There’s a guy named Orion who surfs the St Lawrence River in the winter, sometimes dodging massive chunks of ice and sometimes riding them downstream, looking for waves. If you’ve ever been in Montreal near the river, even in the summer, you know how scary the water looks — churning & choppy with many eddies; I’m gobsmacked that someone goes out in that in freezing temperatures. The footage in this short film is incredible, otherworldly.
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Thoughtful lessons from a Google software engineer. “The punchline isn’t ‘never innovate.’...
Thoughtful lessons from a Google software engineer. “The punchline isn’t ‘never innovate.’ It’s ‘innovate only where you’re uniquely paid to innovate.’ Everything else should default to boring, because boring has known failure modes.”
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about this 2015 observation on Tumblr...
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about this 2015 observation on Tumblr about the dangerous conflation of respect of personhood and the respect of authority.
The America That Could Be
The main point of Adam Bonica’s post The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls is about the optimism of this moment: that the US could be ripe for a Berlin Wall-falling moment that opens the door for a better future. I’m not in the mood for that message these days (IMO, our Wa...
Astronomers have discovered an “almost-galaxy” called Cloud-9 (no, really), a failed galaxy...
Astronomers have discovered an “almost-galaxy” called Cloud-9 (no, really), a failed galaxy that contains no stars. “There’s nothing like this that we’ve found so far in the universe.”
Condé Nast forgot to renew the trademark for Gourmet and so a...
Condé Nast forgot to renew the trademark for Gourmet and so a group of journalists grabbed it and are relaunching the food magazine as a worker-owned co-op. Love it.
Discover the 100-Year-Old Self-Playing Violin, One of the Most Complex Music Players...
Discover the 100-Year-Old Self-Playing Violin, One of the Most Complex Music Players Ever Made. “It featured three vertically mounted violins, each with a single active string, played by a rotating bow of 1,300 horsehairs.”
“I feel stuck and sad and I don’t know what else to...
An Optical Compass Inspired by Bee Vision
Bees use polarized sunlight scattered by the atmosphere in order to navigate; they always know where the sun is, even if it’s cloudy or behind a mountain. Then they waggle dance to inform their hive-mates about food source locations.
So if a bee wants to fly straight tow...
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. “This page contains a collection of small...
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. “This page contains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games.”
Out of the 1000 most-discussed books on Hacker News, it looks like...
Out of the 1000 most-discussed books on Hacker News, it looks like around 50 of them were written by women.
A Logistical Matter
Just wanted to drop a quick note to say that kottke.org moved servers over the weekend. You shouldn’t have noticed anything, except perhaps that the site is faster now. There was a small issue with the RSS feed after the migration, but that’s been resolved. If you notice anything amiss, drop me a line?
As always, big thanks to the crew at Arcustech for their rock-solid hosting and prompt tech support expertise.
Tags: kottke.org
Train Wreck
I loved watching this quick video recap of how Penguin designer Elisha...
I loved watching this quick video recap of how Penguin designer Elisha Zepeda made the book covers for 10 books that came out in 2025. Zepeda has a much longer look at his process on YT.
Using lidar, scientists discovered a 400-foot-long wall composed of “60 massive granite...
Using lidar, scientists discovered a 400-foot-long wall composed of “60 massive granite monoliths, set directly onto the bedrock in pairs at regular intervals”. The wall is 30 feet underwater and was built 7000+ years ago.
words.zip is “an infinite collaborative word search where anyone can find and...
words.zip is “an infinite collaborative word search where anyone can find and submit words — no account required.”
There’s a shark called the cookiecutter shark because it leaves bite marks...
There’s a shark called the cookiecutter shark because it leaves bite marks the shape of “neat, circular holes resembling the cut of a cookie cutter”.
Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans...
Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person. “I dug a fire pit in my backyard and burned my complete set of hardcover Harry Potters.”
A soaring US vs a stagnant EU? “Europeans benefit from more leisure...
A soaring US vs a stagnant EU? “Europeans benefit from more leisure time than Americans, higher life expectancy & lower inequality levels, all w/ comparable productivity rates. However one looks at it, this is a considerably better economic performance.”
Alexandra Petri: I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go...
Alexandra Petri: I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well. “I have just driven six and a half hours to Ohio in order to forecast my own weather. From a hot-air balloon.” She also inspects milk & does lawn work on National Park land.
What You’re Watching Isn’t What You’re Really Watching. “You think you’re watching...
What You’re Watching Isn’t What You’re Really Watching. “You think you’re watching an innocent woman being shot and killed in cold blood by the federal government, but what you’re really watching is the death of the United States of America.”
Abolish ICE
An ICE agent murdered a woman in Minneapolis today. Mayor Jacob Frey...
An ICE agent murdered a woman in Minneapolis today. Mayor Jacob Frey to ICE: “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
How Did We Map the World Before Satellites?
In 1375, a Spanish mapmaker made a world map we now refer to as the Catalan Atlas. For its time, the atlas was remarkably accurate and comprehensive. This video explains how such a map was made in medieval times. From Open Culture:
The upshot is an answer to the very reas...
WikiFlix is a streaming site for movies in the public domain, including...
WikiFlix is a streaming site for movies in the public domain, including Metropolis, It’s a Wonderful Life, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Charade.
“South Korea imports more kimchi than it exports, and the gap has...
“South Korea imports more kimchi than it exports, and the gap has widened as cheaper Chinese-made products take hold in the domestic market.”
A group of students at a New Mexico college (mostly) gave up...
A group of students at a New Mexico college (mostly) gave up their phones & computers for a week. What did they learn? “Most students said they had gotten to know themselves better without their phones butting in all day long.”
MTV Rewind
MTV Rewind is an interface through which you can watch music videos from the 70s to the 20s, organized by decade. There are also “channels” for 120 Minutes, MTV Unplugged, Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, and the first full day of MTV programming.
All of the music videos, more than 33,000 of them, are hosted on YouTube and the lists of videos come from The Internet Music Video Database. Great idea and execution…this is the closest you’ll get to watching MTV back in the 80s.
The proliferation of hummingbird feeders has become a “major evolutionary force” for...
The proliferation of hummingbird feeders has become a “major evolutionary force” for the Anna’s hummingbird species in the western US. “Over just a few generations, their beaks have dramatically changed in size and shape.”
Lost episodes of Star Trek from the 70s. They were going to...
Lost episodes of Star Trek from the 70s. They were going to do a reboot of the TV series (without Spock!) but the project morphed into the first movie. There are 19 episode scripts & treatments from the project; a few were adapted for ST:TNG.