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Leave it to the Auralnauts to take The Mandalorian’s solemn catchphrase “This is the way”, back it with a pulsing beat, and turn it into the banger of the summer. Ok, maybe not. But in the process, they counted 222 uses of the phrase over the three seasons of the show (and also during The Book of Boba Fett, I think).
Related: one hour of Zemo dancing from The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. (via neatorama)
A video of several women, ages 16 to 66, removing their makeup and talking about how they feel with and without it.
Lots of fun lines in this profile of Erling Haaland. He’s “Manchester City’s destroyer of worlds”, “has set upon English soccer like a wrathful angel”, and “he plays with the effectiveness of a sovereign wealth fund”.
Cool hack: NASA plans to extend Voyager 2’s mission for a few more years by diverting power set aside for a non-critical safety mechanism to scientific instruments.
Ambessa Play is a DIY wind-up flashlight kids can build. “For every kit you buy, a refugee child out of school receives one for free.”
Womprat is an extremely thorough and extensive new typeface inspired by Star Wars. Check out the character map; it includes a ton of Star Wars dingbats.
What would a world without vaccines be like? “Vaccines are likely the most important public health intervention of the last 100 years. They’ve saved over a billion lives.”
From 1898, an album of ornamental granite tile patterns available from Threlkeld Granite Co. Ltd. The company was located in the Lake District of northwest England and the quarry they operated is now a mining museum — you can read about the history of the company on their website (via present & correct)
This person’s computer screen was randomly turning off and he traced the problem to his Ikea office chair. “So folks, don’t forget to check if your Ikea chair is compatible with your screen.”
How Corporate Consolidation is Killing Ski Towns. The likes of Vail and Alterra are turning small ski towns into de facto company towns, with increasingly few opportunities for local residents and businesses to benefit.
In a video from The Royal Society, Adam Rutherford shares five data visualizations that have changed the world, including Florence Nightingale’s Crimean War mortality charts, John Snow’s map of cholera outbreaks, W.E.B. Du Bois’ data portraits of Black Americans, eugenicist Henry Goddard’s notorious (and fictional) Kallikak family tree, and Ed Hawkins’ climate warming stripes. (via open culture)
These two ads for the NY Times are really effective at communicating the breadth of the paper’s offerings and also how everything, from sneakers to climate change to gravity, is connected to everything else.
Here’s more info from It’s Nice That.
Knit Grotesk is a typeface based on Futura that’s designed specifically for hand knitting. It comes in three different weights and two styles: dots and stripes. Its designer, Rüdiger Schlömer, is also the author of a book called Typographic Knitting: From Pixel to Pattern:
Learn to knit a variety of typefaces modeled on digital designs by well-known type foundries including Emigre, Lineto, and Typotheque, and emblazon your hats, scarves, and sweaters with smartly designed monograms, letters, or words. Beginning with knitting basics, tips, and resources, and progressing through more advanced techniques, Typographic Knitting provides a systematic introduction on how to construct a variety of letter designs using different knitting techniques. This book bridges the gap between craft and design in a new way, and will delight typography connoisseurs, avid knitters, and makers looking for a novel medium.
(via print)
Former NBA star Dwyane Wade, a Florida sports legend whose daughter is trans, revealed he moved out of the state in part because his “family would not be accepted or feel comfortable there”.
So Your Kid Wants to Be a Twitch Streamer. “My son and I were out for a walk when he told me he wanted to be a streamer when he grows up. He’s 11. I instantly grew a long and bushy beard.”
I’m not going to make a habit of posting AI generated video and photography here (mainly because most of it is not that interesting) but Pepperoni Hug Spot is just too perfect a name for a pizza place to pass up. And it’s got Too Many Cooks vibes.
Samuel Arbesman is writing a book called The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Built Our Modern World — and Shapes Our Future, which he calls “a liberal arts-infused approach to the realm of computing”.
I’m totally charmed by this collection of Japanese company buildings from Spoon & Tamago that are shaped like things related to what they sell. For instance, here’s a chocolate factory that looks like a big chocolate bar:
You’ll have to click through to see the rest, which include a building for a pet food company shaped like a dachshund and tanks at a brewery painted to look like beer glasses.
ForecastAdvisor will show you which service has the best weather forecast for your zip code. It’s also fun to see where forecasts are more (San Diego) and less (Rapid City) predictable.
This video from Paul Dinning features kestrels hunting in Cornwall. I will never tire of watching raptors hovering in the wind, their wings & bodies making dozens of micro-adjustments a second so that they can keep their heads perfectly still and focused on searching for prey on the ground below. From The Kid Should See This:
Like hummingbirds and kingfishers, kestrels have the advantage of a larger accessory optic system, a sort of superhero power that detects movement and helps keep their balance, enabling unparalleled head stabilization while hovering. By bobbing their heads periodically, kestrels can estimate distances and locate prey, sometimes by seeing urine trails with their ultraviolet-sensitive vision.
Watch until the end to see a kestrel eating a still-writhing snake. 😳
See also The Perfect Head Stabilization of a Hunting Red-Tailed Hawk, This Owl Will Not Move His Head, and The Eerie Stillness of Chicken Heads.
The presence of domesticated cats in Europe happened much earlier than previously thought: 8,000 years ago rather than 1,700 years ago. “It also could be said that cats domesticated themselves. They chose us, not the other way around.”
Chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen has kinda sorta retired from the world championship of chess — “I simply feel that I don’t have a lot to gain” — but will continue to play chess in other tournaments.
So you’ve seen how an 18th century sailing battleship was built. But that was for a vessel 227 feet long that could carry around 850 people. This timelapse video shows the construction of a much larger ship: a modern-day, 1,100-foot-long cruise ship that houses 6,600 passengers. The size of this thing is just ridiculous, bordering on the obscene. It took me a second to realize that the giant thing they were constructing in the first minute of the video is in fact an engine, which, when compared to the rest of the ship, is not that big at all. Make sure you watch to the end to see the oddball paint job on the bow.
See also a timelapse of a second ship of this class being built, which focuses on different details. (via core77)
This commemorative plaque in Toronto commemorates itself. “By reading this plaque, you have made a valuable addition to the number of people who have read this plaque.”
Emily Wilson’s eagerly-awaited translation of Homer’s Iliad will be out on September 26 and is finally available for pre-order! I loved her version of The Odyssey (I read it to my kids and we all got a lot out of it).
Wilson posts a lot about her process on Twitter but hasn’t said too much about the finished book yet, aside from this tweet back in February:
It feels bittersweet to be at the end of my eleven-year labor of love, creating verse translations of the Homeric epics. I’m working through Iliad proofs, and full of gratitude that I have had this magical opportunity, to work so closely for so long with these sublime poems.
I’m excited to read the complete Homeric epic in the fall! In the meantime, you can pre-order it at Amazon or Bookshop.org.
If you, like me, are currently reading David Grann’s new book The Wager and are having trouble visualizing exactly what British Royal Navy ships of that era look like and how they work, you might want to watch this video. The 3D fly-through model ship in this video, HMS Victory, is larger and more recently constructed than any of the ships in The Wager (the biggest of which is HMS Centurion) but the basic layout and principles are the same.
On sleeping beauties, evolutionary and cultural innovations that quietly survive for long periods before achieving explosive success once conditions are right for thriving.
Josh Gluckstein makes these remarkably detailed sculptures of animals out of cardboard and paper.
Inspired by my extensive travels and volunteering through Asia, Africa and South America, I have sought to capture the presence of some of the most majestic animals I have seen by creating life-size sculptures, often made from found and recycled materials. I have continually strived to make my practice more and more sustainable, and my new collection is made entirely of recycled cardboard and paper. Its accessibility and versatility allows me to bring the animal to life and capture their character and intriguing beauty while creating zero waste.
(via colossal)
How To Start A Rocket Engine. “Liquid-fueled rocket engines operate by flowing fuel and oxidizer into a combustion chamber at high pressure in order to eject mass out of the rocket nozzle at high velocities.”
Over on Twitter, @smllwrlds is publishing a new tiny illustrated sci-fi story every day of 2023. (via linkmachinego)
The Financial Times attempts to explain the economics of Succession, including who owns how much of Waystar Royco. “Nuggets of detail about how everything works are spread thinly throughout the series.”
In a video for the Victoria and Albert Museum, sculptor Simon Smith shows us how Renaissance sculptor Donatello might have approached carving a piece from marble, which Smith calls “the Emperor of all stones”.
It’s all about trapping shadows. Carving is all about having deep cuts here and lighter here and the angle here and how the light plays on it. And certainly in relief…because relief carving like this, it’s kind of halfway between sculpture and drawing. If you’re doing a three-dimensional sculpture, if a form runs around the back you just carve it so it goes around the back, but with this you have to give the illusion of it running around the back like a drawing. You’ve got to make something look like it turns around and comes out the other side even though it really is just going into the block. And that’s all about angles and shadow and light.
The global sea surface temperature has hit a record high. “In March, sea surface temperatures off the east coast of North America were as much as 13.8C higher than the 1981-2011 average.” 13.8C higher!!
Some of the paintings attributed solely to Hilma af Klint should be understood as the work of a collective of up to 13 women, according to a new book based on recently discovered letters & notebooks of collaborator Anna Cassel.
People are turning everyday moments from their lives into short Wes Anderson vignettes on TikTok and Instagram. “As long as it’s deadpan, then you’re golden.”
A High-Tech Heist at the British Museum. “Members of Looty, a collective formed to reclaim looted art, take surreptitious 3-D scans of the Rosetta stone in order to digitally liberate it into the metaverse.”
The American Prison Writing Archive is a collection of writing from incarcerated people whose mission is “to replace misrepresentation of prisons and imprisoned people with first-person witness by those living in legalized confinement.”
When she died, Hilary Mantel was “working on a rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the overlooked middle sister Mary Bennet, to be titled Provocation”. Here’s a short excerpt of the work in progress.
My post last week about The 13 Levels of Complexity of Drumming got me interested in Larnell Lewis, but I also started going back through Wired’s Levels series to check out some of the ones I’d missed.
First up is DJ Shortkut explaining the 15 levels of turntable scratching. DJing is one of those things that I enjoy the output of but don’t know much about, so it was fun to have it broken down like that. Beat juggling is incredibly cool and looks super difficult to master. 🤯
I’ve featured this on the site before, but Toshi Omigari’s book Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type is so good that here it is again. “The definitive survey of ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s arcade video game pixel typography.”
Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close. “Culture drives politics, law and policy. It is amazingly durable, and you have to take it into account.” Pretty interesting analysis here.
The Arabic Design Archive is “a non-profit initiative that seeks to enable knowledge production about Arabic design and its history through a framework of collecting, digitizing, and exhibiting”.
MTV used to show music videos. Bravo was home to opera and jazz programming. The Learning Channel focused on educational programming. The History Channel aired shows about history. Discovery: nature shows. A&E: fine arts and educational content. Now they all air a lot of reality TV programming like Vanderpump Rules, MILF Manor (I had to look this one up to make sure it’s an actual show), and Duck Dynasty. This video from Captain Midnight explains how and why “channel drift” happened (hint: follow the money).
This is the huge “but” for current EV owners: charging away from home is a huge pain in the ass. “It’s not enough to set sales targets and offer tax credits […] we have to make it easier to charge up away from home.”
Charles Brooks takes photographs of the insides of musical instruments like pianos, clarinets, violins, and organs and makes them look like massive building interiors, enormous tunnels, and other megastructures. So damn cool. Some of the instruments he photographs are decades and centuries old, and you can see the patina of age & use alongside the tool marks of the original makers. Prints are available if you’d like to hang one of these on your wall.
And if you liked those, don’t miss these Dreamy Cave-Like Photos Taken Inside Musical Instruments. (via moss & fog)
How John Glenn’s $40 Camera Forced NASA to Rethink Space Missions. “They couldn’t just send people up into space and not capture the magic and beauty of it all.”
The Most Valuable Object to Sink With the Titanic Was a Colossal Neoclassical Painting. The artwork was La Circassienne au Bain, completed in 1814 by Merry-Joseph Blondel — the surviving owner filed a claim for $3M (in 2023 dollars).
“The true test of a civilization may be the answer to a basic question: Can it keep its children alive?” Despite being one of the richest nations on Earth, the United States is failing this test when compared to other nations.
Footage from Billie Eilish’s first festival appearance in 2017 — there aren’t more than a dozen people in attendance. From that to multiple Grammys in under three years…amazing.
During the course of my online travels, I see a lot of cool and interesting things, but this one really stopped me in my tracks. David Popa uses natural pigments to draw large format portraits on fractured sheets of ice and then photographs them from above. Wow, wow, wow. From a profile of Popa’s work at Colossal:
Because many of his works are destined to melt and be reabsorbed, Popa opts for natural materials like white chalk from the Champagne region, ochres from France and Italy, and powdered charcoal he makes himself — the latter also plays a small role in purifying the water, leaving it cleaner than the artist found it. Most pieces take between three and six hours to complete, and his work time is dependent on the weather, temperature, and condition of the sea. “The charcoal will sink into the ice and disappear from a very dark shade to a medium shade, so it has to be created very quickly and documented. No to mention the work on the ice will just crack and drift away completely, or the next day it will snow and be completely covered,” he says. “I’m really battling the elements.”
I love these so much — they remind me of self-portraits taken in shattered mirrors or fragmented mirrored surfaces, a practice I apparently engage in with some regularity.
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