:

YUHDONTSTOP
Will Be
Much More
Stakes is High
Sunny Storms
Different World
Breakadawn
Pony Ride
A Quick 16 for Mama
Me Myself and I

Feel free to dance at your desk or in your kitchen or wherever you’re listening.

Tags: De La Soul · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video

A new book by Rebecca Solnit came out yesterday; it’s called The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change (Amazon). The synopsis: Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural chan...

TIL about babysitting co-ops. “The premise is simple: Families in the co-op provide each other with free childcare. A point system…ensures that everyone contributes their fair share. Every half an hour is worth one point…”

Hello, good afternoon! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a bunch of new stuff for KDO in the pipeline. I’ve been focused on backend infrastructure recently to make my life (hopefully) easier and have gotten that to a place of “useful enough to test out to find all the b...

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Acquires Original Disney Adult. “There wouldn’t be a Disney as we know it without this guy, a grown man who has watched Tinker Bell And The Great Fairy Rescue more than 90 times.”

TIL about burping your house, aka lüften (in Germany), aka opening up the windows in your house daily to air it out, even in winter.

The Library of Congress houses an online collection of 48 color photographs of Rome taken in the 1890s. The prints were created using the photochrom process: The prints look deceptively like color photographs. But when viewed with a magnifying glass the small dots that ...

Steve Jobs famously said that computers are a bicycle for the mind. What does that make LLMs? An e-bike for the mind? A car for the mind? A jet plane for the mind?

LLMs are getting pretty good at unmasking pseudonymous users — their success rate is “far greater” than humans alone can manage.

“Imagine what it was like for women in colonial North America. Life was different depending on where you lived, your background, and how much money you had.”

This video traces the history of Apple’s HyperCard from Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex to the Mother of All Demos to the Xerox PARC Alto to Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, who said:

HyperCard is a software erector set. It lets people put things together without having to know how to solder.

There’s a ton of information about HyperCard at hypercard.org, including this HyperCard simulator that runs in your browser.

Tags: Apple · Bill Atkinson · computing · HyperCard · Vannevar Bush · video

Does Your Country Need Regime Change? A Quiz. “Is your country a notorious bad actor in the Middle East? Has your leader deployed the country’s military domestically against civilians who were protesting peacefully?”

As part of his show called Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme’s Genesis, currently on display in LA, Takashi Murakami painted his own version of Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son. The painting is paired with Murakami’s copies ...

Remember the “scroll lock” key on your keyboard? What the heck was it for? And why is the same scrolling mechanic showing up in streaming service interfaces?

A painting from 1633 called Vision of Zacharias in the Temple has been newly identified by Rijksmuseum researchers as an authentic Rembrandt van Rijn. It had been decades since the painting was examined — art historians have access to all kinds of new techniques and inform...

Per Betteridge’s law of headlines and also the map above, my answer is clearly no. You can try it yourself here…you draw them one at a time and it adds them to the map automagically. I’m going to blame my trackpad use a little, but I’m not sure I would have done much better had I drawn with a pencil and looked a map beforehand.

Update: Your periodic reminder that Senator Al Franken can draw all 50 US states from memory with astonishing accuracy.

(thx, eric)

[This is a vintage post originally from Jul 2017.]

Tags: Al Franken · geography · maps · timeless posts · USA · video

Recent advances in science have revolutionized our understanding of the Maya, e.g. there’s evidence that “more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire…”

“Boredom is the price we pay for a life rich with meaning. Recognizing this makes the feeling more endurable.”

When lit up at night, this badminton academy in Bhubaneswar, India looks like a shuttlecock.

“Supercharged” solar activity and the equinox effect, which “doubles the chance of auroral activity around the spring and fall equinoxes”, could make March 2026 the best month for the northern lights until the mid-2030s.

Last week, Nine Inch Nails released an album of remixes and unreleased session music from their Tron: Ares score called Tron Ares: Divergence. I’m listening to it now; pretty good so far.

Tags: movies · music · Nine Inch Nails · Tron · video

“A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfills the brief.”

This is the most 2026 thing I’ve ever heard: Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter Bella Freud has a video podcast on YouTube where she interviews people (Cate Blanchette, Lorde, Graydon Carter) while they lie on a psychiatrist’s couch.

A Boston man discovered a document passed down through his family: his ancestor’s freedom papers. “When he touched that paper he was touching the same place his relative touched in 1834.”