Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees. “Composition II with Red, Blue, and Yellow is in the U.S. public domain. It has been since January 1, 2026. No amount of Spanish law or invented ‘dual copyright’ theories changes that.”

The NY Times has added another daily crossword to the line-up: the Midi. “The standard Times daily crossword, you see, is a 15×15 grid. The Mini is 5×5. The new Midi is 9×9, snug in between.”

During the recent annular solar eclipse on February 17, the ESA’s PROBA-2 satellite captured this great shot of the Moon passing in front of the Sun. Cue up the Johnny Cash.

Tags: astronomy · Moon · photography · science · Sun

“Eclipses have been connected with the fate of rulers since at least ancient Mesopotamia, around 4,000 years ago.” But more recently: “In 1581, Queen Elizabeth I of England made it a felony to use horoscopes to predict her death or her successor.”

Calculating the longest line of sight on Earth: 530km (329 miles) between “an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan”.

“x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required. What you’re seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS.”

Ali Akbar, the last newspaper hawker in Paris, has been awarded a knighthood by French president Emmanuel Macron. “Macron went on to refer to Akbar as ‘the most French of the French — a Voltairean who arrived from Pakistan.’”

The details of Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s remarkable career sound a bit outlandish when you list them all together: cracked thousands of codes and ciphers during WWI did the same in WWII, helping to foil Nazi spy rings and protect Allied supply ships chief cryptanalyst f...

How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account. “The answer to why powerful people in some other parts of the world face consequences, while in America they rarely do, is that elite impunity is now an American national project.”

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...