Artist Maya Barkai assembled a collection of pedestrian traffic signals from around the world: Walking Men Worldwide. I love all of these little people. The Warsaw one reminds me somewhat of Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Some of the ones from smaller places have more personality, but I feel like the New York and Boston ones are my favorites aesthetically. Weirdly, the iconic German Ampelmännchen isn’t among the crowd here. A screenprint of the collected pedestrian people is available on the Walking Men Worldwide website. (via @jessicabrillhart) Tags: art · cities · design · Maya Barkai · walking

Instant click for me: how NYC street signs are made. “The sign shop…has a staff of 46 workers, including seven letterers who lay out signs by hand and a blacksmith who makes custom brackets to securely attach signs to traffic poles.”

The History of Concrete, a new documentary film by John Wilson, who one review called “the Werner Herzog of the mundane”. This looks great!

Review of a new book on Stephen Hawking. “The uncomfortable truth is that Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored…”

Uruguayan birder Juan Pablo Culasso, who was born blind, has been recording and collecting bird songs for more than two decades. I think that because I’m blind, I enjoy birds differently. Bird songs are my way of appreciating and understanding this world. Culasso is aide...

From our own Edith Zimmerman for the New Yorker, some Updated Jane Austen Titles like Dead-Ass Karen and Red-Flag Baddie and Brain-Rot Third Space.

“Szilveszter Makó’s surreal portraits have become nearly as recognisable as the celebrities he photographs.” But: “Artists who become successful for a signature style are then accused of monotony for being hired to reproduce it.”

New book from Ed Yong! Life Beyond Measure: Nature’s Hidden Wonders at Every Scale. “A bristlecone pine rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds fly without stopping across the world’s largest ocean…” Out in April, pre-order now.

Yes, this summer really was as hot as you think it was. This summer “was the hottest on record for the contiguous U.S., beating the previous champions of 1936 and 2021 by 0.4°F. Compared to the average over the 20th century, this summer was 3° hotter.”

By taking a camera, pointing it out the window of a train, and keeping track of how fast the train is moving, you can create very wide panoramic scans of the scenery.

It’s a little more complicated than that — all the details are here — but you’re essentially using the train (or ferry) as a massive flatbed scanner.

I knew from the start that I’d need to measure the speed somehow, but I was naïvely hoping that I wouldn’t need to measure it that well and could simply fudge it. This image, however, shows that even small variations of speed matter. This was my first glimpse into how much of a pain dealing with speed would turn out to be.

I love little hacky projects like these.

Tags: photography · remix · trains

Japanese architect Tadao Ando designed a floating children’s library and donated it to Kagawa prefecture. “We created reading spaces throughout the ship. A large circular bench was placed on the rear deck, and children can even lie under the sun.”

The Rumpus Book Club event for this month is a conversation between Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay, and Emily Wilson about Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Sept 25th at 7pm ET on Zoom, free for all.

The Star Wars Archives. 1977-1983. From Taschen. Looks fantastic.

With Adapted Sailing, the Sea Is for Everyone. “The program and others like it across the world are opening up a new frontier for people with reduced mobility, out on the open sea, free from the limitations of buildings and streets.”

This is fun: Red Bull took over one of the karting tracks at Silverstone (home of the British Grand Prix), put 100 regular folks in karts, positioned four-time F1 champ Max Verstappen at the back of the pack, and gave him 75 minutes (or 30 laps) to pass everyone. Spoiler a...

The gang from Craighill explains the origins and uses of three seemingly small design details that show up everywhere: pips, nubs, and the very useful union of pips and nubs. You’ve seen pips on dice and dominos, nubs are used for Braille text, and the pips/nubs combo is used for locks or stops that can be released under pressure. Craighill even has a pips + nubs category in their online store. (thx, rion)

Tags: Craighill · design · video

Usenet-Rewind: search over 1 billion Usenet text posts from 1981 to the present.

“Figures show Japan is now home to 107,677 centenarians, the highest number in the world, of whom 88% are women. The oldest woman is Kishimoto Fuyo, a 114-year-old from Kyoto City and the oldest man is Kato Hikaru, a 112-year-old from Kumamoto.”

Scottish trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill, who I first featured on the site more than 17 years ago, recently took his Santa Cruz eMTB north of the Arctic Circle to Narvik, Norway. He rode three different mountains and the result is this incredibly beautiful video, backed by a Max Cooper soundtrack. As one of the commenters notes, MacAskill makes a relatively heavy eMTB seem extraordinarily playful.

As a mountain biker myself, some of that looks insanely fun but the narrow steep stuff looks insanely insane. Makes me want an eMTB, which I suppose is the whole point of the video.

Tags: biking · Danny MacAskill · Max Cooper · music · video

Hidden in Pieces: Live at the Royal Albert Hall. A live album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Hell yes yes yes! 13 songs are available now plus 9 more tracks when the full album drops in October.

Paul Ford: Aided by LLMs, people & companies are producing lots of software. But where are the AI-coded killer apps? “[AI is] very good at reproducing things that look and feel like what came before.”

The All of the Above Trail Fest is “deconstructing the very definition of a trail race, refiguring it into something more expansive and inclusive”. There are no gender divisions and winners are decided by who gets closest to their predicted finish time.

One thing I didn’t get a chance to work into my post about the unexpected memory bomb triggered by my spice drawer was the tight, deep connection between smell and memory. I first learned about this relationship in college when I read A Natural History of the Senses by Diane...

We Must Create the Shit Machine. “I asked everyone I know at the BIG TECH HUMAN CENTIPEDE ROUNDTABLE, and we all agreed that UNCONTROLLABLE SHIT-RAIN IS USEFUL AND GREAT, and that EVERYONE WANTS IT.”

The frontier Anthropic & OpenAI models are only ~4 months ahead of open models — at 5x the price. “Most organizations should ideally be using open models as the default for the majority of their work, according to [a report] from Mozilla…”

Last year in Ireland, a bouncy castle infested with a “hypervirulent, multidrug-resistant pathogen” infected almost 50 children. Reality: always weirder than the weirdest sci-fi.

Naomi Klein: “Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist.” Klein’s new book, End Times Fascism, written with Astra Taylor, is out today.

Father Country I Do Love You sounds like a doozy of a new exhibition from photographer Taryn Simon. The project focuses on the life and work of an unnamed, retired FBI agent. From the NY Times: She Spent Years on a Giant Project About One Man. The Result Is Monumental. As...

The Tube Computer was recently constructed from hundreds of 1950s vacuum tubes sourced from Eastern Europe. “The Tube Computer has a pleasant homely aroma from the hundreds of double triodes, all quietly burning off their dust.” It heats the room too.

For the 93rd year in a row or something like that I didn’t check the math, Tycho has released his sunrise set from Burning Man. I am not a Burning Man person but I always enjoy this set.

See also a playlist of every 2026 Burning Man set on Soundcloud, currently 147 tracks and some 252 hours of music. (via @mikeakers.bsky.social)

Tags: music · tycho