Jason Kottke’s weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
Generator: Movable Type 4.2
I loved the first volume of this, so I’m pleased to see that David Whyte is back with Consolations II. “To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.”
Biocubes is a visualization comparing the mass of the living world (biomass) to the mass that’s been generated by humans (technomass). From a piece in the Times about the visualization:
“The website enables many comparisons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,” he said. For instance, humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (“In my experience, most people expect the opposite.”) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.
Tags: infoviz
The team at Howtown closed out 2024 by investigating the spice level (i.e. the Scoville ratings) of the lineup of hot sauces on the popular YouTube interview series Hot Ones while also teaching us about how hot peppers evolved and how pepper spininess is measured. (Spoiler: the sauces are not as hot as advertised.)
Cheers to Adam Cole for Peter Pipering this particular passage:
By picking peppers, they could pinpoint the precise percentage of each patch that was pungent, and some patches were more pungent than others.
Perfect.
Huh, there’s going to be a Blade Runner 2099 TV series. It stars Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer and will premiere at some point on Amazon Prime.
Last week, Alessandro Slebir rode one of the largest waves ever surfed, a 100-ft monster at Mavericks.
If the highly unlikely Silurian hypothesis is true (if the Earth was home to an intelligent civilization prior to ours), “it’s the cephalopods…who are the most likely candidates to have reached at least some level of civilization”.
From The Atlantic Science Desk, 77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024. Some that caught my eye:
5. Your body carries literal pieces of your mom — and maybe your grandmother, siblings, aunts, and uncles.
15. The weight of giant pumpkins increased 20-fold in half a century.
19. In the Middle Ages, people took their pet squirrels for walks and decked them out in flashy accessories.
31. One breadfruit tree can feed a family of four for at least 50 years.
38. Classical composers used dice to randomly compose songs.
52. Dogs may be entering a new wave of domestication.
71. The 10,000-steps-a-day goal doesn’t originate from clinical science. Instead, it comes from a 1965 marketing campaign by a Japanese company that was selling pedometers.
Tags: best of · best of 2024 · lists