Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
Featured
From MIT Technology Review, the 8 worst technology failures of 2024. Includes AI slop, Boeing’s Starliner, and woke AI.
I enjoyed Randall Munroe’s take on what he thought adult life would be like as a kid…in the form of a graph, naturally. All those Looney Tunes reruns & 80s movies led us Gen Xers astray.
Tags: infoviz · Randall Munroe · XKCD
Exercise is “the single most potent medical intervention ever known”. “People sleep better. They have better mood. They’re able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps.”
Tim Carmody has a great appreciation of HTML in Wired magazine: HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me.
HTML is somehow simultaneously paper and the printing press for the electronic age. It’s both how we write and what we read. It’s the most democratic computer language and the most global. It’s the medium we use to connect with each other and publish to the world. It makes perfect sense that it was developed to serve as a library — an archive, a directory, a set of connections — for all digital knowledge.
I love HTML!
Tags: HTML · programming · Tim Carmody · web development
My friends Matt & Kay have written a book about travelling to all 14 National Women’s Soccer League stadiums in the US, documenting the highs and lows of each stadium. This is extremely niche and I love it.
Director Steven Soderbergh’s annual list of everything he watched and read in 2024. (I would love to read little media diet-style reviews of all this from him.)
“I will never understand how Jan. 6 was not the end of Trump. So, what happened? The blame largely lies with Republican political leaders.” Remember: Mitch McConnell plainly stated that Trump incited the attack…then voted not to impeach him.
I loved the first volume of this, so I’m pleased to see that David Whyte is back with Consolations II. “To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.”
Biocubes is a visualization comparing the mass of the living world (biomass) to the mass that’s been generated by humans (technomass). From a piece in the Times about the visualization:
“The website enables many comparisons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,” he said. For instance, humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (“In my experience, most people expect the opposite.”) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.
Tags: infoviz
The team at Howtown closed out 2024 by investigating the spice level (i.e. the Scoville ratings) of the lineup of hot sauces on the popular YouTube interview series Hot Ones while also teaching us about how hot peppers evolved and how pepper spininess is measured. (Spoiler: the sauces are not as hot as advertised.)
Cheers to Adam Cole for Peter Pipering this particular passage:
By picking peppers, they could pinpoint the precise percentage of each patch that was pungent, and some patches were more pungent than others.
Perfect.
Huh, there’s going to be a Blade Runner 2099 TV series. It stars Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer and will premiere at some point on Amazon Prime.
