World’s longest bicycle (180+ feet) or slow & impractical steamroller?

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Amazing stat about the disappearance of bands from the UK music charts (29:40 mark): in the first half of the 80s, bands were #1 for 146 weeks; the first half of the 90s, it was 141 weeks. In the 20s so far: 3 weeks that songs by bands were #1. 🤯

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I haven’t watched too much of the Olympics this summer so maybe the announcers explain this every single time they show a medals ceremony, but in case you didn’t know, the long, thin boxes given to the medalists along with their medals contain the official poster of the Game...

Tressie McMillan Cottom reports from Louisville, KY on the challenges of residents organizing a tenants union across racial & political divides. “I have to keep white liberals from disorganizing us.”

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Forthcoming book: The Marvel Comics Covers of Jack Kirby Volume 1. This volume contains covers from 1961 to 1964, including art from The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, and The X-Men.

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It looks like overdose deaths in the US might finally be falling. Still over 100,000 people/year are dying but the trend is heading in the right direction.

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Myles Zhang, a PhD candidate in architectural history, created this drawing of Manhattan’s Chinatown several years ago.

Chinatown’s tenements are in the foreground, while the skyscraper canyons of Lower Manhattan rise above. This shows the area of Chinatown bordered by Bowery, Canal Street, and Columbus Park.

It took him around 60 hours to complete; he made a time lapse video of its creation:

There’s a very large scan of the image that’s worth looking at.

Tags: architecture · art · cities · Myles Zhang · time lapse · video

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A deep dive into Null Island. “Null Island is a long-running inside joke among cartographers. It is an imaginary island located at a real place: the coordinates of 0° latitude and 0° longitude.” Its shape is a reference to the video game Myst.

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The Marshall Project: what communities have learned from sending unarmed responders instead of police, including “data suggests unarmed responders rarely need to call in police” and “many people remain leery of dialing 911 in a crisis”.

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YES YES YES: “Campaigns from Harris for President on down should clarify that they will post to Twitter only after updating other platforms. Steering the media away from Twitter helps democracy.” Time to stop helping Musk’s disinformation campaign.

If you watch any of Steven Spielberg’s movies, you’ll notice a distinctive element: the Spielberg Face.

If Spielberg deserves to be called a master of audience manipulation, then this is his signature stroke.

You see the onscreen character watching along with you in wonder, awe, apprehension, fear, sadness. It’s the director’s way of hitting pause, to show the audience this is a critical scene, to reinforce how the audience should be feeling in that moment.

[This is a vintage post originally from Oct 2016.]

Tags: film school · movies · Steven Spielberg · timeless posts · video

Cooking with Pixar, a playlist of videos with recipes inspired by Luca (trenette al pesto), Turning Ref (congee), Coco (tamales), and Incredibles 2 (cookies).

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When kids can’t get outside to play in a world built for cars, both they and adults suffer. “Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside.”

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If you spend any amount of time on the internet — and if you’re reading this, you probably do and perhaps even feel shamed by your weekly Screen Time notification — you’ve probably seen the statistic that 5% of the Earth’s population is related to 13th century ruler of the Mongol Empire and presumed prolific father, Genghis Khan. In this episode of SciShow, Hank Green explores if that’s true and how researchers investigate relations across dozens and even hundreds of generations.

Tags: genetics · Genghis Khan · Hank Green · science · video

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Google, a monopoly, loses its antitrust case against the Dept of Justice. “A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.”

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Australia is starting kids with peanut allergies on an oral immunotherapy program. “Eligible babies will be given gradually increasing doses of peanut powder each day for at least two years, to reduce sensitivity.”

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Over the last century, athletic performances have dramatically improved because of better training, improved nutrition, a bigger pool of people to draw from, technology, increased financial support, and the human desire to build on each others’ successes. It’s actually shock...

Carl Zimmer’s new book sounds fascinating & relevant: Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. “The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down.”

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If you’re curious about how USA’s Kristen Faulkner shocked the top riders in the women’s road race, these threads go into some of the strategy involved. “Road cycling is built upon prisoner’s dilemmas like this.”

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“A climate scientist half-jokingly once told me that if billionaires really wanted to save the planet, they would buy everyone a heat pump…”

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As an experiment, The Pudding used an LLM (Claude) to produce one of their data-driven, visual stories. “Do we feel replaceable? In short, not right now.”

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“Everywhere they go, the world’s best table tennis players meet strangers who believe they can hold their own against them.” No, you’re not taking even a single point from an Olympic table tennis player. “It’s cute. But it’s not true.”

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Unsurprisingly, I enjoyed this piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom: People Hate on the D.M.V. But It’s Great. The D.M.V. is a beacon of equality in this country. Celebrate the place where you can watch a celebrity fill out the same forms that you do. We should revel in the fac...

How the decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths. “Understanding the role vultures play in human health underscores the importance of protecting wildlife, and not just the cute and cuddly.” It’s all connected.

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Watch a clip from the first animation Hayao Miyazaki directed on his own: a pilot for a series called Yuki no Taiyou from 1972.

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On social media this morning, I ran across this evergreen quote from Toni Morrison about the true function of racism: It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps yo...

Terrified Conservative Planning To Move To 1930s Austria If Trump Loses. “A tearful Hawkins sobbed while imagining his sons growing up in a place and time where they were considered equal to another race or gender.”

Public Work is an image search engine that boasts 100,000 “copyright-free” images from institutions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a relatively simple interface and uses AI to auto-categorize and suggest possibly related images (both visually and content-wise). And it’s fun to just visually click around on related images. On the downside, their sourcing and attribution isn’t great — especially when compared to something like Flickr Commons. I’d love it if an interface this quick and visual-first were adopted by museums though — let’s face it: the image search on museum, library, and institution websites is often terrible and slow. (via @jaygogh) Tags: art 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

From XKCD, a public safety announcement about driving: random drivers can’t grant you the right of way as a gift. Yes, yes, yes, yes to the moon and back. I thought no one else noticed this! Vermont drivers are unusually “nice” in this regard and it drives me bonkers. I ...