“Bring back personal blogging.” I mean, absolutely. But…this is also the 78th time I’ve read this exact article since 2007 and I’m beginning to think it’s not going to happen.
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Entries for December 2022
Our First Closeup Image of Mars Was a Paint-By-Numbers Pastel Drawing
On July 15, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe flew within 6,118 miles of the surface of Mars, capturing images as it passed over the planet. The image data was transmitted back to scientists on Earth, but they didn’t have a good way to quickly render a photograph from it. They determined that the fastest way to see what Mariner 4 had seen was to print out the imaging data as a series of numbers, paste them into a grid, buy a set of pastels from a nearby art store, and do a paint-by-numbers job with the pastels on the data grid. The result (pictured above) was the first closeup representation of the surface of an extraterrestrial planet — in color, no less!
After the flyby of the planet it would take several hours for computers to process a real image. So while they were waiting, the engineers thought of different ways of taking the 1’s and 0’s from the actual data and create an image. After a few variations, it seemed most efficient to print out the digits and color over them based upon how bright each pixel was. So Mr. Grumm went to a local art store and asked for a set of chalk with different shades of gray. The art store replied that they “did not sell chalk” (as that was apparently too low for them, only convenience stores sold “chalk”), but they did have colored pastels. Richard did not want to spend a lot of time arguing with them, so he bought the pastels (actual pastels seen below), had the 1’s and 0’s printed out on ticker tape about 3in wide, and his team colored them by their brightness level (color key seen below).
Here’s a closer view of the pastels and numbers:
The choice of color palette was serendipitous:
Though he used a brown/red color scheme, the thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind. He really was looking for the colors that best represented a grey scale, since that was what they were going to get anyway. It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. It’s as if they came right out of current images of the planet.
Compare with the photography we’re getting from Curiosity these days; we’ve come a long way in the last 60 years. (via @jenniferrrrrroberts and robin sloan)
TIL that Congress passed the Clean Water Act over Nixon’s veto. “It has proved to be one of the most transformative environmental laws ever enacted.”
The Great News Quiz of 2022. How much of what happened this year do you remember correctly?
Yet another soft scrambled egg recipe from Kenji López-Alt. “You slowly stream beaten eggs into simmering heavy cream, which results in soft ribbons coated in a custardy sauce…”
Some Wonderful Things From 2022
As 2022 recedes into the rearview mirror, I took some time to go back over my media diet posts to pick out some books, movies, TV shows, and experiences from the past year that were especially wonderful. Enjoy.
Everything Everywhere All at Once. I’ve seen this a few times now and I still don’t know how the filmmakers pulled this off. A chaotic martial arts action comedy romance multiverse movie with heart? It is a miracle of a film. Definitely my favorite movie of the year and probably in the past 2-3 years.
Glass Onion. I don’t know, maybe this shouldn’t be here because I just watched it the other day, but whatever. This movie is fun. Janelle Monáe and Blanc’s bathing costume were the highlights for me.
Fortnite. The one thing I worked on more than almost anything else during my sabbatical was my Fortnite skills. My kids play and I wanted to join them, so that we could have an activity to do as a family, one that was on their turf and not mine. I’m still not great at it, but I’m more than competent now and it’s been a great addition to our routine.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Seeing this painting in person is a whole other deal. I think I stood in front of it for a good 10 minutes and then circled back later for another look.
Station Eleven. You can see the ending of this coming a mile away and it still caught me by surprise when it happened. I didn’t think I wanted to watch a TV show about a flu pandemic causing the end of civilization, but it was actually perfect.
Severance. It’s comforting to know that TV shows on these massive streaming services can still be weird. I didn’t love this as much as many other people did, Severance did keep popping up in my thoughts in the months after I watched it.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. If you’ve ever worked on a creative project with someone and that collaborative frisson felt like the highlight of your life, this book might be right up your alley.
Tár. Cate Blanchett is just ridiculously good in this.
My Brilliant Friend. The most underrated show on television? This was so much better than a lot of other shows I kept seeing praised but not a lot of people seem to be talking about it.
Kimi. Soderbergh does Rear Window + The Conversation. The direction is always tight and Zoë Kravitz is great in this.
Middlemarch by George Eliot. By far the best thing I read during my sabbatical and an instant addition to my all-time favorites list. For whatever reason, I thought this was going to be stuffy liht-tra-chure but it turns out it’s hilarious? Almost every page had me laughing out loud. The writing is exquisite and Eliot’s observations about human behavior are still, 150 years on, remarkably astute. And there’s a scene near the end of the book that is almost cinematic — she painted such a vivid picture that it took my breath away (like, literally I was holding my breath).
Her Place. This Philly spot is getting a ton of attention and end-of-the-year kudos; it’s well-deserved. The food is great but it’s the casual family-style dinner-party vibe that really makes this place special. People will try to copy this concept — it’ll be interesting to see if they can do it as well.
The Lost Daughter. Based on an Elena Ferrante book and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the acting and cinematography are the central strengths of this film. Olivia Colman & Jessie Buckley shine as an ambivalent mother at two different points in her life and the tight shots keep them smoldering the entire time.
Maus I & II by Art Spiegelman. Correctly lauded as a masterpiece.
Top Gun: Maverick. I was shocked at how much I liked this movie — a Top Gun sequel didn’t have any right to be this entertaining. Straight-up no-frills thrill ride that’s best on a big screen. Loved Val Kilmer’s scenes.
Matrix by Lauren Groff. I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what I liked so much about this book, but it has something to do with its surprising entrepreneurial bent, its feminist startup vibe. Groff’s Marie de France is one of my favorite characters of the year.
Bar Kismet. The type of place where you instantly feel like a regular. And with the ever-changing food and cocktail menus, you’ll want to become one.
Schitt’s Creek. I was worried that I wouldn’t jibe with the show’s humor — nothing worse than a comedy that isn’t funny — but it delivered so many laugh-out-loud moments that I lost count. The show really hits its stride after the first season or two when it makes you start caring about what happens to these annoying weirdos. I would have watched 10 seasons of this.
The Bear. Again, I didn’t love this as much as some others did, but my thoughts kept returning to it often.
Saap. When someone says a restaurant in Vermont is “good”, you always have to ask: “Is it actually good or just Vermont good?” Saap is great, period.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I don’t know how to think about the kind of stories that Chiang writes — they are simple and complex and deep and fantastical and familiar all at the same time. It’s the perfect kind of sci-fi for me.
The US and the Holocaust. Essential six-hour documentary series about how the United States responded (and failed to respond) to Nazi Germany’s persecution and murder of European Jews in the years before, during and after WWII. Another banger from Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. I can’t say that this book made me want to become obsessed with surfing, but maybe it made me want to become obsessed with something again. Beautifully written and personally resonant.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. All nonfiction books should aspire to be this compelling.
Mercado Little Spain. José Andrés’ Spanish version of Eataly. I’ve only been there a couple of times, but omg the food. The pan con tomate is the simplest imaginable dish — bread, tomato, olive oil, garlic, salt — but I could easily eat it every day.
Photo of the Atlantic Ocean taken by me on my trip to Portugal this summer.
New protest tactic for activists in authoritarian countries: blank sheets of paper. “It is a passive-aggressive protest against censorship, a sarcastic performance of compliance that signals defiance.”
From Stereogum’s Tom Breihan, reviews of every #1 single in the history of Billboard’s Hot 100, starting in 1958. He’s currently up to mid-2005.
Austin Kleon’s year in reading for 2022. I also loved Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. “I’m reminded that all bestsellers have this in common: they are page-turners, they make you want to turn the page.”
2022, A Look Back
In just 7 minutes, Vox takes a visual look back at the biggest events of 2022, including Ukraine, inflation, Musk/Twitter, tech layoffs, Serena retires, TikTok, the World Cup, the pandemic continues, the climate crisis intensifies, mass shootings, no more Roe, Iranian protests, the death of Queen Elizabeth, and more.
See also 2022 in Review (AP), 2022 Year in Review (Reuters), 50 Wonderful Things from 2022 (NPR), 2022 Year in Review (United Nations), 2022 in Review (New Yorker), and the Year in Search 2022 (Google).
36 Things I Learned in 2022
Inspired by Tom Whitwell’s annual list (here is 2022’s), I kept a list of interesting things I learned this year. There are supposed to be 52 things but I took much of the year off so you’ll have to manage with only 36. Enjoy!
- For the first time in history in 2020, the weight of things produced by humans (concrete, metals, plastic) was greater than the weight of the global living biomass.
- “It is physically impossible to exceed the 70-pound domestic weight limit for a USPS small flat rate box.”
- There is a species of fish called “boops boops”.
- In a recent experiment by a Turkish farmer, outfitting his cows with VR goggles that simulate being in a pasture upped milk production by 2 gallons per cow per day.
- It’s “just deserts”, not “just desserts”.
- The Sun has only rotated approximately 20 times around the galactic center.
- Of the estimated 1,300,000 to 1,750,000 people sent to the death camps of Sobibór, Bełżec, and Treblinka by the Nazis, “perhaps not more than 150” of them ended up surviving the war. 150. Not 150,000. 150. (From The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees)
- A new streaming version of Fight Club released in China changed the ending from Tyler successfully bombing a large city to him being caught by the authorities.
- An astounding statistic: approximately 1 out of every 70 Americans 65 years and older has died of Covid-19 in the past three years.
- You might be surprised to learn that the crossword puzzle wasn’t invented until 1913. I was even more shocked to learn that the word search puzzle first appeared in 1968.
- The burpee exercise was invented by Royal Huddleston Burpee Sr.
- The Mediterranean Sea mostly dried up for over 600,000 years but took less than 2 years to completely refill, often at rates of 30 feet per day, by a river moving 1000 times more water per day than the Amazon.
- “15% of the searches we see every day have never been Googled before.”
- The word “bear” is actually derived from a euphemism for the animal…we don’t know what the original name was.
- QR codes “sprang from a lunchtime game of Go more than a quarter of a century ago”.
- Abraham Lincoln is the only US president to hold a patent.
- Due to the chaotic nature of weather, accurate forecasts of more than 2 weeks are impossible.
- Cosmic latte is the average color of the universe.
- The silk of Darwin’s bark spiders is ten times stronger than kevlar.
- Because of the climate crisis (melting glaciers). Switzerland’s cartographers are having to redraw the country’s topological maps. “Only three cartographers at the agency [are] allowed to tinker with the Swiss Alps.”
- Warmlines are telephone/chat hotlines for people who aren’t in crisis but just need to vent or talk to someone.
- “Planning the Holocaust took all of 90 minutes.”
- “With the exception of a few native species that live in rotting logs and around wetlands, there are not supposed to be any earthworms east of the Great Plains and north of the Mason-Dixon Line.”
- A final score never seen before in NFL history is called a scorigami. There were 6 scorigamis in the 2021 season and a total of 1047 unique scores ever.
- Actually, it’s “E.E. Cummings” and not “e.e. cummings”.
- In a small 5-year study of basic income in Hudson, NY, “employment among the participants went from 29% to 63%” and they reported better health and personal relationships with others.
- In the 90s, Meat Loaf coached a JV girls softball team in a small Connecticut town. “To the scrappy group of girls he was trying to mold into softball players, he was Coach Meat.”
- The world’s coldest marathon is held in Yakutia, Siberia. 2022’s winner ran it in 3h 22m; the temperature was -53°C.
- In January 2022 in Norway, about 84% of new cars sold were EVs. That compares to 53% in Jan 2021.
- A 70s board game called The Campaign for North Africa takes around 1500 hours (~62 days) to complete.
- Saturn’s rings are disappearing. We only have another 300 million years to enjoy them.
- Wisconsin is home to a local delicacy called the cannibal sandwich (raw ground beef and raw onions, sandwiched between two pieces of bread).
- There are now 8 billion people in the world.
- Due to the lull in human activity, some birds changed their birdsong during the pandemic.
- The Pointer Sisters sang Sesame Street’s “Pinball Countdown” song. “One two three four five…six seven eight nine ten…eleven twelve.”
- “Gun violence recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children. We’re now living in the era of the gun.”
You can check out last year’s list here.
The company that invented MSG is making big bucks selling an MSG-byproduct to semiconductor companies. “More than 90% of personal computers have ABF insulating their processors.”
Ridley Scott is doing Gladiator 2? “The sequel will follow Lucius (son of Lucilla and the nephew of Joaquin Phoenix’s villainous Commodus).”
The McDonald’s Macbeth Sandwich
I ran across this video this morning on Instagram and I haven’t stopped laughing about it, so I thought I’d share it with you. It’s an improv by Ross Bryant from a show called Game Changer in which he makes up a commercial for a new McDonald’s product: the Macbeth sandwich.
It’s perhaps a liiiittle bit of a softball prompt for Bryant, who is a member of The Improvised Shakespeare Company, but to pull it off, he needs to be fluent in both fast food advertising and Shakespeare. The accent, timing, and delivery are perfect — somehow in the space of a minute, he does two or three highbrow/lowbrow shifts and oh, just watch the damn thing. (via rachel lopez)
The Best Headlines of 2022
Paul Fairie has compiled a list of contenders for the best headline of 2022. They include:
‘How to Murder Your Husband’ writer guilty of murdering her husband
Started Out as a Fish. How Did It End Up Like This?
Monkey that was flushed down toilet, fed cocaine now has a boyfriend
The City of Ottawa wants to hear your garbage opinions
You can click through to see the rest and vote for the winners.
The Top 15 Goals of the 2022 World Cup
Since I’m probably not alone in wanting to hang onto the magic of the World Cup a little longer, here are the top 15 goals of the tournament, featuring the likes of Messi (twice!), Rashford, Mbappe, and of course Richarlison’s incredible effort against Serbia. See also this other take on the top goals.
Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things. The history of the internet and social media, in a nutshell: “Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you.”
Winners of the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards
The annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are always a good time and 2022’s competition is no exception. You can peruse the winners and the finalists here. My favorites above are by (from top to bottom) Miroslav Srb, Jennifer Hadley, John Chaney, and Jagdeep Rajput, whose photo captures the wingspan of the sarus crane, the tallest flying bird in the world (up to 5’11”, which is almost as tall as I am!)
What Happens When a Group of 12-Year-Olds Is Left with No Supervision for Five Days?
As part of a British reality TV series in the late 2000s, two sets of 11-to-12-year-old children, one group of 10 boys and another group of 10 girls, were left by themselves in a house for 5 days. They had food, bedding, games, paint, toys, bikes, furniture, etc. They had each taken a cooking course beforehand. None of the children had met before. At any time, they could ring a bell to talk to the production team, a parent, or a child psychiatrist. They were free to leave at any time. To produce the videos above, camera crews were in the house to film, but they were not allowed to speak to the kids and could only intervene for safety reasons. (Content warning: both videos include a few instances of homophobic slurs.)
So what happened?
Initially, there’s a bit of chaos in each house but then things diverge — but not as much as you might expect. After a brief attempt at cleaning, the boys completely trash their house, eat mostly sugar, divide into factions, and somehow trash the house even more. A representative bit of narration about the boys:
The atmosphere is becoming hysterical and aggressive. Almost everything has been destroyed.
The girls also somewhat trash their house, have trouble eating regularly, and two of the girls leave early. But they also, IMO, are more successful than the boys at living together.
Two of the children have left and eight have stayed. Close friendships have grown and split apart and then re-formed. Though the girls have argued and fought, they’ve also been able to forgive each other, to comfort each other when upset, to help each other.
Some reflections and observations:
- I wonder how much the presence of cameras and their operators influenced their behavior. Clearly there was some initial showing off and pushing of boundaries, but after a couple of days, the surveillance may have receded into the background.
- Individual kids can be smart, clever, and kind but a group of them often is not. I believe this often applies to adults as well.
- Both good and bad actions are contagious within groups like this, but bad actions are easier to do and their results more difficult to undo. Like, it’s much easier to squirt ketchup all over the carpet than it is to clean it up.
- Some would watch these videos and say, “well, boys are like that and girls are like this, it’s just nature”. Others might say that girls and boys are socialized differently, resulting in more violent behavior in boys, and more relational behavior in girls, etc. I am not sure this experiment offers any clarity into what the balance is here.
- Everyone in the houses was able to exercise a high degree of personal freedom during their stay, but doing so often greatly impacted the group as a whole in a negative way. Sure, you can trash the living room if that’s what you feel like, but it ruins it for everyone, not just you.
- Watching this, I remember why I hated middle and high school so much.
- Were these “experiments” ethical? For that matter, is sending kids to American middle school ethical?
Anyway, fascinating to watch.
You Don’t Know Africa, a series of quizzes about African geography, countries, and flags. Completely embarrassed by how poorly I did on these.
Great interactive visualization of how our economy inevitably creates super-rich people. “This is the crux of the Yard-sale model. In a free market, one person ends up with all of the wealth – completely by chance.”
A Parent’s Typical Day, as Envisioned by My Child’s Preschool. “Shame on me for not reading the twelve-page weekly emails more carefully.”
The Book of Leaves
As a companion to his short film LeafPresser, Brett Foxwell’s simpler and (in my opinion) more effective The Book of Leaves is a stop motion video of 2400 different leaves arranged so that each leaf blends subtly into the next slightly different leaf.
While collecting leaves, I conceived that the leaf shape every single plant type I could find would fit somewhere into a continuous animated sequence of leaves if that sequence were expansive enough. If I didn’t have the perfect shape, it meant I just had to collect more leaves.
It’s fascinating to watch the same basic branching fractal form manifest itself into so many different shapes, sizes, and colors. I’ve posted a bunch of video tagged “mesmerizing” but I think this is the first one that actually put me in a little bit of a trance.
Foxwell’s WoodSwimmer is one of my all-time favorite internet videos. (via colossal)
What It Feels Like When Fascism Starts. An interesting review of a 1933 novel written about a Jewish family living in Nazi Germany. “Identifying that point at which all is lost is not so easy.”
Annoyed With Clear, the Company That Fast-Tracks Its Customers Through Airports? “CLEAR is simply a way to pay extra to jump the queue accessing a federally mandated process.” I hate it.
The Topologist’s Map of the World
After seeing an abstract US map where the borders between the states were preserved but the shapes of the individual states were not, Tom Comerford was inspired to design what he calls The Topologist’s Map of the World.
I describe this a a topologist’s map because topology is a branch of mathematics concerned with the way that space is connected. In topology it’s common to think of stretchy, distortable surfaces that can be moved around without being punctured or torn.
With many connections to other countries and bodies of water, countries like Russia, India, Brazil, and China are prominent on the map while the US, which only borders two other countries, is a tiny box in the corner. (via hacker news)
How Emiliano Martínez dominated the penalty area during the World Cup final. “He can be warm & lovely at first, which makes people drop their guard, leaving them more vulnerable… This ambiguity is in itself abusive and part of his strategy.”
Life Lessons for 2023
I liked Yung Pueblo’s list of life lessons from 2022 that he’s bringing into the new year. Pueblo’s bestselling Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, and Expand the Future came out back in October.
P.S. Uhhh, why doesn’t Pueblo (aka Diego Perez) have a Wikipedia page? He’s written three bestselling books and has 2.4 million followers on Instagram.
Elon Musk Can’t Fix Your Commute
In this very entertaining and informative video essay, Adam Kovacs details why Elon Musk’s futuristic transportation ideas like the Hyperloop and Boring Loop are not serious solutions to real transportation challenges. Kovacs calls them prime examples of “gadgetbahn”, which he defines as “futuristic transportation that looks cool but is unnecessarily complicated and is definitely not built for real people”. Both the Hyperloop and Boring Loop exhibit several of the main warning signs of gadgetbahn:
- Proposed by some Silicon Valley billionaire
- Carries a very small number of passengers in undue luxury
- Its main feature is also its critical flaw
- The vehicles look like futuristic sex toys
- The vehicles are referred to as “pods”
A pod in a vacuum tube with a dozen couches in it is not innovation. It’s a luxury theme park ride for people with seven-digit bank accounts. Who knows? In 100 years, the Hyperloop might become technically feasible. But until then, we need to invest in technology that we know actually works. Shiny animation won’t take you to work. Actual working, efficient transit systems will. And gadgetbahns just aren’t that.
Kovacs’ YouTube channel Adam Something contains several more entertaining critiques of Musk’s various projects and other transportation and urban projects.
A Timeline of the Evolution of Western Art Movements
From Behind the Masterpiece, a whirlwind summary of evolution of Western art movements, from prehistoric art to the Renaissance to Romanticism to Impressionism to Cubism and beyond. 23 minutes seems like the sweet spot for this kind of thing: any shorter and there wouldn’t be time to give the viewer a sense of each movement but if it were 40 minutes, perhaps many fewer people would be enticed to watch. (via open culture)
Archaeologists Uncover Nearly 170 Nazca Lines Dating Back About 2,000 Years in Peru. “Spotted in aerial photos captured by drones, the drawings feature myriad creatures like birds, snakes, orcas, and people likely created between 100 B.C. and 300 A.D.”
Talking Trash with George Eliot
I read (and loved) Middlemarch this summer and was delighted to find this surprisingly modern usage of the concept of trash-talk about halfway through the book (boldface mine):
But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate’s introduction he was helped by what we mortals rashly call good fortune. I suppose no doctor ever came newly to a place without making cures that surprised somebody — cures which may be called fortune’s testimonials, and deserve as much credit as the written or printed kind. Various patients got well while Lydgate was attending them, some even of dangerous illnesses; and it was remarked that the new doctor with his new ways had at least the merit of bringing people back from the brink of death. The trash talked on such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate, because it gave precisely the sort of prestige which an incompetent and unscrupulous man would desire, and was sure to be imputed to him by the simmering dislike of the other medical men as an encouragement on his own part of ignorant puffing. But even his proud outspokenness was checked by the discernment that it was as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog; and “good fortune” insisted on using those interpretations.
Curious if that term had been in use before George Eliot wrote Middlemarch in the early 1870s, I found Mark Liberman’s post on Language Log, where the earliest citation of the “abuse of opponents” sense of the phrase seems to be 1933. I will leave it to the etymological experts whether what Eliot meant by the phrase can be linked to the competitive speech of Muhammed Ali, Michael Jordan, and other athletes.
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