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Futura, the typeface favored by the likes of filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson was also used extensively for NASA’s Apollo 11 mission (along with an American knock-off of Futura called Spartan).
Hey, public voting is open for the Tiny Awards! I was on the judging committee so I can’t tell you my favorites, but there are lots of lovingly crafted, goofy, creative sites to choose from. Go vote!
Using methods generally employed to track the evolution and spread of plants and animals over time and across geography, this paper aims to provide a scientific classification of Italian stuffed pasta shapes (pasta ripiena) and how they spread and evolved across what is now Italy. From the abstract of ‘Evolution of the Italian pasta ripiena: the first steps toward a scientific classification’:
Our results showed that, with the exception of the Sardinian Culurgiones, all the other pasta ripiena from Italy likely had a single origin in the northern parts of the country. Based on the proposed evolutionary hypothesis, the Italian pasta are divided into two main clades: a ravioli clade mainly characterized by a more or less flat shape, and a tortellini clade mainly characterized by a three-dimensional shape.
The introduction provides a short history lesson in stuffed foods:
The Italian pasta ripiena are part of a large family of Eurasian stuffed dumplings that similarly come in a wide array of shapes and forms and are known by many different names, for example, the Turkish manti, German maultaschen, Polish pierogi, Jewish kreplach, Russian pelmeni, Georgian khinkali, Tibetan momo, Chinese wonton, Japanese gyoza, and many others. It is unclear whether all dumplings had a singular origin or evolved independently, or how the remarkable diversity observed in Italy is related to the greater variation present in Eurasia. Based on linguistic similarities, it has been speculated that stuffed dumplings were probably first invented in the Middle East and subsequently spread across Eurasia by Turkic and Iranian peoples. Dumplings were known in China during the Han Empire (206 BC-220 AD), where archaeological remnants of noodles from this period were also discovered; however, in the same era, pasta had not yet made its appearance in Europe. The Italian ravioli have also been suggested to be a descendent of the Greek manti.
And then moves on to stuffed pastas native to Italy:
In Italy, ravioli are probably the oldest historically documented filled pasta, even though the early iterations of this dish evidently did not include the enclosing pasta casing. Between the 12 and 13 centuries, a settler from Savona agreed to provide his master with a lunch for three people made of bread, wine, meat and ravioli, during the grape harvest. Tortelli and agnolotti first appeared in literature much later. However, the origins of the iconic tortellini are controversial. The long-standing historical feud between the cities of Bologna and Modena over who invented the tortellini was symbolically settled at the end of the 19 century by Bolognese poet and satirist Giuseppe Ceri, who, in his poem “L’ombelico di Venere” (the navel of Venus), declared Castelfranco Emilia, a town halfway between the two cities, to be the birthplace of tortellini. According to this legend, one day, while Venus, Mars and Bacchus were visiting a tavern in Castelfranco Emilia, the innkeeper inadvertently caught Venus in a state of undress and was so astonished at the sight of the goddess’ navel that he ran into the kitchen and created tortellini in her honor. Clearly, a product as perfect as tortellini could be inspired only by Venus, the goddess of beauty.
See also How to Make 29 Different Shapes of Pasta by Hand, 150 Different Pasta Shapes, Flat-Packed Pastas That Pop Open When Cooked, and The Invention of a New Pasta Shape. (via @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social)
Susannah Breslin discovers that you can post nudity on YouTube if it’s artistic (or advertising?) “[YouTube’s policy] did not seem to allow for viewer interpretation.”
An interview with YACHT’s Claire Evans & Jona Bechtolt on that indie life. “We’re not a brand. We’re not a company. We’re human beings. Of course it’s going to change every 30 seconds. We’re following our lives.”
Ok, I did not know this, and it’s blowing my mind: we have been imaging exoplanets for such a long time that scientists have made time lapse movies of their motion around their stars. This one is a 12-year time lapse of four planets orbiting a star called HR 8799 (images from 2009-2021):
And this one of Beta Pictoris b covers a time period of 17 years (2003-2020):
HR 8799 is 133.3 light-years away from Earth and Beta Pictoris is 63.4 light-years away. That’s amazing! (via @philplait.bsky.social)
On her birthday, US Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, wore a keffiyeh & held up a “Guilty of Genocide” sign during Netanyahu’s Congressional address. “It’s shameful that members of Congress would give a standing ovation to genocide.”
Fun little browser game: What Beats Rock?
Laura Dern was forced to drop out of UCLA’s film school to star in Blue Velvet and the head of dept. called her “insane” for doing so. Now, the film is a requirement at the school. Dern: “Pisses me off.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has debuted her first ad for her presidential run and it’s a good one. First of all: Beyoncé. But also: “freedom” is a great theme for Harris. For too long Republicans have defined what that word means in America and now’s the time for Democrats to assert their vision. From the ad:
The freedom not just to get by but get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty, where we can all afford health care, where no one is above the law.
I think a lot about this 2018 Rolling Stone interview with Pete Buttigieg (when he was still mayor of South Bend, Indiana) in which he offers his thoughts on recasting “concepts that conservatives have traditionally ‘owned’ — like freedom, family, and patriotism — in more progressive terms”.
You’ll hear me talk all the time about freedom. Because I think there is a failure on our side if we allow conservatives to monopolize the idea of freedom - especially now that they’ve produced an authoritarian president. But what actually gives people freedom in their lives? The most profound freedoms of my everyday existence have been safeguarded by progressive policies, mostly. The freedom to marry who I choose, for one, but also the freedom that comes with paved roads and stop lights. Freedom from some obscure regulation is so much more abstract. But that’s the freedom that conservatism has now come down to.
Or think about the idea of family, in the context of everyday life. It’s one thing to talk about family values as a theme, or a wedge — but what’s it actually like to have a family? Your family does better if you get a fair wage, if there’s good public education, if there’s good health care when you need it. These things intuitively make sense, but we’re out of practice talking about them.
I also think we need to talk about a different kind of patriotism: a fidelity to American greatness in its truest sense. You think about this as a local official, of course, but a truly great country is made of great communities. What makes a country great isn’t chauvinism. It’s the kinds of lives you enable people to lead. I think about wastewater management as freedom. If a resident of our city doesn’t have to give it a second thought, she’s freer.
Clean drinking water is freedom. Good public education is freedom. Universal healthcare is freedom. Fair wages are freedom. Policing by consent is freedom. Gun control is freedom. Fighting climate change is freedom. A non-punitive criminal justice system is freedom. Affirmative action is freedom. Decriminalizing poverty is freedom. Easy & secure voting is freedom. This is an idea of freedom I can get behind.
Compare that to the “freedoms” that Republicans are pushing for in Project 2025 — and have been pressing on Americans even before that:
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
The Declaration of Independence stated our fledgling nation’s assertion that people are endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. It’s pretty clear which of the two parties’ interpretations of freedom hews closer to that assertion.
A recent book, Van Gogh and the End of Nature, is a “radical revisioning” of van Gogh’s work “in relation to industrial pollution and climate change”.
The Index Card is a new book by Helaine Olen and Harold Pollack about simple advice for personal finance. The idea for the book came about when Pollack jotted down financial advice that works for almost everyone on a 4x6 index card.
Now, Pollack teams up with Olen to explain why the ten simple rules of the index card outperform more complicated financial strategies. Inside is an easy-to-follow action plan that works in good times and bad, giving you the tools, knowledge, and confidence to seize control of your financial life.
I learned about their book from a piece by Oliver Burkeman on why complex questions can have simple answers.
But there’s a powerful truth here, which is that people dispensing financial advice are even less neutral than we realise. We’re good at spotting the obvious conflicts of interest: of course mortgage providers always think it’s a great time to buy a house; of course the sharp-suited guys from SpeedyMoola.co.uk think their payday loans are good value. But it’s more difficult to see that everyone offering advice has a deeper vested interest: they need you to believe things are complex enough to make their assistance worthwhile. It’s hard to make a living as a financial adviser by handing clients an index card and telling them never to return; and those stock-tipping columns in newspapers would be dull if all they ever said was “ignore stock tips”. Yes, the world of finance is complex, but it doesn’t follow that you need a complex strategy to navigate it.
There’s no reason to assume this situation only occurs with money, either. The human body is another staggeringly complex system, but based on current science, Michael Pollan’s seven-word guidance — “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” — is probably wiser than all other diets.
Burkeman wrote one of my favorite books from the past year, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.
“In supposedly affluent Western nations, the dire state or absence of public toilets has become a universal nightmare, impacting the health and quality of life of all of us, but particularly for marginalised groups.”
A study of the world’s most, and least, walkable cities (and those that rely most on public transport). Shocking but not shocking: “The 100 least active cities in the study are all found in North America.”
Some good climate news: the pace of decarbonization in the US is increasing (due in part to Biden policies); we’re on track to “reduce GHG emissions by 38-56% below 2005 levels in 2035”, which is 2-4X the pace from 2005 to 2023.
Matt Lamothe and Jenny Volvovski wrote an illustrated a new book called All About U.S. (Bookshop), which features a look into the lives of 50 kids from the US, one from each state. From the website:
All About U.S. is a non-fiction children’s book, featuring 50 real kids from each state in the United States. The goal of this book is to create an authentic portrait of the country, showcasing the diversity of its people and the vastness of its natural landscapes.
We conducted over 100 hours of interviews, received 20 hours of home tour footage and hundreds of photographs, to create the illustrations and short stories about each family.
It sounds like they worked hard at finding kids from all kinds of different backgrounds (especially with just 50 slots to fill):
- Families who live in a variety of dwellings, from houseboats and yurts to farms, Native reservations, and Air Force bases
- Children with adoptive families, stepfamilies, single-parent families, two moms or dads, and those who live with their grandparents
- Children living with health conditions such as leukemia and muscular dystrophy
- Families from a range of social, religious, and economic backgrounds
This looks like a fantastic book — you can read more about it on the website or pre-order from Amazon or Bookshop.
If you’re feeling nostalgic, here’s a version of MS Paint that works in the browser.
The Gods of Logic: Benjamín Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World) on artificial intelligence. “It is never safe to call on the gods, or even come close to them.”
Dr. Mara Einstein is an author and media studies professor with a special interest in religion & cults and she recently shared a list of books to read and movies to watch “in order to get up to speed on Project2025 and where it came from” (specifically the evangelical aspects). Her first two book picks:
Shadow Network is the best book I’ve read that explains the Republicans’ strategy over the last 50 years. You will come to hate Paul Weyrich, and rightfully so.
Anthea Butler is the chair of religion at University of Pennsylvania. [White Evangelical Racism] ties together the connection among Rs, evangelicals and the racism it tries to hide.
And her top documentary pick:
[Bad Faith] is *the* best documentary on the topic and if you don’t do anything else, watch this. It’s free on Tubi and 99 cents on other outlets.
In the latest data release, the UN’s global population peak projection was revised downward to 10.3 billion people in 2084. “The global fertility rate has more than halved since the 1960s, from over 5 children per woman to 2.3.”
Martin Pollack writes about his Gestapo father and his family, who remained Nazis in spirit after the war. “My father did terrible things during the second world war, and my other relatives were equally unrepentant.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that encapsulates the feeling of America in the 1970s more than this local news report about 13-year-old Terry “Evel Knievel” Bolinger and his attempt to jump over 10 trash cans on his bike “made from the parts of several other bikes”.
At the beginning of the segment, the reporter on the scene says of Bolinger, “There are some youngsters that know what they want to do in life from the time they can talk and walk.” And so it appears that his daredevil ways never left him:
Terry Michael “Spike” Bolinger 42, of Indianapolis, lived, loved and died riding his Harley. “Spike” passed away Tuesday, September 6, 2005 in Wishard Hospital. He was born October 7, 1962 in Indianapolis, IN.
(via the dice)
Chronic Pain is Psychedelic. “In moments of extreme pain, physical or psychological, we become stitched to the present moment. It becomes impossible not to be radically present.” See also Experiencing Grief Can Feel Like Tripping on Hallucinogens.
Flint, MI is giving pregnant residents a “cash prescription” of $1500 during pregnancy and $500/mo for the 1st year of the baby’s life. “In Flint, the poorest city in [Michigan], we are on track to eliminating infant poverty.”
In this visual essay (and video embedded above), Alvin Chang shows how science fiction movies have gotten darker and more complex since the 1950s, when many movies were set in the present with a clear existential threat that was then overcome.
But these days, it’s much more likely that protagonists also have to overcome societal forces — political movements, systemic inequality, rampant capitalism. These are basically things that seem too big to fix.
It’s also far more likely that the narrative explores inner conflicts — moral dilemmas, identity crises, and wrestling with our understanding of what it means to be human. We don’t just face outside threats; we also face threats within ourselves.
Ultimately, today’s sci-fi stories are far more likely to be a commentary on current social issues. These might be critiques of political ideologies, runaway capitalism, irresponsible innovation, human apathy, or eroding mental health.
(via studio d)
Livestream of a blooming corpse flower (you know, the big stinky one) from Milk Barn Farm. “It’s an unusual thing to find in a greenhouse in Oregon. In fact, it may be the first time one has flowered here.”
Andrea Pitzer, who wrote about about the history of concentration camps in her 2017 book One Long Night, has a piece in Scientific American about the historical parallels between Trump’s desire to expel as many as 20 million people from the country and previous concentration camps.
Trump’s plan to launch a massive deportation project nationwide — the first plank in the platform approved at his party’s convention — draws on the same flawed historical rationales and pseudoscience that built support for concentration camps worldwide in the 20th century. Early architects of these camps veiled their efforts in scientific terms while using terror and punishment to seize more power.
For example, Trump has claimed repeatedly that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. “Blood poisoning” is a medical condition; saying that foreigners are poisoning a nation’s blood is simply a slur. But perverting scientific or medical language to violate human rights and permit atrocities comes from a familiar playbook.
Again, this stuff is all right out in the open — no reading between the lines required.
A generic version of a drug that’s “as close as we’ve ever been to an HIV vaccine” could be made for $40 a year per patient (with a 30% profit). Current pricing by Gilead: $42,250 per year.
Kamala Harris is to the left of Joe Biden on health care issues, particularly when it comes to reproductive freedom, support for Medicare for All, drug pricing, and health care antitrust.
From Scientific American: What to Know about Project 2025’s Dangers to Science. Project 2025 “would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology and education.”
“Dark oxygen” source discovered on ocean floor. “The metal nodules are able to make oxygen precisely because they act like batteries”, splitting seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
I read Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s newsletter about “a more lateral approach to Mother’s Day” back when it came out in May, and while I’m not the target audience, I keep thinking about this bit on friendship:
After my mother died in 2021, my family returned home from the memorial service to find a lovely array of treats laid out on our kitchen counter: cake, flowers, rotisserie chicken, a nice bottle of wine, and a copy of the newspaper, which somehow felt like the most tender thing of all. The fridge had been stocked too. It turned out my friends Amy and Ariel had asked my neighbor for the spare key, let themselves in, and taken care of us.
This is elite-tier friendship, and at this level, we can see how much friendship at its best overlaps with mothering. There has been an emphasis over the past few years on friendship as a site of self-improvement: radical honesty, callouts, the naming of slights and hurt feelings in the service of some kind of purified, scrubbed-clean higher self. All of this is fine, but I’m less interested in this rigorous version of friendship than I am in a softer, more accepting friendship that has more in common with caregiving. I am all too aware of my flaws; I don’t really need my friends to remind me of them. Rather than demand I be better, I would rather my friends accept me as I am. Isn’t that the kind of mother we all wish we had, too? And no, you don’t need to be a mother to treat your friends to the mothering they all need. Mothering transcends the biological — every chosen family knows this.
This is also advice that can be directed inward towards a “more accepting friendship” with ourselves; e.g. “I am all too aware of my flaws; I don’t really need to remind myself of them. Rather than demand I be better, I would rather accept me as I am.”
Bodycam footage of Aston Villa midfielder Youri Tielemans shows how quick and demanding Premier League football is, even in the preseason.
An explainer and organizational toolkit from Red Wine & Blue about Project 2025. “It is frighteningly anti-democratic and goes against what the vast majority of Americans want for our country.”
Kamala Harris and her views on the climate crisis. “Harris has made clear throughout her career that she views climate change as a significant threat.”
News Happening Faster Than Man Can Generate Uninformed Opinions. “It’s getting harder and harder to come up with enough incoherent perspectives to meet the moment.”
55 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 16th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a small B&W television, synced to the present-day time. Just open this page in your browser today, July 20th, and the coverage will start playing at the proper time. Here’s the schedule (all times EDT):
4:10:30 pm: Moon landing broadcast starts
4:17:40 pm: Lunar module lands on the Moon
4:20:15 pm - 10:51:26 pm: Break in coverage
10:51:27 pm: Moon walk broadcast starts
10:56:15 pm: First step on Moon
11:51:30 pm: Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew
12:00:30 am: Broadcast end (on July 21)
Set an alarm on your phone or calendar! Also, this works best on an actual computer but I think it functions ok on phones and tablets if necessary.
Back in 2018, I wrote a bit about what to look out for when you’re watching the landing:
The radio voices you hear are mostly Mission Control in Houston (specifically Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke, who acted as the spacecraft communicator for this mission) and Buzz Aldrin, whose job during the landing was to keep an eye on the LM’s altitude and speed — you can hear him calling it out, “3 1/2 down, 220 feet, 13 forward.” Armstrong doesn’t say a whole lot…he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site. But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”. Note the change in call sign from “Eagle” to “Tranquility Base”. :)
Two things to listen for on the broadcast: the 1201/1202 program alarms I mentioned above and two quick callouts by Charlie Duke about the remaining fuel towards the end: “60 seconds” and “30 seconds”. Armstrong is taking all this information in through his earpiece — the 1202s, the altitude and speed from Aldrin, and the remaining fuel — and using it to figure out where to land.
If elected, will Trump end democracy? He Will Try. “How high do his odds of success have to be before you treat this as a genuine emergency? Is a 20 percent chance of losing our democracy too low? Is 30?”
The FCC has voted to more closely regulate prison telecom services, a move that will significantly cut the exorbitant fees that families pay to communicate with incarcerated people.
Cat Graffam combined their love of art and old technology to create a mashup of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World and the Windows XP wallpaper, using MS Paint and a mouse. You can watch how they did it in this video:
Prints of the finished product are available. (via waxy)
I had forgotten that Donald Glover got the name Childish Gambino from a Wu-Tang name generator.
No one knows exactly when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon — and we’ll likely never know for sure. “It wasn’t like an Olympic swim race where touching the wall stops the timer.”
The editors of The Lancet Microbe on the origins of Covid-19. “SARS-CoV-2 is a natural virus that found its way into humans through mundane contact with infected wildlife that went on to cause the most consequential pandemic for over a century.”
In 1934, Dorothy Thompson became the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany for writing critically & unfavorably about the regime and its leader, Adolf Hitler:
He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.
Back in America as one of the most famous journalists and women of her time, she spent the rest of the 30s and early 40s trying to warn the nation of fascism both here and abroad. In 1941, she wrote a piece for Harper’s Magazine called Who Goes Nazi?, in which she muses about which guests at a party would become Nazis.
The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him — or his wife — to dinner.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him — he despises, for instance, Mr. B — because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.
Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language — though they have never met him.
There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal — a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him — intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.
The action in Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower begins on July 20, 2024 — that’s tomorrow. “Beginning in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed…”
Deadpan comic icon Bob Newhart has died at age 94. I was a weekly viewer of Newhart in the 80s and, I’m just now realizing, followed in the footsteps of the titular character in being an NYC writer who moves to VT. 🫠
The Peregrine Falcon is the world’s fastest animal;1 it can reach speeds of more than 240 mph during dives. It uses that speed to kill other birds in mid-air. Here’s a video of a Peregrine diving and killing a duck, shot with a camera mounted on the falcon’s back.
It’s cool watching her fly around, but the exciting part starts right around 2:45. The acceleration is incredible. The same bird does a longer and faster dive in this video (at ~0:55):
Here’s what the Peregrine’s dive looks like from an observer’s point-of-view:
Our family had a lively discussion about Peregrine Falcons around the dinner table a couple of weeks ago…I can’t wait to show the kids these videos when I get home tonight. (via @DavidGrann)
Although Joseph Kittinger and Felix Baumgartner might quibble with that.↩
Heartbreaking: This Guy Has No Idea That He’s So Strange And Memorable-Looking That Everyone From His Flight Is Using Him As A Landmark To Figure Out Which Baggage Claim Area Is Theirs. “Ah, there’s that guy.”
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