I love this little video of burbling pasta sauces (sound on). Wish there was a 10-hour YT version for work background noise…

I’d Be Lead Harpooner on the Pequod If It Wasn’t for These DEI Hires. “I’m just telling you that it’s getting hard out there for us blue-collar Nantucket lads when all the ships’ owners are catching the Abolitionist Mind Virus.”

25 things that explain America, including personal injury lawyer advertisements, Crest Whitestrips, Costco rotisserie chicken, and the Pizza Hut lamp. “The T-shirt cannon merges three American obsessions: guns, sports and freebie giveaways.”

This is a completely fantastic look at how the Enigma Machine works. Jared Owen constructed a 3D model of the German cipher device and clearly walks the viewer through how the electricity flows through the machine to scramble and unscramble secret messages. When electric...

How Wildfire Smoke Is Reshaping Childhood. “Repeated smoke events are changing children’s daily routines, limiting opportunities for outdoor play and social interaction and reshaping how many families experience summer.”

This guy hooked his hamster’s wheel up to Strava — Mollie is logging 5-6 miles per day.

Astronomers have measured the size of the largest galaxy: it’s 1.7 million light years across (17x the diameter of the Milky Way) and contains ~3.4 trillion solar masses in stars.

“In this video, I’ll take you from farm to factory to show you how chocolate is made, and at the end, we’ll use all the chocolate you’ll see in this video to attempt the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest chocolate bar.”

The Computer That Helped Win World War II. “…it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the fascination of a Colossus at work: its sheer bulk and apparent complexity; the fantastic speed of thin paper tape round the glittering pulleys…”

Do you remember the video I posted last summer of YouTuber Benn Jordan where he “uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird”? So cool. Jordan is back with more data encoding tricks in his latest video, There Are Files Stored in ...

Lidar and other discoveries continue to show that the Amazon rainforest was home to a “sprawling ancient civilization much bigger than researchers expected” (possibly up to 3 million people around 100-300 CE).

Hey folks. I just wanted to hop in here quickly to let a cat out of a bag: I am in the midst of moving. Not going to get into the wheres, whys, and hows right now; there’s a bigger post coming at some point about all of that. I’m excited and anxious about the transition (it’s a pretty big one), but it’s been taking up a lot of time, energy, and bandwidth that I would usually be putting into KDO.

The move is happening in early Sept, and I’m probably going to be taking some time off between now and then (timing tbd) to get everything packed & organized, spend time with family & friends before I go, and generally not run myself completely into the ground. Thanks for your patience & understanding; I’m excited to get back to focusing on the site in mid-Sept. ✌️

Tags: Jason Kottke · kottke.org

This is an old list but still interesting: the 12 most linguistically influential American movies since 1980. If you were compiling a list of linguistically influential movies since 2000, what would be on it?

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s reading list for fighting back against Big Tech. “Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people.”

Emily Wilson takes another crack at a critique of Nolan’s “visually stunning, emotionally empty” Odyssey. “Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.”

Surfing Alaska’s Turnagain Arm (home to a twice-daily tidal bore wave) can be fun (10-foot waves you can ride for miles) but also dangerous: “You need a Plan B, a Plan C and a Plan D because no one is coming to rescue you.”

In recent years, science has been learning more and more about how central the role of inflammation is to our health. “The paradox that often makes treating chronic inflammation so difficult: It can be vital and harmful at the same time.”

Huh, here’s the trailer for a new director’s cut (of sorts) of the second X-Files movie (called I Want to Believe, orig. released in 2008) that, per Wikipedia, “will restore horror elements that were previously removed”.

I don’t know what sort of neurodiverse bucket this puts me in, but I think a lot about mowing the lawn1 relative to how much time I actually spend mowing lawns (~6-7 hours per year). And so I was completely fascinated by The Pudding’s latest post on optimal lawn mowing pat...

“poetry camera is a new way to see your world. take a photo with the camera… poetry camera thinks… and prints out a poem about the scene.”

The Phone in Your Hand. “A layer-by-layer teardown of the most intricate object you’ve ever held.”

Using high-definition open source videos and photos from NASA and his own music, John Boswell (aka Melodysheep) created this mesmerizing eight-minute video recap of the Artemis II mission that enchanted us all back in the spring. Like all of his videos I’ve featured on KDO, this one is really well done.

See also Animated Artemis II Photos Reveal Satellites Buzzing Around Earth and Stunning Artemis II Phone Wallpapers. (via colossal)

Tags: artemis · astronomy · Earth · John Boswell · mesmerizing · Moon · NASA · photography · space · video

The Past Catalog Archive is a throwback to fun & modest personal projects on the web. “There is no reason to keep these old catalogs to myself, or only allow them to be viewed. Share them and let everyone take a trip down memory lane.”

Reading Maps: Journeys from books & films (Moby-Dick, Murder on the Orient Express, The Hunt for Red October, The Muppet Movie, etc.) plotted on a map.

Work vs gym: a simple way to decide whether to use AI for a task. “At the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.”

“Long live Hyrule jazz!” The Z Suites is “a modern jazz reinterpretation of the music from The Legend of Zelda”.

How Podcasts Ruined America. This is an odd claim and article. No mention of the clear precursors to right-wing podcasts (talk radio, blogs, Twitter) and the general shift towards less accountability for public speech, esp. by conservatives. 🤔

So, I don’t know what kind of nerd you are, but my brand of nerdiness dovetails neatly with this video about the origins of some of the most common symbols on your keyboard: #, @, &, §, *, ¶, †, and ‡, as well as ☞.

The “and” symbol or ampersand does not look like a word, but it is one. In fact, it is a full one. It is the Latin word for “and”: “et”. The Romans themselves used this. How do we know? Because we have this: the earliest known example of it, graffitied onto a wall in the doomed Roman city of Pompeii.

See also Where the $&%@# Did Grawlixes Come From?

Tags: language · video

What Climate Science Can Tell Us About the Lost World That Inspired The Odyssey. “A new climate study suggests that centuries of repeated severe drought added to the pressures on that collapsing world.”

This is fun: BoxSquad. Limbs & borders are all draggable.