Fractal gears

Fractal Gears is fun to play around with…just keep hitting that randomize button for Sierpinski triangle-esque gear mechanisms.
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Fractal Gears is fun to play around with…just keep hitting that randomize button for Sierpinski triangle-esque gear mechanisms.
Citi Bike has improved greatly over the past year. Here’s how they did it.
A collection of old film footage of NYC, taken between 1896 and 1905, along with maps and descriptions of the locations.
Here’s the teaser trailer for the Spielberg-directed adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Hmm. (via the slick new trailer town)
Update: The full trailer has dropped.
I was about to say something about how Spielberg rarely directs animated films but BFG isn’t actually animated. Or is it? CG has gotten so good and blockbusters so reliant on special effects that it’s hard to tell what’s real. I mean, superhero movies are so laden with special effects that they might as well be considered animated. They’re all basically Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but done so seamlessly that you can’t tell Toontown from the real world.
This video is 20 minutes of the best YouTube footage from 2015 of extreme sports, marriage proposals, cute kids, funny animals, fast cars, groovy dancing, dronies, and more slow-motion GoPro footage than you could ever want to see in one lifetime. I’ve linked to a few of these videos, but generally my list of cool videos of the year would be a bit less X-TREEM. If you want to watch all 506 videos in the compilation, check out this playlist.
For the past few years, I’ve featured the season’s best gift guides from other sites and pulled out a few things from each that I think you might be interested in. Let’s get right to it.
As usual, my #1 gift guide suggestion is: make like Zuck and give to charity this holiday season. Volunteer in your area, find a worthy charity via GiveWell or Charity Navigator, or help people around the world help themselves with Kiva micro-lending. (You don’t have to worry about structuring your giving as an LLC though because you’re not rich. Just pony up regular-like.) Nicholas Kristof also shared some Gifts With Meaning recently.
Whenever I need something for my home, my first stops are always The Wirecutter and The Sweethome. The Wirecutter’s holiday guides are the best place to find the best technology buys. This food smoker, a 2Tb wireless backup drive, and a Weber grill are among this year’s picks. I am also trying to justify spending $400 on headphones because these Oppo PM-3s sound amazing.
Every household will be getting at least one of the following this year: a hoverboard self-balancing scooter, a drone, a selfie stick, an adult coloring book, or Ta-Nehesi Coates’ Between the World and Me.
My favorite gift guide this year is from Quartz. They asked a number of notable people, including Junot Diaz and Melinda Gates: what’s the best gift you’ve ever received? The result is not so much a list of products for purchase as it is a way of thinking about how to give people you love what they need and want. Unexpectedly moving. [Runner-up: Motherboard’s Best Black Friday Deals accompanied by the full text of the Communist Manifesto. Which BTW is available for purchase… ;) ]
If you’ve got kids, The Kid Should See This Gift Guide should be your gifting spirit animal. I leaned heavily on this guide in the past year for Xmas and two birthdays. Choice picks this year include LittleBits’ Gizmos & Gadgets Kit, The Roald Dahl Audio Collection, the Sprout Pencil (a pencil that grows real plants when it’s spent), and this Maps book.
I’m so sorry. You’ve missed out on the season’s best holiday gift: Edmund Halley’s personal copy of Isaac Newton’s Opticks, given to him by Newton himself. It was recently sold at auction for $1.33 million. Instead, perhaps a copy of Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe?
For the aspiring Gob Bluth in the family, the Pyro Mini fireshooter (“turn your boring wrists into flamethrowers”). And some accompanying music.
Cookbooks are always good gifts: Crossroads: Extraordinary Recipes from the Restaurant That Is Reinventing Vegan Cuisine, Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest Nopi: The Cookbook (he’s the author of the outstanding Plenty), Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes, and Kenji Lopez-Alt’s magnum opus The Food Lab. Cooking is the main thing I feel like I should be doing more of in 2016.
Some old favorites that I recommend almost every year: the Tovolo King Cube Ice Tray, Tattly temporary tattoos, the KitchenAid Professional 600 Series 6-Quart Stand Mixer, Palomino Blackwing pencils, the Kindle Paperwhite, and a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant. (If you’re getting that last one for that special someone, you’d best get a massive bow for it.)
If you have too much stuff already or if you’re shopping for the person who has everything, perhaps Marie Kondo’s bestselling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing would be appropriate?
From Eater’s 2015 Holiday Gift Guide, Maker’s Mark X Woodzee Sunglasses (made from old whiskey barrels), Pleasant Ridge Reserve Extra Aged (award winning cheese from Wisconsin!!), and a young readers edition of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Speaking of whiskey barrels, I did not find these “white oak tools that turn drinking whiskey into top-shelf occasion whiskey” on Eater’s list but am intrigued. Do they work? Or would a small barrel for aging work better?
The Verge 2015 Holiday Gift Guide recommends the Loch Ness Monster soup ladle, Solitaire Cards designed by Susan Kare, and The Art of Lego Scale Modeling.
Friends of kottke.org who make cool products include Field Notes, Tattly, Stowaway Cosmetics, Hella Bitters, printmaker David Bull, Storq maternity wear, and Cabin Porn.
From the gang at Boing Boing comes their 2015 gift guide. On it, I spotted Mark Frauenfelder’s own Trick Decks: How to Hack Playing Cards for Extraordinary Magic, Haflinger wool moccasins, the Sphero BB-8 Droid from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things.
And a few miscellaneous things I’ve noted recently: a 200-year-old bonsai tree (for $28,000…how do they ship this thing?), the 1M Hauly Heist (for the “discreet, comfortable carry of up to US$1 Million in used bank notes while minimising the risk of radio frequency tracking”), the Google Cardboard VR viewer (for the DIYers, you can even make your own), the complete set of Minecraft handbooks (my 8-year-old has read the whole set from cover-to-cover about 12 times), and Ken Burns’ restored 25th anniversary version of The Civil War on Blu-ray.
Moar liszts und zhoppin sourzus!! (Sorry, I’m getting a little punchy…) Slate Picks, Canopy, Digg Store, The Colossal Shop, Tools & Toys 2015 Christmas Catalog, Kit, Tinybop’s Loves, The Brooklyn Holiday Gift Guide, and the Food52 Holiday Gift Guide. You can also look back at past guides from this site: 2012, 2013, 2014.
Update: As a public service, here are some things you shouldn’t buy your loved ones for the holidays. Deadspin presents The 2015 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog, which includes a $1000 bar cart. But the worst holiday gift idea I’ve seen,1 hilariously demonstrated by Alton Brown at the end of this video of Amazon’s dumbest kitchen gadgets, is the Rollie Hands-Free Automatic Electric Vertical Nonstick Easy Quick Egg Cooker. You crack some eggs into the device’s hole and many minutes later, a phallic cooked egg tube comes rising out of it. I mean…
Update: A couple of additional sources of bad gifts for the holidays. Megan Amram imagined a Goop gift guide from Gwyneth Paltrow including a $4000 pair of floor-length jean shorts, a $100 bill (price: $1000), and a yoga mat made out of a Picasso painting ($106M). There’s also The Worst Things for Sale blog which features things like fart-filtering underwear, the hot dog bucket hat, and George Takei’s Eau My cologne.
Update: Phil Plait of Bad Astronomer wrote up A Holiday Telescope Buying Guide. For the casual beginner, he recommends the OneSky scope from Astronomers Without Borders. For the more advanced star hustler, Plait himself uses the Celestron C8 S-GT Advanced Computerized Telescope.
What began as an inside joke over email for bloop, a version of “Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop were written exclusively by and for black women”, is now available for all. Aminatou Sow and Jenna Wortham present the 2015 Bloop Holiday Gift Guide. Among the picks are Lenny Kravitz’s ridiculously huge scarf and the Carry-On Cocktail Kit.
This is not the worst gift ever though. A former co-worker of mine and her husband received a turtle as a wedding present. Like as a pet. Like, here’s a bunch of responsibility for a living thing you didn’t ask for. They cared for it for several months before deciding they didn’t really want a turtle (TOTALLY understandable) and released it in Central Park, which was also probably not a great decision. ↩
Joshua Foer, winner of the 2006 USA Memory Championship and author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, shows us how to memorize anything using a “memory palace” technique with the first 100 digits of pi as an example.
When you see photos of Jupiter, they’re almost always the of same view: the north pole at the top, the gaseous bands perfectly horizontal, and the Red Spot somewhere in the mix. But @robdubbin reminds us that there are other ways of looking at Jupiter. Here’s a view of the planet’s southern hemisphere:

And the northern hemisphere:

If you take photos of the whole of Jupiter’s surface and stretch it out flat, you get something like this:

That last one in particular is worth checking out at full resolution. (via @tcarmody)

Transport for London recently released a document called the London Underground Station Design Idiom, a guide to the design aesthetic of Tube stations. After an introductory chapter called “A manifesto for good design”, the document offers nine main guidelines for how Underground stations should be designed:
1. Achieve balance across the network. Good design is achieved through balance. For us, this means balance between heritage and the future, between a station’s commercial activity and its customer information, and between the network as a whole and the station as a local place.
2. Look beyond the Bostwick gates. Stations are more than portals to the Underground; they are also places to meet, eat, shop and, most importantly, they are centres of community. Many people’s mental map of London is organised by Underground stations. A neighbourhood’s identity can be enriched by truly ‘embedding’ its station in the local area.
3. Consider wholeness. Good design starts by considering the whole: the whole station (from platform to pavement); the whole of the project from engineering to surface finishing; the whole team. It’s about making sure the right people are engaged from the outset. Considering ‘wholeness’ means creating entire spaces with clear forms, which are clutter-free and legible for all users and requirements.
4. Prioritise comfort for staff and customers. Well-designed stations support staff in their varied roles so they can provide world class customer service. It is this interaction between staff, customers and the built environment that makes London Underground stations so special and distinguishes us from other metros.
5. Delight and surprise. Every Underground station should include at least one moment of delight and surprise, to improve customers’ journeys and the working environment for staff. Such moments help put the network on the map, as a world-class leader of design.
6. Use materials to create atmosphere. The quality of materials has a huge impact on the way a station is perceived by both customers and staff. High quality materials that are robust and easy to maintain make better environments. Use materials to make atmospheric spaces that are dramatic and rich in texture. Make stations more memorable to customers and better places to travel to or through.
7. Create ambience with lighting. Lighting on the Underground is used to make safe and functional environments, with maintenance and costs often dictating the choice and application of fittings with no consideration on how this impacts overall perception of space. Although lighting must be functional to improve safety and increase feelings of comfort, it can also be transformational - improving spaces, drawing attention to heritage or special features and helping customers flow intuitively through a station.
8. Integrate products and services. Good design is not just about choosing the right materials and lighting, it also involves integrating the other products and services which make up the station. All network furniture, fixtures and equipment - such as customer information, safety equipment, ticketing, poster frames, advertising, CCTV and signage - must be fully integrated into the station so there is clarity and coherence from platform to pavement and across the network.
9. Prepare for the future. By embracing new technologies and understanding their benefits we can create better-designed stations that enhance the user experience. This also means considering the life cycle of existing and new materials and products. Designing in flexibility allows our stations to better respond to new challenges, opportunities and change programmes.
Aside from some of the specifics, that’s not a bad list of guidelines on how to think about designing anything. (via mefi)
Ok, this is a little freaky. If you take a bunch of photos of a person and create a 3D simulation of their face (which is already weird but totally possible) and then use video of someone else speaking to control the 3D face simulation, you can recognize the speaker’s facial expressions and gestures in the 3D face. That sounds a little complicated but just watch the short video clip above. You can clearly see George W. Bush’s facial expressions on the faces of Obama, Tom Hanks, and Hillary Clinton…especially when he says “the legislative process can be ugly”. And the reverse is true as well: even with Bush’s facial expressions and voice, the 3D model of Obama looks like Obama. This is a whole new kind of uncanny valley.
See also real-time facial expression reenactment.
Retro Report looks back on the story of the boy in the plastic bubble.
The epitaph on David Phillip Vetter’s gravestone observes correctly that “he never touched the world.” How could he have? From a few seconds after his birth until two weeks before his death at age 12, David lived life entirely in one plastic bubble or another. Touching the world would have killed him in fairly short order. Even his two weeks outside a plastic cocoon were spent in a hospital trying, futilely, to stave off the inevitable.
There was never a child quite like David Vetter. Americans above the age of, say, 45 may remember him not so much by name as by a phenomenon of the 1970s and early ’80s: “the boy in the bubble.” The Retro Report series of video documentaries, exploring major news developments of the past, returns to that era through interviews with, among others, David’s mother and one of his doctors. More than just a look backward, the report examines medical strides that now give hope to the once-hopeless, coupled with ethical questions long part of the “bubble boy” story.
I remember very clearly watching the news reports about “the boy in the bubble” when I was a kid. Now, as an adult and a parent, the ethical concerns hit me somewhat harder. (via @DavidGrann)

Alan Taylor at In Focus has shared his list of the Top 25 News Photos of 2015.
As I have in past years, I’ll share more lists of the year’s best photos as they come in.
Update: The AP shares their Top 100 News Images of 2015. Very few of these photographs show anything good, so fair warning.
Update: In Focus has published all and three parts of a three-part series of 2015: The Year in Photos.
Update: One more from In Focus: Hopeful Images from 2015. A reminder that the good in the world vastly outweighs the bad…even if it doesn’t often make the news.
Update: Nature has a collection of the best science images of 2015. The WSJ presents their Year in Photos 2015.
Prince covered Radiohead’s Creep at the Coachella music festival in 2008. The video got yanked due to copyright infringement but it’s back up. For the moment anyway and perhaps forever…Prince’s Twitter account linked to it. (via @anildash (who else??))
One of the things I look forward to at the end of each year is David Ehrlich’s video compilation of his favorite films of the year. 2015’s installment does not disappoint.
Today, the NY Times is running an editorial by Dr. Bennet Omalu called Don’t Let Kids Play Football. Omalu was the first to publish research on CTE in football players.
If a child who plays football is subjected to advanced radiological and neurocognitive studies during the season and several months after the season, there can be evidence of brain damage at the cellular level of brain functioning, even if there were no documented concussions or reported symptoms. If that child continues to play over many seasons, these cellular injuries accumulate to cause irreversible brain damage, which we know now by the name Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a disease that I first diagnosed in 2002.
Depending on the severity of the condition, the child now has a risk of manifesting symptoms of C.T.E. like major depression, memory loss, suicidal thought and actions, loss of intelligence as well as dementia later in life. C.T.E. has also been linked to drug and alcohol abuse as the child enters his 20s, 30s and 40s.
The story of Omalu, his research, and its suppression by the NFL is the subject of Concussion, a movie starring Will Smith that comes out on Christmas Day, as well as a book version written by Jeanne Marie Laskas.
Update: Dr. James Hamblin shares the findings of a new paper on how repeated head trauma can affect the brains of kids as young as 8.
In the journal Radiology today, an imaging study shows that players ages 8 to 13 who have had no concussion symptoms still show changes associated with traumatic brain injury.
Christopher Whitlow, chief of neuroradiology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, wanted to see how head impact affects developing brains. His team studied male football players between ages 8 and 13 over the course of a season, recording “head impact data” using a Head Impact Telemetry System to measure force, which was correlated with video of games and practices.
If you take two circular magnets and slap them on the ends of a AA battery, the resulting axel will drive on a road of aluminum foil. This is called a homopolar motor and it’s one of the simplest machines you can build. How does it work? Well, it’s been awhile since my last electromagnetism class, but the homopolar motor works because the combination of the flow of the electric current (from the battery) and the flow of the magnetic current produces a torque via the Lorenz force. This short video explanation should give you a good idea of the principles involved. (via digg)

NASA’s New Horizons probe has sent back the first of the sharpest images of Pluto it took during its July flyby of the planet.1
These latest images form a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide on a world 3 billion miles away. The pictures trend from Pluto’s jagged horizon about 500 miles (800 kilometers) northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across its icy plains.
View the new image at high resolution here or watch a video scroll of the imagery:
Oh yes, I went there. Bring it, NDT.↩
In their first page one editorial since 1920, the NY Times argues for strict gun control.
But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.
It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.
I don’t really want to get into it on a sunny Saturday morning, but 1) this doesn’t go far enough for me…I’m one of those people who does want guns taken away from everyone; and 2) the media also needs to make tough choices about how and how much they cover shootings like this. CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin can’t write an essay about how she’s sick and tired of reporting on gun violence and then her network gives their viewers a guided tour of the apartment where the suspects in the San Bernardino shooting lived (which Baldwin tweeted out to her followers advising them to TURN ON #CNN).
Chris Donovan loved designing women’s shoes, so he quit his job as a telephone repairman and followed his fashion design dreams all the way to Florence. What a great video from AARP, filmed by David Friedman. You can see more of Donovan’s work on his Instagram account. (via @mathowie)
Volvo took a real dump truck, hooked it up to a remote control, handed it to a 4-year-old girl, and she proceeds to DEMOLISH a closed course with it. Man, I really needed this video today. Wonderful. (via @joeljohnson)
“DVD extras” is a phrase that’s rapidly receding in the pop cultural rearview mirror, but YouTube is chock full1 of them for many popular movies and shows. Here are a few behind-the-scenes looks at Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Bonus video: how to make a Courtesan au Chocolat from Mendl’s:
“Chock full” is another antique phrase, although I bet people will still be using “chock full” long after “DVD extras”.↩
BREAKING! Colin Nissan wrote a sequel to It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers
This account of serving on a jury during a murder trial is fascinating, from the racial issues of the jury selection to the social dynamics in the jury room during deliberations.
There’s a handwritten confession that the defendant claims he didn’t write. He says he signed a blank page that appeared later containing a confession. In the months since the arrest, changes have been made to local precincts that now allow them to record all interrogations on video. In this case, no video was taken.
The suggestion of a police conspiracy is laughable to the prosecutor, and, I will learn, to many of my fellow jurors. I suppose this is why every black man was eliminated from the jury pool. If it’s biased to presuppose police officers are corrupt, it should be considered equally biased to presuppose that they always act lawfully. Instead, it’s considered ridiculous. The presumption of innocence is dangerously misplaced.
I keep thinking of Walter Scott, whose uniformed murderer is seen on camera shooting him while he runs away, and who plants a weapon on his freshly killed corpse. While doing all this, the officer reports over police radio that Scott attacked him.
(via @robinsloan)
Jonathan Merritt writes about Fred Rogers, ordained Presbyterian minister and beloved children’s TV show host who used his faith and TV to help millions of children.
Fred Rogers was an ordained minister, but he was no televangelist, and he never tried to impose his beliefs on anyone. Behind the cardigans, though, was a man of deep faith. Using puppets rather than a pulpit, he preached a message of inherent worth and unconditional lovability to young viewers, encouraging them to express their emotions with honesty. The effects were darn near supernatural.
I watched Mr. Rogers religiously growing up, pun intended. Actual church, with its focus on rites, belief in the supernatural, and my pastor’s insistence that the Earth was only 6000 years old, was never appealing to me, but Mr. Rogers’ unconditional, graceful, and humanistic brand of religion was just perfect. I heard him say this line at the end of his show hundreds of times:
You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There is no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.
It’s easy to roll your eyes, but when you’re six or eight years old, such a simple message from someone who obviously loves you can mean everything.
From Steven Pinker’s book, The Sense of Style, here are some of the most common words and phrases that trip people up.
Bemused means bewildered and does not mean amused.
Correct: The unnecessarily complex plot left me bemused. / The silly comedy amused me.
Data is a plural count noun not, standardly speaking, a mass noun. [Note: “Data is rarely used as a plural today, just as candelabra and agenda long ago ceased to be plurals,” Pinker writes. “But I still like it.”]
Correct: “This datum supports the theory, but many of the other data refute it.”
Enormity means extreme evil and does not mean enormousness. [Note: It is acceptable to use it to mean a deplorable enormousness.]
Correct: The enormity of the terrorist bombing brought bystanders to tears. / The enormousness of the homework assignment required several hours of work.
A deplorable enormousness!
With the new Star Wars movie only a couple weeks away, fans and Star Wars scholars have gone into hyperdrive1 spinning alternate theories about what the series of movies are all about. The most popular such theory attempts to rehabilitate the worst character in the prequels, Jar Jar Binks. Because maybe he’s the most powerful Sith Lord in the galaxy? Who uses drunken fighting like Jackie Chan?
Another theorist asserts that the prequels were secretly brilliant because of a little-discussed over-arching theme related to the Jedi Code and the corruption of the Jedi.
But my personal favorite theory suggests that the past and future Star Wars movies are about ridding the galaxy of a bacterial plague carried by the Jedi.
I don’t know what Midi-chlorians actually are. They might be something like symbiotic/parasitic bacteria or archaea, they might be organelles that live inside a cell, they might even be coherent chunks of molecular code…machines living inside the very DNA of their hosts.
What I do know is what they can do. They manipulate their hosts, they control them and eventually take them over. Eventually, they force them to fight while releasing as much dark energy as they can possibly manage, because that’s how they continue their life cycle.
Being force sensitive just means you’re more heavily infested and more easily manipulated.
Update: The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker suggests that the first three Star Wars films about Luke Skywalker becoming a terrorist.
A more focused study, however, is needed to truly understand that the Star Wars films are actually the story of the radicalization of Luke Skywalker. From introducing him to us in A New Hope (as a simple farm boy gazing into the Tatooine sunset), to his eventual transformation into the radicalized insurgent of Return of the Jedi (as one who sets his own father’s corpse on fire and celebrates the successful bombing of the Death Star), each film in the original trilogy is another step in Luke’s descent into terrorism. By carefully looking for the same signs governments and scholars use to detect radicalization, we can witness Luke’s dark journey into religious fundamentalism and extremism happen before our very eyes.
Cue the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive malfunction noise…↩
Yes, yes, it is fascinating. At least when Bill Hammack, aka Engineer Guy, explains how it all works. Don’t miss the bit at the end for how quietly ingenious Lego’s injection molding process is. (via digg)
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