Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
Tressie McMillan Cottom on AOC’s presumed presidential run . But these are different times. Ocasio-Cortez is a different woman, and Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down.
We haven’t done an open thread for awhile, so… What have you been working on? How are you feeling? What’s on your mind these days? What’s the best thing you’ve seen this week? Have you called a plumber to your home lately? Are you new here? Introduce yourself if you feel like it. Heck, if you’re a regular commenter, reintroduce yourself if you’d like. Tags: kottke.org · open threads
NOAA: Contiguous US Breaks Its Record for Hottest Month Ever . It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl…” (This record will be broken several more times in the decades to come.)
Jamelle Bouie almost never misses. In this video that’s just shy of 10 minutes long, he chastises American political cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on “wokeness” instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump regime. (And he worked in a reference to Jonathan Frakes saying no .) I bring this up because this is just a great example of a…
A recently unearthed conversation with Anthony Bourdain from 2005 . “We discuss Tony’s preferred sucker-punch etiquette, his loyalty to cigarettes the Chateau Marmont, ayahuasca in Peru, and the talk show he dreamed up with Christopher Walken in mind.
Ok so when you woke up this morning, you probably didn’t expect to watch a 20-minute video about a trebuchet — but to be fair, I didn’t either. But Tom Stanton’s build of a fully mechanical trebuchet that propels a tiny plastic pellet faster than the speed of sound (complete with tiny sonic boom) is genuinely fascinating to watch. He starts with a basic plan, but as he builds tests, there are all…
Craig Mod wrote about his recent adventures using LLMs: A Swarm of Blood Robots . I now have a comprehensive family tree, naming the very boats my Italian and Polish ancestors came over on in the late 1800s, the villages a few came from
Draw any shape and hear it as a drum. Eigendrum : a drum simulator where you can change the shape of the drum to see how it affects the sound it makes.
G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost . G.P.S. has also led us to outsource existential skills: locating yourself in space, parsing out your surroundings, staying calm when you don’t know where you are. Do we lose something when we no longer get lost?
Some of the most storied problems in mathematics, those posed by Paul Erdős, are being solved by LLMs .
Lovely short video about artist Jas Knight , who is a participant in the Met Museum’s Copyist Program : The Copyist Program offers time and space for artists to develop their own interpretation of an artwork through intimate study in the Museum s galleries. Copyists have created reinterpretations of original artworks in The Met collection since 1872. Here’s Knight from the video, in which he is…
Here’s how Rocky’s musical language from the Project Hail Mary movie was created . The filmmakers didn’t want it to feel like a human language because he’s supposed to be really more musically communicating .
I m Done Using AI . “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.
Why weren t bicycles invented sooner? Why was no one even considering the question of human-powered vehicles until the 1400s? Why weren’t there bicycle mechanics in the 1300s, when there were clockmakers, or at least by the 1500s, when we had watches?
Death Cab for Cutie rolled into the NPR offices for a Tiny Desk Concert , which featured two new songs from their current album and some oldies: Title and Registration and Soul Meets Body. Gibbard noted: I m starting to realize that some of our earlier records came out a similar distance away from, like, the Beatles records when I was a kid. This is Death Cab’s second Tiny Desk… here’s the first…
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same . A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.
Oh wow, Williams College’s Hopkins Observatory has a huge collection of eclipse glasses viewers (and other eclipse ephemera), some of them dating back to 1793. Here are a few of my favorites: (via present correct ) Tags: design · eclipses
Stories that the authors of the Bible borrowed from other cultures and religions , including the flood myth, the Garden of Eden, etc. I learned about these in a religion mythology class in college, which cemented my atheism.
Widely regarded as the most complicated board game ever made , The Campaign for North Africa tries to simulate WW2 s North African theater in as granular fashion as possible…” 1500 hours to finish the game — that’s 1h20m every day for 3 years.
New vocabulary term: soft secession” .
Good sentence : The market s most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.
Your brain is a gambling addict that bets on reality . It doesn’t wait for information. It guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t, you run into walls.
I’ve felt this for years (blogs have global context): The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts . There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.
British climate scientist Kevin Anderson (from a 2024 video ): So there is lots that you will hear — lots of rhetoric, lots of good words, lots of optimism about the future. But given we ve known about this subject and apparently been working on it for 30 years, the trend line tells us that we are heading towards three to four degrees centigrade of warming across this century: an absolute climate…
Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths , including 146 million among children younger than 5 years For every death averted, 66 years of full health were gained on average, translating to 10.2 billion years of full health gained.
Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease.” The key difference: the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change.
Stories of people finding weird, wild and defiant ways to avoid using AI in their professional lives” . Like: I keep a to-do list in a paper notebook, but my boss believes I have an AI task-keeping assistant via Claude.
Crocs Has a Trick for Dodging Taxes: a Tiny Office in Malta . Come tax season, the Broomfield, Colo., company has claimed that all its global profits were actually earned in this two-person office. The US is not a serious country.
The Doulas Who Help Us Die . Instead of assisting in the birthing room or the nursery, end-of-life doulas could keep vigil over people during their last hours, providing comfort and companionship and helping a family find peace.
NASA has provided some early-stage funding to explore the idea of releasing a swarm of tiny probes (weighing only a few grams each) into Saturn’s rings to study them up close.
So, I’m not exactly sure what this is, but what it appears to be is a fan-assembled album of the recording sessions for Tron: Legacy by Daft Punk Joseph Trapanese. 67 tracks in this YouTube playlist and 61 tracks from the Internet Archive (not sure of the overlap here ) Some of it sounds just like the 31 tracks from the “Complete Edition” of the soundtrack , some of it is alternate studio takes,…
Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed . “A whole lot of people under the age of 45 no longer believe that indicators such as wages, unemployment, or the number of college degrees that are handed out have much to do with a healthy economy.
If You Haven’t Recently Used Claude Code, You Might Not Understand Where AI Is At . There’s a huge gulf between a chatbot that’s just putting text into your brain and an agent that uses code to interact with an external environment.
Socialists Are Winning Because They Listen to People (and don’t just treat them like ATMs). “The best of them are running campaigns that acknowledge that to win, Democrats are going to have to organize voters — not just fund-raise off them.
Thing that I am now invested in: this woman has spent 30 weeks secretly training to beat her brother (a former competitive player) at Dance Dance Revolution . The showdown is today
The video rental store as “third place” . Decades before recommendation algorithms, video stores served as social hubs where conversation and camaraderie became a form of taste-making.
The End of Google Search . The internet giant is “changing the formula” of its products and media folks are beginning to assume that there will be no search traffic in the future…and fretting about their survival.
Media Matters : ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 194 segments about the three major heat events” that hit the US this summer and not a single one of them mentioned climate change . Not one!
Fun little review by Marcin Wichary of a 1984 flying video game called Sopwith , which was never supposed to be released to the public (an event that the game’s creator didn’t learn about until years later).
I love this little video of burbling pasta sauces (sound on). Wish there was a 10-hour YT version for work background noise
I’d Be Lead Harpooner on the Pequod If It Wasn’t for These DEI Hires . I’m just telling you that it’s getting hard out there for us blue-collar Nantucket lads when all the ships’ owners are catching the Abolitionist Mind Virus.
25 things that explain America , including personal injury lawyer advertisements, Crest Whitestrips, Costco rotisserie chicken, and the Pizza Hut lamp. The T-shirt cannon merges three American obsessions: guns, sports and freebie giveaways.
This is a completely fantastic look at how the Enigma Machine works . Jared Owen constructed a 3D model of the German cipher device and clearly walks the viewer through how the electricity flows through the machine to scramble and unscramble secret messages. When electricity travels through one rotor it changes the letter once. But remember, we have three of these rotors and they each have…
How Wildfire Smoke Is Reshaping Childhood . Repeated smoke events are changing children’s daily routines, limiting opportunities for outdoor play and social interaction and reshaping how many families experience summer.
This guy hooked his hamster’s wheel up to Strava — Mollie is logging 5-6 miles per day.
Astronomers have measured the size of the largest galaxy : it’s 1.7 million light years across (17x the diameter of the Milky Way) and contains ~3.4 trillion solar masses in stars.
In this video , I’ll take you from farm to factory to show you how chocolate is made, and at the end, we’ll use all the chocolate you’ll see in this video to attempt the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest chocolate bar.
The Computer That Helped Win World War II . …it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the fascination of a Colossus at work: its sheer bulk and apparent complexity; the fantastic speed of thin paper tape round the glittering pulleys
Do you remember the video I posted last summer of YouTuber Benn Jordan where he uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird” ? So cool. Jordan is back with more data encoding tricks in his latest video, There Are Files Stored in This Video (or: How To Hide Shit In Media) . Here s his intro, which sounds completely bonkers but he demonstrates everything…
Lidar and other discoveries continue to show that the Amazon rainforest was home to a “sprawling ancient civilization much bigger than researchers expected” (possibly up to 3 million people around 100-300 CE).