Thoughtful thread on the armed man who rushed the WHCA dinner. “This guy is indicative of people who are anti Trump not having a voice because Congress and SCOTUS have enabled Trump to obliterate any recourse they have when he does horrible things.”

“Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, often found in plastic, coupled with climate change’s effects…are each linked to reductions in fertility and fecundity across global species – including in humans.” Argh, no one wants a Children of Men prequel…

Teaser trailer for season four of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. “Space is limitless in its beauty. And in its terror.” (Reminder: they are doing an episode with puppets this season.)

An amazing capture of galaxy Messier 104, aka the Sombrero Galaxy, by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera mounted on a Chilean observatory. The Sombrero galaxy (Messier 104) is a galactic masterpiece that captivates scientists and astronomy enthusiasts alike. Its intrica...

Gunfire of the Vanities: Trump Dinner Shooting Defines a Violent, Unserious America, “a land where guns are everywhere and a callous elite media dons formalwear to toast its own humiliation by our narcissist king”.

Daredevil Michelle Khare ran 7 marathons on 7 different continents in 7 days. The first one was on Antarctica.

Moderna developed an mRNA Covid-flu combo vaccine and it’s been approved for use in the EU, “but it continues to be shelved in the US, where it was developed”.

Paul Ford: This Is How We Get Moral A.I. Companies. (Tl;dr: regulation.) “The entire culture of American technology is built around two terms: disruption and, of course, scale. But ethics are constraints on disruption and scale.”

Wow, Sabastian Sawe set a world record with a 1:59:30 marathon. “They call Sabastian Sawe the silent assassin. But it was impossible to ignore the beautiful destruction on the streets of London as the 30-year-old Kenyan…”

A collection of weekly bus passes from Milwaukee, WI. Years covered are 1930-1979. Was there a new design every single week? (via @slowernet) [This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2015.] Tags: design · timeless posts

A papyrus of part of the Iliad has been discovered in a Roman-era tomb of mummies in Egypt. “The papyrus contains a passage from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, specifically the section known as the ‘Catalogue of Ships’…”

“We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knives and [started carving]. When we finally had the full alphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.”

While reading this article about the structure of complex knots, I ran across this diagram drawn by scientist Peter Guthrie Tait in 1885 for a paper called On Knots Part III. It’s one of two figures that together show all of the possible variations of knots with 10 crossings. I think the color plus the small multiples activated the Tufte array in my brain; anyway, I love this diagram. (via damn interesting)

(I tried for the better part of an hour to track down a high-resolution copy of Tait’s paper to no avail. There are various contenders, but nothing that includes high-res scans of both knottiness diagrams. I’m curious about this archive of the original paper but not $41 curious. If anyone has access through their institution and wants to send me a PDF, I’d love that.)

Tags: mathematics · Peter Guthrie Tait · science

Instead of Losing Democratic Elections, What If We Just Stopped Having Them Altogether? “My goodness, imagine the efficiency. No long lines. No campaign ads. No need to pretend Wisconsin matters every four years.”

How The Heck Does Shazam Work? “By throwing away almost everything and keeping only a handful of landmark peaks, a noisy 5-second clip from a coffee shop becomes a set of coordinates precise enough to pinpoint one song out of millions.” Fascinating!

What’s on your mind lately? What’s going on in your life? Witnessed anything amazing? Anything you’d like to share with the rest of the class?

Here in Vermont, it’s barely spring (which means it’ll probably snow at least one more time before I need to start mowing the lawn). No mountain biking yet. A local theater is playing Silence of the Lambs this weekend (35th anniversary!), so I might go do that. I’ve been working on a new post editor for KDO and it’s coming along — building software and designing interfaces is fun and maddening. Autumn is going to come with some big changes for me, and I’ve been making some progress in preparing for that.

Hows about yous?

Tags: kottke.org

1D Chess. “You might initially find it more difficult than expected, but assuming optimal play, is there a forced win for white?”

Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed on the Michael biopic out in theaters right now: “How can you tell an authentic story about Michael Jackson without ever mentioning the fact that he was seriously accused of being a child molester?”

Twin Peaks × LCD Soundsystem: a video mashup of Dance Yrself Clean and the Twin Peaks theme music. Perfect. A damn fine cup of coffee, even.

ProPublica explores what a future without vaccines would look like in the US. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of children paralyzed, and many other children stricken with serious but easily preventable health issues.

The earliest-known recordings of whale songs (from 1949) were recently discovered in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s archive. The scientists who recorded the audio didn’t even know what they were listening to.

I’ve never seen anything like these photos before. In October 2024, Rachel Moore had a close encounter with a humpback whale in French Polynesia and took these photos of the whale’s eye. Moore wrote of the experience: This moment of eye contact was beyond my wildest dre...

Worried About Teens Today? So Were Adults in the 1920s. “A century ago, new technology and mobility reshaped what it meant to be young, linking rural life more closely to the city.”

I got the chance to go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with friends recently and it was magical, otherworldly, lovely. I think we hit peak blossom down to the second. It was cold and gray and windy, which kept the crowds down, provided the perfect photographic contrast, and made for an enchanting petal-fall. Tags: photography

If you want to surf elsewhere in the galaxy, it doesn’t actually look that promising. “Surfing on Titan would likely be a surreal, slow-motion, and tenebrous experience.” Or there’s also a planet with a sulfuric acid ocean?

On a recent mini-episode of the Becoming the People podcast, Prentis Hemphill talked about traitors to the patriarchy. Here’s a short excerpt:

I only want to spend time with men who are traitors to that project, the project of patriarchy and patriarchal violence. I want to hang out with traitors and snitches and betrayers of that system. If you do not actively identify as a traitors to that system, if you don’t actively have receipts, I don’t think that a lot of people should necessarily believe that they can invest time in in you.

Here’s the full episode (which you can also listen to on Apple Podcasts):

(via @rebeccawooolf)

Tags: Prentis Hemphill · video

I love the chutzpah of this: all 35 of Shakespeare’s plays ranked. Romeo & Juliet didn’t crack the top 20 but Macbeth, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night made the top 5. Worth it for the old photos of productions feat. Ralph Fiennes, Judi Dench, Brian Cox…

“I believe in an old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work. Read the book, not the summary. Write the piece, not the prompt. Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

Sony’s AI division has designed a robot that can beat elite human players at table tennis. From the paper:

Evaluated in matches against elite and professional players under official competition rules, Ace achieved several victories and demonstrated consistent returns of high-speed, high-spin shots. These results highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains requiring fast, precise human–robot interaction.

Ace is a fine name, but I might have gone with something like WALL-E Supreme instead. (Robbie Supreme?)

Tags: artificial intelligence · robots · sports · table tennis · video

I had somehow missed (or forgotten) that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, one of The Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Filming has wrapped and it’s out in theaters on Nov 26.