Jason Kottke’s weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
The newest book from Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders. “Learn how dung beetles navigate by the stars, and trees communicate through their roots.”
A pair of physicists from MIT and Jefferson Lab and an animator have created a new visualization of the atomic nucleaus.
For the first time, the sizes, shapes and structures of nuclei in the quantum realm are visualized using animations and explained in the video.
The video also establishes what appears to be a new unit of measure with an adorable name, the babysecond:
To better define the velocities of particles at such small distance scales, we establish the baby second as 10^-23 seconds. A photon moving at the speed of light crosses three femtometers (a bit more than the radius of oxygen-16) in one baby second.
TIL that the dunk tank has extremely racist origins. Unbelievable but also not.
“If you were to modify the flash cooling process so that the toffee had more time to harden and work out its air bubbles, it’s possible we could get a type of Butterfinger bar that might be strong enough to be used as a makeshift building material.”
So first of all, before you watch this analysis of Chris Marker’s fantastic La Jetée, you should watch the film itself if you’ve never seen it. It’s 28 minutes long, entirely in black & white, and is a “speculative fiction masterpiece” done with “422 photos, a voiceover, and a score”. You can find it streaming at Amazon, Apple, Criterion Channel, or Kanopy. You will not regret it. And then come back and watch this analysis/appreciation by Evan Puschak.
Tags: Chris Marker · Evan Puschak · film school · La Jetee · movies · time travel · video
In a unique settlement agreement, Parkland shooting survivor Anthony Borges now owns the rights to the gunman’s name. “The settlement prevents the gunman from talking to the media or making money by telling his story.”
From Every Frame a Painting, an appreciation of Jackie Chan and his particular and excellent brand of action comedy.
I love old Jackie Chan movies. When I lived in Minneapolis, a theater there showed them on Saturday nights, late. Drunken Master II is a particular favorite…the final fight scene is AMAZING. The part about how the camera never moves and shoots wide-angle during his scenes is why action in contemporary Hollywood films leaves me yawning.
[This is a vintage post originally from Dec 2014.]
Tags: Jackie Chan · movies · timeless posts · video
In 2002, the US military lost a $250 million war game in 10 minutes. A newly declassified report “warned of military vulnerabilities to unconventional tactics that were later exploited by enemies in real conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
Lidar drone mapping has revealed previously unknown cities in the mountains of modern-day Uzbekistan that were important Silk Road way stations. One was bigger than many major cities in Italy at the time.
Edith Zimmerman has put some new stuff in her Etsy shop, including original watercolors and this print of Mermaids of North America (which I love).
Tags: art · Edith Zimmerman
Kelli Anderson details how the clever A-to-Z 7-segment display mechanism works on the front of Alphabet in Motion, her new pop-up book about typography.
From 2017: I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People. “Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.” 🎯