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Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
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Amazing stat about the disappearance of bands from the UK music charts (29:40 mark): in the first half of the 80s, bands were #1 for 146 weeks; the first half of the 90s, it was 141 weeks. In the 20s so far: 3 weeks that songs by bands were #1. 🤯
Tressie McMillan Cottom reports from Louisville, KY on the challenges of residents organizing a tenants union across racial & political divides. “I have to keep white liberals from disorganizing us.”
Forthcoming book: The Marvel Comics Covers of Jack Kirby Volume 1. This volume contains covers from 1961 to 1964, including art from The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, and The X-Men.
Myles Zhang, a PhD candidate in architectural history, created this drawing of Manhattan’s Chinatown several years ago.
Chinatown’s tenements are in the foreground, while the skyscraper canyons of Lower Manhattan rise above. This shows the area of Chinatown bordered by Bowery, Canal Street, and Columbus Park.
It took him around 60 hours to complete; he made a time lapse video of its creation:
There’s a very large scan of the image that’s worth looking at.
Tags: architecture · art · cities · Myles Zhang · time lapse · video
The Marshall Project: what communities have learned from sending unarmed responders instead of police, including “data suggests unarmed responders rarely need to call in police” and “many people remain leery of dialing 911 in a crisis”.
If you watch any of Steven Spielberg’s movies, you’ll notice a distinctive element: the Spielberg Face.
If Spielberg deserves to be called a master of audience manipulation, then this is his signature stroke.
You see the onscreen character watching along with you in wonder, awe, apprehension, fear, sadness. It’s the director’s way of hitting pause, to show the audience this is a critical scene, to reinforce how the audience should be feeling in that moment.
[This is a vintage post originally from Oct 2016.]
Tags: film school · movies · Steven Spielberg · timeless posts · video
If you spend any amount of time on the internet — and if you’re reading this, you probably do and perhaps even feel shamed by your weekly Screen Time notification — you’ve probably seen the statistic that 5% of the Earth’s population is related to 13th century ruler of the Mongol Empire and presumed prolific father, Genghis Khan. In this episode of SciShow, Hank Green explores if that’s true and how researchers investigate relations across dozens and even hundreds of generations.
Tags: genetics · Genghis Khan · Hank Green · science · video
Google, a monopoly, loses its antitrust case against the Dept of Justice. “A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.”
Carl Zimmer’s new book sounds fascinating & relevant: Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. “The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down.”
“A climate scientist half-jokingly once told me that if billionaires really wanted to save the planet, they would buy everyone a heat pump…”
As an experiment, The Pudding used an LLM (Claude) to produce one of their data-driven, visual stories. “Do we feel replaceable? In short, not right now.”
“Everywhere they go, the world’s best table tennis players meet strangers who believe they can hold their own against them.” No, you’re not taking even a single point from an Olympic table tennis player. “It’s cute. But it’s not true.”
