Vintage Weekly Bus Passes
A collection of weekly bus passes from Milwaukee, WI. Years covered are 1930-1979. Was there a new design every single week? (via @slowernet)
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A papyrus of part of the Iliad has been discovered in a Roman-era tomb of mummies in Egypt. “The papyrus contains a passage from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, specifically the section known as the ‘Catalogue of Ships’…”
“We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knives and [started carving]. When we finally had the full alphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.”
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see full listTenfold Knottiness
While reading this article about the structure of complex knots, I ran across this diagram drawn by scientist Peter Guthrie Tait in 1885 for a paper called On Knots Part III. It’s one of two figures that together show all of the possible variations of knots with 10 crossings. I think the color plus the small multiples activated the Tufte array in my brain; anyway, I love this diagram. (via damn interesting)
(I tried for the better part of an hour to track down a high-resolution copy of Tait’s paper to no avail. There are various contenders, but nothing that includes high-res scans of both knottiness diagrams. I’m curious about this archive of the original paper but not $41 curious. If anyone has access through their institution and wants to send me a PDF, I’d love that. Update: I have a copy of the paper and will be posting updated images soon! Thank you, Michael!)
Instead of Losing Democratic Elections, What If We Just Stopped Having Them Altogether? “My goodness, imagine the efficiency. No long lines. No campaign ads. No need to pretend Wisconsin matters every four years.”
How The Heck Does Shazam Work? “By throwing away almost everything and keeping only a handful of landmark peaks, a noisy 5-second clip from a coffee shop becomes a set of coordinates precise enough to pinpoint one song out of millions.” Fascinating!
It’s Friday, Let’s Do an Open Thread
What’s on your mind lately? What’s going on in your life? Witnessed anything amazing? Anything you’d like to share with the rest of the class?
Here in Vermont, it’s barely spring (which means it’ll probably snow at least one more time before I need to start mowing the lawn). No mountain biking yet. A local theater is playing Silence of the Lambs this weekend (35th anniversary!), so I might go do that. I’ve been working on a new post editor for KDO and it’s coming along — building software and designing interfaces is fun and maddening. Autumn is going to come with some big changes for me, and I’ve been making some progress in preparing for that.
Hows about yous?
1D Chess. “You might initially find it more difficult than expected, but assuming optimal play, is there a forced win for white?”
Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed on the Michael biopic out in theaters right now: “How can you tell an authentic story about Michael Jackson without ever mentioning the fact that he was seriously accused of being a child molester?”
Twin Peaks × LCD Soundsystem: a video mashup of Dance Yrself Clean and the Twin Peaks theme music. Perfect. A damn fine cup of coffee, even.
ProPublica explores what a future without vaccines would look like in the US. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of children paralyzed, and many other children stricken with serious but easily preventable health issues.
The earliest-known recordings of whale songs (from 1949) were recently discovered in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s archive. The scientists who recorded the audio didn’t even know what they were listening to.
Eye Contact With a Humpback Whale
I’ve never seen anything like these photos before. In October 2024, Rachel Moore had a close encounter with a humpback whale in French Polynesia and took these photos of the whale’s eye. Moore wrote of the experience:
This moment of eye contact was beyond my wildest dreams. I’ve never encountered a whale like this one, and it was the most profoundly beautiful experience of my life.
Tragically, just a few days later, the whale was dead; she drowned after being struck by a boat. Moore’s photos and experience galvanized an effort to regulate a slow zone for large boats in French Polynesia during whale migration season, which became law late last year:
French Polynesia has just passed new speed regulations to better protect humpbacks during their migration. Vessels over 12 meters must now travel at 10 knots (12 knots max) within 1 nautical mile of the islands, helping prevent the kind of tragedy we never want to see again.
(via moss & fog)
Worried About Teens Today? So Were Adults in the 1920s. “A century ago, new technology and mobility reshaped what it meant to be young, linking rural life more closely to the city.”
Peak Cherry Blossoms
I got the chance to go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with friends recently and it was magical, otherworldly, lovely. I think we hit peak blossom down to the second. It was cold and gray and windy, which kept the crowds down, provided the perfect photographic contrast, and made for an enchanting petal-fall.
If you want to surf elsewhere in the galaxy, it doesn’t actually look that promising. “Surfing on Titan would likely be a surreal, slow-motion, and tenebrous experience.” Or there’s also a planet with a sulfuric acid ocean?
Traitors to the Project of Patriarchy
On a recent mini-episode of the Becoming the People podcast, Prentis Hemphill talked about traitors to the patriarchy. Here’s a short excerpt:
I only want to spend time with men who are traitors to that project, the project of patriarchy and patriarchal violence. I want to hang out with traitors and snitches and betrayers of that system. If you do not actively identify as a traitors to that system, if you don’t actively have receipts, I don’t think that a lot of people should necessarily believe that they can invest time in in you.
Here’s the full episode (which you can also listen to on Apple Podcasts):
(via @rebeccawooolf)
I love the chutzpah of this: all 35 of Shakespeare’s plays ranked. Romeo & Juliet didn’t crack the top 20 but Macbeth, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night made the top 5. Worth it for the old photos of productions feat. Ralph Fiennes, Judi Dench, Brian Cox…
“I believe in an old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work. Read the book, not the summary. Write the piece, not the prompt. Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”
This Ping Pong Robot Can Beat Elite Human Players
Sony’s AI division has designed a robot that can beat elite human players at table tennis. From the paper:
Evaluated in matches against elite and professional players under official competition rules, Ace achieved several victories and demonstrated consistent returns of high-speed, high-spin shots. These results highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains requiring fast, precise human–robot interaction.
Ace is a fine name, but I might have gone with something like WALL-E Supreme instead. (Robbie Supreme?)
I had somehow missed (or forgotten) that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, one of The Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Filming has wrapped and it’s out in theaters on Nov 26.
A group of “unauthorized users” have accessed Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, which the company recently said they couldn’t widely release because it was too dangerous. Whoopsie doodle! Maybe don’t use guessable paths for your powerful cyberattack model?
“Even the Weather Felt Expensive”
Filmmaker Noah Hawley was invited to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in 2018. Reflecting on the experience recently for The Atlantic, Hawley writes that today’s super-rich have stopped “pretending that the rules of human society apply” to them.
The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.
Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.
The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.
Daisy Grewal in 2012 for Scientific American: How Wealth Reduces Compassion.
Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.
Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West by Justin Farrell sounds like an interesting read along these same lines.
Wow, this interview! “I’ve never had an interview quite like this one with Charlize Theron.”
“In a new book called “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” [Israeli professor of Holocaust & genocide studies] Omer Bartov argues that Zionism has morphed into an ideology of extremism that led to genocide in Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 7th.”
Lessons from a 1969 documentary on Nazi-occupied France on how fascism takes root. “A former undercover British agent recalls that working-class French were eager to help him and to shelter him. Those who were wealthier preferred to stay out of it.”
A new short story from Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation, etc.) called Constellations about a mission that has crash-landed on a distant planet.
Finally! The Trailer for the Coyote vs. ACME Movie.
We thought this day would never come. But we kept the faith and now we can begin to reap the rewards: there is actually a trailer for the Coyote vs. ACME movie and the movie itself is actually coming out on Aug 28.
Quick recap of the situation so far: Ian Frazier wrote a story for the New Yorker in 1990 about an imagined lawsuit brought by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Company. Fast forward to 2022-23: James Gunn, Dave Green, Will Forte, and others make a movie based on the NYer article…and then Warner Bros. shelves the movie to take a tax write-off. Like, they are going to destroy the completed film. And now, somehow, miraculously, Warner seems to have finally done the right thing and sold the rights to the film so it can be released (which is theoretically the primary reason for their business, releasing movies).
Well, here it is at last: the new Boards of Canada album is called Inferno and it will be released on May 28. Pre-order or pre-save the album.
Jamelle Bouie on the truly unprecedented open corruption of the Trump regime. I’ve found it useful to think of DJT’s 2nd term primarily as a heist: a theft of money & power from the American people by a con man who finally found the perfect score.
Is the best literary film adaptation of the last 50 years: a) The Silence of the Lambs, b) The Princess Bride, c) The Return of the King (LoTR), d) Apocalypse Now, or e) Jurassic Park?
A French corporation was recently found criminally liable for enabling terrorism. “The court in Paris has just ruled that cynicism and an exclusive focus on profits can constitute a crime.”
The Leaf Sheep Slug: The Animal That Eats Sunshine
This is an animal called the leaf sheep:
It’s a species of slug that is partially solar-powered, like a plant. Leaf sheep are kleptoplastic organisms that steal chloroplasts from algae, store them in their bodies, and then can rely on photosynthesis for their energy needs:
The Costasiella sea slug not only looks like a succulent—it acts like one, too. One of the few animals able to photosynthesize, this tiny invertebrate (also known as the leaf slug or leaf sheep) acquires chloroplasts by munching on Avrainvillea, a paddle-shaped seaweed with a velvety texture. It then stores those chloroplasts in its own body, which enables the slug to soak up sunlight and transform it into energy—a process that also gives the mollusk its green color.
The chloroplasts are stored in the horn-shaped structures called cerata located on the slugs’ backs. Cerata evolved to increase the surface area of these animals for use in respiration and surface area is very helpful if you run on solar panels.
And they’re also cute as a button! I mean, look at these things:
Everyone Is Blaming AI for the Water Crisis. We’re Looking at the Wrong Culprit. “One drive to the work I do on the Colorado River used more than 20 times the water of everything I did with AI in 11 weeks.”
The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock. “This clock displays the current time alphabetically.” Totally deranged…I love it.
Criterion x Every Frame a Painting: The Edges of Wuxia
Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou are back with a video essay about pushing the boundaries of genre in Tsui Hark’s 1995 film The Blade.
One reason filmmakers like to work in a genre is that it gives us a pre-made box: a set of expectations, tropes, and boundaries. On the one hand, we want to play within that box, and on the other, we want to push against its edges. Tsui Hark’s The Blade is an exploration and a deconstruction of the box that is wuxia.
If you’re not familiar with wuxia, the video explains the genre; it’s basically Chinese martial arts fantasy — think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Hero. (thx, neil)
Teaser Trailer for Silo Season Three
As I watched the teaser trailer for season three of Silo, I discovered that I am very much looking forward to this new season. July 3, 2026.
Trials for a pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine: “Nearly 90% of people whose immune systems responded to the vaccine were still alive up to six years after receiving the last treatment. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is around 13%…”
“NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected organic molecules on Mars, including chemicals widely considered building blocks for the origin of life of Earth.” And: “We think we’re looking at organic matter that’s been preserved on Mars for 3.5bn years.”
It’s Getting Harder to Spot AI in Contemporary Publishing. And That’s Very, Very Bad. “The word salads that we might identify as AI today may not be the kind of machine-made writing that we will see tomorrow.”
ReciproCard: “Start by searching for your home library above to instantly see every free reciprocal agreement you qualify for.” Use this to have more options for Libby ebooks.
“The Extrapolated Futures Archive is a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction. Describe a situation you are facing, and find the SF stories that already worked through the implications.”
Nancy Friedman notes the decline in quality in movie taglines. “As movies have become louder, flashier, and more expensive, their taglines have atrophied: they’re limp, lackluster, and uninspiring.”
The 16th season of the Dissect podcast is a deep dive into Daft Punk; here’s the 1st episode.
Bodega Cats of New York
The Bodega Cats of New York project documents the working cats of NYC’s delis, bodegas, and corner stores.
The cat at the local deli wasn’t a pet. She knew the regulars. She kept the mice out. She gave people a reason to walk an extra block. And she was technically a violation of city health code.
That was six years ago. Since then, the project has documented over 150 shops, collected 13,500 petition signatures, and helped introduce the first legislation in New York City history to classify bodega cats as working animals.
Available soon in book form.
A few years back, the Mini Cooper’s taillights were designed to look like the Union Jack flag, which is fine until you turn the blinker on and it looks like an arrow pointing in the wrong direction. I hated this design the moment I saw it on the road.
The Astronomy Picture of the Day, in which the International Space Station looks like it’s landing on the Moon.
Project Plowshare: Nukes for Peace!
I’d vaguely heard of Project Plowshare but good god, what a ridiculous and dangerous waste of time and money.
At the height of the Cold War, nuclear weapons were seen not only as devices of destruction, but also as tools for progress. Project Plowshare was a bold attempt to use atomic explosions for more practical purposes: from digging canals and creating harbors to reshaping entire landscapes. This project was designed to push the limits of what seemed possible, but instead turned into an environmental disaster.
This reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons when Homer buys a gun and uses it around the house for everything, like changing the TV channel and opening beer cans. If the only tool you have is a hammer…
“Here are some things that have been found in donation bins: A live puppy. Live Japanese grenades. An 1854 tombstone for Rebecca Jane Nye. Old skulls. A stolen Frederic Remington sculpture. Customized Air Jordans made for Spike Lee.”
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