The fish doorbell in Utrecht is back for another season! “Did you spot a fish? Press the Fish Doorbell! Then our lock keeper can let the fish through.”

On the occasion of the release of her latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit sat down for an interview with David Marchese of the NY Times. Here’s the video version: This is a great interview. Marchese’s first question is about how we find the posi...

The NY Times went back through a century of women’s obituaries “to re-examine them with the benefit of distance — to see what was emphasized, what was minimized, what might have been left unsaid”. https://bsky.app/profile/prisonculture.bsky.social

Dozens of former employees of Noma tell of abuse & violence at the hands of its chef/owner, René Redzepi. Punching, screaming, shoving, stabbing, slamming, intimidation, ridicule, blacklisting. What an asshole.

Can’t stop, won’t stop. On the heels of the refreshed Rolodex from earlier in the week, I’ve pushed another “Just Enough Social” feature to the site: members bios & profile pics. Here’s what that looks like: Members can find a link to their profile by 1) clicking on y...

Lots of great defecation physics here: “66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It’s a…small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog’s, at 10 milliliters.”

The New School Cancelled Their Class on Soccer and World Politics. We Are Going To Teach it Anyway. Enrollment is now open; the class will deal with questions like “Which regimes are using this tournament to launder their reputations?”

SETI might be missing alien signals because “stellar ‘space weather’ may blur ultra-narrow radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations before they leave their home star systems”. SETI usually looks for “extremely sharp frequency spikes”.

Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhattan Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Colonel, then estranged from the company he founded, strolled into the kitchen afte...

The Met Introduces High-Definition 3D Scans of Dozens of Art Historical Objects, including Egyptian temples, Greek oil flasks, van Gogh paintings, and cuneiform tablets.

“If measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates decline 1% annually for the next five years, associated medical and societal costs could reach $1.5 billion.” (That 1% is a conservative estimate “given current policy and coverage trajectory”.)

Director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Poker Face) wrote the review of the Thursday crossword puzzle for the NY Times today. “I love a good Thursday. The baffling special graphics, the wait-that-can’t-be-right puzzlement and that glorious ah-ha moment…”

Earth’s gravity is lumpy. “The gravity in East Antarctica is measurably weaker than anywhere else on the planet.”

Oh wow, I love these photographs of “big tusker” elephants by Johan Siggesson. I didn’t even know big tuskers were a thing — and they may not be for much longer: The term “Big Tusker” refers to an elephant with tusks so large they scrape the floor. Unfortunately, the o...

This is kind of amazing: World Monitor is a real-time global intelligence dashboard. Includes military activity, climate anomalies, live webcam feeds in warzones, internet outages, active fires, and even the Pentagon Pizza Index.

Yes, let’s retire the restaurant monologue. “The urge to direct diners through every bite of a meal runs counter to what I love about dining out, one of just a few cornerstones of American life that have not yet been optimized into oblivion.”

From ProPublica, a database of financial disclosures from the Trump regime’s political appointees. “Use this database to explore potential conflicts of interest for President Donald Trump and his team.”

After posting the video on the history of HyperCard the other day, I went down a bit of a HyperCard rabbit hole on the Internet Archive. There are a ton of HyperCard programs, manual & packaging scans, and other resources available on IA; among them: The Manhole, from...

Web game: list as many animals as you can in 1 minute (but you get more time with correct guesses).

In 2017, city planner Jeff Speck gave a talk on the four ways to make a city more walkable: In the typical American city, in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk tha...

Legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth: “Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6.”

“The entire Sun oscillates in a globally coherent way, and the oscillations are formed by sound waves trapped inside the Sun that make it resonate just like a musical instrument.”

From late January, a 40-minute talk by Rick Steves on “how lessons learned on the road can help Americans better understand and meet the challenges facing Democracy in the USA.”

Timothy Snyder on strongmen. “Once you accept that Trump is strong, you are accepting that you are weaker than Trump. And once you accept the strongman form of politics, you no longer have recourse to laws, or norms, or even basic ideas of decency.”

Ok, you know this is going to be a good one: De La Soul plays a Tiny Desk Concert.

The humor of De La Soul has always been one of its calling cards. When DJ Maseo tells the Tiny Desk crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a new group called De La Soul,” he means it as a joke. But, in so many ways, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop is new: the duties have been reassessed, the focus has shifted and the newness of The Plugs is laid plain here at the Tiny Desk.

Here’s the setlist:

YUHDONTSTOP
Will Be
Much More
Stakes is High
Sunny Storms
Different World
Breakadawn
Pony Ride
A Quick 16 for Mama
Me Myself and I

Feel free to dance at your desk or in your kitchen or wherever you’re listening.

Tags: De La Soul · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video

A new book by Rebecca Solnit came out yesterday; it’s called The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change (Amazon). The synopsis: Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural chan...

TIL about babysitting co-ops. “The premise is simple: Families in the co-op provide each other with free childcare. A point system…ensures that everyone contributes their fair share. Every half an hour is worth one point…”

Hello, good afternoon! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a bunch of new stuff for KDO in the pipeline. I’ve been focused on backend infrastructure recently to make my life (hopefully) easier and have gotten that to a place of “useful enough to test out to find all the b...

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Acquires Original Disney Adult. “There wouldn’t be a Disney as we know it without this guy, a grown man who has watched Tinker Bell And The Great Fairy Rescue more than 90 times.”

TIL about burping your house, aka lüften (in Germany), aka opening up the windows in your house daily to air it out, even in winter.