Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers (free WSJ piece at MSN). “Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in.”

Illustrator Zara Picken maintains an archive of commercial illustration from the mid-20th century. So much throwback inspiration here! Tags: illustration · Zara Picken

Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses. “The letter…marks one of the most significant erosions of transgender civil rights in the United States to date.”

“A collection of images of trees at Dollar Tree store locations across the United States.”

Physicist Sean Carroll leads off this video with this line:

I like to say that Einstein is, if anything, underrated as a physicist, which is hard to imagine given how highly he is rated.

And then leads us through a history of modern physics and quantum mechanics that, Einstein and Newton aside, is much more collaborative than you often hear about.

This idea that there are many people contributing and many different parts of the pieces need to put together is actually much more characteristic of how physics is usually done than the single person inventing everything all by themselves.

Tags: Albert Einstein · physics · science · Sean Carroll · video

These synchronized martial arts robots are genuinely impressive.

They’re doing a new Pride and Prejudice adaptation. From the comments on the trailer: “this looks like a temu version of the 2005” and “The Darcy is not Darcying”.

Jayden Hoffman spent more than 4 months customizing this computer keyboard, replacing the letter keys with hand-painted logos (McDonald’s arch for M, Avengers for A, Xbox logo for X, Google for G, etc.)

Is This Waymo a Better Person Than You? “When the light turns yellow, this Waymo does not speed up. It does not calculate whether it could make it. It does not believe in ‘probably.’ It waits.”

“The CyberTruck is 17 times more likely to have a fire fatality than a Ford Pinto”, a 70s automobile that put the “car” in “exploding car”.

Commenters in this thread shared a bunch of songs “where the drum beats are Morse code that also serve as a separate layer to the lyrics”.

What’s fun about school closing for the wicked blizzard in the Northeast today is last week was February break for Massachusetts schools, which means many kids are home for the the 6th school day in a row, and many will be home for closures tomorrow and beyond. All this to s...

Tear Gun by Taiwanese designer Yi-Fei Chen is a contraption that “collects and freezes actual tears to shoot them back at the person who caused the cry”.

For a show on Hulu called Tell Me Lies, synth-pop band Chvrches covered Such Great Heights by The Postal Service. Lovely.

Tags: Chvrches · music · remix · The Postal Service · video

“I remember walking by a former drug dealer, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, a former mobster and a former preacher all sitting around a table together in the prison yard. Surely this was not happening anywhere else in America.”

I Am a 15-year-old Girl. Let Me Show You the Vile Misogyny That Confronts Me on Social Media Every Day. “I frequently feel objectified, dehumanised and disgusted by the hate towards women I see online.”

How to Stop a Dictator. “Democracy is in fact a powerful motivating factor: When people are convinced that there’s a threat to their political freedoms, they can be motivated to go to extraordinary lengths to defend them.”

Just dropped this morning: the trailer for the final season of For All Mankind. When season four’s teaser trailer came out, I caught some flack for suggesting that “if you tilt your head and squint…you see For All Mankind as a prequel/origin story for The Expanse”. It looks like we’re heading even more in that direction in season five, which begins airing March 27.

Tags: For All Mankind · trailers · TV · video

Top tier nerd shit. “WalkmanLand is a tribute to the long forgotten portable music players from the 80-90s. The Walkmans.”

Well, this is one of those things I wish I’d known about earlier — sessions with Isabel Wilkerson, James McBride, Ocean Vuong, Rebecca Solnit, Lauren Groff, Judy Blume…all sold out. 😭

Early on in the promotional period for season two of Andor, a series explicitly about fascism that depicted a genocide, Disney asked creator Tony Gilroy not to use the words “fascism” and “genocide”. Now that promotional period has passed and he can speak freely. Here’s Gi...

A Meta employee who works on AI safety let an AI agent named OpenClaw loose on her inbox and it deleted all her email. (This tracks; companies like Meta actually don’t care about AI safety and hire accordingly.)

I Hate Trump’s Awful Policies, but I Love That He’s a Huge Asshole. “I don’t like Trump’s immigration laws; they’re racist and economically disastrous. But I do love how evil he is.”

Writer Lauren Groff on how she works. “After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box — and never reads it again.” And: “We all need to fill ourselves with the ghosts of other writers.” Her new book is out now.

“We” Haven’t Lost Our Sense of Shame. Only Republicans Have. “I remember when Republicans used to lecture us all the time about the disappearance of shame in our culture…”

Token Anxiety. “This voice in my head that says ‘something could be running right now’ just doesn’t shut off. I’m not even building a company. I’m just addicted to building my random ideas.”

Alan Taylor has shared a bunch of photos of the just-concluded Winter Olympics “featuring infrared imaging, vintage cameras, optical filters, digital composites, unusual angles, unexpected subjects, and more”. Two of my favorites: The first photo is of a curling match t...

“Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments.”

“What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?”

During her time aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara took a series of photos of the Earth from directly overhead. Seán Doran has stitched those images together into a gorgeous 4K video of a journey across North America, from San Diego to cloud-covered Quebec.

The footage is a simulation, converting an image sequence into video footage using image processing and animation. In reality this journey from California to Quebec took 11 minutes to traverse. In order to better appreciate the view this film slows that speed by a factor of 4.

Along the way, we’re treated to views of Joshua Tree National Park, the Grand Canyon, and the Rocky Mountains. Even the clouds are mesmerizing.

Tags: Earth · ISS · Loral O'Hara · mesmerizing · NASA · photography · Sean Doran · space · video