For his 2012-13 piece The Obstruction of Action by the Existence of Form, artist R. Eric McMaster built a hockey rink less than 1/10th the size of a regulation rink and had two full hockey teams play what has to be the most frustrating game of hockey ever. This is definitely a metaphor for something but I don’t quite know what.
Tags: art · hockey · R. Eric McMaster · sports · this is a metaphor for something · video
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“Dark energy, which most physicists have long held to be unchanging, may in fact be weakening.” And now cosmologists are trying to figure out what this means for our conceptions of the universe.
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Elite athletes are using a new baking soda formulation to boost athletic performance. A recent study showed “a 1.4% boost for cyclists in a 40-km time trial, which works out to a gain of roughly a minute over the course of an event lasting an hour”.
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Australian artist Joshua Smith makes extremely detailed and realistic miniatures of grimy, graffitied buildings — he calls them “sculptures of Urban Decay”.
See also Gritty Miniatures of Classic NYC Street Objects.
Tags: art · Joshua Smith
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An introduction to the latest iteration of Dynamicland’s Realtalk, a prototype of
a communal computing environment that makes use of physical materials to make collaboration easier & more powerful. (Hard to explain, just watch the video..)
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Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad. “On average, America is an ugly country. The median American scene…would be an exhaust-choked roadway flanked on both sides by fast food restaurants and big box stores.”
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A working thumper from Dune built out of Lego. (Working as in it thumps…I have no idea if it actually summons Shai-Hulud.)
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A copy of the letter written and signed by Albert Einstein in 1939 warning President Franklin Roosevelt of the possibility of Nazi Germany building nuclear weapons is up for auction next week at Christie’s. The estimate is $4-6 million.
The present letter is based direc...
This is a website you can only visit once. (I mean, technically you can visit many times. But embracing constraints is worthwhile.)
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Hi, it’s me, Edith, again! I’m back with one more comic before I sign off for a while. I know I haven’t actually been blogging recently, but I wanted to make a more official “goodbye for now” post in case anyone is like, Where did Edith go? Basically I think I bit off a little more than I could chew, blogging-wise. But it meant so much to me that Jason was willing to give it a shot.
Thank you for reading, big thanks to Jason for having me, and I hope to be back before too long (especially if Jason goes on vacation again or something 👀). And of course I’m not actually going anywhere, so I’ll see you in the comments!
Tags: diary comics
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Lies by scientists can kill people — falsified research on beta blockers may have killed 800,000 people. “In cases where research dishonesty is literally killing people, shouldn’t it be appropriate to resort to the criminal justice system?”
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I Never Expected To Run For Office — Here’s What I Learned. “An election wasn’t really a contest with a prize. It was a course of study. It was the process of trying to become the world’s premier authority in what my neighbors wanted and needed…”
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I don’t remember how I happened upon them, but I’ve been enjoying Lane 8’s seasonal mixtapes for the past few years — good upbeat music to work to.
He’s been doing these for 11 years. The Denver DJs mixes are available on Soundcloud, YouTube, and Apple Music. The fall 2024 mix should be out very soon!
Tags: Lane 8 · music
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100 tiny tricks for sorting out your life. I did this one recently: “Take 10 minutes to tackle the inevitable plastic boxes and lids situation in your kitchen.” (All this advice all at once was kinda overwhelming tbh.)
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I’d never heard this before: in a long jump competition in 1974, Tuariki Delamere did a full front flip during a jump in an attempt to fly further.
The idea of a front flip in long jump had been talked about for years. Experts believed it could help jumpers go further by ...
The folks at Kurzgesagt have done a few time travel videos now, but this one is notable for its concise, intuitive explanation and visualization of our constant speed through spacetime (special relativity).
Everything in our universe moves at the speed of light through f...
Realized I often use “Forgetful Jones” when describing my tendency to forget things but had forgotten where I’d picked it up from. It’s from Sesame Street, of course.
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A new scientific analysis suggests that the Altar Stone at Stonehenge (weighing several tons) was transported to the site from more than 450 miles away in Scotland (likely by sea).
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If you (or someone you know) has hiked the Appalachian Trail since 1979, it’s likely that a photo of that person exists in the ATC’s online Hiker Photo Archive. Some folks in these photos have never seen them before & forgot they even exist.
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In her excellent link-laden newsletter Curious About Everything, my friend Jodi Ettenberg highlighted this passage from Steve Silberman, the author of Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity who died last week (italics mine):
Sometimes the word “...
“Tim Walz has tonic masculinity. Confident. Decent. The kind of man who…would start his job at the White House ‘being asked about national security and the tax code and end with him wearing a headlamp up in the attic fixing some old wiring.’”
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The last coal-fired power station in the UK will close down on Sept 30. Coal literally fueled the Industrial Revolution in the UK and now it’s all but vanished from the country.
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David Attenborough on Cybertruck behavior. “Here we see the Cybertruck has formed a peculiar symbiotic relationship with the larger Flatbed Trailer species.”
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From the staff at Rolling Stone, a list of the all-time best 100 episodes of TV. The rules: 1 episode per show, no reality (or talk shows or news or sketch comedy), and it’s mostly American shows (but, come on, no episodes of Fawlty Towers?)
I cannot help it, I love lists l...
In 1994, a Navajo/Diné weaver named Marilou Schultz made a weaving of the microscopic pattern of an Intel Pentium processor. (In the image above, the weaving is on the left and the chip is on the right.)
The Pentium die photo below shows the patterns and structures on the...
Atul Gawande: Tuberculosis is still the world’s #1 infectious disease killer (1+ million people per year) but “the are new advances in screening, prevention and treatment, however, that now make significant progress possible — if we tap them.”
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New School Year Drop-Off and Pick-Up Rules. “Approach the White Zone at exactly 2.6 mph. Staff are standing by to launch your student into the window, Dukes of Hazzard style, with a trebuchet handmade by the LARP Club.”
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