“By focusing its narrative on the tech industry itself, Halt and Catch Fire’s staying power has only increased. The story it tells still has something to say about our present-day reality.”
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For the latest episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman interviews Timothy Snyder about “how we misunderstand freedom, why truth and empathy are under threat, and what this political moment asks of us”. Millman is an *excellent* interviewer.
Endgame for the Open Web, brought on by LLM bots, content summarizing while driving no traffic, increasing paywalls for information of all kinds, locking down APIs (due to AI abuse), attacks on Wikipedia, disruption of open source communities, etc.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listNASA’s LRO found a new crater on the Moon…it’s 225 meters across and 43 meters deep. “According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years.”
The US Is the Last Big Petrostate
In a conversation with economist Paul Krugman, climate journalist David Roberts asserts that the United States and China are going in different directions in energy, one forwards and one back.
One of the grand international stories right now — though it’s very hard when you’re in the midst of as much chaos and insanity as we are to get clear about the big narratives — is that the US is basically aligning itself as the last big petrostate. We’re going to go down with the fossil fuel ship, and China is aligning itself as the first electrostate. It is rapidly electrifying its economy, and it is dominating the technologies that enable an electrostate: batteries, EVs, etc., all that stuff. So where do you think the future lies?
All these emerging nations right now are stuck on coal. The story the US is trying to tell you is “shift to LNG. It’s cleaner than coal.” You’ll get some emission reductions. And then, basically, you’ll become dependent on our LNG. And for emerging nations, that’s an enormous 50 year investment program. They’re thinking now, “well, where is the energy situation going to be in 50 years? Do we think that fossil fuels are going to win in 50 years?” By launching this war, I think we have accelerated the process of pushing emerging nations into China’s arms and faster toward clean energy. That’s going to be the big effect of all this.
Help! My Favorite Athlete Is an Idiot (Alt headline: When Sports Heroes Have Terrible Opinions). “Just root for the jersey and not necessarily the nitwit wearing it?”
Astronaut Michael Fincke was rendered unable to speak while on the ISS, prompting an evacuation to Earth. “We’re almost 100% sure that this is a space-related thing.” Uh, I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi recently; this is *exactly* how It starts.
A new study shows that since 1990, the United States has caused $10 trillion in global climate damages. China is responsible for $9T. “Our emissions have caused damage not only to ourselves, but pretty substantial damage in other parts of the world.”
Jesus Clarifies Return Will Be Strictly Limited To Carpentry Business. “My sole focus during this Second Coming will be various woodworking projects and not the establishment of a messianic kingdom.”
I love these looping GIF animations from perfectl00p that use Windows 3.1 elements (Minesweeper, Solitaire, SkiFree, Notepad).
Ultra-Rare DJ Set From Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter
For his recent London run of shows, Fred Again coaxed Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter out of his helmet and in front of the decks for a 2-hour collaborative DJ set. And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
Test footage from a slime simulator game made by former Epic Games employee Asher Zhu. You try to stay hydrated in the hot Tokyo summer by showering and drinking beverages from vending machines.
A list of chain restaurants whose names contain unusual structures, presented in decreasing order of how appealing it would be to eat in such a structure. (White Castle, Waffle House, etc.)
There’s an upside-down “H” on the facade of a Frank Lloyd Wright building in Illinois. Here’s a deep dive into how it got there.
A comparison of different sorting algorithms (bubble, merge, heap, timsort). You can run them one at a time or race all seven.
Stephen Colbert is co-writing a Lord of the Rings movie. “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is set 14 years after the passing of Frodo. Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure…”
“Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy…could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime.”
We watched Zoolander last night and right before the Derelicte DJ throws on Relax, there’s a 2-second snippet of something that sounded super familiar. It took me a bit to track it down, but it’s trance banger Free by Mono Culture.
A new edition of On Liberty, a canonical work of political philosophy, “is the first to officially name Harriet Taylor Mill as a co-author alongside John Stuart Mill”.
“COVID probably killed 150,000 more people in its first two years than official U.S. tolls show”. Not surprising when you look at excess mortality numbers for that period.
“Plain text accounting is a way of doing bookkeeping and accounting with plain text files and scriptable, command-line-friendly software.”
It’s an Open Thread #2
Hey folks. The site is going to be very light this week and early next week — I’m spending some time with my family and accompanying my daughter on some spring break college visits. I’ll be back to full force mid-next week.
In the meantime, I thought the open thread we did a couple of weeks ago was so lovely that it should be a regular thing. So, what’s going on in your world? What are you working on? Reading or watching or listening to anything good these days? How can we help you with something that’s been weighing you down?
An interview with Andy Weir about the accuracy of the science in Project Hail Mary. “I’m proud that the only true violation of physics in the story is something you have to go down to the quantum level to find.”
“Stop naming things after people, living or dead. No schools. No streets. No courthouses. No fountains. Just quit it.”
A cartographer posits that our maps should be messier. “The idea that we must have a crisp line dividing one country from another is often inaccurate when it comes to what states are actually claiming.”
This is a diabolical phishing attack. “That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers.”
This is hilarious. A man was pictured in two different photos on the same front page of a local newspaper: one of him painting a holiday sign and a gs station security cam still of him taking a wallet.
“Some countries are better positioned to weather this energy crisis than they would have been just a few years ago. That’s because of the rapid growth of renewable energy, battery systems and electric vehicles…”
Britain Has Invaded All but 22 Countries
Of the current 200 nations in the world, the British have invaded all but 22 of them. The lucky 22 include Sweden, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Bolivia, and Belarus. The full analysis is available in Stuart Laycock’s book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded.
Stuart Laycock, the author, has worked his way around the globe, through each country alphabetically, researching its history to establish whether, at any point, they have experienced an incursion by Britain.
Only a comparatively small proportion of the total in Mr Laycock’s list of invaded states actually formed an official part of the empire.
The remainder have been included because the British were found to have achieved some sort of military presence in the territory — however transitory — either through force, the threat of force, negotiation or payment.
Incursions by British pirates, privateers or armed explorers have also been included, provided they were operating with the approval of their government.
The US currently has military personnel stationed in all but 43 countries.
For instance, as of Sept. 30, 2011, there were 53,766 military personnel in Germany, 39,222 in Japan, 10,801 in Italy and 9,382 in the United Kingdom. That makes sense. But wait, scanning the list, you also see nine troops in Mali, eight in Barbados, seven in Laos, six in Lithuania, five in Lebanon, four in Moldova, three in Mongolia, two in Suriname and one in Gabon.
But the presence in most of those countries is due to diplomatic usage of military personnel. (thx, aaron)
The words shark (the animal) and shark (a predatory scoundrel) may have two different origins. “This would make ‘shark’ possibly the only word borrowed from a Mayan language into English directly.”
Parachord is “a new kind of music player that invites all your streams, local audio files, and playlists scattered across multiple services to the same party”. Interesting!
Every Fashion Designer, Explained. If you don’t know anything about fashion, this video will get you up to speed quickly. Vivienne Westwood, Nigo, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, Dapper Dan, Hubert de Givenchy, etc. etc.
300+ issues of the UK music magazine NME from 1969-1983. The ads alone are incredible.
“The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”
Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. There’s the 1631 Bible that says “thou shalt commit adultery” but James Joyce resisted some of his corrections: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”
Paris now has a cycling network bigger than Amsterdam and “more daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car”.
The Human City
Photographer and drone pilot Pio Andrea Peri captured this overhead photo of a Sicilian city called Centuripe. Perched atop hilltops, the city looks like a person from above — even on Google Maps. (via daily overview)
Gender Play in Nineteenth-Century Theater. “The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and Iago…”
A study pitted adults vs little kids to see which was better at making paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock. “The researchers found that the kids’ paintings made in this manner resembled genuine Pollocks more than did those from adult painters.”
Dawn Wilcox’s quest to chronicle the life & death of every woman in the US killed by a man. “Did women have no choice, Wilcox wondered, but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?”
Checking in with Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, kinetic machine sculptures that move under their own power along the beach. Some of the most recent versions are quick fast and can even tow humans along behind them.
Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8 billion. How good of a person do you expect her to be? “I got to thinking about all this the other day while mulling the curious, oft-repeated fact that Miuccia Prada was, in her 1960s youth, a Communist.”
“Birds in the United States are not only declining, but they are declining faster, especially in areas with intensive agriculture, according to new research.”
A generator for VHS slipcovers, cassette tape inserts, CD labels & inserts. You can paste in Spotify URLs, search for movies, etc. Really cool and fun.
The Delta Air Lines Seatback Chess Bot Will Destroy You
The chess program available on Delta Air Lines’ seatback screens is an ELO monster that can beat almost all opponents on easy mode. This guy used a series of increasingly powerful bots to see just how good the Delta chess bot is. Can it beat a grandmaster-level bot? (via clive thompson)
What does it feel like to be struck by lightning? “Some have to relearn simple things, things they’ve done their whole life — how to read, how to sing, how to ride a bike.”
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