Evolution Keeps Making Crabs, And Nobody Knows Why. “The defining features of crabbiness have evolved at least five times in the past 250 million years.”
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Entries for June 2023
Attention digital media workers: the longest-ever strike at a digital media company is only 13 days. The ROI for striking seems pretty high — these companies seem to settle pretty quickly?
The New Rubik’s Cube World Record Is Just 3.13 Seconds
In roughly the time it took you to read this sentence, Max Park solved a Rubik’s Cube. With his time of 3.13 seconds, Park bested Yusheng Du’s 2018 mark of 3.47 seconds. Just watch the video above…it’s ridiculous. I love how the judge comes in to preserve the scene as everyone goes bananas.
Park was one of the subjects of the excellent documentary, The Speed Cubers (trailer).
Logo Factory
Jigar Patel uses 3D modelling software to imagine factory production lines that “build” logos and app icons for brands like Instagram, Netflix, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and many others. He’s also posted a bunch of behind-the-scenes videos about how he does it — love it when artists show their work.
You can also follow Patel’s work on Instagram and TikTok.(thx, michael)
I thought this was a limited-time thing, but Amazon is still selling the 2nd gen AirPods Pro for 20% off Apple’s price. I bought some of these a few months ago and they are fantastic.
Apollo Remastered
NASA keeps the original film negatives from the Apollo program sealed in a frozen vault in Houston, TX and rarely grants access to them. As a result, nearly all of the photos we see of those historic missions were made decades ago or are copies of copies. Recently, the film was cleaned and digitally scanned at “an unprecedented resolution”.
Using these new high-res scans, image specialist Andy Saunders remastered each of the 35,000 photographs, resulting in this incredible-looking book, Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record. From the book’s website:
The photographs from the lunar surface are as close as we can get to standing on the Moon ourselves, and for the first time, we were able to look back at Earth from afar, experiencing the “overview effect” — the cognitive shift that elicits an intense emotional experience upon seeing our home planet from space for the first time. The “Blue Marble” photograph, taken as Apollo 17 set course for the Moon, depicts the whole sunlit Earth, and is the most reproduced photograph of all time. Along with Apollo 8’s “Earthrise,” which depicts Earth above the lunar horizon, it was a catalyst for the environmental movement that continues today.
Saunders is also selling prints of some of these remastered photos, which look absolutely stunning.
The history and significance of various LGBTQ+ flags explained. The six colors of the traditional pride flag all mean something…red represents “life and the fight against HIV/AIDS”.
The Absurd Logistics of Concert Tours
I was totally fascinated by this look at the absurd logistics of concert tours and now have a newfound appreciation for all the people involved who collaborate to make the magic happen (and perhaps also a little bit more forgiving about the high price of tickets (but Ticketmaster can still go to hell)).
Now, to an outsider, the load out process might look chaotic, and the pace of the tour may seem unsustainable or unmanageable. But though grueling and exhaustingly complicated, these massive, nation-wide tours function remarkably smoothly considering the variety of variables.
(via open culture)
Electric vehicles alone can’t solve transportation’s climate problems. “Reducing vehicle travel and investing in other options (like public transit) are critical pieces that should not and cannot be overlooked.”
A Peek Into Japan’s Convenience Stores. “A far, far cry from their American cousins, convenience stores in Japan are without exception, spotless, well-stocked, open 24x7, and are … well, actually convenient.”
“I just bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print, and I regret nothing.” I loved the World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid and have considered buying a contemporary set.
The Spider-Verse Lego Scene Was Created By a 14-Year-Old Animator
After 14-year-old Preston Mutanga’s Lego version of the trailer for Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (embedded above) went viral, the team hired him to animate a short Lego sequence for the actual film.
In the brief scene, we see a Lego version of Peter Parker as he observes a dimensional anomaly and sneaks off to the Daily Bugle’s bathroom to alert another Spider-Man about the issue. While the scene is short, it killed in my theater and it also looked as good as anything in the recent Lego films. After seeing it, a few friends of mine even commented that it must have been the same team that animated it. But nope! It was a lone teenager, actually.
You can check out more of Mutanga’s work on his YouTube channel.
A collection of “dumb or overly forced” astronomical acronyms, including WISEASS, ABRACADABRA, HIPPIES, TATOOINE, Hot DOGs, SUGAR-RUSH, and GANDALF.
For the first time in more than 30 years, there’s a new Atari game cartridge coming out for the 2600: a game called Mr. Run and Jump.
Really interesting brief interview with Meredith Whittaker about AI, algorithms, and power in Big Tech. “There is no Cartesian window of neutrality that you can put an algorithm behind and be like, ‘This is outside our present and history.’”
Before She Was Famous: Demo Tape of Madonna Performing With Her Post-Punk Band
In 1979, just a few short years before she hit it big as a pop artist, Madonna was in a post-punk rock band called The Breakfast Club — she sang and played the drums. In the video above, the band rips through four demo songs in just over 8 minutes. From Dangerous Minds, some context:
Hardcore fans will also know Madonna has been known to perform versions of these songs (and other early material) live. Here’s the thing — much like the early days of the Go-Go’s, Madonna is definitely flexing her affinity for punk rock while mixing it with her own brand of spirited pop which the entire world would soon embrace and others would emulate. Now, if you’ve never heard this version of Madonna, and dig your punk with a side of pop, you are going to love these raw jams. It’s also quite compelling to hear them, knowing what was to come from Madonna in a few short years.
(via open culture)
Anti-Trans Moral Panics Endanger All Young People. “The common thread between [all moral panics] is a grievance-driven bid to control people.”
An anecdote from 1983 about algorithmic perfection and hard-boiled eggs. “The most obvious and absolutely correct algorithm may be wrong and even harmful if it works under incorrect assumptions.”
“Is Gwen Stacy, aka Spider-Woman, aka Ghost Spider, aka Spider-Gwen… Transgender? And the answer, I’m here to tell you, is yes, Gwen Stacy is trans. If you want her to be.”
Swimming Pool Stories
Icelandic filmmaker Jón Karl Helgason has made a film called Sundlaugasögur (Swimming Pool Stories) about the central role of the swimming pool in Icelandic life. The trailer is above. From Fatherly:
The swimming pool is first and foremost a communal space. “The swimming pool is your second home,” Helgason says. “You are brought up in the swimming pool.” There may be only 160, or so, swimming pools in the entire country (which is roughly 305 miles wide by 105 miles long), but every one of them is the essential social hub of a community, large or small.
The swimming pool is a public utility — as critical as the grocery store or the bank. “The British go to the pub, the French go to the cafes — in our culture, you meet in the swimming pool,” says Helgason. Swimmers come from all walks of life, from farmers to artists to clergymen to celebrities. “You can have 10, 15, 20, 30 people [in the pool] — they’re talking about politics and about their lives.”
For the first time, wind and solar generated more power than coal in the US over the first five months of 2023.
Studio Ghibli is planning to release Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, How Do You Live?, with no trailer or other promotional material. “Deep down, I think this is what moviegoers latently desire.”
“The ingredients for space yeast are fairly simple. Astronaut breath, water, yeast starter, electricity, a rolling pin and we can make it happen.”
A Massive 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
Using imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization at Caltech has created a 5.7 terapixel mosaic image that covers 99.5% of the surface of Mars. The whole image is available to navigate with a 3D viewer in your browser.
The Beatles are set to release one last song after using AI audio tools to extract John Lennon’s voice from a scratchy old demo tape.
The Black Hole That Kills Galaxies
Astronomers believe that there’s a black hole at the center of almost every large galaxy in the universe. Some of those black holes are particularly energetic, chewing up the galaxies in which they reside and releasing massive amounts of energy out into the cosmos. Those black holes and the energy emitted from matter and gas falling towards their centers are what astronomers call quasars.
But if we look closely, we see who is actually in charge. Small as a grain of sand compared to the filaments, the centers of some of these galaxies shine with the power of a trillion stars, blasting out huge jets of matter, completely reshaping the cosmos around them. Quasars, the single most powerful objects in existence, so powerful that they can kill a galaxy.
After 251 weeks, Greta Thunberg has ended her school strike for climate, not because the climate crisis is over but because she’s graduating.
In case you missed it, this is probably the best (and most hilarious) plain-language explanation of what’s in Trump’s federal indictment.
A philosophy professor uploaded his Introduction to Ethics final exam to an online site often used to cheat on such exams and caught 40% of his students cheating. But was it unethical of him to entrap them like that?
Vintage Analog Photo Booths
FotoAutomat restores vintage analog photo booths and redeploys them around Europe, mostly in Paris.
There are less than fifty working analog photo booths remaining in the world now. Since 2007, FotoAutomat has been working to preserve this photographic heritage by restoring and maintaining the last original analog photobooths in Paris, Nantes and Prague, mainly in spaces dedicated to art and culture.
This is some primo Wes Anderson shit. (via meanwhile)
If you’re still looking for a last-minute gift for your dad, check out the 2023 Father’s Day Gift Guide.
Forgetting How to Be Yourself
For the New Yorker, Louisa Thomas on major league pitcher Daniel Bard, who has struggled with the yips on and off during his career.
Many baseball players have minor control issues at one point or another. Sometimes it happens after an injury, when a player is relearning how to throw, over-attending to discrete motions that used to feel fluid and natural. “Overthinking” is the simple way to put it: the brain’s prefrontal cortex trips up the sensory cortex and the motor cortex. In other cases, the mind can essentially go blank. Players usually snap out of it, the way Bard had years before. But the brain can get stuck in certain patterns, and the yips can take over in a way that no one fully understands.
I used to write quite a bit about the sort of practiced autopilot that’s necessary to perform at a high level and what happens when the wheels come off the wagon and you start overthinking and second-guessing. From a 2021 post about Simone Biles’ case of the twisties:
This phenomenon goes by many names — performance anxiety, stage fright, choking, the yips, cueitis (in snooker), and target panic (for archers) - and the world-class are not immune. Daniel Day-Lewis had stage fright so bad he quit the stage decades ago — an affliction he shared with Laurence Olivier, Barbra Streisand, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. If you’ve read anything at all about this stuff, Biles’ case of the twisties doesn’t seem so unusual or mysterious — it’s just one of those things that makes her, and the rest of us, human.
Back to Bard, who tried a bunch of different fixes for his pitching problems:
Once Bard acknowledged the problem, he tried every available fix. He met with sports psychologists; he saw a hypnotist; he meditated. He whispered mantras, which he found counterproductive — athletes “don’t think in words, we think in shapes, feelings, and visions,” he told me. He had a rib removed, to help with the blood-flow problem caused by thoracic-outlet syndrome. He tried different arm slots. Adair posted inspirational messages around their house. At one point, she and Bard drove to a Holiday Inn to meet a woman who used eye-movement therapy to treat soldiers with P.T.S.D. Bard also tried a technique called tapping: you tap your fingers on certain places on your head, in a certain order, to reframe traumatic memories. It didn’t work.
I don’t know if anyone else has felt like this, but I think I might have the yips — not for a sport but for my life. I feel like I have forgotten how to naturally be myself. My preferences, what I enjoy doing, what I think about certain things, how I feel, how I feel about how I feel — it all feels forced right now, overthinking and second-guessing galore. What Would Jason Do? The hell if I know…but I do know that if you’re asking yourself what you would do in a certain situation instead of just doing it, you’ve already lost.
Like Bard, I’ve tried a bunch of different things recently to fix this, to seemingly little avail. Perhaps thinking about it as the yips but for my life will help me address it?
If it’s asparagus season in your neck of the woods, check out this thread of ways to prepare it.
The one question I was waiting for in this interview with Baby Gronk’s dad/manager but didn’t get was: “How do you justify this obvious child abuse?” This whole thing is gross.
Members of Radiohead Form Side Project to Sound Exactly Like Radiohead. “It’s vital to step outside your comfort zone with most of the same members of the band and see what other roads are available for us to explore.”
This is just an amazing story about a frog and their new house.
Taking the Day (or Two)
Hey folks. I’ve been struggling with some things recently and I need to take some time to try to recalibrate instead of sitting in front of a computer. I’ll see you back here on Monday.
Watch a Traditional Japanese Noh Mask Being Made
Noh is a classical Japanese art of dramatic dance that’s been performed since the 14th century. The masks worn by characters are an art form in themselves, and in this video, an expert craftsperson carves a noh mask out of a single block of Japanese cypress and then paints it with pigments made from crushed seashells.
I love the look of the rough texture of the mask when she’s about halfway through, before she smoothes it out with the paint — it’s like IRL low-poly. But the detail of the finished product is incredible.
See also How to Carve Marble Like Italian Master Donatello. (via open culture)
Real-Life Infrastructure That Looks Like Sci-Fi
Kane Hsieh, proprietor of the excellent MachinePix, has collected a bunch of photos of infrastructure that looks like science fiction.
The archive of the Nuremberg trials is available online, “including evidentiary films, full audio recordings of the proceedings, and approximately 250,000 pages of digitized paper documents”.
Is AI the end of computer programming as we know it? Abstraction is how programming evolves, “growing more removed from the electronic guts of computing and more approachable to the people who use them.”
I’ve been reading a lot about the end of Succession and thought this piece by Brian Phillips was particularly interesting. “The crown is made of tinfoil; the only reason to chase it is because childhood trauma is compelling you to.”
The Arctic could be completely free of summer sea ice as early as the 2030s. “In a new study, scientists found that the climate milestone could come about a decade sooner than anticipated.”
Stunning Poster for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Totally loving this Chinese movie poster for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (perhaps designed by Huang Hai).
And while we’re on the subject, I watched the movie the other day and loved it. In fact, it might be the most visually inventive movie I’ve ever seen…it’s just one mindbending visual after another, for more than two hours. (via @gray)
A great profile of the last Italian stone carver in Barre, VT, the Granite Capital of the World. He’s a *20th generation* stone carver. “That’s when I really knew that this guy was a genius, not just a sculptor.”
For the first time in their history, the Human Rights Campaign has declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans. “There is an imminent threat to the health and safety of millions of LGBTQ+ people and families…”
The Train Speed Optical Illusion
If you watch the video above of a front-facing camera on a moving train, the train appears to move much faster in the zoomed out view than in the zoomed in view. Here’s what’s going on:
The illusion that speed decreases when zoomed is “because when one focuses on an inner portion of the movie, the optic flow angular speed is slow, and appears to fill one’s entitle visual field, which is consistent with overall lower forward speed.
Note: The more zoomed, the more densely packed the overhead rigging appears. So, even though you appear to be moving forward more slowly when zoomed in, the actual rate of rigging flowing by remains constant, consistent with same forward speed in all conditions.
(via the kid should see this)
Some myths about blogging that stop people from writing, including “writing boring posts is bad” and “more material is always better”.
Blackstar — The Sun In A New Light
Blackstar is a relaxing and meditative 45-minute video of the Sun made by Seán Doran using footage from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Instead of the familiar yellow, Doran has chosen to outfit our star in vivid blue and black, which lends the video a sort of alien familiarity. This looks absolutely stunning in 4K.
What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life? “Intimate friendships don’t come with shared social scripts that lay out what they should look like or how they should progress.”
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