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 copying Diego Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja:
Almost every artist was a copyist up until the 20th century because as a painter you would go through certain exercises to learn how to paint. You haven’t begun to see a painting until you’ve copied it.
And I especially liked this bit:
Velázquez’s brain is on that canvas. So we’re encountering a person’s brain that doesn’t exist anymore when we’re looking at a painting by them. I’m literally interacting with Velázquez.
In a piece about Harold Fisk’s Mississippi meander maps, I wrote about art as a time machine:
It takes some imagination, but standing before a painting by Hilma af Klint, a sculpture by Bernini, or a cave painting in Chauvet, France draws you back in time in a powerful way: you know you’re standing precisely where those artists stood hundreds or even thousands of years ago, laying paint to surface or chisel to stone. Even experiencing art through prints or photographs leads the mind to consider all the cultural, political, technological, and economic things that were happening when the work was produced. Art is a doorway to past worlds.
You can see Knight’s copy of Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja and compare it with the original. (via the kid should see this)
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.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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 one from 2015:
I took this as an opportunity to listen to my favorite Death Cab song, Transatlanticism. And when are we getting a Postal Sevice Tiny Desk? Come on, we’ve been good! We need this!
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)
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 catastrophe, a catastrophe for all species including our own. And so that’s the direction of travel. Now, that direction of travel does not have to continue, but the current trend line tells us that all we are doing so far is giving rhetoric and optimism and greenwash, and not driving the levels of change that are necessary to stay within the 1.5-to-2-degree framing of the Paris Agreement.
And:
And I have to be honest and say that my judgment, my best guess as someone who’s worked on this for years, is that we are going to fail. We’re going to go to three or four degrees centigrade of warming, and we’re going to put up with — well, we won’t put up with — we’ll have to live through, or die from, all of the repercussions that that will have. That is a terrible prospect, and one that I think we have to try everything we can to avoid.
But the message of hope, if there’s any thread of hope in this, is that it is a choice to fail. We have so far repeatedly — I’m going to say “we”; what I mean is effectively our leaders, politically, academically, in the journalistic community, across the board, those people that are framing this debate — have chosen actively to fail for three decades. And when they have breakfast with their own children, I hope they are thinking about what they have deliberately, what we have deliberately, imposed upon their future.
“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.
vintage post from Jun 2014
· gift link
Tom Chiarella shares his rules for giving a eulogy.
It may hurt to write it. And reading it? For some, that’s the worst part. The world might spin a little, and everything familiar to you might fade for a few minutes. But remember, remind yourself as you stand there, you are the lucky one.
And that’s not because you aren’t dead. You were selected. You get to stand, face the group, the family, the world, and add it up. You’re being asked to do something at the very moment when nothing can be done. You get the last word in the attempt to define the outlines of a life. I don’t care what you say, bub: That is a gift.
This rule surprised me:
You must make them laugh. Laughs are a pivot point in a funeral. They are your responsibility. The best laughs come by forcing people not to idealize the dead. In order to do this, you have to be willing to tell a story, at the closing of which you draw conclusions that no one expects.
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, and some of it is probably just random bits and bobs from the movie that didn’t make it onto the soundtrack.
Anyway, if you love this album as much as I do, I’ll leave you to explore.
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.”
vintage post from Aug 2015
· gift link
This image was tweeted out by the NASA Europa Mission account the other day:
One of these images is of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, and the other eight are frying pans. Can you pick Europa out? Hint: frying pans tend not to have impact craters.
Update: The photos of the frying pans were taken by Christopher Jonassen, whose work I featured back in 2011 (which I had totally forgotten about). At the time, I even joked about the pans looking like a Jovian moon. kottke.org is a flat circle. (thx, tony)
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 different wirings on the inside. When electricity travels through all three of them it changes the letter three times.
Then at the end, we have the reflector. This also has 26 metal contacts. Inside is more wiring that connects the letters in pairs. So it goes in as one letter and then comes out as another letter.
To the right of here is the input wheel. It has 26 wires that go in and connects to the 26 metal contacts.
Let’s put this all together. Electricity flows through one of the 26 wires, let’s say the wire for the letter Y. Then it gets changed to a different letter at all three rotors. Then it hits the reflector, which again, changes the letter. And then it goes back through the rotors again which changes the letter three more times. And it comes back out on a wire that represents a completely different letter. And if you were counting, this means the letter was changed seven times.
Seriously, this is one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen of anything on YouTube — by the end of it, I was pretty sure I could now build an Enigma Machine if I needed to. (via benn jordan)
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.”
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 he says he’s going to:
This video is a very deep dive on all of the different ways that you can covertly send and receive data. I’m going to show you how to secretly store encrypted files in music that sounds completely normal to the human ear. I even made a little web app where somebody could paste a link to a Spotify song and it unlocks a completely secret separate audio stream. I’m going to show you how you can send and receive encrypted messages via ultrasound with no cell service or Wi-Fi required by turning your phone into a modem. We’re going to be exploiting Meta’s copyright protection to store ebooks inside Instagram videos. And I’m going to show you how I stored, hosted, and shared malware inside of a harmless Facebook photo of my [dog].
This is a pretty dense video and, I’m going to be honest, some of it went right over my head. But it is also genuinely mind-blowing and makes me want to watch a Sneakers-esque hackers movie where the characters do things like:
So if you ever want to send someone a selfie over PA system in a place with no Wi-Fi or cell service, I guess we’ve made that possible today.
If you want to play around with any of the stuff in the video, Jordan coded a bunch of demos and tools and put them up on his website.
I also ran across this recently: a system that can transfer data at 190 KB/s between two phones by pointing the camera of one phone at a QR video.
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).
Hey folks. I just wanted to hop in here quickly to let a cat out of a bag: I am in the midst of moving. Not going to get into the wheres, whys, and hows right now; there’s a bigger post coming at some point about all of that. I’m excited and anxious about the transition (it’s a pretty big one), but it’s been taking up a lot of time, energy, and bandwidth that I would usually be putting into KDO.
The move is happening in early Sept, and I’m probably going to be taking some time off between now and then (timing tbd) to get everything packed & organized, spend time with family & friends before I go, and generally not run myself completely into the ground. Thanks for your patience & understanding; I’m excited to get back to focusing on the site in mid-Sept. ✌️
This is an old list but still interesting: the 12 most linguistically influential American movies since 1980. If you were compiling a list of linguistically influential movies since 2000, what would be on it?
Tressie McMillan Cottom’s reading list for fighting back against Big Tech. “Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people.”
Surfing Alaska’s Turnagain Arm (home to a twice-daily tidal bore wave) can be fun (10-foot waves you can ride for miles) but also dangerous: “You need a Plan B, a Plan C and a Plan D because no one is coming to rescue you.”
In recent years, science has been learning more and more about how central the role of inflammation is to our health. “The paradox that often makes treating chronic inflammation so difficult: It can be vital and harmful at the same time.”
Huh, here’s the trailer for a new director’s cut (of sorts) of the second X-Files movie (called I Want to Believe, orig. released in 2008) that, per Wikipedia, “will restore horror elements that were previously removed”.
I don’t know what sort of neurodiverse bucket this puts me in, but I think a lot about mowing the lawn1 relative to how much time I actually spend mowing lawns (~6-7 hours per year). And so I was completely fascinated by The Pudding’s latest post on optimal lawn mowing paths and “why some people mow a lawn better than others”.
They built several digital lawns for people to mow and recorded all of their moves, how often they paused at certain times, and who mowed an optimal path.
Solving the lawn mowing problem is formally called Coverage Path Planning, and is related to one of the most famous path planning problems in computer science: The Traveling Salesman Problem.
Humans turn out to be pretty good mowers, especially those who take their time and have played some video games (including, one would assume, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Mr. Do!, and any other game where you need to worry about dead-ends).
Sarah, one of the best mowers, spent her attention unevenly on purpose. She had a theory about why.
“The bigger spaces have more cognitive load for you to figure out what the best path is. Whereas the smaller spaces…there are fewer decisions to make.”
She planned the tight, trap-prone sections carefully and winged it on the open ones.
So it’s not about thinking more or faster, but when thinking happens. That’s what a good heuristic does: it spends your attention on the decisions that matter and nothing on the ones that don’t.
The piece is interactive so you get to try your hand at digital mowing as well.
My actual lawn is very irregularly shaped with a few dead-ends & choke points and an added wrinkle that I can’t blow grass clippings into the flower beds (so I can only go one-way the “wrong way” in those areas). So every time I mow, I’m trying to figure out the optimal path so I don’t end up backtracking too much. I probably end up saving about 45 seconds of actual time but boy is it fun from an intellectual standpoint.
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