Jason Kottke’s weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
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Music By John Williams is a documentary film about the legendary composer who did the scores for Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters, Superman, E.T., Home Alone, Schindler’s List — seriously, one person composed all these?! — Saving Private Ryan, Harry Potter, Lincoln, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and the Olympic Fanfare and Theme that NBC uses for the Olympics.
Anyway, the documentary premieres on Nov 1 on Disney+.
Tags: John Williams · movies · music · trailers · video
If you play Spelling Bee, the Times has a Spelling Bee Buddy that offers statistics and personalized hints that update as you play. (There’s also a Connections Bot.)
The NY Times has been doing these challenges every Friday where you sit and look at one piece of art for 10 minutes. Last week featured a woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige called Great Bridge: Sudden Rain at Atake, a piece that Vincent van Gogh had in his personal collection and painted a version of himself.
I didn’t expect to last the entire 10 minutes — a slow start to the day (dentist, errands) had me feeling rushed and a computer with an infinite number of apps & websites just a tab or click away is not the ideal medium for this exercise — but once I got going (or, rather, once I slowed down), it was pretty easy. (via laura olin)
Tags: art · Utagawa Hiroshige · Vincent van Gogh
When I tell folks (like during my XOXO talk) that I’m leaving a lot of money on the table by not paywalling my stuff on Substack, this is what I’m talking about: “You probably can’t make more than $1 million a year on Substack. But Matthew Yglesias does.”
Two college students paired Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses with facial recognition tech and were able to pull up info on strangers (name, home address, phone number, and family members) in seconds just by looking at them.
It’s been awhile since I’d checked in on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Great Art Explained. In the past year, curator James Payne has done videos on Duchamp, Manet, Magritte, and that one painting by Caspar David Friedrich (you know the one). But this one, on Vincent van Gogh’s final painting, particularly caught my attention:
The mystery of what [his final painting] was and where it was painted would take over a century to solve, and that was only thanks to a worldwide epidemic. What it means is that we now have a deeper insight into what van Gogh’s final last hours were like — before his tragic death.
Tags: art · art history · death · James Payne · video · Vincent van Gogh
A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, an apt word because the flocks move like a rumor pulsing through a crowded room. This is a particularly beautiful murmuration observed in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
[This is a vintage post originally from Jan 2015.]
Tags: birds · timeless posts · video
Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of books that need to be sorted alphabetically by author. What’s the fastest way to accomplish this task? Luckily, efficient sorting is a problem that’s been studied extensively in computer science and this TED-Ed video walks us through three possible sorts: bubble sort, insertion sort, and quicksort.
For more on sorting, check out Sorting Algorithms Visualized, sorting techniques visualized through Eastern European folk dancing, and a site where you can compare many different sorting algorithms with each other. (via the kid should see this)
Tags: programming · video
“Barbaric.” A “nightmare of vulgarity.” “Monstrous.” “A violent mess.” “The work of a madman.” Those are just some of the reactions that Henri Matisse’s Dance received after its public debut in 1910. In this video, Evan Puschak shares How Matisse Revolutionized Color In Art with this painting and other Fauvist work.
Tags: art · art school · color · Evan Puschak · Henri Matisse · video
Examples of a book cover design trend: multi-panel illustrations or “bento books”. Think the covers for Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
The humble hyperlink, the backbone of the entire internet, is increasingly endangered. “If you degrade hyperlinks…you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things.”
“As of late September 2024, residential households in the U.S. are eligible for another order of 4 free at-home [Covid] tests from USPS.” Order here!