The JWST has found carbon on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. It’s got water, it’s got carbon…it’s got life maybe?
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Entries for September 2023
Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can’t. “Ticketmaster’s ‘Verified Fan’ system doesn’t help fans. It helps scalpers who have hundreds of accounts, use special internet browsers, and have dozens of credit cards.”
Emerald and Stone, a Visual Tribute to Brian Eno
As a tribute to Brian Eno, visual artist Thomas Blanchard made this video of Emerald and Stone, a 2010 song that Eno collaborated on with Jon Hopkins & Leo Abrahams. According to Blanchard, he made the video with no digital visual effects — “the visual compositions have been created out of paint, oil and soap liquid.”
Eno himself is still working and mentoring younger artists…he and Fred Again released an ambient album back in May.
Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events. Just staggering corruption. As Jamelle Bouie says, this shows Thomas’s contempt not only for the American public but the Supreme Court as well.
Studio Ghibli has sold a controlling stake to Nippon Television and will become a subsidiary of the Japanese broadcaster.
“If AI takes over those mundane projects and tasks that aren’t creatively engaging or necessarily important, you free up designers to be creative in the same way the computer first did when it arrived on the scene.”
What Happens If You Destroy A Black Hole?
Here’s a fun thought experiment: can you destroy a black hole? Nuclear weapons probably won’t work but what about antimatter? Or anti black holes? In this video, Kurzgesagt explores the possibilities and impossibilities. This part baked my noodle (in a good way):
Contrary to widespread belief, the singularity of a black hole is not really “at its center”. It’s in the future of whatever crosses the horizon. Black holes warp the universe so drastically that, at the event horizon, space and time switch their roles. Once you cross it, falling towards the center means going towards the future. That’s why you cannot escape: Stopping your fall and turning back would be just as impossible as stopping time and traveling to the past. So the singularity is actually in your future, not “in front of you”. And just like you can’t see your own future, you won’t see the singularity until you hit it.
🤯
“A tachyonic antitelephone is a hypothetical device in theoretical physics that could be used to send signals into one’s own past.”
Kinda fascinating piece about TikTokers Mixie and Munchie. “Instagram, I look at it now, is the stage. Pick who you want to play, look how you want to look. Create a character of your own because everyone online is fake, anyway.”
Gritty Miniatures of Classic NYC Street Objects
Danny Cortes took up making patinated miniatures of familiar NYC objects during the pandemic and it turned into a full-time vocation for him. He spoke to the NY Times about how his work puts him in the flow state:
“I loved that when I worked on a piece, I didn’t think about my problems — my divorce, the pandemic,” said Mr. Cortes. “It was an escape — like I’m meditating, literally floating. I didn’t have a problem in the world. I wanted that high again, I kept chasing that.”
Love that and love the miniatures…they are crazy realistic.
Blighted façades and distressed structures are the very scenes which fuel Daniel’s attention to detail. The work to produce each piece is arduous and requires great precision to achieve such realism. Daniel had developed techniques that can give a model an aged, distressed or patinated style. He also recreates miniature scaled vintage advertising posters and graffiti art on his models. Daniel’s miniature models make unique collectable creations that will take you on a gritty romantic journey through New York that everyday passers by have overlooked.
You can check out more of Cortes’ work on Instagram.
Never past your prime! 13 peaks we reach at 40 or later. “Ageing doesn’t have to mean slowing down. In fact, you’re more likely to win an ultramarathon in midlife, not to mention get happier, wiser and more body confident.”
Bentley vs. Train. This is peak internet right here. We will be whispering “tren” in my household for a long time to come.
Everyone Loves Someone Who Had an Abortion
Using a phrase popularized by reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman, The National Network of Abortion Funds teamed up with Molly Crabapple and Padma Lakshmi to produce a video about their mission to support abortion access in the US.
In order for abortion to be truly an option, it must not only be legal, but actually available, without the shame. It’s time we worked together towards a world where all people have the power and resources to care for and support their bodies, identities, and health — for themselves and their families. We need to take the hassle, hustle, and harassment out of healthcare. It’s time to change the conversation about abortion, to make it a real option, available to all people without shame or judgment. We all love someone who has had an abortion, whether we know it or not.
The video is three years old and from the very first line (“Abortion is legal in all 50 states”), you can tell how much the situation has changed in the United States — and how the NNAF’s mission is even more urgent. If you’d like to join me in donating, step right this way.
The US government is restarting their program to send 4 free at-home Covid tests to every household in the country — you can sign up starting Sept 25th.
People’s behaviour at music gigs is getting worse. I have three rules to solve that. “Most of these conventions simply fall under the catch-all rubric of Don’t Be a Selfish Idiot. Being a selfish idiot, however, is very on-trend.”
Antique Book Patterns
From the Bergen Public Library Norway, a collection of antique book patterns from front or end papers. The books in question are from 1890-1930. Lovely.
Of course, this reminds of one of my favorite videos I’ve posted: a 1970 short film on how to make marbled paper.
An essay on friendship. “Friendship is a form of purposive idleness. The relationship is based on equality, not on power.”
The Zeitpyramide is a public art work designed to celebrate the 1200th anniversary of a German town. One block of the pyramid will be laid every 10 years until completion in 3183. The 4th block was just laid about a week ago.
Huh, you can take in-person and live virtual tours of Amazon’s warehouses. “The tour shows you how products move through our fulfillment centers, focusing on four main processes: Pick, Pack, SLAM, and Ship.”
“B612 is an highly legible open source font family designed and tested to be used on aircraft cockpit screens.”
Tycho’s Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2023
Every year at Burning Man (pandemic years aside), Tycho does a ~2hr DJ set around sunrise and then releases it on Soundcloud — here’s the 2023 version.
I’ve been listening to this for the past week and while I don’t like it quite as much as the sets from previous years, it’s definitely something to add to the rotation of chill work music.
See Tycho’s BM sets from 2022, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Pretty much the only reason I’d ever want to go to Burning Man (esp after this year) is to catch this set in person sometime.
With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways. “We have to be truthful, not neutral. I would make sure that you don’t just give a platform … to those who want to crash down the constitution and democracy.”
Son, You’re Old Enough to Know the Truth, There is No Such Thing as the “Invisible Hand of the Market”. “The fingers! They’re unregulated!”
Close to 2,000 Environmental Activists Killed Over Last Decade. “Violence, intimidation, and harassment are also being inflicted to silence defenders around the world,”
Jet Line: Voicemails from the Flight Path
Talk to anyone who lives near the flight path of Burlington, Vermont’s airport and it won’t be too long until they are complaining to you about the F-35 jets that routinely disrupt their lives. The loud, expensive weaponry arrived in the state in 2019 and have upset and angered residents ever since.
A sudden roar announced that the military jets were taking to the sky again.
Julia Parise’s son had developed a routine for whenever this happened: He would look to his mother and assess whether it was “one of them” — the F-35 fighter jets that had become such a constant presence in his young life — before asking her to cover his ears. He might do it himself, recalling aloud her reassurances as he did: “They won’t hurt me. They won’t hurt me.”
To capture the community unrest created by what one resident calls “Lockheed Martin’s welfare program” (the jet program will cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion over its lifetime), filmmakers Patrick McCormack and Duane Peterson III made a short film called Jet Line: Voicemails from the Flight Path featuring residents’ concerns from a complaints hotline the pair set up.
This short film employs an anonymous hotline to elevate the voices beneath Vermont’s F-35 flight path, the first urban residents to live with one of the military’s most controversial weapons systems overhead.
Tranquil scenes of unassuming neighborhoods near Burlington International Airport are juxtaposed with voicemails of the unheard, those drowned out by the ear-shattering “sound of freedom.” Exploring the relationship between picturesque residential areas and the deafening fighter jets overhead, Jet Line is a poetic portrait of a community plagued by war machines, documenting untenable conditions in a small city once voted one of the best places to live in America.
I hear the F-35s almost every time I am up in the Burlington area and they are very loud. I hear them when I’m on the phone with friends who live in Winooski. I hear them during my weekly Zoom session w/ my Burlington-based therapist and we have to pause for a few seconds so everyone can hear again. I live 30 miles away and they flew loudly over my house earlier today, as they do at least once a week. Over the weekend, the Marine Corps tweeted that they’d lost an F-35 somewhere in South Carolina and — yes, you heard right: they lost a whole-ass $100 million lethal weapon over a populated area. (They found the wreckage yesterday.) Hopefully when one of VT’s F-35s decides to drop out of the sky someday, it somehow misses everyone.
Global adventurer Jan Chipchase just returned from a month-long trip in the Pamir Mountains, including lots of time in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. His travelogues are fascinating — start here and work your way forward.
The Man Who Became Uncle Tom. Clint Smith examines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the remarkable, complicated man who helped inspire the title character, Josiah Henson.
The Process Tee
When you start something new, how do you know where you’re going to end up? Most of the time, you don’t — you stumble around for awhile, exploring uncertainly until, slowly, things start to make sense. That messy journey is all part of the process. Designer Damien Newman and I have teamed up with Cotton Bureau to make some t-shirts featuring his Design Squiggle that illustrate this untidy pattern of creativity. The Process Tee is available in two varieties — light design on dark fabric and dark design on light fabric — and 50% of the profits will be donated to a charitable organization (more on that below).
Newman originally came up with the Design Squiggle (aka The Process of Design Squiggle) more than 20 years ago to explain how design worked to some of his clients. Here’s his description:
The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. It is intended to convey the feeling of the journey. Beginning on the left with mess and uncertainty and ending on the right in a single point of focus: the design.
Although it originated in the design world, the Squiggle is handy for understanding or describing the process of many different creative endeavors. If you asked a chef, a scientist, a writer, a programmer, or an artist to describe how they got from their starting point to an end result, I think it would look a lot like the Squiggle. So what’s this shirt about? The Process of Design. The Process of Writing. Cooking. Art-making. Science. Learning a New Skill. Creativity. The Messy Process of Becoming a Better Human.
The Process Tee is short-sleeved and available in unisex, fitted, and youth sizes in several light (white, heather white, heather gray, banana, banana cream, pink, gold) and dark colors (black, royal blue, red, green, purple, orange) with sizes ranging from S to 5X, which I hope will work for almost everyone. I ordered a few test shirts to figure out the sizing and placement of the Squiggle and I think they turned out really well: sharp, simple, and even a little enigmatic.
50% of the profits from these tees will be donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Access to safe, legal abortion is essential health care and we’re supporting the NNAF in their mission to work towards a world “where all reproductive options, including abortion, are valued and free of coercion”.
Update: I’ve sent two donations to the NNAF so far, for a total of $3,640. Thanks for helping support such a great cause — I will continue to update this post with further donation amounts.
Update: Sent another donation from the past month of sales: $432 for a total of $4,072 donated so far!
Update: It’s been awhile, but I just sent another donation from the sales since November: $656 for a total of $4,728 donated so far!
Learn how to process your own JWST photos at home, “no technical experience required to start”.
Ok wow, they are making Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person into a movie? And if you read the original short story in the New Yorker, you’ll find the movie poster very familiar.
RamenHaus: slowly rotating ramen bowls. This is *extremely* my jam.
The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie Cover Depeche Mode
On their current US tour commemorating the 20th anniversaries of their two seminal albums (Give Up and Transatlanticism), The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie have been coming together to perform an encore rendition of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. The video above is their version of it from last weekend’s show in New Haven, which I attended and very much enjoyed, but there are several other versions to choose from on YouTube: Boston, Wash DC, Portland, Rhode Island, etc.
Cutting Up a Huge Lego Salmon
In this ASMR stop motion cooking video, a chef butchers a huge Lego salmon and prepares a salmon and rice bowl. This video is surprisingly visceral, what with the sound effects and the (Lego) blood.
This reminds me more than a little of the sushi scene in Isle of Dogs. (thx, caroline)
How Pontevedra, Spain transformed into a more people-centric city. “It’s not my duty as mayor to make sure you have a parking spot. For me, it’s the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you’re going to put them.”
If you’re liking the NY Times puzzle game Connections, you can try your hand at your own grid for others to solve.
Some Stunning Shots From the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023 Competition
The Royal Observatory Greenwich in London has announced the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023 competition and as you can see from the selection above, there were some amazing shots. From top to bottom:
- Runwei Xu and Binyu Wang for their photo of The Running Chicken Nebula.
- Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau for capturing a question mark on the Sun. I will never tire of looking at the detail of the Sun’s surface.
- Angel An. “This is not, as it might first appear, an enormous extraterrestrial, but the lower tendrils of a sprite (red lightning)! This rarely seen electrical discharge occurs much higher in the atmosphere than normal lightning (and indeed, despite the name, is created by a different mechanism), giving the image an intriguingly misleading sense of scale.”
- Mehmet Ergün. More Sun!
- Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner and Yann Sainty for their shot of the Andromeda galaxy.
The last shot was the overall winner. While not as dramatic as some of the others, it documented the discovery of a previously unknown feature of a nearby cosmic neighbor:
The Andromeda galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way, and one of the most photographed deep-sky objects. Yet this particular photo, captured by an international trio of amateur astronomers, revealed a feature that had never been seen before: a huge plasma arc, stretching out across space right next to the Andromeda galaxy.
“Scientists are now investigating the newly discovered giant in a transnational collaboration,” explain the photographers. “It could be the largest such structure nearest to us in the Universe.”
You can see the rest of the winning images on the Royal Observatory site as well as coverage from the BBC, the Guardian, Colossal, and Universe Today.
How to Cool Down a City. “Almost every aspect of how we build cities amplifies heat, from the buildings we live in to the cars we drive.” But there are ways to design cities to be cooler.
Beyoncé’s birthday Renaissance show celebrated the depths of Black womanhood. “The reality is too many Black women don’t make it to 42 and too many are not celebrated.”
Well Wishes My Love, Your Love
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the animation style Gabriel Gabriel Garble uses in his short film Well Wishes My Love, Your Love — it’s so cool and unique. Everything in the film has this sort of radiating energy that interacts with everything else. (via it’s nice that)
Jamelle Bouie: “The unfortunate truth, as we’re beginning to see with the authoritarian turn in the Republican Party, is that our constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need democracy, as we understand it, to actually work.”
“Adults 18 years and older without health insurance and adults whose health insurance does not cover all COVID-19 vaccine costs can get updated COVID-19 vaccines at no cost through the [CDC’s] Bridge Access Program.”
Max Alexander is a 7-year-old fashion designer with 1.7 million followers on Insta.
Movies That Began As Short Films
Deadline’s Robert Lang compiled a bunch of short films (that you can watch for free online) that were later developed into feature-length films like Reservoir Dogs, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Boogie Nights, Bottle Rocket, Napoleon Dynamite, and District 9.
For instance, here’s Quentin Tarantino’s original Reservoir Dogs:
Wes Anderson’s original Bottle Rocket:
The original short version of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On:
Peluca, upon which Napoleon Dynamite was based:
The Dirk Diggler Story, the short film by PT Anderson on which Boogie Nights was based:
I was reminded this morning that Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad comes out in less than 2 weeks! Very excited!
The Brassicas Will Continue Until Morale Improves
For a recent XKCD, Randall Munroe celebrates the the magical brassica oleracea plant.
Brassica oleracea is a species of plant that, like the apple, has a number of different cultivars. But these cultivars differ widely from each other: cabbage, kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, collard greens, and cauliflower.
Welcome, redwood, to the family, er, species.
“There are reports that laboratory tests to detect abortion drugs have not only been created in Poland but are, in rare cases, also being used there to investigate the outcomes of pregnancies.”
The winners of the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize (for unusual and often goofy scientific achievements) include an explanation of why scientists like to lick rocks and “re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools”.
A lovely story about an NYC woman reading a now-deleted YouTube comment for the first time. “It was so, so emotional. I couldn’t believe anyone ever felt that way about me. I never knew I inspired anything like that.”
AI-Assisted Language Translation of Speaking, Including Mouth Movements
Ok, this is a little bit bonkers: HeyGen’s Video Translate tool will convert videos of people speaking into videos of them speaking one of several different languages (incl. English, Spanish, Hindi, and French) with matching mouth movements. Check out their brief demo of Marques Brownlee speaking Spanish & Tim Cook speaking Hindi or this video of a YouTuber trying it out:
The results are definitely in the category of “indistinguishable from magic”.
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