Based on the bestselling book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (also available as a graphic novel), this documentary explores the mythology of American racism and how it still shapes the world today. The director is Oscar-winner Roger Ross Williams and in preparing for the film, he decided that only Black women would appear in it:
“When we started looking at historians and scholars, we came up with a long list. I noticed the pattern that most of the people doing the work around racism in America were Black women,” Williams told Netflix. “I asked them in pre-interviews, ‘Why do you do this work?’ And many of them said the same thing — that they had no choice. This was their experience and their life. And if they’re going to dedicate their life to something, it’s going to be about changing and understanding racism in America because they can’t escape racism in America. I said to everyone, ‘We’re going to have only Black women in this film.’ It was an important statement to make.
Stamped From the Beginning comes out on Netflix on November 20.
Tags: books · Ibram X. Kendi · movies · Stamped From the Beginning · trailers · video
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
There are only a couple of things I like about Halloween: 1. Heidi Klum’s costumes (last year she dressed up as a worm), and 2. the relatively recent Japanese tradition of mundane Halloween costumes. From Spoon & Tamago and Nick Kapur (here too), here are a few of my favorite mundane costumes:
“Factory worker who wore a helmet all day”
“Person who was about to be late for work, but then their train got delayed and now they are taking their time since they got a proof-of-delay ticket from the station”
“Person taking a hearing test at the doctor’s office”
See also 2021’s best costumes, including “guy who leans in as his Mario Kart character turns a curve”.
Tags: Halloween · holidays · Japan
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Like many of you, I read the news of a single person killing at least 18 people in Lewiston, Maine yesterday, which comes on the heels of many, many other mass shootings over the past four years. While these are outrageous and horrifying events, they aren’t surprising or shocking in any way in a country where more than 33,000 people die from gun violence each year.
America is a stuck in a Groundhog Day loop of gun violence. We’ll keep waking up, stuck in the same reality of oppression, carnage, and ruined lives until we can figure out how to effect meaningful change. I’ve collected some articles here about America’s dysfunctional relationship with guns, most of which I’ve shared before. Change is possible — there are good reasons to control the ownership of guns and control has a high likelihood of success — but how will our country find the political will to make it happen?
An armed society is not a free society:
Arendt offers two points that are salient to our thinking about guns: for one, they insert a hierarchy of some kind, but fundamental nonetheless, and thereby undermine equality. But furthermore, guns pose a monumental challenge to freedom, and particular, the liberty that is the hallmark of any democracy worthy of the name — that is, freedom of speech. Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech.
This becomes clear if only you pry a little more deeply into the N.R.A.’s logic behind an armed society. An armed society is polite, by their thinking, precisely because guns would compel everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening. The suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly — not make any sudden, unexpected moves — and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend.
We’re sacrificing America’s children to “our great god Gun”:
Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains — “besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily — sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).
The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
Roger Ebert on the media’s coverage of mass shootings:
Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.
Jill Lepore on the United States of Guns:
There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American. The gun that T. J. Lane brought to Chardon High School belonged to his uncle, who had bought it in 2010, at a gun shop. Both of Lane’s parents had been arrested on charges of domestic violence over the years. Lane found the gun in his grandfather’s barn.
The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five.
A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths:
The only guns that Japanese citizens can legally buy and use are shotguns and air rifles, and it’s not easy to do. The process is detailed in David Kopel’s landmark study on Japanese gun control, published in the 1993 Asia Pacific Law Review, still cited as current. (Kopel, no left-wing loony, is a member of the National Rifle Association and once wrote in National Review that looser gun control laws could have stopped Adolf Hitler.)
To get a gun in Japan, first, you have to attend an all-day class and pass a written test, which are held only once per month. You also must take and pass a shooting range class. Then, head over to a hospital for a mental test and drug test (Japan is unusual in that potential gun owners must affirmatively prove their mental fitness), which you’ll file with the police. Finally, pass a rigorous background check for any criminal record or association with criminal or extremist groups, and you will be the proud new owner of your shotgun or air rifle. Just don’t forget to provide police with documentation on the specific location of the gun in your home, as well as the ammo, both of which must be locked and stored separately. And remember to have the police inspect the gun once per year and to re-take the class and exam every three years.
Australia’s gun laws stopped mass shootings and reduced homicides, study finds:
From 1979 to 1996, the average annual rate of total non-firearm suicide and homicide deaths was rising at 2.1% per year. Since then, the average annual rate of total non-firearm suicide and homicide deaths has been declining by 1.4%, with the researchers concluding there was no evidence of murderers moving to other methods, and that the same was true for suicide.
The average decline in total firearm deaths accelerated significantly, from a 3% decline annually before the reforms to a 5% decline afterwards, the study found.
In the 18 years to 1996, Australia experienced 13 fatal mass shootings in which 104 victims were killed and at least another 52 were wounded. There have been no fatal mass shootings since that time, with the study defining a mass shooting as having at least five victims.
From The Onion, ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens:
At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”
But America is not Australia or Japan. Dan Hodges said on Twitter a few years ago:
In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.
This can’t be the last word on guns in America. We have to do better than this for our children and everyone else whose lives are torn apart by guns. But right now, we are failing them miserably, and Hodges’ words ring with the awful truth that all those lives and our diminished freedom & equality are somehow worth it to the United States as a society.
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Lego is coming out with a huge new set that’s based on Denis Villeneuve’s two-installment adaptation of Dune (or, as it’s know around these parts, DUNC). OMG, the Baron Harkonnen minifig!! It reminds me of something…ah yes:
Longbaron is looooooooong.
Anyway, it’s coming out in February and the main build is a 1369-piece model of the Atreides Royal Ornithopter with “fold-out, flappable wings, deployable landing gear and an opening cockpit”. Baron Harkooooooooooooonnen. I can’t stop! I, uh, may have pre-ordered this the second I saw it. (via polygon)
Tags: Denis Villeneuve · Dune · Lego · movies
From XKCD, a comparison chart that shows how black holes and regular holes measure up to one another. Some of these are pretty clever: "some of them are the mouths of wormholes".
Tags: black holes · physics · science · XKCD
I loved playing around with the National Audubon Society's Bird Migration Explorer, which is a beautifully designed interactive map of the Western hemisphere that shows the seasonal migration patterns of more than 450 species of birds. What a resource...so much information to explore here. (via marco c. in the comments)
Tags: birds · design · infoviz · maps
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
One of the things I was thinking about doing with the comments is having posts on Fridays that are specifically participatory. So let's try it out today. Currently, there's no profile information available for commenters...you can't click on a name to visit their Instagram acct or whatever. That feature is on my to-do list but it might be awhile before I get to it. But I know folks are curious about who reads the site...
So, in the meantime, if you feel comfortable sharing, you can use this thread to introduce yourself: maybe where you live, what you're into, your social accounts. I think many of us smartly err on the side of not sharing too many specific details about ourselves online (myself included, but it's obviously complicated 🙃) due to safety issues, but I think it's possible to get to know each other a little bit without spilling too many beans. (thx to Russell for the idea)
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Hey everyone. I rolled out a new comments system (in beta!) on Monday and it seems to have been well-received so far. I've fixed some of the most egregious bugs and rolled out some tweaks and it seems to be holding up pretty well. 🤞 (Is there a knock-on-wood emoji?)
It's early days and I'm rolling things out slowly (only ~10 posts were open for comments this week out of about 50), but commenting activity waned as the week went on. Discovery is still poor (there's no list of open comment threads) and there aren't any notifications — even as an admin user, I have to go to the front page of the site and click into individual threads to see if there's anything new. That's an obvious hinderance to participation and I'm gonna make a first pass at fixing it next week.
I also recognize that it's tough for readers to make room for a new online social space. People have their routines with Mastodon, Threads, Reddit, Instagram, etc. and each of those spaces has different social norms and unspoken rules. Getting used to a new space and learning what it's "for" takes time. At the end of the day, it's on me to facilitate discussion here. I'm not used to writing posts to spark conversation and it's gonna take some time for that muscle to develop and to find a balance — I don't want the site to become a series of prompts. ("Here's a cool thing about giraffes. Do YOU like giraffes?" 🥴)
Like LLMs, we've all been trained on contemporary social media and tend to interact online in that way now. But per the community guidelines, I'm asking us to try for a slightly different sort of discussion:
There are three types of feedback I get often via email or social media that I love: 1) when someone sends me a link related to something I've shared (often with a short explanation/summary), 2) when a reader with expertise about something I've posted about shares their knowledge/perspective, or 3) when someone tells a personal story or shares an experience they had related to a post or link. When readers share this sort of constructive feedback, it improves the original post so much...that's what I want to happen with comments on kottke.org.
The internet is full of places for people to go to express their opinions or argue about others' opinions, so I'd like to steer away from that here. If we can prioritize talking about facts, sharing stories, experiences, and expertise over opinions, it'll make for better, more informative threads.
I'd also like folks participating in threads to think a little bit less about what you might want out of making a comment and a little bit more about how your comment might help improve the community's understanding of the topic at hand.
When I think about the posts & comments on social sites that I'm most interested in, they're often experiences/personal stories, informed opinion, or, my personal favorite, links to related content. I'm gonna share some comments from this past week that hit these marks. First is Steven's comment in the best 50 bars thread:
Our friend Kate Mikkelson has been tracking the best bars for years and maintaining her own list which may be of some relevance here. We were just in Brooklyn and while we didn't make it to any of the bars on the most recent list we did go to Long Island Bar (twice) and had the best martini we've ever had, and enjoyed a great meal with excellent cocktails at Maison Premiere. Probably the best bar we've been to in recent memory was Artillery, in Savannah, but we've been lucky to visit many others, both with Chris and Kate and without, mostly in New Orleans, San Francisco, and Austin.
An excellent link, some context, and a little personal story.
I loved everyone sharing their favorite music videos in this thread. It took some cajoling by Caroline, but the thread got instantly better for everyone when people started sharing links to the videos they were talking about. Sharing links is a form of Showing Your Work and it only takes a few additional moments.
Though it contains fewer than 10 comments, I thought the best thread of the weeke was on the What a Japanese Neighborhood Izakaya Is Like post. I easily could have pinned every comment in the thread but I'll highlight two here. First, this one by Thom:
One of the best gift's a friend ever gave me was (silently) insisting we always meet at the same coffee shop. Over time, the connections we created and overall vibe of doing so spilled into other aspects of my life, especially when I travel. Usually when you go somewhere new you want to try as many things as possible. But I try and go to the same place repeatedly, glorying in the warmth of them learning my name, picking up on what I like to order, and finally telling me about things I should check out they think I'd like.
I don't know if it's a skill to do so, but, having now moved between cities and countries multiple times in my life, it's my first objective when I find a new home. Go somewhere enough times until they know my name. In this small way it feels like my spending money there matters more than it would in a place where the staff turnover even day by day would make this impossible.
And Josh:
Love this. I recently stumbled onto a show on Netflix called Midnight Dinner about a guy who runs a Izakaya (though I didn't know what it was called until this post). It follows the stories of his regulars and has been warm comfort TV as the nights get colder. Y'all might appreciate it as I've been doing.
I've added Midnight Dinner to my Netflix queue — I hadn't heard of it before. Comments like these make whatever posts I've written so much better — many thanks to these readers and everyone that else that took the time to comment this week.
I've been working nights and weekend for the past few weeks to get this thing going, quite happily for the most part, but I'm wiped. So I'm taking the rest of the day off (aside from one more post (with comments on!) after this one) to get a few things done around the house, do a bit of reading, and go watch my daughter play soccer. I'll see you next week!
Tags: kottke.org
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
For the New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews a new book, Steven Conn's The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is — and Isn't (Bookshop.org), which makes the case that what we typically think of as rural America or "real America" is a mirage.
A piercing, unsentimental new book, "The Lies of the Land" (Chicago), by the historian Steven Conn, takes the long view. Wistful talk of "real America" aside, Conn, who teaches at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, argues that the rural United States is, in fact, highly artificial. Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts. But we rarely acknowledge this, Conn writes, because many of us — urban and rural, on the left and the right — "don't quite want it to be true."
For one thing, the predominant rural population in what is now the United States was coercively removed and eliminated by the federal government:
Settlers styled themselves as pioneers who had won their land with their bare hands. This is how it went in "Little House on the Prairie," with the frontier family racing ahead of the law to seize Indian property. ("Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve" would have been a more accurate title, the literary scholar Frances W. Kaye has archly suggested.) Yet in the end land ownership came, directly or indirectly, from the state. The Homestead Act of 1862, along with its successors, gridded up and gave away an area the size of Pakistan. And although homesteading sounds like a relic from the sepia-toned past, its most active period came, the historian Sara Gregg has pointed out, in the twentieth century. The final homesteader got his land in 1988.
1988! The very next paragraph:
One irony is that — after Indigenous towns — it's the havens of the East Coast 'elite, such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, which have the deepest roots. Most bastions of "real America" are, by contrast, relatively new. Wasilla, Alaska, where Sarah Palin served as mayor, really is a small town in a farming area. But most of its farms were created by a New Deal campaign to relocate struggling farmers from the Upper Midwest. (Hence Palin's "you betcha" accent, similar to the Minnesota ones in the film "Fargo.") Palin's proud patch of "real America," in other words, was courtesy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
This is one of those pieces I could quote every other paragraph so I'm gonna stop there.
Tags: books · Daniel Immerwahr · Steven Conn · The Lies of the Land · USA
Pete Davidson hosted Saturday Night Live last night and somehow said exactly the right thing to open a comedic television program after an unspeakably tragic week.
Tags: Pete Davidson · Saturday Night Live · TV · videoHow do I navigate grief and hopelessness after a tragedy? How can I get through my grief and sadness? Sitting with grief can feel like we're frozen in shock or being pulled between heavy feelings and numbness. In this calming visualization, Headspace Meditation and Mindfulness Teacher Dora Kamau teaches us that grief is non-linear and how to practice self-compassion throughout each phase of grief. We'll learn ways to be present with our grief or intense sadness so that we can allow our emotions to move through us instead of feeling stuck.
See also How Do You Help a Grieving Friend?, How to help a friend through a tough time, according to a clinical psychologist, What To Do About Our Collective Pandemic Grief Before It Overwhelms Us, Grief Is Unexpressed Love, and How to Process Our Collective Global Trauma. (via the kid should see this)
Tags: Dora Kamau · videoYou may have previously read about the Citicorp Center. Joe Morgenstern wrote about the Manhattan skyscraper in a classic New Yorker piece from 1995. The building was built incorrectly and might have blown over in a stiff wind if not for a timely intervention on the part of a mystery architecture student and the head structural engineer on the project.
Tells about designer William J. LeMessurier, who was structural consultant to the architect Hugh Stubbins, Jr. They set their 59-story tower on four massive nine-story-high stilts and used an unusual, chevron-shaped system of wind braces. LeMessurier had established the strength of those braces in perpendicular winds. Now, in the spirit of intellectual play, in his Harvard class, he wanted to see if they were just as strong in winds hitting from 45 degrees. He discovered the design flaw and during wind tunnel tests in Ontario learned the weakest joint was at the building's 30th floor.
The whole piece is here and well worth a read. Last month, the excellent 99% Invisible did a radio show about Citicorp Center and added a new bit of information to the story: the identity of the mystery student who prodded LeMessurier to think more deeply about the structural integrity of his building. (via @bdeskin, who apparently factchecked Morgenstern's piece back in the day)
[This was originally posted on May 13, 2014.]
Tags:architecture Joe Morgenstern NYC skyscrapers William LeMessurier
Over a period of eight years, Trevor Traynor took dozens of photos of newsstands and their operators. The project started in NYC but came to include newsstands in LA, Lima, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Marrakesh, London, Rome, Paris, and several other places around the world. (via present & correct)
Tags: photography · Trevor TraynorWhat Americans Know About Religion, a Pew Research survey from 2019. Atheists and agnostics tend to know more about religion than Christians do.
The climate crisis has cost $16 million per hour in extreme weather damage over the past 20 years. That's $2.8 trillion total...likely "a significant understatement". And it's only going to get worse.
How Red-State Politics Are Shaving Years Off American Lives. "[State-level] investments began to diverge sharply along red and blue lines, with conservative lawmakers often balking at public health initiatives they said cost too much or overstepped."
US citizens or permanent residents with permanent disabilities can get a free lifetime pass to US National Parks (and other federal lands).
During a recent show, Jerry Seinfeld seemed to tease the return of Seinfeld: "something is going to happen that has to do with that ending".
---
Note: Quick Links are pushed to this RSS feed twice a day. For more immediate service, check out the front page of kottke.org, the Quick Links archive, or the @kottke Mastodon feed.
This new series from Netflix looks pretty good — and it's got an impeccable pedigree: it's based on Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, a Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award finalist, and a bestseller to boot. The four-part limited series premieres November 2nd.
Tags: All the Light We Cannot See · Anthony Doerr · books · trailers · TV · videoYou have likely heard Yo-Yo Ma play his most famous piece before. Maybe even dozens of times. But Ma's rendition of Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 takes on a whole new dimension when accompanied by a babbling brook and bird calls in the forests of the Great Smoky Mountains. A lovely moment of peace in a world that could really use some right now.
Tags: music. Johann Sebastian Bach · video · Yo-Yo MaNothing is faster than the speed of light. But compared to the unimaginable size of the Universe, light is actually extremely slow. This video is 45 minutes long and during that time, a photon emitted from the Sun1 will only travel through a portion of our solar system.
In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system.
It takes light more than 43 minutes to travel to Jupiter and even to travel the diameter of the Sun takes 4.6 seconds. (thx, andy)
To even fight its way out of the Sun is an incredible journey for a photon. The Sun is so dense that a photon generated at the core is absorbed and re-emitted trillions of times by hydrogen nuclei on its way out. By some estimates, it may take up to 40,000 years for a photon to escape the Sun's surface and head on out to the cold reaches of space.↩
[This was originally posted on February 3, 2015.]
Tags:astronomy physics science video
Photographer Reuben Wu was commissioned by Apple to take some of his wonderful light-painted photos with Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max in a project called The Inner Landscape.
So proud to be one of the first photographers to reveal a new series of images captured on the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max and celebrate its launch. "The Inner Landscape" is a series of six unearthly places that feel more intimate than epic, more ambiguous than explicit, making up a body of work that feels cohesive through its sense of connection and psychological space.
I love Wu's work. More information about this project can be found at Colossal, Petapixel, and on Wu's Instagram.
Tags: Apple · iPhone · photography · Reuben Wu · telephonyScholastic Under Fire for Allowing Schools to Opt Out of 'Diverse Books' for Book Fairs. "Why is it appropriate for Scholastic to have an easy censorship option?"
An Epidemic of Chronic Illness Is Killing Us Too Soon. "The United States is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping people alive."
Michael Lewis finds himself under the microscope. "What happens when a writer who is used to rapturous reception, with a knack for shaping stories, collides with an active public drama he doesn't control?"
Errol Morris Did Not Like This Q&A About His le Carré Film. "Properly considered, no one should ever under any circumstances talk to anybody else."
---
Note: Quick Links are pushed to this RSS feed twice a day. For more immediate service, check out the front page of kottke.org, the Quick Links archive, or the @kottke Mastodon feed.
Amazon has a bunch of stuff on sale today & tomorrow for an "event" they're calling Prime Big Deal Days. I'm not going to do a big roundup here, but here are a few things you might be interested in if you're an Amazon shopper:
You can find more deals on the Prime Big Deal Days page.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
Tags: AmazonPlanet Earth III will begin airing later this year on BBC and, presumably, at some later time in the US. The latest installment in the legendary series, 17 years after the first one was released, will once again be presented by Sir David Attenborough, now 97 years old and still as enthusiastic about sharing the wonders of nature as he ever was.
'The opening of the series with David was filmed in the beautiful British countryside in exactly the location where Charles Darwin used to walk whilst thinking-over his Earth-shaking ideas about evolution. It seemed the perfect place for David to introduce Planet Earth III and remind us of both the wonders and the fragility of our planet. ....and for him, of course, the sun shined under blue skies one of the only days it did all summer!.'
The video above is a quick first look at the series and here's a trailer as well:
Looking forward to this...the Planet Earth series is still the gold standard for nature documentaries.
Tags: David Attenborough · Planet Earth · trailers · TV · videoKelvin Kiptum shatters marathon world record with run of just over two hours. Wow, 2:00:35. "As the 23-year-old ran the final few hundred metres along Columbus Drive, he even had time to blow kisses and wave to the crowd."
It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. "I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket..."
Is food in America better or worse than in other countries (France, Korea, Peru) around the world? It depends on what you mean by "better" and how broad your lens is.
---
Note: Quick Links are pushed to this RSS feed twice a day. For more immediate service, check out the front page of kottke.org, the Quick Links archive, or the @kottke Mastodon feed.
This is like CSI for geography dorks: you're plopped into a random location on Google Street View and you have to guess where in the world you are. So much fun...you get to say "wait, zoom in, enhance, whoa, back up" to yourself while playing. My top score is 14103...what'd you get? p.s. Using Google in another tab is cheating! (thx, nick)
[This was originally posted on May 9, 2013.]
Tags:games geography Google Maps Google Street View
A preview of Spike Lee: Creative Sources, up at the Brooklyn Museum through early February. "There are so many amazing objects in his collection, and so many things that are so important to him and that really tell a story."
A Chance Discovery Uncovered the Remarkable Life of One of the First Female Oceanographers, Christine Essenberg. "How many other unknown women in science are out there, hidden away in boxes?" (via @JenLucPiquant)
---
Note: Quick Links are pushed to this RSS feed twice a day. For more immediate service, check out the front page of kottke.org, the Quick Links archive, or the @kottke Mastodon feed.
If you need a small window of peaceful beauty today, here you are.
[This was originally posted on July 15, 2016.]
Tags:Norway time lapse video
One could spend several hours delving into the Manuals Showcase over at the Internet Archive. Among the collection of handbooks, manuals, and guides, you'll find gems like the IBM Model B Electric Typewriter User Manual 1954, The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock, CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual, NJ Transit Graphics Standards Manual, and the McDonalds McDonaldland Specification Manual (1975).
I've written about the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual before — "some of these things are practically best practices in American business, not against enemies but against their employees, customers, and themselves".
Tags: books · design · Internet ArchiveFrom The Economist on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their work that led to the development of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, a lovely short appreciation of vaccines.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that vaccines have saved more from death than any other medical invention. It is a hard claim to gainsay. Vaccines protect people from disease cheaply, reliably and in remarkable numbers. And their capacity to do so continues to grow. In 2021 the who approved a first vaccine against malaria; this week it approved a second.
Vaccines are not only immensely useful; they also embody something beautifully human in their combination of care and communication. Vaccines do not trick the immune system, as is sometimes said; they educate and train it. As a resource of good public health, they allow doctors to whisper words of warning into the cells of their patients. In an age short of trust, this intimacy between government policy and an individual's immune system is easily misconstrued as a threat. But vaccines are not conspiracies or tools of control: they are molecular loving-kindness.
The WHO says that vaccines currently prevent 4-5 million deaths per year. The CDC points to a paper that says that more than 50 million death can be prevented between 2021 and 2030. Vaccination is nothing short of a scientific miracle. (via eric topol)
Tags: medicine · science · vaccinesCritics for The Hollywood Reporter pick their 50 best TV shows of the 21st century (so far). Lots to disagree with here but also "any title [on the list] you had yet to see was surely worth checking out". And wow, Mad Men.
In iOS 17, users no longer have to include "Hey" when invoking Siri. Siri Price has had to change her name bc every time someone spoke to her, all in-range phones would pipe up. "Now people can't even say my name. I'm absolutely fuming." (via @TechDesk)
Huh. Did Medium "borrow" their current logo from Japan Tobacco Inc.'s 1985 logo? They are very similar...
The MacArthur Foundation has announced 2023's round of fellows and accompanying $800,000 "genius grants". Aw shoot, passed over again!
Last month was the hottest September on record by an "absolutely gobsmackingly bananas" margin. "September 2023 beat the previous record for that month by 0.5C, the largest jump in temperature ever seen." 1.8C warmer than pre-industrial levels.
---
Note: Quick Links are pushed to this RSS feed twice a day. For more immediate service, check out the front page of kottke.org, the Quick Links archive, or the @kottke Mastodon feed.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research recently conducted a poll asking Americans about their religious beliefs and found that about 30% of American adults are non-religious (which they refer to as "the nones", presumably after the book by Ryan Burge).
The decades-long rise of the nones — a diverse, hard-to-summarize group — is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. religion. They are reshaping America's religious landscape as we know it.
In U.S. religion today, "the most important story without a shadow of a doubt is the unbelievable rise in the share of Americans who are nonreligious," said Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and author of "The Nones," a book on the phenomenon.
The nones account for a large portion of Americans, as shown by the 30% of U.S. adults who claim no religious affiliation in a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Other major surveys say the nones have been steadily increasing for as long as three decades.
So who are they?
They're the atheists, the agnostics, the "nothing in particular." They're the "spiritual but not religious," and those who are neither or both. They span class, gender, age, race and ethnicity.
While the nones' vast diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups, most of them have this in common:
They. Really. Don't. Like. Organized. Religion.
But a dislike of organized religion among the nonreligious doesn't necessarily translate into atheism or agnosticism: 43% of "the nones" say they believe in God.
Tags: books · religion · Ryan Burge · The Nones · USA"Lise Meitner developed the theory of nuclear fission, the process that enabled the atomic bomb. But her identity — Jewish and a woman — barred her from sharing credit for the discovery, newly translated letters show."
The Hidden Costs of Using an Electric Bike. "An electric bike is going to force you to get a lot more fresh air than you're used to." Lolz.
---
Note: Quick Links are pushed to this RSS feed twice a day. For more immediate service, check out the front page of kottke.org, the Quick Links archive, or the @kottke Mastodon feed.
This video from Practical Engineering offers a brief explanation of dozens of different types of railcars, from passenger train cars like the dining car & sleeper car to freight cars like the boxcar, tank car, and hopper cars (for hauling things like sand or grain) to specialized cars the rail companies use to build and maintain their routes like rail grinders, snowplows, and track geometry cars.
Trains are one of the most fascinating engineered systems in the world, and they're out there, right in the open for anyone to have a look! Once you start paying attention, its pretty satisfying to look for all the different types of railcars that show up on the tracks.
They even made a little checklist to use for your beginner trainspotting. (via the kid should see this)
Tags: trains · videoErik Wernquist made his short film One Revolution Per Minute to explore his "fascination with artificial gravity in space". The film shows what it would be like to travel on a large, circular space station, 900 meters (0.56 miles) in diameter that rotates a 1 rpm. Even at that slow speed, which generates 0.5 g at the outermost shell, I was surprised to see how quickly the scenery (aka the Earth, Moon, etc.) was rotating and how disorienting it would be as a passenger.
Realistically - and admittedly somewhat reluctantly — I assume that while building a structure like this is very much possible, it would be quite impractical for human passengers.
Putting aside the perhaps most obvious problem with those wide windows being a security hazard, I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect — when it comes to the comfort of the experience — would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
I calculated that the outer ring of the space station is moving at 105.4 mph with respect to the center. That's motoring right along — no wonder everything outside is spinning so quickly.
Tags: Erik Wernquist · physics · science · space · videoFall always brings brisker days, earlier sunsets, and a whole raft of new books that are impossible to find the time to read. Add this memoir by Patrick Stewart to the pile next to your bed: Making It So (bookshop.org). The Hollywood Reporter has a great video excerpt with audio from the audiobook (narrated by Stewart himself, naturally) about his early days on Star Trek: The Next Generation:
From an accompanying article:
Tags: books · Making It So · Patrick Stewart · Star Trek · TV · videoSo when he was on set shooting the show's debut season and co-stars like Jonathan Frakes, Denise Crosby and Brent Spiner would tease him or ad-lib a joke or laugh when they flubbed their lines, it would low-key infuriate him.
"I could be a severe bastard," he writes. "My experiences at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre had been intense and serious... On the TNG set, I grew angry with the conduct of my peers, and that's when I called that meeting in which I lectured the cast for goofing off and responded to Denise Crosby's, 'We've got to have some fun sometimes, Patrick' comment by saying, 'We are not here, Denise, to have fun.'"
"In retrospect," Stewart continues, "everyone, me included, finds this story hilarious. But in the moment, when the cast erupted in hysterics at my pompous declaration, I didn't handle it well. I didn't enjoy being laughed at. I stormed off the set and into my trailer, slamming the door."
You really have to applaud the effort here: YouTuber Todd in the Shadows made a 33-minutes supercut of every song he could find that stops, even momentarily, on the word "stop". Here are the ground rules:
If there was even the briefest of stops, I counted it. It's okay if the band holds the note rather than complete silence. But the entire band has to stop, not just a couple instruments; the singer can keep singing though.
I gotta say I did not watch the whole thing, but the very last clip is *kisses fingers*. (via @peterme)
Tags: music · videoMegan Gray on a disturbing piece of information that was revealed in the antitrust case against Google: their search engine replaces some search queries with others that generate more commercial results (and therefore more money for the company). Here's how it works:
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here's how it works. Say you search for "children's clothing." Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for "NIKOLAI-brand kidswear," making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren't searching for at all. It's not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don't get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can't escape.
Yuuuck. I think it might be time to switch away from Google search — its results have been getting worse for years and it seems like the company doesn't care too much about fixing it. I've been hearing good things about Kagi and there's always DuckDuckGo.
Tags: Google · Megan Gray · advertising · searchOn Luddites, the rebellion against Big Tech, human rights, and the AI threat: "Robots aren't coming for your job; bosses are." Ted Chiang: "Most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism."
Katalin Karikó just won the Nobel Prize for her dogged and live-saving work on mRNA vaccines. Her impeccably timed memoir, Breaking Through: My Life in Science, is coming out next week.
Blaring phones will scare the beejesus out of everyone in America on Oct 4 at 2:20pm ET; FEMA is conducting a test of their public alert system. Maybe set an alarm or calendar notification so you'll be prepared?
---
Note: Quick Links are pushed to this RSS feed twice a day. For more immediate service, check out the front page of kottke.org, the Quick Links archive, or the @kottke Mastodon feed.
Designed by architect Thomas Randall-Page, the Cody Dock rolling footbridge opens with a "surprising and playful motion" to let boats pass through by simply rolling out of the way.
The bridge rolls on undulating rails cast into the concrete abutments on either bank. Ballast fills the top of each square portal, countering the weight of the bridge deck that connects them. This symmetry allows the whole bridge structure to smoothly role through 180 degrees to a fully inverted position facilitating movement of boats from the river to the dock. This finely balanced is this system allows the 13 tonne bridge to be operated via hand winches only.
Here's a video about the then-proposed bridge from 2019 that shows the unique rolling mechanism:
And here's a video from earlier this year that shows the design process and how the finished bridge works:
Tags: architecture · Thomas Randall-Page"A cheap malaria vaccine that can be produced on a massive scale has been recommended for use by the World Health Organization (WHO)." Each dose is only $2-4 (4 doses/person) and 100 million doses/yr are already lined up to be produced.
How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson. "We are dealing with not one but two unreliable narrators: Musk and Isaacson himself."
Using NLP to find similar phrases to "champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends". Results included "focus for my real friends, real cuss for my faux friends" and "metrics for my real friends, real tricks for my meh friends".
The new words added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary last month include rizz, cromulent, vector graphics, rewild, jorts, non-player character, jump scare, finsta, beast mode, and thirst trap.
UNESCO Just Named 42 New World Heritage Sites. "Among the newly inscribed group are an archaeological cemetery site in South Korea, a roadside inn in Iran, and a famed hop-growing region in Czechia."
---
Note: Quick Links are pushed to this RSS feed twice a day. For more immediate service, check out the front page of kottke.org, the Quick Links archive, or the @kottke Mastodon feed.
Wow, Nicholas Rougeux has restored John Gould’s A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Humming-Birds, which was published between 1848 & 1887 and contains hand-colored lithographic depictions of almost every single hummingbird species known to exist at the time.
From Rougeux's page about the project:
The monograph is considered one of the finest examples of ornithological illustration ever produced, as well as a scientific masterpiece. Gould's passion for hummingbirds led him to travel to various parts of the world, such as North America, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, to observe and collect specimens. He also received many specimens from other naturalists and collectors.
The image at the top of the post is the gorgeous poster that Rougeux created from the drawings in Gould's monograph...you can order some for your walls and read a making-of.
See also other projects by Rougeux that I've posted about.
Tags: art · birds · design · infoviz · John Gould · Nicholas Rougeux · scienceThomas Zimmer on one of my political pet peeves: the polarization narrative. "The 'polarization' paradigm privileges unity, stability, and social cohesion over social justice and equal participation."
Hayao Miyazaki Announces Return To Filmmaking After Big Time Fuckup At New HVAC Installation Job. "They had to bring in the drywall crew to repair all the damage I caused."
Using AI voice-cloning to make pop stars cover Weird Al Yankovic songs instead of the other way around. Think Michael Jackson covering Eat It and Madonna singing Like A Surgeon.
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19".
---
Note: Quick Links are pushed to this RSS feed twice a day. For more immediate service, check out the front page of kottke.org, the Quick Links archive, or the @kottke Mastodon feed.
