“As far as artist signatures go, Jan van Kessel’s seventeenth-century painting in which he spells out his own name with caterpillars and snakes must be up there with the best of them.”
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Good news! As of June 1, a transmission line is delivering hydro-generated electricity into NYC: “1,250 megawatts of clean energy directly into New York City’s power grid”. That’s around 20% of the city’s total electric load, now clean.
The Three Ways to Make a Living
Well, this is kinda depressing, courtesy of Jason Zweig’s father:
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
I aim for #2. But maybe society needs more of #3 and, it goes without saying, a whole lot less of #1. (via df)
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listTIL that Muji once sold a car. “The Muji Car 1000 was a debadged and stripped down 2-door version of the Nissan March, with the smallest engine, an automatic, steel wheels, and A/C, available in one color: white.”
The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time, including Inaccessible Island Rail, Macaroni Penguin, Morepork, Chocolate Boobook, Dickcissel, Carunculated Caracara, and Resplendent Quetzal.
The Best Thing About The Satanic Panic. “There’s a phenomenon called the rhyme-as-reason effect that says people are more likely to believe something is true if it rhymes.”
JS Crossword. “This crossword uses some lesser-known and cursed JS features, so I’d recommend it for people already somewhat familiar with JavaScript.” Diabolical.
Daft Punk, Medieval-Style
Watch and listen to bardcore trio Courseval play a cover version of Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo, a track from Discovery. This is lovely. And a banger.
Courseval have covered other popular music in medieval style, including Rihanna’s Umbrella, Take On Me by A-Ha, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, and Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.
Frozen To -22 Degrees, BYD’s New EV Just Charged To 97% In Only 12 Minutes. This is genuinely impressive — charging and driving an EV in subzero winter weather is just brutal (ask me how I know).
They’re doing a film adaptation of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Daisy Edgar-Jones will play Sadie (perfect choice) and the director is Oscar-winner Siân Heder (Coda).
The Birds of Palestine
Illustrator John Rooney has teamed up with the Middle East Children’s Alliance to produce and sell this Birds of Palestine print. Rooney on Instagram: “All profits will be going towards providing emergency assistance to children and families in what is still a dire situation in Palestine.”
TIL that Andreessen Horowitz owns/runs the NYC Tech Week event. Among other things, A16Z made Daniel Penny a partner in the firm despite no investing experience after he killed a homeless Black man on the NYC subway.
If You Take the Weasel Job Then You Must Be the Weasel. “Bilton reveals himself as a goon, a soft-peddler, a PR man, an obfuscator; the opposite of everything that 60 Minutes is supposed to be”.
Re the Patagonia vs. Pattie Gonia case: the company should sponsor her environmental efforts and part of that is a trademark agreement where each side compromises a little bit; Pattie can keep doing her thing and Patagonia is seen as an ally again.
Why Wildfire Experts Are So Worried About This Year’s Fire Season. “Key environmental indicators show that the nation is a tinderbox, gripped by widespread drought and with a light snowpack in the mountains.”
I’ve probably featured this before but always worth a re-up: “A Books Unbanned library card gives teens across the United States free digital access to ebooks and digital resources, including banned and challenged books — no matter where they live.”
Star Wars Influences: Dam Busters
The original Star Wars movie was a mashup. George Lucas and his collaborators pulled from everywhere: westerns, samurai movies, Flash Gordon, and a 1955 war film called The Dam Busters. This video shows just how closely the attack on the Death Star mirrors a scene from The Dam Busters of a group of bombers attacking a dam. The dialogue is identical in places. From the Dam Busters Wikipedia page:
Director George Lucas hired Gilbert Taylor, responsible for special effects photography on The Dam Busters, to be the director of photography for the film Star Wars. The attack on the Death Star in the climax of Star Wars is a deliberate and acknowledged homage to the climactic sequence of The Dam Busters. In the former film, rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and fire a proton torpedo at a precise distance from the target to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails, another run must be made by a different pilot. In addition to the similarity of the scenes, some of the dialogue is nearly identical. Star Wars also ends with an Elgarian march, like The Dam Busters.
You can also watch Star Wars footage with Dam Busters audio and Dam Busters footage with Star Wars audio to see just how closely the two scenes match.
Given modern IP concerns and stakes, it’s difficult to envision this type of homage working today. Star Wars came out just 22 years after The Dam Busters, which is a beloved & acclaimed movie in Britain…it’s not obscure. Imagine a movie released in 2026 by a young Academy Award-nominated director that lifts a scene wholesale from a 2004 film like The Notebook, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Million Dollar Baby — it just wouldn’t happen without a lot of lawyerly conversation. I mean, maybe Lucas had those convos with The Dam Busters filmmakers… 🤷♂️
“Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account.” And the bot just went ahead and did it.
In Post-War Japan, the US Used Quiz Culture to Help Democratize the Country. TV quiz shows “normalized participation, merit-based competition, and equal opportunity — values that contrasted sharply with the hierarchical structures [of] prewar Japan”.
Meet the Ukrainian Stunt Pilot Who Shoots Down Russian Drones
Timur Fatkullin is a Ukrainian flying ace who uses his acrobatic flying skills honed before the war to shoot down Russian drones.
When I fly close to the target, I can’t engage because there’s houses or infrastructure underneath. So we keep flying, keeping it in the searchlight, in the spotlight. And we’re not even, because it’s like 200 kilos target and we’re six tons, and it’s black Shahed in the black night. But from my aerobatics, I brought formation flying. You have to be professional, you have to be confident, practice a lot, anticipate a lot, and trust completely each other. There’s no other way. So these skills help enormously, and with this aircraft, we can stay in the air up to 4.5 hours. It’s my devotion, not just to my country, but to aviation. That’s the truth.
As you can see in this video from the NY Times, planes like these shoot the drones down using low-fi techniques: with machine guns mounted in the planes’ doorways.
One of the drone-hunting pilots, who are civilian volunteers: “Standing aside and doing nothing is impossible. For our team, it’s impossible.”
And from a different perspective, here’s a WSJ video profile of a Ukrainian drone pilot:
Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World. “A collection of the greatest political maps in history and how these images have an unmatched power to influence our thinking — and our world.”
“Serena Williams has announced her sensational return to professional tennis at 44 years old next week at the Queen’s Club in London.” Yessss.
The Illuminated Windows of NYC
For his project Windows, Dave Krugman took photos of hundreds of NYC apartment windows at night and stitched them together into ever-shifting typologies. What’s going on in each of those apartments?
Legendary film editor Marcia Lucas died last week. Lucas edited Star Wars (won an Oscar for it), Taxi Driver, Return of the Jedi, and American Graffiti. It was Marcia that suggested to George Lucas that Darth Vader kill Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Roost is a messaging app where messages aren’t instant; they travel between users at the speed of whichever bird they use to send it. Note sending is limited by the # of birds in your rookery…if they’re all out, you have to wait until one returns.
Slow blogging day today; I spent some time on the KDO undercarriage and a new little members-only feature for the Rolodex: a simple list of links to the latest posts from Rolodex sites. (Click on “Latest Posts”; like I said, it’s a wee feed reader.)
Pope Releases Encyclical On Perils Of Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Strategy. “I fear for what horrors the fan base might soon endure, but I would be negligent not to give Andor its flowers.”
Radiohead’s OK Computer reimagined as Nintendo 64 songs, featuring reworked sounds from Mario Kart, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye 007, and more.
Andor Gave Us One Of TV’s Best Monologues
Andor loves a good monologue. Among the best of them is Nemik’s Manifesto:
Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy.
And Kino Loy’s speech to his fellow prisoners on Narkina 5:
There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who’s confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us.
In this just-released episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak breaks down Luthen Rael’s “extraordinary” monologue about what he’s sacrificed for the cause.
Here’s the original scene and a transcript of the speech:
Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my — what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? EVERYTHING!
The great thing about Luthen’s monologue, which Puschak doesn’t really get into, is that it makes the viewer rethink the entire basis of the show — and of Star Wars in general. Instead of Good Guys and Bad Guys, you’re asked to consider shades of gray. These blurred lines are hinted at before, mostly through individual character arcs (Han, Anakin, Lando, Rey, Kylo), but Luthen plainly lays out the moral complexity involved: revolutions and rebellions are led by and made up of flawed people who do harmful things for the right reasons…or at least, that’s what they tell themselves, what they need to tell themselves.
Luthen, Mon Mothma, Cassian — there’s no solution to their personal trolley problem, except that they somehow have to keep living after condemning others to suffering and death. Viewed through that lens, the rest of Star Wars reads quite differently.
Infinite Jeffs is an actual physical book you can buy in which “every one of the ~550,000 words in Infinite Jest [is replaced] with ‘Jeff’ while preserving punctuation, line breaks, etc.”
How Should a Book Sound? And What About Footnotes? Footnotes present “kind of a nasty problem for an audiobook: where do the footnotes go? There is no bottom of the page in an audiobook, obviously.”
From The Mandalorian and Grogu, an extended loop of Shakari, a synth-y track from composer Ludwig Göransson. See also Niamos from Andor (composed by Nicholas Britell).
Not a surprise but nice to have the data: the Federal Reserve calculated that inflation would be much lower without Trump’s stupid tariffs.
The Backward Index
How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the words in the dictionary out backwards and organized them alphabetically into a collection called the Backward Index.
The Backward Index evidently turned out to be a useful tool in the pre-electronic age. For example, it could help identify a set of related terms that should be defined in similar ways, including open compounds (Highland pony, Shetland pony, Welsh pony), closed compounds (blocklike, clocklike, rocklike, socklike, chalklike), and morphologically related terms (phytopathological, ethological, lithological, ornithological). Thus, looking up all the diseases that end in –itis or all the doctrines and theories that end in –ism was now possible. Since rhymes depend on word endings, initial research for a rhyming dictionary also made use of the Index, where sequences such as seepy, steepy, weepy, sweepy and dorty, forty, shorty, snorty, porty, sporty, rorty, torty show up regularly.
The index of reversed words eventually grew to 315,000 entries, each one typed up by one of M-W’s many typists.
We do know a few facts. One is that they were typed up. They were typed up by the typist and I interviewed several retired Merriam-Webster employees, at least a couple of them in their 90s. And they all recall this work. They all recall the file and they say, well, that’s what the typists did when there was no manuscript for them to type. When in the process of making the Unabridged Dictionary, for example, there was an enormous amount of copy at the beginning of the project. But then as the typesetting went on, what happened was through revision and later stages of editing, there was less and less and less of the actual manuscript to type. And that left some of the typing pool available to do other projects. And their assignment was to, when they had the time, to type the headwords in the dictionary backwards.
Here are some more examples of entries from the Backward Index:
(thx, margaret)
On The Fuel Efficiency of Launching My Enemies Into The Sun. Incredibly nerdy and fun: does it require more power to eject a person from the solar system or launch them into the Sun?
The Rise & Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’. “The energy required to deceive is unsustainable. Reality is relentless. The tyrant who chooses to fight it is doomed.”
Down with -maxxing! Searching for the absolute best option isn’t always the wisest course of action. Better to make a good-enough choice so “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live”.
There are no lightsabers in The Mandalorian and Grogu, a first for Star Wars films. There are also no Wilhelm screams in the movie, which is weird because I thought I heard snippets of it everywhere (even Mando’s blaster sounded a little Wilhelm-ish).
100 Iconic Moments From Sir David Attenborough
Let’s the keep the David Attenborough love going: this is a six-hour video featuring 100 of the most iconic moments from the famed naturalist’s work. I got this via Enrique, who rightly asserts that “There’s no such thing as too much David Attenborough.”
See also Three Hours of Unbelievable Moments From Nature, Narrated by David Attenborough.
Consider the Sister: an interview with Amy Wallace. “It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her.”
I, Sisyphus, Am Ninety-Five Percent of the Way There. “Honestly, folks, we are so, so close. The summit is largely visible. It is nearly visible. There is a concept of visibility at play here that is impossible to ignore.”
Make Way for Beavers
A Tube station in West London used to have a flooding problem. Instead of opting for an expensive reworking of the landscape via reservoir & levee, local officials reintroduced a family of beavers into the area.
The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring back a vanished species and help Britain adapt to a very modern problem: climate change.
Britain is famous for drizzle, but climate change is making rainfall heavier and more erratic. Places that didn’t used to flood are now waterlogged. So scientists have enlisted some of the animal kingdom’s best flood engineers — beavers — to help.
In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek’s flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.
“They effectively turned this site into a giant sponge that can take heavy rainfall and slowly release water back into the landscape, creating a lot more resilience for flooding,” explains Sean McCormack, a local veterinarian who started the Ealing Beaver Project, named for the London borough of Ealing, where it’s located.
The beaver-engineered landscape has attracted other animals, increasing the area’s biodiversity:
“By felling trees, they’ve also opened up the canopy, and we’ve seen an abundance of biodiversity,” McCormack says.
Freshwater shrimp have appeared in the creek, he says, plus eight new species of birds, two types of bats and rare brown hairstreak butterflies, which lay their eggs on blackthorn branches nibbled by beavers.
American Wealth, Sliced Up
Using the Federal Reserve’s Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 data, Ryan Thorpe imagines a pizza party with 100 guests and 100 slices of pizza as a stand-in for the United States:
We’re having a pizza party with 100 guests! Let’s divvy up the slices the way wealth is divided among American households:
• 1 person gets 30 slices
• 9 people get 3.7 slices each
• 40 people get 0.75 slices each
• 50 people get 0.05 slices eachDig in! But watch out for “those people” trying to steal your 0.05.
I checked the math and it’s not quite 100 slices…it’s ~96.1 I whipped up a pizza pie chart (embedded above) so you can visualize how much each person gets. Is this the kind of party we Americans want to attend on a daily basis?
I imagine Thorpe rounded off some numbers for clarity. ↩
As part of the Ocean Census project, “scientists have discovered 1,121 marine species in a single year”. Discoveries include “a new species of deep-sea ghost shark, a symbiotic bristle worm…as well as corals, crabs, shrimps, sea urchins, and anemones”.
Caught In Joy: Music for Flow, Rest, and Reset
The moment I clicked through to the Caught In Joy YouTube channel, I knew I was going to love it. The description:
Over 80 albums designed to focus, flow and reset. Instrumental electronic music for you brain to wander.
And from the website:
Caught In Joy (Karol Pokojowczyk) is a multi-instrumentalist based in Florida, passionately dedicated to live composing, hardware synthesizers, and tape recording - a completely independent music project. I strive to create four albums and visual performances every month, entirely by myself.
I started my professional life as a software engineer and later became a serial entrepreneur, with a few successes along the way. After more than 30 years of working, I saved enough to fund my dream: building a home studio where I could finally focus fully on music.
In the past three years, he’s released 80+ albums and other performances, which are available for purchase on BandCamp. I’ve only had time to listen to bits and pieces of a few albums & videos, but I know a bunch of them are going into my Underscore collection very soon.1 (via johnny decimal)
Underscore is one of my favorite things I’ve ever built because it’s simple, it does exactly what I want, and I use it every day. ↩
A recent study of 2.5M scientific papers found ~146,900 fake citations, presumably hallucinated by AI. The fake citations “were not limited to a handful of bad apples but appeared across many papers, each containing a small number of fake references.”
To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant. “If a for-profit AI company signs your paycheck, might that compromise your research? By playing Aristotle to AI Alexander, do you risk your work becoming an instrument for hype-building and myth-making?”
“Observe the moth in its monumental fight for life, and do likewise. We gain life’s powers by knowing that eventually they will be taken away. There is beauty in this struggle. Murmurations of starlings occur only in the evening.”
Going Focaccia Crazy
I have a pizza oven and baked very underwhelming bread twice during the pandemic, but I’ve found it difficult to fall into a proper rabbit hole when it comes to dough-making. Focaccia might do it for me.
My daughter and I had been wanting to experiment with focaccia (and schiacciata) and so I suggested we make this Bon Appetit recipe that Alana recommended in this recent KDO recipe thread — it’s tough to resist “I am mildly famous for this focaccia. It’s bread for lazy people who love hot bread.” It’s me. I am lazy. I love hot bread.
We made it yesterday and it came out well: very delicious right out of the oven. And it was really the first time I’ve made dough where I’ve been like, “oh, I finally get why people say pizza/bread dough is a living thing”. Today we made sandwiches (mortadella, prosciutto, burrata, arugula) and they were quite good — but the focaccia crumb was pretty dense. Which sent me on a little bit of a research expedition, during which I found this video on YouTube:
Wow! Check out all those bubbles…ours didn’t look anything like that. I actually squealed when she pressed down on the bread and it sprung right back — that focaccia might be able to replace my car’s suspension. This recipe results in a more hydrated dough than the BonApp recipe does. And you work it more and it has different flour (00 instead of all-purpose). And the process looks only a little bit less lazy…manageable for me, I think. Looking forward to trying this out next!
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