We live in a world of ordinary abundance & luxuries only dreamed of in centuries past: music on demand, photographs, books, eyeglasses, refrigeration, vaccination, bicycles, and the washing machine.

For TCM, Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou tell us how legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu made the transition to color filmmaking. His first color film was Equinox Flower in 1958 and it took a couple of films for Ozu to work out how to best emplo...

Two new episodes of Ric Burns’ 1999 documentary series New York will soon air on PBS. “Produced by the same team that created the original NEW YORK series, The Future of Cities presents a sweeping and dramatic portrait of New York since Sept 11th.”

Yale study: “A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom on AOC’s presumed presidential run. “But these are different times. Ocasio-Cortez is a different woman, and Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down.”

We haven’t done an open thread for awhile, so… What have you been working on? How are you feeling? What’s on your mind these days? What’s the best thing you’ve seen this week? Have you called a plumber to your home lately?

Are you new here? Introduce yourself if you feel like it. Heck, if you’re a regular commenter, reintroduce yourself if you’d like.

Tags: kottke.org · open threads

NOAA: Contiguous US Breaks Its Record for Hottest Month Ever. “It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl…” (This record will be broken several more times in the decades to come.)

Jamelle Bouie almost never misses. In this video that’s just shy of 10 minutes long, he chastises American political & cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on “wokeness” instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump r...

A recently unearthed conversation with Anthony Bourdain from 2005. “We discuss Tony’s preferred sucker-punch etiquette, his loyalty to cigarettes & the Chateau Marmont, ayahuasca in Peru, and the talk show he dreamed up with Christopher Walken in mind.”

Ok so when you woke up this morning, you probably didn’t expect to watch a 20-minute video about a trebuchet — but to be fair, I didn’t either. But Tom Stanton’s build of a fully mechanical trebuchet that propels a tiny plastic pellet faster than the speed of sound (comple...

Craig Mod wrote about his recent adventures using LLMs: A Swarm of Blood Robots. “I now have a comprehensive family tree, naming the very boats my Italian and Polish ancestors came over on in the late 1800s, the villages a few came from…”

“Draw any shape and hear it as a drum.” Eigendrum: a drum simulator where you can change the shape of the drum to see how it affects the sound it makes.

G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost. “G.P.S. has also led us to outsource existential skills: locating yourself in space, parsing out your surroundings, staying calm when you don’t know where you are. Do we lose something when we no longer get lost?”

Some of the most storied problems in mathematics, those posed by Paul Erdős, are being solved by LLMs.

Lovely short video about artist Jas Knight, who is a participant in the Met Museum’s Copyist Program: The Copyist Program offers time and space for artists to develop their own interpretation of an artwork through intimate study in the Museum’s galleries. Copyists have cr...

Here’s how Rocky’s musical language from the Project Hail Mary movie was created. The filmmakers didn’t “want it to feel like a human language because he’s supposed to be really more musically communicating”.

I’m Done Using AI. “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.”

Why weren’t bicycles invented sooner? “Why was no one…even considering the question of human-powered vehicles until the 1400s? Why weren’t there bicycle mechanics in the 1300s, when there were clockmakers, or at least by the 1500s, when we had watches?”

Death Cab for Cutie rolled into the NPR offices for a Tiny Desk Concert, which featured two new songs from their current album and some oldies: Title and Registration and Soul Meets Body. Gibbard noted:

I’m starting to realize that some of our earlier records came out a similar distance away from, like, the Beatles records when I was a kid.

This is Death Cab’s second Tiny Desk…here’s the first one from 2015:

I took this as an opportunity to listen to my favorite Death Cab song, Transatlanticism. And when are we getting a Postal Sevice Tiny Desk? Come on, we’ve been good! We need this!

Tags: Death Cab For Cutie · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same. “A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.”

Oh wow, Williams College’s Hopkins Observatory has a huge collection of eclipse glasses & viewers (and other eclipse ephemera), some of them dating back to 1793. Here are a few of my favorites: (via present & correct) Tags: design · eclipses

Stories that the authors of the Bible borrowed from other cultures and religions, including the flood myth, the Garden of Eden, etc. I learned about these in a religion & mythology class in college, which cemented my atheism.

“Widely regarded as the most complicated board game ever made, The Campaign for North Africa tries to simulate WW2’s North African theater in as granular fashion as possible…” 1500 hours to finish the game — that’s 1h20m every day for 3 years.

New vocabulary term: “soft secession”.

Good sentence: “The market’s most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.”

“Your brain is a gambling addict that bets on reality. It doesn’t wait for information. It guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t, you run into walls.”

I’ve felt this for years (blogs have global context): “The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.”

British climate scientist Kevin Anderson (from a 2024 video): So there is lots that you will hear — lots of rhetoric, lots of good words, lots of optimism about the future. But given we’ve known about this subject and apparently been working on it for 30 years, the trend ...

“Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years… For every death averted, 66 years of full health were gained on average, translating to 10.2 billion years of full health gained.”

“Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease.” The key difference: “the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change.”