Using an LLM’s “superhuman ability to parse through galactic quantities of data”, a very amateur astronomer has found a possible exoplanet candidate. MIT is going to point their satellite at the candidate planet to collect more data soon.

This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s hardest food — is made in Nishi-Izu, Japan. Inside Kanesa Katsuobushi Shoten, a workshop founded in 1882, 5th-gener...

Brewster Kahle argues against news sites blocking the Internet Archive from archiving their sites. “Impeding the Wayback Machine’s preservation work will not prevent powerful AI companies from gathering training data.”

NPR’s Planet Money recently did a show on tariff refunds and interviewed Panic’s Cabel Sasser about how they decided to refund their Playdate-buying customers for the tariffs surcharge they paid.

Do you believe in life after death? This is a great interactive piece by Alvin Chang about people’s beliefs about the existence of an afterlife and how those beliefs change over the course of our lifetimes.

This is really impressive: a software engineer got a Game Boy emulator running at 30 fps on a tiny e-ink screen. If you’re familiar with e-paper, you know that they normally refresh much slower (2-3 times a second), not nearly quick enough to play even a simple video game...

A 24-minute video tour of the Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous exhibition at the Met. I hope I make it to NYC to see this before it closes in January.

Towers of Babble is a game that mashes up word games and tower defense games. “Nouns make buildings and other parts of speech make modifiers that you can add to a building to improve its stats.”

I’d never heard of this before: in 1990, the BBC aired a program created by and starring Douglas Adams called Hyperland. It begins with a frustrated Adams throwing his TV out (too linear, too non-interactive) and Tom Baker (from Doctor Who) popping up as an intelligent int...

Lane 8 has released his Fall 2026 Mixtape, 4 hours, recorded live at SF’s Castro Theatre. This one’s going straight into the earholes. Soundcloud, YouTube, and elsewhere.

Won’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, from Building the Creature? “These are serious concerns. And I think we should all stop. Me, especially. Can anyone make me stop doing the thing I want to do? Apparently not.”

Writing for Vanity Fair (archive link), Ta-Nehisi Coates says that Donald Trump is the most visionary politician of his era. Through a mix of moxie, cynicism, and misanthropy, Trump has made himself into the dominant American of our age. Sometimes a man meets his moment, an...

Charles Harley on Subway Takes: “I don’t think Black people should have to pay for ancestry.com. Why do I have to pay you to figure out where you stole me from?”

Illustrator and writer Luis Mendo’s second book is out. “The only website that once a year becomes a book.” I have Book One and it’s lovely…

I love these digital illustrations by Adam Fuhrer; he calls them chromatic aberrations. It was difficult to narrow them down to the few favorites above. I posted about Fuhrer’s pen plotted art a couple of years ago…I like the direction he’s taking this. Tags: Adam Fuhrer · art

Margaret Atwood in 2023: Go Ahead and Ban My Book. “It’s very hard to control what young people get their hands on, especially if they’re told something is too old for them, or too evil, or too immoral.”

This woman does some amazing things with a series of white rings — lots of precision optical illusions.

It’s mesmerizing watching people moving like machines — an interesting psychological thing. Like Avantgardey, which if you haven’t heard of them (just because they show up all the time on my Instagram doesn’t mean that happens for everyone), you should check them out:

(via @sevlu)

Tags: dance · video

The trailer for Blade Runner 2099, a new limited series premiering in late November and starring Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer.

Diego Poncelet recently set a new world record for the fastest speed on a skateboard. The old record was 146.7 km/h (91.2 mph) and he hit 151.8 km/h (94.3 mph). There are a couple of parts you can skip, but watching most of the video is worth it because you see the process and can compare how truly insanely fast he is moving during the final run — I found myself holding my breath for the last minute or so.

Also, I cannot believe how closely the camera car is following him — looks like only a few feet away. Bonkers.

I just found the first time I posted about speed skateboarding on KDO: this post from 2008. Less aerodynamic, more gonzo, and the cameraman is also on a skateboard going equally fast.

Tags: Diego Poncelet · skateboarding · video

I played (not) solitaire for more hands than I would care to admit. “A multiplayer game where the multiplayer was about companionship, empathy, and comfort, instead of competition or even interaction.”

Good headline: Nine Inch Snails.

A lovely little mountain biking video with some incredible locations and cinematography. The drone piloting is A+. Also available on Vimeo. (via alastair humphreys)

Tags: cycling · video

Is the camera shutter noise the last skeuomorphic element left in iOS?

Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates drawings of fish. There’s an option to slow the animation down so you can watch it draw the fish line-by-line.

The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter. The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the soun...

How many shots are in the average movie? How does it compare to the past? “You might expect the editor to be the most important factor in the number of shots, but in fact, knowing who directed a film accounts for 70% of the variation in its cutting pace.”

Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World. “The epic story of how a handful of surprisingly simple mathematical ideas have sparked today’s technological breakthroughs — from Netflix’s recommendation algorithm to medical imaging to AI…” Interesting!

I ran across this post on Instagram by Bobby in Space (who posts about design and the psychology of place) and wanted to pull it onto the actual internet. Here are some snippets of his “5 hills I will die on as someone who studies the psychology of place”. I don’t think thes...

Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Maybe this isn’t the best show in the world, but I have been enjoying it. I thought s02 was better than s01 so at least the trajectory is promising.

Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts and no server that holds your work. Every document lives in the address of its page… Copy the link and you have copied the document.” Includes a word processor, spreadsheet, calculator, etc.