1787: “Caroline Lucretia Herschel became the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist and hold a government position in the UK.” 2025: “Professor Michele Dougherty CBE FRS FRAS became the first woman appointed Astronomer Royal in the UK.”
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Two Ways To Film The Same Scene
In a review of City of Angels, the 1998 Hollywood remake of Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, Roger Ebert says:
To compare the two films is really beside the point, since “Wings of Desire” exists on its own level as a visionary and original film, and “City of Angels” exists squarely in the pop mainstream.
In his latest video, Evan Puschak leans into the vast gulf between the two films to “explore the differences in cinematic cultures and styles”. He takes a close look at the same scene in both films and what they reveal about Hollywood on the one hand and European art cinema on the other.
Two of the most promiscuous snack brands, Oreo and Reese’s, are teaming up to bring the eating public two new treats: the Oreo Reese’s Cookie and Reese’s Oreo Cups. 🫱 Is this… 🦋 innovation?
kdo rolodex · a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
-
Brad Graham (RIP)https://web.archive.org/web/20020601183825/http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/index.shtml -
Michael Sippeyhttps://sippey.com -
Joan Westenberghttps://www.joanwestenberg.com -
Swissmisshttps://swiss-miss.com -
Great Art Explainedhttps://youtube.com/@GreatArtExplained
refresh for more
The Rule of Law Is Dead in the US. “I did not write an ‘end of term’ Supreme Court review piece this year because… what’s the point? [Critiquing individual cases] feels like a guy on the Titanic complaining about the song selection from the band.”
How to Upload an Image to a Bird
Entertaining YouTuber Benn Jordan built a setup to record and analyze bird sounds, songs, and calls. He used it to record a starling who has mastered mimicking all sorts of manmade and artificial sounds in its environment, including things like the default iPhone camera shutter sound. Jordan drew an image of a bird, played it as a sound, the starling played the sound back, and Jordan was able to see his bird drawing in the decoded sound.1 That is, he uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird. 🤯
That’s the hook of the video, but the whole thing is well-worth watching (perhaps save for the last 10 minutes, which is a nerdy deep-dive into equipment) — the explanation of bird acoustics is both interesting & entertaining.
Thanks to KDO reader Liana for sending me this video three days ago, a full 48 hours before it got linked to from everywhere yesterday. *sigh* Some days I wish there were four or five of me to handle all of the cool things I run across and that people send me.
P.S. The comments on the YouTube post are worth a read:
So for a few weeks I thought I was going crazy because I would hear my Samsung dryer “Load Complete” song play but I didn’t have the dryer going and it sounded far away but not like it was in the house. On Saturday, I was out working in the yard and heard it again and there was a bird perfectly emulating the “Load Complete” song note for note! I started the dryer and from the tree the bird was in, you can clearly hear the dryer which is I guess how it learned it. Nature is so cool!
Imagine teaching a whole species of birds one song that draws a bird on a spectrogram. Suppose it survives with the species for millennia. One hell of a trip for future civilisations to find.
yeah I host my files on an AAS (Avian Accessible Storage). It’s a cloud storage solution
A Rainbow Lorikeet chose me for a partner 4 years ago. Excellent mimic. He calls my two cats to the back door, ” Here Kitty Kitty, Here Puddy Puddy” in MY voice. The cats come, expecting and looking for me. The bird then proceeds to laugh at them, with MY laugh. I’m also attempting to teach him to whistle the last stanza of the Italian national anthem.
Can you run Doom… on a bird?
- You’ll recall that this is how the Merlin Bird ID app cleverly identifies bird calls: by the image of a call’s spectrogram.↩
Motherfucking windfarms. In Europe, they’re called Royale with Breeze. (I stole that joke from Bluesky.)
Always Stand on the Side of the Egg
In 2009, novelist Haruki Murakami controversially accepted the Jerusalem prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in the aftermath of Israeli military action in Gaza. In his acceptance speech, he related a story about something he keeps in mind while writing:
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?
What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.
This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others — coldly, efficiently, systematically.
You can read the whole speech here. (via @robinsloan)
Forthcoming book from Bill McKibben: Here Comes the Sun. “Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history — if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.”
Bill McKibben: Rooftop Solar Is a Miracle. Why Are We Killing It With Red Tape? In many countries, getting rooftop solar or “balcony solar” can be as easy going to the store, buying some panels, and plugging them in. In the US, it’s not so easy.
Rebecca Solnit: The renewable energy revolution is a feat of technology. “It is nothing less than astonishing and unbelievable that we have achieved so much progress in so little time.”
The End of America as a Center of Science
Ross Anderson writes about how scientific empires, from the ancient Sumerians to the Nazis to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, have crumbled (or been willfully dismantled by ideologues) and the clear signs that the same thing is happening here in the United States under the conservative regime.
The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. “It’s very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,” Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University’s undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now.
Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science — the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others — and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility — or else be subject to correction by political appointees.
And so:
Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since [World War II]. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America’s research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”
Side effect of the Tour de France: pro riders gobbling up all the Strava top times (King of the Mountains) across France: “1,809 KOMs nabbed by the pros during the three weeks of racing”.
How conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins are hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic. “Evidence hasn’t emerged” to support that idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory. Here’s what the evidence says.
The Wirecutter’s list of the best canned cocktails. Very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this. None of these are available at my local liquor store, but we do have Barr Hill’s canned G&T, which is the best canned cocktail I’ve ever tasted.
How to Leave Substack. “Unfortunately, Substack willingly platforms, and allows bad actors to monetize, hate speech and misinformation. You should probably leave Substack.”
“Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. It couldn’t have done it without the west’s help. The current hand-wringing by Keir Starmer and other western politicians is empty bluster. They knew what was happening all along.”
Photos: Starvation and Chaos in Gaza. “Israel’s blockade of most food and aid, along with distribution difficulties inside the Gaza Strip, have driven many of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians to the brink of starvation.”
Covid safety measures drastically reduced flu deaths, but the fatality rate has risen sharply again. “90% of reported pediatric deaths this season have occurred in children who were not fully vaccinated against influenza”.
Weird & Wonderful Historical Photos From the 20th Century
From Alan Taylor at The Atlantic, whose curatorial eye I’ve always admired, “a grab bag of curious and interesting historical images from the 20th century”, including photos of the world’s largest banjo, diving archery, death-defying photography, and underwater alligator racing.
Zim&Zou’s ’80s-Inspired Paper Cassettes and Boombox Radiate with Color. Strange, now I have a hankering to watch an entire papercraft version of Do The Right Thing.
Someone Played a Perfect Game of Tetris
A perfect game in Tetris is defined as achieving the max score (999,999) in the least amount of time possible, meaning you need to score a bunch of Tetrises in a row (and nothing else) at the highest possible starting speed. A few years ago, a player used a tool to develop a sequence of moves and timing to score a perfect game, proving that it was possible. But could a human do it just by the playing the original game in the way it was intended? Well, you’ve got to watch the video to find out.
I’ve said it before — I love these Tetris analysis videos. Both aGameScout, who did the video above, and Summoning Salt (who made this feature-length video about the history of Tetris world records) are world-class at using video to explain the innovation, competition, and cooperation that allow these players to keep pushing higher and faster, past what anyone thought possible even a few years ago.
Thinking back to the Jackson Goldstone post, what I really want is a aGameScout- or Summoning Salt-caliber video about the differing riding styles of mountain bike riders, how each of them uses their own style to go faster, and where the innovations are happening. I’m sure these videos exist and I just don’t know where to find them, but if they don’t, this would be a hell of an opportunity for someone with ace communication & video editing skills.
Note to self: spend some time checking out Tapestry, Iconfactory’s universal feed/social reader app. (Old heads will remember FriendFeed…)
Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog. “Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.” There was *an actual swastika* in the push alert!
Trailer for Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, a documentary film on the comic artist who created the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus.
Archaeologists Discover a 2,400-Year-Old Skeleton Mosaic That Urges People to “Be Cheerful and Live Your Life”. This skeleton is a whole vibe.
I’m Giving My Kids a ’90s Summer — the 1890s. “Just like the 1890s and the 2020s, they’ll play with the unvaccinated kids down the street and drink raw milk until dark.” Dangerous factory jobs too!
Macbook Air M4s Are on Sale
I bought a 15” Apple Macbook Air M4 a few months ago and I love it. Of course, I loved my previous computer (an M1 Macbook Air) too, but bumping up the screen size and quality has been a game-changer for me. More speed and memory is great too for running virtual machines and waaayyy too many tabs in Chrome. And it’s still super portable.
Just the other day I urged a friend (hi, Alex!) to upgrade from an older Intel Air, so when I saw that Amazon was selling M4 Airs for a discount, I figured I’d share the good word with you folks as well:
- Apple 2025 MacBook Air 15-inch Laptop, M4 chip, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Storage. $1,199.00 (-14% off). This is the one that I have, in sky blue, which really isn’t blue so much as a vibrant, slightly shimmering gray.
- Apple 2025 MacBook Air 13-inch Laptop, M4 chip, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD Storage. $799.00 (-20% off). This is the 13-inch base model and $800 is an absurdly low price for so much computer, especially in the age of the mad king’s tariff scheme.
If you click through to either of those, there are more models with differing amounts of memory, hard drive, etc. Oh and all of them come with a 12-megapixel camera so you’ll look sharper on the screens of others during Zooms or FT calls, for better or worse. (via daring fireball)
Video Mashup Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne
Last week, I linked to a video mashup by Bill McClintock of several metal songs, saying “although the video was posted a day or two before Ozzy Osbourne died, it feels like a fitting tribute to one of metal’s true pioneers”. This morning, YouTube helpfully informed me that McClintock had since done a proper tribute in the form of a compilation of every Ozzy/Sabbath-related video mashup he’d ever done.
Rest in darkness, Ozzy. 🤘
XKCD: Kite Incident. “I don’t know. Lemme look up a map of where the jet stream goes.”
Oooh, George Saunders’ next novel comes out in January. “Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life.”
Science Is Winning the Tour de France. Data, nutrition, equipment, and training are propelling riders to performances that best the dopers of yesteryear. “In other words, Armstrong on dope then would be an also-ran next to Pogačar today.”
The Set Design of Sesame Street (Feat. Jane Jacobs)
An article about The Quintessential Urban Design of ‘Sesame Street’ with a bunch of photos? This is extremely up my alley. One of the show’s big influences when it began was Jane Jacobs’ landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which informed the set design:
“Even if you hadn’t read Jane Jacobs, that book was so huge that it was in the air,” said Benjamin Looker, who is the author of “A Nation of Neighborhoods” and an associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University.
The show’s creators, he said, were “assimilating some of the popular notions that she put into play about the value of the sidewalk and street life.”
On Sesame Street, the stoop, the outdoor-dining space in front of Hooper’s convenience store, and Elmo’s wide-open window blur the boundaries between public and private space, fostering neighborly interactions between characters.
Street noises in the background and neighbors hollering through windows signal to viewers that this block is not a wealthy one. The streetscape, Mr. Looker said, “is an extension of people’s homes.”
A friend shared that they recently visited the Sesame Street set and that is something I would very much like to do someday.
An analysis of every word that’s visible on NYC’s streets (from 18 years of Google Street View Data). “The data is astonishing; it feels like sifting through the city’s source code. For example, here’s all 111,290 matches for ‘pizza’, on a map.”
Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is going to feature an episode where all the characters are Muppetized (with puppets created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop). I love this show.
A list of the top 100 “most innovative, influential, and informative” podcasts of all time. The list includes 99% Invisible, The Big Dig, Code Switch, Heavyweight, In Our Time, Radiolab, Slow Burn, and You’re Wrong About.
Is This the Best Downhill Mountain Biker in the World?
Meet Jackson Goldstone. He’s 6 years old, lives in British Columbia, and is already ripping it up on his bike. Here’s a video of him taking the long way around on his way to kindergarten:
Wow, if he keeps riding and improving, I wonder how good this kid could be? Ok, I’m funning you a little bit because that was several years ago and Jackson is starring in GoPro videos at the age of 10 and riding the hardest trails faster and better than many adult riders:
I mean, I think Jackson could really be world-class some da— Ha, more tricks! Jackson is actually 21 years old here in the present of 2025 and is actually now one of the best downhill mountain bikers in the world. Here’s the POV video from a recent win of his:
There are a couple of notable things about this video:
1. Watch the way he goes through a bunch of tree stumps at full tilt at ~1:10 by basically jumping over the whole thing with a couple of quick hops. Adjust the playback speed of the video to 0.5 or 0.25 to see how he does it. I’ve watched this like 10 times and it’s still bonkers.
2. And then at ~1:52, he screams through a tunnel and gaps directly onto a wooden berm — and you can hear how the crowd reacts. Here’s another view of that same gap and the rest of his run:
Other riders clear that gap too, but somehow not as big or direct as Jackson does it. I don’t actually know enough about mtn biking to know how Goldstone is doing what he’s doing, but if you want a hint, check out the “Bike Jesus” section of this video that starts at ~5:30:
3. Oh yeah, and just how ungodly fast he and the other riders are going past trees and through rocks and all sorts of other lurking assailants. Blimey.
Is starvation in Gaza really Israel’s fault? The facts are clear. “Israeli officials have, for months — indeed, since the start of the war — not only admitted to working to restrict the aid that makes its way to Gaza, but bragged about doing so.”
Another piece from Hitler scholar Timothy Ryback that is uncomfortably resonant today: What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker.
José Andrés: The World Cannot Stand By With Gaza on the Brink of Famine. “There is no excuse for the world to stand by and watch two million human beings suffer on the brink of full-blown famine.”
TIL the etymology of boycott. “When Boycott set about evicting 11 tenants, the locals had had enough. The Mayo branch of the Irish Land League urged Boycott’s employees to withdraw their labor and began a campaign of isolation against Boycott.”
All the Dogs, Explained
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of dogs in the world, wild & domesticated, and how they are related to each other.
Great Danes are the tallest dogs in the world. Standing on his hind legs, the Great Dane Zeus was taller than Shaq. He could drink directly from the kitchen sink.
Watch this: Chinese EV maker BYD built a driverless car that can *jump over potholes*, has a top speed of 243mph, and can charge from 30% to 80% battery in 10 minutes. It’s a Mario Kart World kart IRL — hold ZR to Charge Jump!
New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Violated the Constitution”. “The president, tiptoeing precipitously down the sidelines of legality, inadvertently ran the constitutional football out of bounds.”
“Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.”
Is this the beginning of the end of HIV/AIDS? Lenacapavir “offers 100% protection” against contracting HIV and there are already 6 generic manufacturers lined up to produce the drug under royalty-free licensing agreements.
Hard Things Are Supposed to Be Hard
Hard things are supposed to be hard.
Changing old patterns, ending relationships you’ve outgrown, raising children, creating from your core, letting go, stretching, growing, and stepping into the unknown.
The more worthwhile endeavors require you to show up vulnerably & honestly, and they leave space for something new to happen.
From the description:
All of my familiar self-protective parts are showing up to remind me of the vulnerability that is required when I step into new places. When I let myself be someone new in the world.
I feel the anxious thoughts creep in about what could go wrong, about how I might be judged, about what could happen, about how unsafe it is to expose myself.
And then I remember that this is a normal part of the growth process, especially when you’re stepping into something you’ve never done before. My wonderful, protective, survival-oriented little brain is trying to keep me safe by pulling me back into familiar territory.
Yep. Yeeeeeeppp. Yep yep yep. (via @tressiemcphd)
Carbon chauvinism, perhaps coined by Carl Sagan, refers to the narrow-minded view that extraterrestrial life must be based on carbon because all life on Earth is.
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