According to this analysis of excess deaths by The Economist, roughly 3 million people globally per year are still dying because of Covid-19. “At current rates, it would kill more people in the next eight years than in the past three.”
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Entries for May 2023
From journalist & author Melissa Gira Grant, a list of recommended media about American fascism.
The Santa Clara Principles outlines standards regarding transparency and accountability in content moderation for social media platforms.
“A beluga whale long believed to be a Russian spy…” Excuse me, what?!
Seeing Beyond the Beauty of a Vermeer. Teju Cole visits the unprecedented Rijksmuseum exhibition and finds the trouble in Vermeer’s paintings. What a great read.
What Happened When I Stopped Drinking. “I put down the bottle and picked up everything else.”
How the U.S. Almost Became a Nation of Hippo Ranchers. “In 1910, a failed House bill sought to increase the availability of low-cost meat by importing hippopotamuses that would be killed to make ‘lake cow bacon.’”
You can buy a 4-inch cube of tungsten online for only $4000. Tungsten is one of the densest metals so this small cube (about the size of a pint of ice cream) weighs a whopping 41.6 pounds.
Copenhagen’s Circle Bridge
In 2015, artist Olafur Eliasson designed the Circle Bridge (Cirkelbroen) to span a canal in central Copenhagen. The pedestrian bridge was designed to slow people down a bit:
The bridge is made of five circular platforms, and it contributes to a larger circle that will form a pedestrian route around Copenhagen Harbour, where people — cycling, running, walking — can see the city from a very different perspective. As many as 5,000 people will cross this bridge each day. I hope that these people will use Cirkelbroen as a meeting place, and that the zigzag design of the bridge will make them reduce their speed and take a break. To hesitate on our way is to engage in bodily thought. I see such introspection as an essential part of a vibrant city.
Small boats can travel easily under the bridge but a section of the bridge also swings gracefully away to let larger boats pass. (via greg allen)
Wow, this report about the toxic work environment of Lost is tough to read. “I can only describe it as hazing. It was very much middle school and relentlessly cruel. And I’ve never heard that much racist commentary in one room in my career.”
Great CJR feature on news cooperative Defector. “This is our little business — we just need to have these margins, pay our employees, and that’s it.”
Doctor Who’s Jon Pertwee interviews Star Trek’s William Shatner in this clip from the early 90s. Crazy crossover! Pertwee offhandedly mentions that Steven Spielberg was interested in doing a Doctor Who reboot?!
Scientists have been able to induce hibernation in mice and rats using ultrasonic pulses. If it works in humans, we may be able to trigger suspended animation for space travel or medical intervention.
Fighting Fascism in America
In a Memorial Day reflection, historian Heather Cox Richardson highlights a pamphlet distributed by the US War Department to Army soldiers during World War II on the topic of fascism: what it is and how to combat it.
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices — either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
See also The 14 Features of Eternal Fascism, How Fascism Works, Toni Morrison’s Ten Steps Towards Fascism, and Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.
The Ancient ‘Wonder Material’ Sucking CO2 Out of the Atmosphere. “Though public awareness is low, some scientists believe “biochar” is quietly becoming the world’s first major carbon removal success story.”
The Sun, as Seen by the World’s Largest Solar Telescope
The Inouye Solar Telescope is the largest and most powerful solar telescope in the world. The telescope is still in a “learning and transitioning period” and not up to full operational speed, but scientists at the National Solar Observatory recently released a batch of images that hint at what it’s capable of. Several of the photos feature sunspots, cooler regions of the Sun with strong magnetic fields.
The sunspots pictured are dark and cool regions on the Sun’s “surface”, known as the photosphere, where strong magnetic fields persist. Sunspots vary in size, but many are often the size of Earth, if not larger. Complex sunspots or groups of sunspots can be the source of explosive events like flares and coronal mass ejections that generate solar storms. These energetic and eruptive phenomena influence the outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun, the heliosphere, with the potential to impact Earth and our critical infrastructure.
In the quiet regions of the Sun, the images show convection cells in the photosphere displaying a bright pattern of hot, upward-flowing plasma (granules) surrounded by darker lanes of cooler, down-flowing solar plasma. In the atmospheric layer above the photosphere, called the chromosphere, we see dark, elongated fibrils originating from locations of small-scale magnetic field accumulations.
(via petapixel)
I like the Tom Wambsgans triple play theory of how Succession is going to end. (And remember, the first episode of the series featured….a softball game.)
Watch Tarkovsky’s Best Films Online for Free
Mosfilm, one of the largest film studios in the USSR during the Soviet era, has put full-length versions of many of its most acclaimed and influential films on YouTube for free, including six of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films: Stalker, Solaris, Ivan’s Childhood, The Mirror, Andrei Rublev, and The Passion According to Andrei. Also available is Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein. Several of these movies appear on Sight and Sound’s 2022 list of the best 100 movies of all time. (via @irwin)
Finally, they’ve ported Tetris to a Chicken McNugget. The plastic nugget handheld is available at Chinese McDonald’s restaurants for around $4.25.
The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth
Oh this is so nerdy and great: Veritasium introduces us to Micromouse, a maze-solving competition in which robotic mice compete to see which one is the fastest through a maze. The competitions have been held since the late 70s and today’s mice are marvels of engineering and software, the result of decades of small improvements alongside bigger jumps in performance.
I love stuff like this because the narrow scope (single vehicle, standard maze), easily understood constraints, and timed runs, combined with Veritasium’s excellent presentation, makes it really easy to understand how innovation works. The cars got faster, smaller, and learned to corner better, but those improvements created new challenges which needed other solutions to overcome to bring the times down even more. So cool.
Building a Scale Model of Time
The length of a human life is around 80 years. You might get 100 if you’re lucky. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. The vast difference between a human lifespan and the age of the universe can be difficult to grasp — even the words we use in attempting to describe it (like “vast”) are comically insufficient.
To help us visualize what a difference of eight orders of magnitude might look like, Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh have created a scale model of time in the Mojave Desert, from the Big Bang to the present day. This is really worth watching and likely to make you think some big think thoughts about your place in the universe and in your life.
This is a followup of the scale model of the solar system they built and a video they made about people seeing the Moon through a telescope for the first time.
See also a behind-the-scenes: How We Built a Scale Model of Time. (via colossal)
The Tesla Model Y is now the best-selling car in the world, beating out the Toyota Corolla. The over-reliance on cars is still a big issue, but an EV topping the best-seller list right now is a small bit of good news re: the climate crisis.
A Day in the Life of a Woke Third-Grade Teacher, as Imagined by a Far-Right Politician. “I pull into the parking lot and say hello to the drag queen we recently hired as the school librarian.”
From Slashfilm, a list of the Top 100 Movies Of All Time. More accurate to call this a list of favorite movies rather than the best ones…lots of crowd-pleasing comedies on here.
How Does Humor Intersect With Grief and Fear?
Last week, popular YouTuber, author, and science communicator Hank Green announced that he had cancer (very treatable Hodgkin’s lymphoma). His video announcement was part of a series of back-and-forth videos he does with his brother John Green, popular YouTuber and novelist. John replied to Hank’s video with a short one of his own, noting that humor is one way that people deal with grief but also a way in which we can accompany people through tough times.
To work, the humor has to feel like love rather than judgment, like inclusion rather than stigma, and like celebration rather than dismissal. And that’s a tough balance. Sometimes well-intentioned people, including me, get it wrong. And it also depends on, like, who’s saying it and the context.
Good luck and my warmest thoughts to the Greens and their family as they navigate this difficult time. And, you know, fuck cancer.
Target Removes All Towels From Stores After Soaking-Wet Lunatic Objects To Dryness. “The towels were never meant to force a bone-dry lifestyle on any sopping maniac…”
Tina Turner Brought Rock & Roll Back Home To Black Women. “Black women could be rock stars because Tina Turner said so. Black women could be country singers.”
The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion. “The oldest video games are now about seventy years old, and their stories are disappearing.”
Henry Kissinger turns 100 this week and he’s still a war criminal. “Whatever his accomplishments, his legacy includes an enormous pile of corpses. This is a birthday that warrants no celebration.”
Andy Warhol’s early embrace of the Amiga computer for digital art creation hints at how he might have felt about generative AI tools.
Visualizations of American Household Types
Based on data from a 2021 survey, FlowingData made these cool infographics of all of the different types of households in the United States. Here are the ten most common:
Single homeowners are the most common but look at #9: inmate. Shameful.
Great step-by-step guide for would-be book banners: What do I do if I don’t like a book at the library?
Turns out that Pedro Pascal doesn’t spend that much time in his Mandalorian suit on shoots — he’s got two stand-ins who wear it most of the time and Pascal does voiceovers.
It’s Just Business
Whenever I hear someone say “it’s just business” in order to magically justify some decision to ignore the humanity of individual people, I remember that it’s adapted from a line in The Godfather spoken by Michael Corleone at the precise moment when he decides to become a murderous sociopath. We should maybe stop running businesses like fictional mafia families.
“American cheese is not a quality product. In fact, its lack of quality is often the point, a grand embrace of the lowbrow and cheap that is the cornerstone of so much comfort food.” (I love American cheese.)
Hand Talk
Hand Talk sign language has been used by indigenous communities for thousands of years as a lingua franca between groups and tribes that didn’t share a common spoken language. Hand Talk is an endangered language — the US government tried to eradicate indigenous languages starting the late 1800s — but it’s still in use today.
This was fascinating. For example, as with all languages, Hand Talk vocabulary reveals how they thought about everyday concepts like time:
For example, let’s take the simple question: “How old are you?” First, there’s a single sign for “question.” So for a question about someone’s age, you’d use the motion for question with the motion for “winter”. How many winters are you? That’s what I ask. In PISL you measure months by moons, days by the sun. And to refer to different times of day, you would show hand placement according to the position of the sun in the sky. So this sign for morning, afternoon, or night.
Hand Talk was also one of the influences on ASL and the borrowing of vocabulary between the two language groups continues.
Cool Pac-Man arcade cabinet set coming soon from Lego. There’s a crank on the side that simulates Pac-Man chasing the ghosts.
A Paralyzed Man Can Walk Naturally Again With Brain and Spine Implants. “The brain-spine interface…took advantage of an AI thought decoder to read Mr. Oskam’s intentions…and match them to muscle movements.”
Tina Turner has died at the age of 83. “With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.” Simply the best.
Wendy’s is testing a scheme to deliver takeout food to people’s cars using what sounds like a robotic dumbwaiter or pneumatic tube system.
How Should We Feel about Barnes and Noble Now? “They are putting on the costume and language of a pretty neighborhood independent bookstore, but their inner mechanics are still all big-box chain corporation.”
Ze Frank on Slime Molds
As part of his True Facts series about the natural world, Ze Frank explains all about slime molds, which are super interesting! Slime molds can efficiently solve mazes, plan efficient train routes, adapt to changing conditions, and learn from each other.
See also many beautiful photos of slime molds.
Quantifying the human cost of global warming: because of climate change, over 600 million people currently live outside the “human climate niche”. That could rise to more than 1/3 of the total global population by the end of the century.
France has banned short-haul flights to destinations where the same journey can be made by train in under 2.5 hours.
The 100 Greatest Children’s Books of All Time
Relying on the choices of 177 book experts from 56 different countries, BBC Culture recently chose the 100 greatest children’s books of all time. The top five are:
1. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
2. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
3. Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
5. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
In terms of Sendak, I always preferred In the Night Kitchen to Where the Wild Things Are. Here are a few of my personal favorites from the list:
14. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
20. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
31. The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
45. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
92. Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
Is the Lord of the Rings a children’s book? Young adult? And I would have liked to have seen Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go on the list. And perhaps some Frog and Toad?
This has been apparent for months now: Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network. “Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler.”
I had no idea this existed: Informed Delivery is a free service from the USPS that lets you see photos of your mail & packages before they arrive. There’s even a daily email digest option.
You Cannot Hear These 13 Women’s Stories and Believe the Anti-Abortion Narrative. “It’s increasingly clear that it’s not safe to be pregnant in states with total abortion bans.”
The 2023 finalists for the Apple Design Awards, honoring “excellence in innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement in app and game design”.
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