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Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998

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• Jason Kottke

Taking the Day

Sea Anemone

Hello fronds and anemones. Tomorrow is my birthday so I am taking today off. I’ll see you back here on Monday.

But before I go: I pushed some changes to how videos work on the site (after a bunch of feedback). The default behavior is now: you click on a video and it plays. If you hold “b” (for lightbox) while clicking, the video will play in a widescreen lightbox. Also, the escape key will now close the video and the lightbox is better about resizing so that the bottom of the videos don’t get cut off (thanks to Christophe for the CSS fix).

I don’t think this is the forever solution (it doesn’t address folks who want to open the videos on YouTube or Vimeo in a new tab), but I wanted to get something out there while I figure out the rest.

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• Jason Kottke

For more than a century in the 18th & 19th centuries, an...

For more than a century in the 18th & 19th centuries, an edited version of Romeo & Juliet, with “a 67-line final conversation between Romeo and Juliet”, was more popular than Shakespeare’s original.

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• Jason Kottke

A four-year-old mystery finally solved: who was the awkwardly tall stranger at...

A four-year-old mystery finally solved: who was the awkwardly tall stranger at our wedding? “Who was the tall man in a dark suit, distinguished by the look of quiet mortification on his face?” Love the reason he was there.

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• Jason Kottke

Engineering Lego Cars to Climb Increasingly Tall Walls

I haven’t gotten my Brick Technology fix in awhile, so here’s a video featuring a series of more and more capable Lego vehicles climbing over taller and taller walls. As I have written before, here’s what makes these videos so compelling: They’re not even really about Leg...

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• Jason Kottke

From Eater, a list of the 38 most essential & influential US...

From Eater, a list of the 38 most essential & influential US restaurants of the past 20 years. The list includes Momofuku Ssäm Bar, Via Carota, Husk, Alinea, Nong’s Khao Man Gai, Mission Chinese Food, and Gjelina.

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• Jason Kottke

How to Be a Good Literary Citizen (in Seven Easy Steps). “The...

How to Be a Good Literary Citizen (in Seven Easy Steps). “The most important rule of literary citizenship is to show up. Showing up can mean a number of things: attending events at your local bookstore or library, volunteering…”

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• Jason Kottke

The Black Hole That Could Rewrite Cosmology. Astronomers may have found a...

The Black Hole That Could Rewrite Cosmology. Astronomers may have found a primordial black hole, perhaps formed by quantum fluctuations during post-Big Bang inflation “before any stars had yet appeared”.

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• Jason Kottke

Former NBA star Reggie Miller’s neighbors got him hooked on mountain biking....

Former NBA star Reggie Miller’s neighbors got him hooked on mountain biking. “I was still in basketball shape. And they destroyed me. Being out there on the mountain bike, I was like ‘oh my God this is so fun!’ And that’s what got me hooked.”

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• Jason Kottke

The Music of the Everyday

Artist and composer Matthew Wilcock looks for patterns in the everyday and creates music from them. It’s easier to quickly watch an example than to explain: Instantly thought of the video for Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers, directed by Michel Gondry. They also see...

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• Jason Kottke

Zadie Smith: “In my experience, every kind of writing requires some kind...

Zadie Smith: “In my experience, every kind of writing requires some kind of self-soothing Jedi mind trick, and, when it comes to essay composition, the rectangle is mine.”

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• Jason Kottke

The Hummingbird Bike

a very sleek bike called the Hummingbird bike

Gooood lord, just look at this exquisite handmade bike, a collaboration between British design collective Tomato1 and Shinichi Konno of Cherubim.

  1. Karl Hyde and Rick Smith of the electronic group Underworld are Tomato co-founders. I found my way to this bike after watching Underworld’s recent Boiler Room set.’↩

Tags: bicycles · biking · design · Shinichi Konno · Tomato · Underworld

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• Jason Kottke

New issue of Laura Olin’s newsletter, full of good stuff. “I had...

New issue of Laura Olin’s newsletter, full of good stuff. “I had forgotten that the Statue of Liberty was, upon installation, brown.”

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• Jason Kottke

Two Slice is a bitmappy font that’s only two pixels tall and...

Two Slice is a bitmappy font that’s only two pixels tall and “somewhat readable”.

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• Jason Kottke

Fantastic essay by Roxane Gay: Civility Is a Fantasy. “Calling for civility...

Fantastic essay by Roxane Gay: Civility Is a Fantasy. “Calling for civility is about exerting power. It is a way of reminding the powerless that they exist at the will of those in power and should act accordingly. It is a demand for control.”

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• Jason Kottke

Steamed Hams but It’s a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film. The classic Simpsons...

Steamed Hams but It’s a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film. The classic Simpsons bit but it’s live-action and a My Dinner with Andre parody. So many more where that came from.

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• Jason Kottke

Generative Design

I had a lot of fun playing around with this collection of generative design tools, especially the textual ones. I wore out the “randomize” button on each of these. (via sidebar) Tags: art · design · programming 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

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• Jason Kottke

Why Do Wind Turbines Have Three Blades? Why not two? Or five?...

Why Do Wind Turbines Have Three Blades? Why not two? Or five? Or eight? Turns out that three is sort of a Goldilocks sweet spot for blade count due to physics, engineering, and aesthetic reasons.

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• Jason Kottke

Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time. “An emotional research team became...

Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time. “An emotional research team became tearful as they described how data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients.”

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• Jason Kottke

Hybrid ASCII Art

Enigmatriz uses ASCII art to punch up and blow out public domain photos and illustrations — I love their style. From It’s Nice That: Using the Image to ASCII tool available online, Enigmatriz found a new way to play with digital assets. “Everyday, I sit on my co...

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• Jason Kottke

Historian Thomas Zimmer has left academia, Substack, and the US; now he’s...

Historian Thomas Zimmer has left academia, Substack, and the US; now he’s launching his new career as an indie writer with a newsletter about “the ongoing struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America”. Recommended!

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• Jason Kottke

Using Cesium-137 testing to find counterfeit wine. “Cesium-137 did not exist on...

Using Cesium-137 testing to find counterfeit wine. “Cesium-137 did not exist on this planet until we exploded the first atomic bomb.” The technique was used to test the legitimacy of some wines said to belong to Thomas Jefferson.

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• Jason Kottke

Is the New York Times finally getting real about Trump? “In the...

Is the New York Times finally getting real about Trump? “In the last 10 days or so, several Times articles have been considerably more straightforward – and honest – about the way Trump lies and spreads division.”

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• Jason Kottke

Everyone Was Wrong About Maximum Siphon Height

Steve Mould is always informative and entertaining, so I started watching his video on building the world’s tallest siphon, nodding along to what I thought was the reasonable conclusion. And then the video kicked into another gear — because with science, the simple solution is not always the whole story when extreme conditions are in play. (via the kid should see this)

Tags: physics · science · Steve Mould · video

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• Jason Kottke

In Jimmy Kimmel’s words: What the late-night host said upon his return...

In Jimmy Kimmel’s words: What the late-night host said upon his return from suspension. “I was not happy when they pulled me off the air.”

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• Jason Kottke

McSweeney’s didn’t even need to lampoon Trump’s comments about vaccines, autism, &...

McSweeney’s didn’t even need to lampoon Trump’s comments about vaccines, autism, & Tylenol…they just printed them verbatim and it reads like the most unhinged parody. “They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies. It’s a disgrace.”

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• Jason Kottke

An excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s new book Will There Ever Be Another...

An excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s new book Will There Ever Be Another You. “But the soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.”

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• Jason Kottke

Wild Cats, Bored Cats, Sleepy Cats

The style of ShouXin’s drawings is a perfect match for their subject matter — cats are simultaneously wild and carefully composed. (via colossal) Tags: art · cats · ShouXin 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

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• Jason Kottke

A tantalizing peek into the massive 90,000-item archive left behind by David...

A tantalizing peek into the massive 90,000-item archive left behind by David Bowie.

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• Jason Kottke

Carbon Dating: Cold War Nukes & Art Forgeries

In the most recent episode of Howtown, Joss Fong explains how above-ground nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s left a signature in all life on Earth that can be used as a forensic tool for catching art forgers, shady ivory dealers, and even fraudulent wine sellers/cellars. ...

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• Jason Kottke

Conservative White Christians Will Worship Anyone But Jesus. “Seeing White Evangelicals build...

Conservative White Christians Will Worship Anyone But Jesus. “Seeing White Evangelicals build idols out of people whose lives and public work are the antithesis of Jesus is something we’ve grown accustomed to.”