Four Quick Links for Friday Afternoon

Four Quick Links for Friday Afternoon

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Former gang leader Duane Keith Davis has been indicted for the murder of Tupac Shakur. "The broad outlines of what occurred that night were known to the police as far back as 1996" but they lacked admissible evidence.

A Template for Right-Wingers Upset with Taylor Swift. "Taylor Swift's popularity is clearly a sign of societal decline because she doesn't embrace my [patriotism / Judeo-Christian values / need to force girls and women into giving birth]."

How to make a Super Mario Bros game out of paper and cardboard. Clever!

The Seven Meetings You Hate. "2. Why Am I Here? It seems like a good set of people, but I have no clue how I'm relevant to this meeting."

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Hand Embroidered Satellite Imagery

Hand Embroidered Satellite Imagery

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hand-embroidered artwork of a satellite view of Earth

hand-embroidered artwork of a satellite view of Earth

hand-embroidered artwork of a satellite view of Earth

hand-embroidered artwork of a satellite view of Earth

Danielle Currie creates these amazing hand-embroidered artworks of satellite views of Earth.

Danielle Currie's intricate hand embroidered pieces capture the beauty of Earth from a satellite view. Each piece is named with the latitude and longitude coordinates, providing observers the opportunity to independently explore the area which inspired the piece.

Here's the Landsat 8 satellite photo that inspired the embroidery at the top of the post.

Currie sells the original artworks as well as some prints of her work.

P.S. Apparently I've posted more than a little about embroidery over the years, so I gave the subject a tag page. There's some cool stuff in there...I'd forgotten about The Embroidered Computer.

Tags: art · Danielle Currie · embroidery · satellite imagery

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50 Unknown Facts About Star Wars

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50 unknown facts about Star Wars, many gleaned from How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. I've heard some of these before, but not many...the list doesn't include low-hanging fruit like Harrison Ford's carpentry.

Favorite facts: 1. Early on, Luke Skywalker's nickname was "Wormy". Wormy! 2. The actor who portrayed Vader, David Prowse, spoke his dialogue on set not knowing he would be dubbed over. Because of his West Country accent, the other cast members referred to Prowse as Darth Farmer.

Speaking of Harrison Ford's carpentry, the new biography of Joan Didion has a good story about that time Didion and her husband John Dunne hired Ford to do some construction for them.

Off and on, for over six month, the Dunnes engaged a construction crew to expand the waterside deck, install waxed pine bookshelves, and lay terra-cotta floor tiles. The men tore out prefabricated plywood walls and pulled up "icky green" flooring. Harrison Ford headed the crew. "They were the most sophisticated people I knew," Ford said. "I was the first thing they saw in the morning and the last thing they saw before cocktails."

In Vegas, Dunne wrote, "[W]hat had started as a two-month job ... [stretched] into its sixth month and the construction account was four thousand dollars overdrawn... I fired the contractor. 'Jesus, man, I understand,' he said. He was an out-of-work actor and his crew sniffed a lot of cocaine and when he left he unexpectedly gave me a soul-brother handshake, grabbing my thumb while I was left with an unimportant part of his little finger." The next day, Dunne realized the only thing separating him and his family from the Pacific Ocean was a clear sheet of Pliofilm where the French doors were supposed to go. "I rehired the contractor," he wrote. "'Jesus, man, I understand,' the contractor said."

Much later, when Didion's daughter was ill, Ford did the family a further service.

The following day, Didion flew from Teterboro to Los Angeles on Harrison Ford's private plane, along with her friend Earl McGrath. Ford "happened to be in New York and heard about Q's condition ... and called to offer to take Joan," said Sean Michael. "I find that to be a beautiful thing," he said. "A man you hire to build cabinets, thirty years later is flying you in his private jet to your daughter's hospital bedside."

Jesus, man, I understand.

Update: Some of Ford's comments from the book were taken from Carolyn Kellogg's reporting on an awards festival.

As if to make up for her absence, a parade of stars was in attendance. Harrison Ford, who was prepared to present her the award, spoke somewhat extemporaneously instead. "I just want to tell you all how much her friendship has meant to me," he said. Forty years ago, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, were "The most sophisticated people I knew."

Then a carpenter, Ford was hired by Didion and Dunne to build their beach house in Malibu. "I was the first thing they saw in the morning and the last thing they saw" — he paused — "before cocktails."

[This was originally posted on October 13, 2015.]

Tags:Harrison Ford    Joan Didion    movies    Star Wars    video   



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Seven Quick Links for Friday Noonish

Seven Quick Links for Friday Noonish

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A good interactive from The Pudding on the invisible loneliness epidemic in America. "The amount of time we spend with friends has plummeted — and again it hit younger people [34 or younger] especially hard."

New linguistics trend: "whom of which" (and its relation to "pied piping"). "Our striker, whom of which is our best player, scores a lot of goals."

Daft Punk is releasing a "drumless" edition of their album Random Access Memories. It'll be out in Nov.

Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water. "Engineers at MIT and in China are aiming to turn seawater into drinking water with a completely passive device that is inspired by the ocean, and powered by the sun."

Part one of Erin Kissane's investigation into the role Facebook/Meta played in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. "The harms Meta passively and actively fueled destroyed or ended hundreds of thousands of lives."

Ethiopian Tigst Assefa is the new women's marathon record-holder: 2:11:53. The men's record in 1965 was 2:12, but the women are getting faster quicker. Since '65: men are 11m faster while women are an hour faster. (And 5m vs 9m since '98.)

Hamburger Helper Unveils New Line Of Erotic Casseroles Meant To Be Eaten Off Naked Body. "The erotic casserole's box would include step-by-step instructions on how to blindfold one's partner and titillatingly dribble hot grease on their chest."

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Stunning High-Resolution Lidar Images of Rivers & Deltas

Stunning High-Resolution Lidar Images of Rivers & Deltas

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colorful Lidar image of a river

colorful Lidar image of a river

colorful Lidar image of a river

colorful Lidar image of a river delta

colorful Lidar image of a river

colorful Lidar image of a river

colorful Lidar image of a river

colorful Lidar image of a river

I cannot get enough of Dan Coe's high-resolution images of rivers and river deltas constructed from lidar data. So swirly, swoopy, fractally, and squiggly! Many of these images are time machines, showing the various meanders these rivers took hundreds and thousands of years ago. As I wrote in a post about the Mississippi River meander maps designed by Army Corps of Engineers cartographer Harold Fisk:

Fisk's maps represent the memory of a mighty river, with thousands of years of course changes compressed into a single image by a clever mapmaker with an artistic eye. Looking at them, you're invited to imagine the Mississippi as it was during the European exploration of the Americas in the 1500s, during the Cahokia civilization in the 1200s (when this city's population matched London's), when the first humans came upon the river more than 12,000 years ago, and even back to before humans, when mammoths, camels, dire wolves, and giant beavers roamed the land and gazed upon the river.

Coe has put 4K versions of these images up on Flickr in both landscape and portrait aspect ratios. They work really well for computer and phone wallpapers — I've been using this one on various devices since I first saw it years ago.

Tags: Dan Coe · Harold Fisk · geology · rivers

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Winners of the 2023 Bird Photographer of the Year Competition

Winners of the 2023 Bird Photographer of the Year Competition

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a vivid green bird sitting in the midst of a large green leaf

a diving bird returning to the surface with a fish in its mouth

a pair of parrots fighting on a tree branch

From over 23,000 entered images, the judges in the Bird Photographer of the Year competition for 2023 have selected their winners and runners-up. I selected a few of my favorite images above; the photographers from top to bottom: Nicolas Reusens, Henley Spiers, and Gianni Maitan.

Tags: best of · best of 2023 · birds · photography

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Three Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

Three Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

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"Health experts are calling for a 'feminist approach' to cancer to eliminate inequalities, as research reveals 800,000 women worldwide are dying needlessly every year because they are denied optimal care."

The Norwegian secret: how friluftsliv boosts health and happiness. "Friluftsliv is not a specific activity. Hiking in the forest, kayaking along the fjords and skiing in the mountains could all be part of it, but so [is] simply sitting in the woods."

Actor Michael Gambon has died at the age of 82. He had a long career on stage and screen and gained international fame as Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films.

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The Origins of the Socialist Slur

The Origins of the Socialist Slur

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The Atlantic has an adapted excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson's new book, Democracy Awakening: The Origins of the Socialist Slur. It begins:

For years after World War II, the "liberal consensus" — the New Deal idea that the federal government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure — was a true consensus. It was so widely popular that in 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote of the United States that "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition."

But the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional tied the federal government to ensuring not just economic equality, but also civil rights. Opponents of the liberal consensus argued that the newly active federal government was misusing tax dollars taken from hardworking white men to promote civil rights for "undeserving" Black people. The troops President Dwight Eisenhower sent to Little Rock Central High School in 1957, for example, didn't come cheap. The government's defense of civil rights redistributed wealth, they said, and so was virtually socialism.

Tags: Democracy Awakening · Heather Cox Richardson · USA · books · politics · racism

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A Cover of Radiohead's Creep by Prince

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Prince covered Radiohead's Creep at the Coachella music festival in 2008. The video got yanked due to copyright infringement but it's back up. For the moment anyway and perhaps forever...Prince's Twitter account linked to it. (via @anildash (who else??))

[This was originally posted on December 7, 2015.]

Tags:music    Prince    Radiohead    video   



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Three Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish

Three Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish

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In honor of National Pancake Day, may I humbly offer you The World's Best Pancake Recipe.

America's 2023 Covid booster rollout has been slow and uneven because it works like the rest of our health care system now (whereas before it was a single-payer program run by the US government).

Scientists Witnessed The Birth Of A New Accent In Antarctica. "The changes in accent were subtle, but significant enough to be acoustically measured and even predicted by a computational model." (via openculture.com)

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Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson

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the book cover for Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson, author of the excellent Letters from an American newsletter, has a new book out today about the health of American democracy: Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. From Virginia Heffernan's review of the book in the Washington Post:

She has an intriguing origin point for today's afflictions: the New Deal. The first third of the book, which hurtles toward Donald Trump's election, is as bingeable as anything on Netflix. "Democracy Awakening" starts in the 1930s, when Americans who'd been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash were not about to let the rich demolish the economy again. New Deal programs designed to benefit ordinary people and prevent future crises were so popular that by 1960 candidates of both parties were advised to simply "nail together" coalitions and promise them federal funding. From 1946 to 1964, the liberal consensus — with its commitments to equality, the separation of church and state, and the freedoms of speech, press and religion — held sway.

But Republican businessmen, who had caused the crash, despised the consensus. Richardson's account of how right-wingers appropriated the word "socialism" from the unrelated international movement is astute. When invoked to malign all government investment, "socialism" served to recruit segregationist Democrats, who could be convinced that the word meant Black people would take their money, and Western Democrats, who resented government protections on land and water. This new Republican Party created an ideology that coalesced around White Christianity and free markets.

Heffernan calls this first part of Richardson's book "the most lucid just-so story for Trump's rise I've ever heard". I'm in the midst of two other books right now (The Vaster Wilds & The Mountain in the Sea) but I might have to make room for a third.

Tags: books · Democracy Awakening · Heather Cox Richardson · politics · USA · Virginia Heffernan

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The Plot of All Objects in the Universe

The Plot of All Objects in the Universe

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a scientific plot of all of the objects in the universe

You just have to admire a chart that casually purports to show every single thing in the Universe in one simple 2D plot. The chart in question is from a piece in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Physics with the understated title of "All objects and some questions".

In Fig. 2, we plot all the composite objects in the Universe: protons, atoms, life forms, asteroids, moons, planets, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, giant voids, and the Universe itself. Humans are represented by a mass of 70 kg and a radius of 50 cm (we assume sphericity), while whales are represented by a mass of 10^5 kg and a radius of 7 m.

The "sub-Planckian unknown" and "forbidden by gravity" sections of the chart makes the "quantum uncertainty" section seem downright normal — the paper collectively calls these "unphysical regions". Lovely turns of phrase all.

But what does it all mean? My physics is too rusty to say, but I thought one of the authors' conjectures was particularly intriguing: "Our plot of all objects also seems to suggest that the Universe is a black hole." Huh, cool.

Tags: infoviz · physics · science

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Eminem's Lose Yourself, the Super Mario Bros Edition

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There I Ruined It is fast becoming one of my favorite web delights — musician Dustin Ballard remixes and mashes beloved songs in an attempt to ruin them. The video embedded above features Eminem's Lose Yourself sung to the tune of the Super Mario Bros theme song...and it makes me laugh every time I watch it.

You can check out more of There I Ruined It on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

P.S. My idea for a song to ruin: the Happy Days theme song, but it just keeps repeating the days of the week ("Sunday Monday happy days / Tuesday Wednesday happy days...") in a loop, using the Shepard tone to (seemingly) keep the pitch ever-rising.

Tags: Dustin Ballard · Eminem · music · remix · Super Mario Bros · video

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"The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60)"

"The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60)"

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a collage featuring religious scenes, nature, and dripping blood

a collage featuring religious scenes, nature, and dripping blood

a collage featuring religious scenes, nature, and dripping blood

a collage featuring religious scenes, nature, and dripping blood

a collage featuring religious scenes, nature, and dripping blood

I don't know about you, but the title "The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60)" made me click pretty damn fast to see what sort of Victorian age shenanigans this dude was up to. From the Public Domain Review:

The Blood Book is handmade, folio-sized, with a handsome marbled endpaper and forty-three pages of exquisitely crafted decoupage. John Bingley Garland, the manuscript's creator, used collage techniques, excising illustrations from other books to assemble elegant, balanced compositions. Most of the source material is Romantic engravings by William Blake and his ilk, but there are also brilliantly colored flowers and fruits. Snakes are a favorite motif, butterflies another. A small bird is centered on every page. The space between the images is filled with tiny hand-written script that reads like a staccato sermon. "One! yet has larger bounties! to bestow! Joys! Powers! untasted! In a World like this, Powers!" etc.

The book's reputation, however, rests on a decorative detail that overwhelms: To each page, Garland added languid, crimson drops in red India ink, hanging from the cut-out images like pendalogues from a chandelier. Blood drips from platters of grapes and tree boughs, statuaries and skeletons. Crosses seep, a cheetah drools, angels dangle bloody sashes. A bouquet of white chrysanthemums is spritzed.

To be clear, Garland's blood is not that of surgery or crime or menses, but of religious iconography. He obviously intended the blood to represent Christ's own.

The Blood Book are strikingly modern; as PDR states, Garland uses "techniques usually dated to Cubism in the early twentieth century" to make his collages. I love running across seemingly out-of-time objects like this.

Tags: art · John Bingley Garland · religion

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Five Quick Links for Monday Noonish

Five Quick Links for Monday Noonish

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Painter David Salle has been working with an AI program trained on his work. "Salle had to admit the machine was finally starting to spawn images with true artistic value."

Jesus Chris, Nepo Baby. "I totally understand that people think I got my job because of my dad, but I definitely would have still been the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ even if my dad wasn't God."

Taylor Lorenz: The makers of counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags are promoting their wares with live fashion shows on TikTok.

Today is the day: every US household can sign up to receive four free at-home Covid tests delivered right to your residence. All you need to do is put in your name and address — it took me 20 seconds this AM. Pls boost/repost!

A timely message for tech/web workers watching the WGA get what they wanted from the Hollywood studios: Ethan Marcotte's new book You Deserve a Tech Union. "By standing together, we can build a better version of the tech industry."

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Typical Urban Planning Opinion Progression

Typical Urban Planning Opinion Progression

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XKCD comic about titled Typical Urban Planning Opinion Progression

From XKCD, the progression of people's opinions about cars & urban planning, from "I wish there wasn't so much traffic to get into the city. They should put in more lanes." to "Anything that makes a city a worse place to drive makes it a better place to live." As The War on Cars said on Bluesky, "Randall Munroe, welcome to The War on Cars."

P.S. Re: putting in more lanes, read up on induced demand and road dieting for why that's often not a great idea.

Tags: cars · cities · comics · XKCD

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How to Apologize

How to Apologize

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Elizabeth Spiers for the NY Times on how to apologize (given the recent spate of celebrity non-apologies): I Have a Question for the Famous People Who Have Tried to Apologize.

The first step in a good apology is acknowledging harm. The second is expressing genuine regret, and where possible, acknowledging our shortcoming. Our intentions are not always good. Sometimes we're selfish. Sometimes we don't know what we're doing, and sometimes we fail to consider the consequences. If we can admit these things, it helps repair trust.

Then we vow, in good faith, to not perpetuate the same harm again.

The last step is repair. This means directly addressing the harm done — not via self-flagellation on YouTube nor with any expectation of forgiveness.

I posted about how to apologize a few years ago after reading Katie Heaney's piece on, wait for it, celebrity non-apologies:

Here are the six components of an apology from Beth Polin:

1. An expression of regret — this, usually, is the actual "I'm sorry."
2. An explanation (but, importantly, not a justification).
3. An acknowledgment of responsibility.
4. A declaration of repentance.
5. An offer of repair.
6. A request for forgiveness.

I think about these components whenever giving or receiving apologies — it's a great framework to keep in mind.

Tags: Beth Polin · celebrity · Elizabeth Spiers · how to · Katie Heaney

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Two Quick Links for Monday Morning

Two Quick Links for Monday Morning

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The Writer's Guild and the Hollywood studios reach a tentative deal after 146 days of striking. WGA's negotiating committee: "We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional..." Unions work — form them, join them.

Biden Will Join Autoworkers on Picket Line in Michigan, a Historic Move. "There is little to no precedent for a sitting president joining striking workers on a picket line."

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Three Quick Links for Friday Afternoon

Three Quick Links for Friday Afternoon

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How Big Ben Works: A Detailed Look Inside London’s Beloved Victorian Clock Tower. Always down for a clock mechanism explainer.

There's No Such Thing as an Ethical Museum. "At its core, an art museum is essentially a narrative of empire. If, as Napoleon quipped, history is a set of lies agreed upon, a museum is their physical manifestation." (via @990000)

How to identify and pronounce the names of ten common types of clouds, including cirrus, cumulonimbus, and nimbostratus.

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NASA's Logo: the Worm vs. the Meatball

NASA's Logo: the Worm vs. the Meatball

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NASA's original logo looked something like this:

Nasa Meatball Logo

It was referred to, colloquially, as the meatball. In the 1970s, the meatball was switched out for the worm, a more Modernist take:

NASA Worm Logo

This logo was done by Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn, and Danne wrote an essay about the experience.

And here is one of the most interesting exchanges I've ever witnessed in a design presentation:

Fletcher: "I'm simply not comfortable with those letters, something is missing."
Low: "Well yes, the cross stroke is gone from the letter A."
Fletcher: "Yes, and that bothers me."
Low: "Why?"
Fletcher: (long pause) "I just don't feel we are getting our money's worth!"

Others, not just the designers were stunned by this last comment. Then the discussion moved back to the strong red/rust color we were proposing. We had tried many other colors of course, including the more predictable blue range, but settled on red because it suggested action and animation. It seemed in spirit with the Can Do nature of the Space Agency.

Fletcher: And this color, red, it doesn't make much sense to me."
Low: "What would be better?"
Fletcher: "Blue makes more sense... Space is blue."
Low: "No Dr. Fletcher, Space is black!"

NASA's Graphics Standards Menu utilizing the worm logo can be seen here.

Nasa Design Manual

The space agency switched back to the original logo in 1992. Michael Bierut compared the two:

The worm is a great-looking word mark and looked fantastic on the spacecraft. By any objective measure, the worm was and is absolutely appropriate, and the meatball was and is an amateurish mess.

(thx, jarrett)

[This was originally posted on August 20, 2015.]

Tags:Bruce Blackburn    design    logos    Michael Bierut    NASA    Richard Danne   



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Three Quick Links for Friday Noonish

Three Quick Links for Friday Noonish

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The JWST has found carbon on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. It's got water, it's got carbon...it's got life maybe?

Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can't. "Ticketmaster's 'Verified Fan' system doesn't help fans. It helps scalpers who have hundreds of accounts, use special internet browsers, and have dozens of credit cards." (via waxy.org)

Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events. Just staggering corruption. As Jamelle Bouie says, this shows Thomas's contempt not only for the American public but the Supreme Court as well.

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It's Time to Replace Urban Delivery Vans

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European cities are transitioning to the use of cargo e-bikes and other micro-mobility solutions for package and other urban deliveries because they are safer, cleaner, and even faster in some cases than using vans or large trucks. The US isn't making that same shift right now — this video from Vox explores why...and how we can move in that direction.

Fortunately, there's a hero waiting in the wings: the e-cargo bike. Not only can these bad boys deliver packages in urban environments just as quickly (and sometimes faster) than delivery vans, they take up far less space and are much less likely to cause pedestrian deaths. Companies like Amazon, DHL, and UPS are using them in several European cities, but American cities haven't followed suit.

In this video, we explore why that is, and lay out some of the big steps American cities would need to take to join the e-bike delivery revolution.

See also No Cars Allowed in This Swiss Town (Except Tiny Electric Ones).

Tags: cars · cities · e-bikes · video

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Emerald and Stone, a Visual Tribute to Brian Eno

Emerald and Stone, a Visual Tribute to Brian Eno

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As a tribute to Brian Eno, visual artist Thomas Blanchard made this video of Emerald and Stone, a 2010 song that Eno collaborated on with Jon Hopkins & Leo Abrahams. According to Blanchard, he made the video with no digital visual effects — "the visual compositions have been created out of paint, oil and soap liquid."

Eno himself is still working and mentoring younger artists...he and Fred Again released an ambient album back in May.

Tags: Brian Eno · music · Thomas Blanchard · video

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Two Quick Links for Thursday Night

Two Quick Links for Thursday Night

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Studio Ghibli has sold a controlling stake to Nippon Television and will become a subsidiary of the Japanese broadcaster.

"If AI takes over those mundane projects and tasks that aren't creatively engaging or necessarily important, you free up designers to be creative in the same way the computer first did when it arrived on the scene."

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Two Quick Links for Thursday Afternoon

Two Quick Links for Thursday Afternoon

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"A tachyonic antitelephone is a hypothetical device in theoretical physics that could be used to send signals into one's own past."

Kinda fascinating piece about TikTokers Mixie and Munchie. "Instagram, I look at it now, is the stage. Pick who you want to play, look how you want to look. Create a character of your own because everyone online is fake, anyway."

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What Happens If You Destroy A Black Hole?

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Here's a fun thought experiment: can you destroy a black hole? Nuclear weapons probably won't work but what about antimatter? Or anti black holes? In this video, Kurzgesagt explores the possibilities and impossibilities. This part baked my noodle (in a good way):

Contrary to widespread belief, the singularity of a black hole is not really "at its center". It's in the future of whatever crosses the horizon. Black holes warp the universe so drastically that, at the event horizon, space and time switch their roles. Once you cross it, falling towards the center means going towards the future. That's why you cannot escape: Stopping your fall and turning back would be just as impossible as stopping time and traveling to the past. So the singularity is actually in your future, not "in front of you". And just like you can't see your own future, you won't see the singularity until you hit it.

🤯

Tags: black holes · Kurzgesagt · physics · science · video

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Three Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

Three Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

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Never past your prime! 13 peaks we reach at 40 or later. "Ageing doesn't have to mean slowing down. In fact, you're more likely to win an ultramarathon in midlife, not to mention get happier, wiser and more body confident."

Bentley vs. Train. This is peak internet right here. We will be whispering "tren" in my household for a long time to come.

The US government is restarting their program to send 4 free at-home Covid tests to every household in the country — you can sign up starting Sept 25th.

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Everyone Loves Someone Who Had an Abortion

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Using a phrase popularized by reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman, The National Network of Abortion Funds teamed up with Molly Crabapple and Padma Lakshmi to produce a video about their mission to support abortion access in the US.

In order for abortion to be truly an option, it must not only be legal, but actually available, without the shame. It's time we worked together towards a world where all people have the power and resources to care for and support their bodies, identities, and health — for themselves and their families. We need to take the hassle, hustle, and harassment out of healthcare. It's time to change the conversation about abortion, to make it a real option, available to all people without shame or judgment. We all love someone who has had an abortion, whether we know it or not.

The video is three years old and from the very first line ("Abortion is legal in all 50 states"), you can tell how much the situation has changed in the United States — and how the NNAF's mission is even more urgent. If you'd like to join me in donating, step right this way.

Tags: abortion · healthcare · Molly Crabapple · Padma Lakshmi · Renee Bracey Sherman · video

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Three Quick Links for Wednesday Afternoon

Three Quick Links for Wednesday Afternoon

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People's behaviour at music gigs is getting worse. I have three rules to solve that. "Most of these conventions simply fall under the catch-all rubric of Don't Be a Selfish Idiot. Being a selfish idiot, however, is very on-trend."

An essay on friendship. "Friendship is a form of purposive idleness. The relationship is based on equality, not on power."

The Zeitpyramide is a public art work designed to celebrate the 1200th anniversary of a German town. One block of the pyramid will be laid every 10 years until completion in 3183. The 4th block was just laid about a week ago.

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Fantastic 1970s Letter From Lego to Parents

Fantastic 1970s Letter From Lego to Parents

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At some point in the 1970s, Lego included the following letter to parents in its sets:

Lego Letter

The text reads:

The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls.

It's imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship.

A lot of boys like dolls houses. They're more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They're more exciting than dolls houses.

The most important thing is to the put the right material in the their hands and let them create whatever appeals to them.

The letter seems like the sort of thing that might be fake, but Robbie Gonzalez of io9 presents the case for its authenticity.

In our home, Lego currently rules the roost...the kids (a boy and a girl) spend more time building with Lego than doing anything else. This weekend, they worked together to build a beach scene, with a house, pool, lifeguard station, car, pond (for skimboarding), and surfers. Dollhouse stuff basically. Then they raced around the house with Lego spaceships and race cars. Nailed it, 1970s Lego.

Update: QZ confirms, the letter is genuine.

[This was originally posted on November 24, 2014.]

Tags:Lego    parenting   



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Tycho's Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2023

Tycho's Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2023

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Every year at Burning Man (pandemic years aside), Tycho does a ~2hr DJ set around sunrise and then releases it on Soundcloud — here's the 2023 version.

I've been listening to this for the past week and while I don't like it quite as much as the sets from previous years, it's definitely something to add to the rotation of chill work music.

See Tycho's BM sets from 2022, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Pretty much the only reason I'd ever want to go to Burning Man (esp after this year) is to catch this set in person sometime.

Tags: music · Tycho

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Three Quick Links for Tuesday Afternoon

Three Quick Links for Tuesday Afternoon

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Close to 2,000 Environmental Activists Killed Over Last Decade. "Violence, intimidation, and harassment are also being inflicted to silence defenders around the world,"

Global adventurer Jan Chipchase just returned from a month-long trip in the Pamir Mountains, including lots of time in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. His travelogues are fascinating — start here and work your way forward.

The Man Who Became Uncle Tom. Clint Smith examines Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the remarkable, complicated man who helped inspire the title character, Josiah Henson.

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Jet Line: Voicemails from the Flight Path

Jet Line: Voicemails from the Flight Path

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Talk to anyone who lives near the flight path of Burlington, Vermont's airport and it won't be too long until they are complaining to you about the F-35 jets that routinely disrupt their lives. The loud, expensive weaponry arrived in the state in 2019 and have upset and angered residents ever since.

A sudden roar announced that the military jets were taking to the sky again.

Julia Parise's son had developed a routine for whenever this happened: He would look to his mother and assess whether it was "one of them" — the F-35 fighter jets that had become such a constant presence in his young life — before asking her to cover his ears. He might do it himself, recalling aloud her reassurances as he did: "They won't hurt me. They won't hurt me."

To capture the community unrest created by what one resident calls "Lockheed Martin's welfare program" (the jet program will cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion over its lifetime), filmmakers Patrick McCormack and Duane Peterson III made a short film called Jet Line: Voicemails from the Flight Path featuring residents' concerns from a complaints hotline the pair set up.

This short film employs an anonymous hotline to elevate the voices beneath Vermont's F-35 flight path, the first urban residents to live with one of the military's most controversial weapons systems overhead.

Tranquil scenes of unassuming neighborhoods near Burlington International Airport are juxtaposed with voicemails of the unheard, those drowned out by the ear-shattering "sound of freedom." Exploring the relationship between picturesque residential areas and the deafening fighter jets overhead, Jet Line is a poetic portrait of a community plagued by war machines, documenting untenable conditions in a small city once voted one of the best places to live in America.

I hear the F-35s almost every time I am up in the Burlington area and they are very loud. I hear them when I'm on the phone with friends who live in Winooski. I hear them during my weekly Zoom session w/ my Burlington-based therapist and we have to pause for a few seconds so everyone can hear again. I live 30 miles away and they flew loudly over my house earlier today, as they do at least once a week. Over the weekend, the Marine Corps tweeted that they'd lost an F-35 somewhere in South Carolina and — yes, you heard right: they lost a whole-ass $100 million lethal weapon over a populated area. (They found the wreckage yesterday.) Hopefully when one of VT's F-35s decides to drop out of the sky someday, it somehow misses everyone.

Tags: Duane Peterson III · Patrick McCormack · Vermont · video

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The Process Tee

The Process Tee

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two t-shirts, one dark and one light, with a squiggly pattern that is jumbled up on the left but gets straight and smooth on the right

When you start something new, how do you know where you're going to end up? Most of the time, you don't — you stumble around for awhile, exploring uncertainly until, slowly, things start to make sense. That messy journey is all part of the process. Designer Damien Newman and I have teamed up with Cotton Bureau to make some t-shirts featuring his Design Squiggle that illustrate this untidy pattern of creativity. The Process Tee is available in two varieties — light design on dark fabric and dark design on light fabric — and 50% of the profits will be donated to a charitable organization (more on that below).

Newman originally came up with the Design Squiggle (aka The Process of Design Squiggle) more than 20 years ago to explain how design worked to some of his clients. Here's his description:

The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. It is intended to convey the feeling of the journey. Beginning on the left with mess and uncertainty and ending on the right in a single point of focus: the design.

Although it originated in the design world, the Squiggle is handy for understanding or describing the process of many different creative endeavors. If you asked a chef, a scientist, a writer, a programmer, or an artist to describe how they got from their starting point to an end result, I think it would look a lot like the Squiggle. So what's this shirt about? The Process of Design. The Process of Writing. Cooking. Art-making. Science. Learning a New Skill. Creativity. The Messy Process of Becoming a Better Human.

The Process Tee is short-sleeved and available in unisex, fitted, and youth sizes in several light (white, heather white, heather gray, banana, banana cream, pink, gold) and dark colors (black, royal blue, red, green, purple, orange) with sizes ranging from S to 3XL, which I hope will work for almost everyone. I ordered a few test shirts to figure out the sizing and placement of the Squiggle and I think they turned out really well: sharp, simple, and even a little enigmatic.

50% of the profits from these tees will be donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Access to safe, legal abortion is essential health care and we're supporting the NNAF in their mission to work towards a world "where all reproductive options, including abortion, are valued and free of coercion".

Tags: fashion · kottke.org

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Two Quick Links for Monday Afternoon

Two Quick Links for Monday Afternoon

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How Pontevedra, Spain transformed into a more people-centric city. "It's not my duty as mayor to make sure you have a parking spot. For me, it's the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you're going to put them."

If you're liking the NY Times puzzle game Connections, you can try your hand at your own grid for others to solve.

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Cutting Up a Huge Lego Salmon

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In this ASMR stop motion cooking video, a chef butchers a huge Lego salmon and prepares a salmon and rice bowl. This video is surprisingly visceral, what with the sound effects and the (Lego) blood.

This reminds me more than a little of the sushi scene in Isle of Dogs. (thx, caroline)

Tags: cooking · food · Lego · stop motion · video

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Some Stunning Shots From the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023 Competition

Some Stunning Shots From the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023 Competition

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a colorful shot of The Running Chicken Nebula

what looks like a question mark on the surface of the sun

purple sprites in the upper reaches of the atmosphere

a photo of the whole sun

the Andromeda galaxy next to a giant blue plasma arc

The Royal Observatory Greenwich in London has announced the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023 competition and as you can see from the selection above, there were some amazing shots. From top to bottom:

  1. Runwei Xu and Binyu Wang for their photo of The Running Chicken Nebula.
  2. Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau for capturing a question mark on the Sun. I will never tire of looking at the detail of the Sun's surface.
  3. Angel An. "This is not, as it might first appear, an enormous extraterrestrial, but the lower tendrils of a sprite (red lightning)! This rarely seen electrical discharge occurs much higher in the atmosphere than normal lightning (and indeed, despite the name, is created by a different mechanism), giving the image an intriguingly misleading sense of scale."
  4. Mehmet Ergün. More Sun!
  5. Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner and Yann Sainty for their shot of the Andromeda galaxy.

The last shot was the overall winner. While not as dramatic as some of the others, it documented the discovery of a previously unknown feature of a nearby cosmic neighbor:

The Andromeda galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way, and one of the most photographed deep-sky objects. Yet this particular photo, captured by an international trio of amateur astronomers, revealed a feature that had never been seen before: a huge plasma arc, stretching out across space right next to the Andromeda galaxy.

"Scientists are now investigating the newly discovered giant in a transnational collaboration," explain the photographers. "It could be the largest such structure nearest to us in the Universe."

You can see the rest of the winning images on the Royal Observatory site as well as coverage from the BBC, the Guardian, Colossal, and Universe Today.

Tags: astronomy · best of · best of 2023 · photography · science · space

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Five Quick Links for Monday Noonish

Five Quick Links for Monday Noonish

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How to Cool Down a City. "Almost every aspect of how we build cities amplifies heat, from the buildings we live in to the cars we drive." But there are ways to design cities to be cooler.

Beyoncé's birthday Renaissance show celebrated the depths of Black womanhood. "The reality is too many Black women don't make it to 42 and too many are not celebrated."

Jamelle Bouie: "The unfortunate truth, as we're beginning to see with the authoritarian turn in the Republican Party, is that our constitutional system doesn't necessarily need democracy, as we understand it, to actually work."

"Adults 18 years and older without health insurance and adults whose health insurance does not cover all COVID-19 vaccine costs can get updated COVID-19 vaccines at no cost through the [CDC's] Bridge Access Program."

Max Alexander is a 7-year-old fashion designer with 1.7 million followers on Insta.

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Well Wishes My Love, Your Love

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I don't think I've ever seen the animation style Gabriel Gabriel Garble uses in his short film Well Wishes My Love, Your Love — it's so cool and unique. Everything in the film has this sort of radiating energy that interacts with everything else. (via it's nice that)

Tags: animation · Gabriel Gabriel Garble · video

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Two Quick Links for Friday Afternoon

Two Quick Links for Friday Afternoon

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I was reminded this morning that Emily Wilson's translation of The Iliad comes out in less than 2 weeks! Very excited!

"There are reports that laboratory tests to detect abortion drugs have not only been created in Poland but are, in rare cases, also being used there to investigate the outcomes of pregnancies."

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Movies That Began As Short Films

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Deadline's Robert Lang compiled a bunch of short films (that you can watch for free online) that were later developed into feature-length films like Reservoir Dogs, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Boogie Nights, Bottle Rocket, Napoleon Dynamite, and District 9.

For instance, here's Quentin Tarantino's original Reservoir Dogs:

Wes Anderson's original Bottle Rocket:

The original short version of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On:

Peluca, upon which Napoleon Dynamite was based:

The Dirk Diggler Story, the short film by PT Anderson on which Boogie Nights was based:

Tags: Boogie Nights · Bottle Rocket · lists · Marcel The Shell With Shoes On · movies · Napoleon Dynamite · Reservoir Dogs · video

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The Brassicas Will Continue Until Morale Improves

The Brassicas Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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a simple cartoon of two people standing next to a redwood tree. One says to the other, 'Did you know the mighty redwood is actually the same species as broccoli and kale?' The caption reads 'Every year or two, botanists add another plant to brassica oleracea and see if anyone calls them on it.'

For a recent XKCD, Randall Munroe celebrates the the magical brassica oleracea plant.

Brassica oleracea is a species of plant that, like the apple, has a number of different cultivars. But these cultivars differ widely from each other: cabbage, kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, collard greens, and cauliflower.

Welcome, redwood, to the family, er, species.

Tags: food · science · XKCD

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Five Quick Links for Friday Noonish

Five Quick Links for Friday Noonish

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The winners of the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize (for unusual and often goofy scientific achievements) include an explanation of why scientists like to lick rocks and "re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools".

The second official trailer for Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.

A lovely story about an NYC woman reading a now-deleted YouTube comment for the first time. "It was so, so emotional. I couldn't believe anyone ever felt that way about me. I never knew I inspired anything like that."

A bathtub in the kitchen? The NY Times takes a peek into the tiny, weird kitchens of NYC apartments and the people who love them (or have at least learned to live with them).

An excellent, thought-provoking, sobering read from Ana Marie Cox: What if our entire national character is a trauma response? "Privilege may keep you from certain kinds of risks, but it won’t make you resilient. Only community can."

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AI-Assisted Language Translation of Speaking, Including Mouth Movements

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Ok, this is a little bit bonkers: HeyGen's Video Translate tool will convert videos of people speaking into videos of them speaking one of several different languages (incl. English, Spanish, Hindi, and French) with matching mouth movements. Check out their brief demo of Marques Brownlee speaking Spanish & Tim Cook speaking Hindi or this video of a YouTuber trying it out:

The results are definitely in the category of "indistinguishable from magic".

Tags: artificial intelligence · HeyGen · language · video

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Three Quick Links for Thursday Afternoon

Three Quick Links for Thursday Afternoon

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Lego is selling a kit with braille bricks for those with visual impairments. The studs on the bricks correspond to numbers and letters in the braille code.

"By 1920, the network of interurbans in the US was so dense that a determined commuter could hop interlinked streetcars from Waterville, Maine, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin — a journey of 1,000 miles — exclusively by electric trolley."

Adjusted for inflation, the iPhone 15 is the most affordable base-model iPhone since the original iPhone in 2007. (via daringfireball.net)

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The iPhone Alarm as a Piano Ballad

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If you expand the default iPhone alarm into a piano ballad, it sounds quiet lovely actually. The sheet music is available here.

See also Steve Reich Is Calling, two iPhones ringing at slightly different tempos.

Tags: iPhone · music · remix · telephony · video

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Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould

Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould

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cover of a book called Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould with an illustration of a pair of toucans

illustrations of two pairs of colorful birds

illustration of a pair of black and white birds

Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould is a new book documenting the work of early 19th century naturalist artist Elizabeth Gould.

Artist and illustrator Elizabeth Gould is finally given the recognition she deserves in this gorgeous volume that includes hundreds of her stunning and scientifically precise illustrations of birds from nearly every continent.

For all of her short life, Elizabeth Gould's artistic career was appreciated through the lens of her husband, ornithologist John Gould, with whom she embarked on a series of ambitious projects to document and illustrate the birds of the world. Elizabeth played a crucial role in her husband's lavish publications, creating beautifully detailed and historically significant accurate illustrations of over six hundred birds -many of which were new to science. However, Elizabeth's role was not always fully credited and, following her tragic death aged only thirty-seven, her efforts and talent were nearly forgotten.

Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould is available for pre-order from Amazon or Bookshop.org and comes out on November 7. (via colossal)

Tags: art · birds · Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould · books

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Four Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

Four Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

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The Analogue Pocket is a portable video game system that can play "the 2,780+ Game Boy, Game Boy Color & Game Boy Advance game cartridge library" as well as those from other systems (like Game Gear) with adapters. This looks cool as hell.

The One Thing Everyone Should Know About Fall Covid Vaccines. "The simplest way to think about them — everyone should just get one — is arguably the best."

Welcome, John Scalzi, to the 25 years of blogging club! His wife Krissy threw him a surprise blog birthday party. 🎉❤️

The 10 electric vehicles of our collective dreams, including a fully EV Jeep Wrangler, a minivan, a Fiat 500, a small rounded van, a cheaper Tesla, and A Perfectly Good Little EV Truck.

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A Teaser Trailer for Season Four of For All Mankind

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The first teaser trailer for season four of the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind takes the form of a recruitment video encouraging people to join the burgeoning workforce in space. It doesn't give us much in the way of plot or character updates, but here's the season synopsis (spoilers if you're not caught up to the end of season three):

Rocketing into the new millennium in the eight years since Season 3, Happy Valley has rapidly expanded its footprint on Mars by turning former foes into partners. Now 2003, the focus of the space program has turned to the capture and mining of extremely valuable, mineral-rich asteroids that could change the future of both Earth and Mars. But simmering tensions between the residents of the now-sprawling international base threaten to undo everything they are working towards.

I have to admit my interest in the show waned a bit after the first season, but it's still a pretty great show and I will be tuning in for season four on November 10. And is it just me or, if you tilt your head and squint, can you see For All Mankind as a prequel/origin story for The Expanse? (via gizmodo)

Tags: For All Mankind · space · trailers · TV · video

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Disney+ to Air a Real-Time Toy Story Version of an NFL Game

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This is pretty clever actually: Disney+ and ESPN+ will air a real-time, Toy Story-ified version of the Oct 1st Jacksonville Jaguars and Atlanta Falcons NFL game. From Deadline:

Using the NFL's Next Gen Stats and on-field tracking data, every player and play will be presented in "Andy's Room," the familiar, brightly colored setting for the Toy Story franchise. The action will be virtually simultaneous with the main game telecast, with most plays recreated after an expected delay in the neighborhood of about 30 seconds. Woody, Buzz Lightyear and many other characters will be visible throughout, and a press release notes they will be "participating from the sidelines and in other non-gameplay elements." Along with game action, the announcers, graphics, scoreboard, referees' penalty announcements, celebrations and other parts of the experience will all be rendered in a Toy Story-centric fashion.

I stopped watching the NFL years ago, but I might tune in to see how this works.

Tags: animation · Disney · football · Pixar · remix · sports · Toy Story · TV · video

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The Science of the Perfect Second

The Science of the Perfect Second

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I really enjoyed this piece by Tom Vanderbilt on how time is kept, coordinated, calculated, and forecast. It's full of interested tidbits throughout, like:

Care to gawk at one of the world's last surviving original radium standards, a glass ampoule filled with 20.28 milligrams of radium chloride prepared by Marie Curie in 1913? NIST has it in the basement, encased in a steel bathtub, buried under lead bricks.

And:

For GPS to work, it needs ultra-exact timing: accuracy within fifteen meters requires precision on the order of fifty nanoseconds. The 5G networks powering our mobile phones demand ever more precise levels of cell-tower synchronization or calls get dropped.

And:

And as Mumford could have predicted, nowhere has time become so fetishized as in the financial sector, with the emergence over the past decade of algorithmic high-frequency trading. Donald MacKenzie, the author of Trading at the Speed of Light, estimated in 2019 that a trading program could receive market data and trigger an order in eighty-four nanoseconds, or eighty-four billionths of a second.

And:

All this makes F1 staggeringly accurate: it will gain or shed only one second every 100,000,000 years. Since the days when time was defined astronomically, the accuracy of the second is estimated to have increased by a magnitude of eight.

And:

"A clock accurate to a second over the age of the cosmos," Patrick Gill, a physicist at the U.K.'s National Physical Laboratory, is quoted as saying in New Scientist, "would allow tests of whether physical laws and constants have varied over the universe's history."

And:

"If you were to lift this clock up a centimeter of elevation," Hume told me, "you would be able to discern a difference in the ticking rate." The reason is Einstein's theory of relativity: Time differs depending on where you are experiencing it.

And I could go on and on. If any or all of those tidbits is interesting to you, you should go ahead and read the whole thing.

Tags: physics · science · time · Tom Vanderbilt

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