Shane Schieffer is attempting to swim the entire 140-mile length of Lake Powell in 10 days, self-supported. Yeah, that means he’s dragging 215lbs of gear behind him on a paddle board while he swims. He’s documenting the whole thing on Instagram; here’s a video where he exp...
The Rise of the Traveling Third Space. “Traveling third spaces are not physically fixed; they move across cafes, malls, restaurants, and host various programming for a singular community in a particular city.”
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Lucasfilm recently released an official map of the galaxy that Star Wars takes place in. And it’s huge.
The map is slightly interactive; you can zoom and scroll it, but you can’t search or, say, click to highlight all the star systems featured in Andor. But you can do manual lookups using this massive 59-page PDF listing of Star Wars star systems.
Tags: maps · Star Wars
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A thoughtful essay about e-bikes as a metaphor for AI, augmentation vs amputation, and the bargain of innovation. “We often consider what technology promises to enable for us, without considering what it will almost certainly disable.”
From Lewis Hine, a photograph of Clyde Bradford. Hine’s photos of child laborers resulted in some of the first laws in the US against child labor.
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In 1987, choir director Dennis Bell arranged a version of U2’s #1 hit I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For for his choir, the New Voices of Freedom. After hearing a recording of the arrangement, U2 asked Bell & the choir to join the band for an upcoming show at Mad...
From Orbital Mechanics, a visualization of the 2153 nuclear weapons exploded on Earth since 1945.
2153! I had no idea there had been that much testing. According to Wikipedia, the number is 2119 tests, with most of those coming from the US (1032) and the USSR (727). The l...
3books, a site that features the books recommended by guests at the end of each Ezra Klein Show podcast.
Built by my pal Michael Sippey.
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Great interactive feature on how former world record holder Max Park solves the Rubik’s Cube. You scroll through his slow-motion solve — he makes
12 moves in the first second. “It’s like playing chess at the speed of ping pong.”
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I loved this: The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department. “The writer had already engaged in the charm and betrayal inherent in reporting. We were in the harm-reduction business.”
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In the mid-70s, Mike Mandel traveled around the United States photographing photographers as if they were baseball players, capturing the likes of Imogen Cunningham, Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston, and Ansel Adams.
I photographed photographers as if they were baseball...
How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes. “The country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.”
I ran across this delightful account that explores and explains everyday scientific questions through maddeningly catchy songs. Like why a cast saw cuts through plaster but spares your skin:
How working principle of an electric kettle is another banger:
My gateway into this account was why are steel coils placed upright when trucks are hauling them:
These will get stuck in your head. Available on YouTube and TikTok (e.g. how is a football made).
Tags: science · video
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Thetrusize.com, by James Talmage and Damon Maneice, is a website that lets you move a country or state around a Mercator projection map of the world so you can see how big or small a country really is.
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A paper recently published in a behavioral sciences journal describes a high school student’s hyperthymesia, an extraordinary ability to retrieve autobiographical memories. Teenager With Hyperthymesia Exhibits Extraordinary Mental Time Travel Abilities:
The subject of the ...
Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America! “We are retaining some features for premium users. Want rule of law? That’s premium. The right to run your company without government interference? That’s a paid feature now.”
This video features a number of scientists who were working on stuff like HIV treatments and life-saving cancer research but whose work has been shut down or curtailed by the Trump regime cutting their funding.
The Network of Time is a project that links people together, in the style of six degrees of separation, by appearance together in photographs.
Every photo you take with someone else links you into the vast network of people caught together in images.
It’s a collage millio...
“New York City is marking its 400th birthday this year and almost no one gives a damn.”
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For her newest film, director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) has adapted Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet; both book and movie are about William Shakespeare and his wife in the aftermath of the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal stars as William Shakespeare an...
Scientists Have Found the First Branch on the Tree of Life. “The sister to all other animals, the first to branch off, and the most genetically isolated animal is … drumroll please … the comb jelly!”
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Alexander Chee: How Can I Write At A Time Like This? “We are being hit with what I would call advanced resilience targeting, an attack on our ability to be in community, to be healthy, to make a living, to know our rights, to have a government.”
We Already Know a Way to Save a Bunch of Lives. (Giving wounded people blood earlier, in ambulances, increases their chance of survival. But insurance won’t pay for it so we don’t do it in the US. 🤬)
I didn’t know this about eels:
No one has ever seen an eel reproduce naturally. Not in the wild, not in captivity, not even once. And yet, eels are everywhere. In rivers, in lakes, in oceans, slippery, ancient, and inexplicably present.
For centuries, the world’s greate...
Here’s the trailer for Bugonia, dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos & starring frequent collaborator Emma Stone. “Two conspiracy obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.”
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I Am An AI Hater. “But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
