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From Universe Today, an ongoing series of articles on A Brief-ish History of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Part I is entitled “Where is Everybody?”
You Can Make an App for That. “The most important thing you’ll need is taste. Not objectively good taste, necessarily, so much as a keen sense of your own.”
Mariame Kaba’s letter to young activists: “I don’t know how things will turn out, but I am committed to something other than this — the current structure and state of this world. We can live differently.”
A pep talk in the face of despair. “Things can always get better, but it doesn’t happen via inertia. It happens because a lot of people tried.”
Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live. Among the buildings are a school in Mass., a hospital in Rwanda, a prison in Norway, and a lighthouse in Maine. Intriguing!
India’s Hottest District Shuts at 10 AM as Mercury Breaches 48 Degrees Celsius Mark. “After 10am, Banda becomes deserted. At first, you see one or two people outside. Then, as the day rises, there is only silence.” (48C = 118F)
New-to-me vocabulary: oneshotted, “a term that means, roughly, to be destroyed and subsequently remade by a single experience”.
Interview with the guy behind the great Art But Make It Sports social accounts. “When he sees a sports photograph, he can recall, off the top of his head, a pose, or a style, or even just a figure or a form, from a painting or a sculpture.”
The Banality of the Video Podcast. “The sets, installed with plentiful mics awaiting speech, are authoritative and yet unintimidating, like a friend’s renovated suburban basement.”
Cucumbers used to be called “cowcumbers”. I’m sorry, what?!
No reparations for Black Americans. No student loan forgiveness. No UBI for average Americans. But reparations, treason forgiveness, and UBI for the Jan 6th insurrectionists & criminals who attacked Congress. Got it, got it, got it.
On the heels of turning Orwell’s Animal Farm into a kids’ movie, Alexandra Petri imagines other dystopian source material for family flicks. “Andy Serkis’s Maus: Talking mice? Great. Talking mice and cats? Even better!”
“Somewhere between ‘Let’s catch up soon’ and ‘Sorry, life has been hectic’, adult friendship became one of the most emotionally significant and least discussed losses of modern life.”
The fake courtesy machine is a wooden hand-cranked contraption that types “I hope this email finds you well” over and over again. Jacquard loom & player piano vibes.
Marcin Wichary on how to get more fun and utility from your keyboard experience. “Break all the rules. You’re designing for the audience of one.”
Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise. The Pudding analyzed 200,000 similes from popular fiction. “The clichés are obvious, marked by a single tall spike that overshadows the others.”
“I have travelled all over the world in the last 30 years, and have never seen anything like the density of assholes I just encountered in Japan, [i.e.] tourists being an unbearable menace specifically while on and around their phones.”
There’s something so relaxing about watching art conservator Julian Baumgartner restore this damaged painting, a self-portrait by Italian painter Emma Gaggiotti Richards. I love how he paints tiny cracks in the damaged areas to match those in the rest of the painting.
There are many more videos and photos of Baumgartner’s restoration process on Instagram and YouTube. (via the kid should see this)
[This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2018.]
Tags: art · Julian Baumgartner · meditative · timeless posts · video
Marbles Squared is a puzzle game 30 years in the making that you can play on the web, Game Boy, ZX Spectrum Next, and Palm Pilot.
Ben Prunty has composed the soundtrack to a new game, Subnautica 2. Prunty did the FTL: Faster Than Light soundtrack back in the day, which I love.
Perhaps businesses are collecting too much data for their own good. “Each morning at 10am, I get an email from Caroline in the finance team showing the cash we have in the bank compared with the same day last year. This fact offers no hiding place.”
Mike Monteiro on how to deal with your suddenly grown-up kids. “When your kid leaves it is the happiest day of your life and also the saddest day of your life. And a lot of other feelings in between.” In the midst of this right now; it’s been a lot.
I have always liked Steve Kerr, but I did not expect to read this whole 15,000-word profile of him at ESPN. Really interesting throughout.
Handy app: “Point your camera at anything (a dress, a paint swatch, a flower, your kid’s drawing) and What Color Is This? names the color instantly.” I like the increasingly specific color labels (e.g. blue to light blue to Tiffany blue).
“In 2014, the Dutch scholar Hans Corneel de Roos first noticed that the Icelandic version of Dracula was in fact not a translation, but was rather a very different novel from Stoker’s version.” The “translation” was published in 1901.
