Jason Kottke’s weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
Generator: Movable Type 4.2
What the hell? Saturn now has a total of 274 moons. That’s so many that they may have to relax the naming conventions because there aren’t enough Norse deities to cover them all.
In seeking information on how 21st century humans lived, future archaeologists will rely on fossils of soda cans, chicken bones, clothes, and concrete. Oh and, “wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic”.
From Teen Vogue, a profile of Vivian Jenna Wilson. “She barely thinks about her father [Elon Musk]. ‘I’m not giving anyone that space in my mind. The only thing that gets to live free in my mind is drag queens.’”
The editor in chief at Science: I Was Diagnosed With Autism at 53. I Know Why Rates Are Rising. “The rise in diagnoses is the result of greater awareness, better identification (especially among women and girls) and a broader definition…”
Coco 2? Pixar will produce a sequel to Coco, set to come out in 2029. It joins Incredibles 3 and Toy Story 5 in development at the studio.
Ha, Improved Relative Time lets you ditch BC and AD for designations like ABW (After Barbed Wire), BHCS (Before High Carbon Steel), AIP (After iPhone), and ASCR (After Supersonic Combusting Ramjet). No ATSDB (After Trial-Size Dove Bar) tho…
Beautiful Public Data posts about the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII using historical documents from the Library of Congress & National Archives, including photos by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange.
In this video for Wired, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies fascism & authoritarianism, answers questions from the internet about dictators.
Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an autocracy, and authoritarianism? What are the most common personality traits found in tyrants and dictators? Is Xi Jinping a dictator? How do dictators amass wealth?
Tags: politics · Ruth Ben-Ghiat · video
“Thirty lonely but beautiful actions you can take right now which probably won’t magically catalyze a mass movement against Trump but that are still wildly important.”
We might get to see Coyote vs. Acme after all…Warner Bros. is in the process of selling it.
On Edward Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art “Anything that is art…is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other…”
Editorial from Nature magazine: Vaccines save lives. Leaders must champion them. “We urge policymakers to help boost people’s confidence in vaccines, and not to undermine scientific and medical institutions or the process of research.”
A new video from Kurzgesagt explores the limits of human exploration in the Universe. How far can we venture? Are there limits? Turns out the answer is very much “yes”…with the important caveat “using our current understanding of physics”, which may someday provide a loophole (or wormhole, if you will). Chances are, humans will only be able to explore 0.00000000001% of the observable Universe.
This video is particularly interesting and packed with information, even by Kurzgesagt’s standards. The explanation of the Big Bang, inflation, dark matter, and expansion is concise and informative…the idea that the Universe is slowly erasing its own memory is fascinating.
[This is a vintage post originally from May 2016.]
Tags: astronomy · physics · science · space · timeless posts · video
UbuWeb, a pirate library of avant-garde artifacts, closed in 2024. But last month, they started the site back up again. “Archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression.”