A bathtub in the kitchen? The NY Times takes a peek into the tiny, weird kitchens of NYC apartments and the people who love them (or have at least learned to live with them).
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for September 2023
An excellent, thought-provoking, sobering read from Ana Marie Cox: What if our entire national character is a trauma response? “Privilege may keep you from certain kinds of risks, but it won’t make you resilient. Only community can.”
Lego is selling a kit with braille bricks for those with visual impairments. The studs on the bricks correspond to numbers and letters in the braille code.
The iPhone Alarm as a Piano Ballad
If you expand the default iPhone alarm into a piano ballad, it sounds quiet lovely actually. The sheet music is available here.
See also Steve Reich Is Calling, two iPhones ringing at slightly different tempos.
“By 1920, the network of interurbans in the US was so dense that a determined commuter could hop interlinked streetcars from Waterville, Maine, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin — a journey of 1,000 miles — exclusively by electric trolley.”
Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould
Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould is a new book documenting the work of early 19th century naturalist artist Elizabeth Gould.
Artist and illustrator Elizabeth Gould is finally given the recognition she deserves in this gorgeous volume that includes hundreds of her stunning and scientifically precise illustrations of birds from nearly every continent.
For all of her short life, Elizabeth Gould’s artistic career was appreciated through the lens of her husband, ornithologist John Gould, with whom she embarked on a series of ambitious projects to document and illustrate the birds of the world. Elizabeth played a crucial role in her husband’s lavish publications, creating beautifully detailed and historically significant accurate illustrations of over six hundred birds -many of which were new to science. However, Elizabeth’s role was not always fully credited and, following her tragic death aged only thirty-seven, her efforts and talent were nearly forgotten.
Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould is available for pre-order from Amazon or Bookshop.org and comes out on November 7. (via colossal)
Adjusted for inflation, the iPhone 15 is the most affordable base-model iPhone since the original iPhone in 2007.
The Analogue Pocket is a portable video game system that can play “the 2,780+ Game Boy, Game Boy Color & Game Boy Advance game cartridge library” as well as those from other systems (like Game Gear) with adapters. This looks cool as hell.
The One Thing Everyone Should Know About Fall Covid Vaccines. “The simplest way to think about them — everyone should just get one — is arguably the best.”
A Teaser Trailer for Season Four of For All Mankind
The first teaser trailer for season four of the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind takes the form of a recruitment video encouraging people to join the burgeoning workforce in space. It doesn’t give us much in the way of plot or character updates, but here’s the season synopsis (spoilers if you’re not caught up to the end of season three):
Rocketing into the new millennium in the eight years since Season 3, Happy Valley has rapidly expanded its footprint on Mars by turning former foes into partners. Now 2003, the focus of the space program has turned to the capture and mining of extremely valuable, mineral-rich asteroids that could change the future of both Earth and Mars. But simmering tensions between the residents of the now-sprawling international base threaten to undo everything they are working towards.
I have to admit my interest in the show waned a bit after the first season, but it’s still a pretty great show and I will be tuning in for season four on November 10. And is it just me or, if you tilt your head and squint, can you see For All Mankind as a prequel/origin story for The Expanse? (via gizmodo)
Welcome, John Scalzi, to the 25 years of blogging club! His wife Krissy threw him a surprise blog birthday party. 🎉❤️
The 10 electric vehicles of our collective dreams, including a fully EV Jeep Wrangler, a minivan, a Fiat 500, a small rounded van, a cheaper Tesla, and A Perfectly Good Little EV Truck.
Disney+ to Air a Real-Time Toy Story Version of an NFL Game
This is pretty clever actually: Disney+ and ESPN+ will air a real-time, Toy Story-ified version of the Oct 1st Jacksonville Jaguars and Atlanta Falcons NFL game. From Deadline:
Using the NFL’s Next Gen Stats and on-field tracking data, every player and play will be presented in “Andy’s Room,” the familiar, brightly colored setting for the Toy Story franchise. The action will be virtually simultaneous with the main game telecast, with most plays recreated after an expected delay in the neighborhood of about 30 seconds. Woody, Buzz Lightyear and many other characters will be visible throughout, and a press release notes they will be “participating from the sidelines and in other non-gameplay elements.” Along with game action, the announcers, graphics, scoreboard, referees’ penalty announcements, celebrations and other parts of the experience will all be rendered in a Toy Story-centric fashion.
I stopped watching the NFL years ago, but I might tune in to see how this works.
The Science of the Perfect Second
I really enjoyed this piece by Tom Vanderbilt on how time is kept, coordinated, calculated, and forecast. It’s full of interested tidbits throughout, like:
Care to gawk at one of the world’s last surviving original radium standards, a glass ampoule filled with 20.28 milligrams of radium chloride prepared by Marie Curie in 1913? NIST has it in the basement, encased in a steel bathtub, buried under lead bricks.
And:
For GPS to work, it needs ultra-exact timing: accuracy within fifteen meters requires precision on the order of fifty nanoseconds. The 5G networks powering our mobile phones demand ever more precise levels of cell-tower synchronization or calls get dropped.
And:
And as Mumford could have predicted, nowhere has time become so fetishized as in the financial sector, with the emergence over the past decade of algorithmic high-frequency trading. Donald MacKenzie, the author of Trading at the Speed of Light, estimated in 2019 that a trading program could receive market data and trigger an order in eighty-four nanoseconds, or eighty-four billionths of a second.
And:
All this makes F1 staggeringly accurate: it will gain or shed only one second every 100,000,000 years. Since the days when time was defined astronomically, the accuracy of the second is estimated to have increased by a magnitude of eight.
And:
“A clock accurate to a second over the age of the cosmos,” Patrick Gill, a physicist at the U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory, is quoted as saying in New Scientist, “would allow tests of whether physical laws and constants have varied over the universe’s history.”
And:
“If you were to lift this clock up a centimeter of elevation,” Hume told me, “you would be able to discern a difference in the ticking rate.” The reason is Einstein’s theory of relativity: Time differs depending on where you are experiencing it.
And I could go on and on. If any or all of those tidbits is interesting to you, you should go ahead and read the whole thing.
“Studies have found that [cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia] is as effective as using sleep medications in the short term and more effective in the long term.” And there are self-directed online programs that are effective.
Mike Pence on That Time When the Insurrectionists Wanted to Hang Him. “I was honored to be a part of the discourse that day. You see, democracy is messy.”
New Super-Human Super Mario Bros Speedrun Record Set
I love reading about speedrunning, specifically Super Mario Bros speedrunning, so this piece in Ars Technica about a new world record by Niftski is right up my alley. Here’s the run if you want to watch it:
Four particular things caught my eye about this run:
- Niftski’s new record is 4m 54.631s, which is now faster than what was believed to be the theoretical limit for a human-played game.
- It’s also extremely close to the fastest SMB game ever played done using tool-assisted speedrunning (where you basically play in super slow motion, so you can make all the very precise movements easily, a la The Flash). “In the battle of man versus machine, Niftski is now just 0.35 seconds away from standing up, John Henry-style, against the standard of machine-made automation.”
- I always marvel at the level of dedication and ingenuity of the players working together (though competition) to lower the possible times through the tiniest of adjustments.
- His heart rate tops out at 188bpm by the end of the game. I know he’s sitting at a desk, but that’s got to be of some cardiovascular advantage, right?
👏👏👏
How the Underground Railroad Got Its Name. A new book reveals that Thomas Smallwood, an African American shoemaker, coined the term in 1842.
Huh, the premiere of Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar on Netflix will be followed by three other short film adaptations of Roald Dahl stories by Anderson, starring the same cast.
The 2023 Fall Foliage Prediction Map
Well, it is that time of year again when the leaves in the northern hemisphere change colors. As usual, SmokyMountains.com has published their best guess as to when the leaves will be changing in various parts of the country. At the end of September and beginning of October here in Vermont, it’ll start looking like this.
River, a visual connection engine. “Clear your mind and surf laterally through image space.”
The JWST has detected tantalising (but very tentative) signs of life on an exoplanet 120 light years away in the form of dimethyl sulphide. “On Earth, at least, this is only produced by life.”
Student-Built EV Car Goes 0-62 mph in Record 0.956 Seconds
A group of students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts recently set a record for the fastest 0-62mph time with their hand-built electric car: 0.956 seconds. The 309-lb car got up to 62mph in just 40.3 feet, which is ~10 feet shorter than the width of a basketball court. The old record was 1.46 seconds, which this car just absolutely obliterated. For reference, the Tesla Plaid’s 0-60 time is 1.99 seconds.
The video of their run is kind of amazing…the car is just so ludicrously quick that I started giggling when it leapt off the line.
Both the FDA and CDC have signed off on updated Covid booster shots for ages six months and up. You should be able to get your shot as early as the next few days. I’ll be getting mine as soon as I can.
If you want to know what Apple announced at their event today, The Verge’s 15-min recap video is a good place to start.
Repurposed Retro Tech Portraits by Nick Gentry
London artist Nick Gentry takes old recording media (VHS tapes, cassette tapes, floppy disks) and turns them into portraits (Instagram). Gentry gets his materials from members of the public:
Made from floppy disks contributed by members of the public. As a social art project, the process is open to everyone. Find out how to recycle and include your obsolete materials in future artworks by getting in touch.
(via colossal)
I’m a little ashamed to admit that I was excited to find out that there’s a Cheetos Mac & Cheese. But this can’t actually be good, can it?
Stunning JWST Image of a Grand-Design Spiral Galaxy
Love this recent JWST shot of the M51 spiral galaxy.
The graceful winding arms of the grand-design spiral galaxy M51 stretch across this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Unlike the menagerie of weird and wonderful spiral galaxies with ragged or disrupted spiral arms, grand-design spiral galaxies boast prominent, well-developed spiral arms like the ones showcased in this image. This galactic portrait was captured by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI).
In this image the reprocessed stellar light by dust grains and molecules in the medium of the galaxy illuminate a dramatic filamentary medium. Empty cavities and bright filaments alternate and give the impression of ripples propagating from the spiral arms. The yellow compact regions indicate the newly formed star clusters in the galaxy.
(via bad astronomy)
How Covid Affects the Heart. “In addition to the complications that can occur during the acute phase of a Covid infection, there appears to be an increased risk of heart attacks, strokes and other problems up to a year after an infection.”
Trump plans to become a dictator — denial will not save you. “Trump and his advisers are actively creating the infrastructure for him to follow through on his plans to be a dictator when/if he retakes the White House in 2025.”
Relocating a Floating Island
About once a year, boat owners on Wisconsin’s Lake Chippewa gather to move a small floating island from blocking access under a bridge. It’s a simple application of Newtonian physics: the boats all just nose into the island, gun their motors, and slowly shove the island out of the way.
The floating clump of mud and plant material is technically a bog, not an island, but it’s hefty enough to support the growth of trees all the same. Looking at it, you could easily believe it was a fully-fledged island. That is… until it starts drifting around.
“It’s one of the first things you look for when you come out here in the morning; where’s the bog?” Denny Reyes, owner of The Landing in Chippewa, told Arizona News.
The problematic bog is actually one of many, but it’s one of the biggest and close to a bridge that can get blocked when it goes for a wander. In 2022, with the wind on their side, it took around 25 boats to budge the bog and collectively push it back out into the lake.
It seems like Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki has once again failed to retire. “Not only does he not feel like retiring anymore, he’s actively coming into work to create yet another film.”
“I take risks on solo hikes, navigating animal traps and dangerous terrain. But for a woman, men are the biggest threat. I do it to be more open to the world, in the hope it will be more open to me.”
A Trans Travel Guide. “This project seeks to provide ‘travel advice’ for trans travelers (and our companions) based on laws and practical safety within various jurisdictions.”
A recipe to make sriracha from scratch. “Setting out to recreate Huy Fong’s ubiquitous sauce, I ended up with something that hit the right notes, but with a brighter, fresher flavor.”
My Saturday Self Versus My Sunday Self. “Saturday: Hopefully, I’m not getting a cold, so I can make Jamie’s surprise party. Sunday: Hopefully, I’m getting Ebola, so I can miss work.”
Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money. (Given Spotify’s tiny payouts, this actually seems like a very slow way to launder money…)
A new database of testimonies by survivors of the Roma and Sinti genocide during World War II. Between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma & Sinti were murdered by the Nazis in the 30s and 40s.
Are any words the same in all languages? Some that are close: orange, taxi, and tomato. Can you guess what two words made the grade?
Surprising Movies That Got Thumbs Down From Siskel, Ebert, or Both. The Silence of the Lambs, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Die Hard (Ebert 👎?!), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
“White men have controlled women’s reproductive rights throughout American history — the post-Dobbs era is no different.” Enslaved women were forced to reproduce and others were sterilized due to the eugenicist movement.
Dives of the Kingfisher in Slow Motion
Nature does its thing so quickly sometimes that you have to slow it down to appreciate the beauty and power of it. This is a video of a kingfisher plucking fish out of the water, with views from both above the water (which catches the dive and takeoff) and below the water (which shows the efficient grab of the fish). The underwater view is amazing…I’d never seen that before.
Affirmative Action Is Still in Effect. For Men. “Declining male enrollment has led some colleges to adopt an unofficial policy that many find objectionable: ‘We need to admit men, and women are going to suffer.’”
Bike Index is a non-profit bike registry. You can register your bike and if it gets stolen, you might be able to get it back with the help of the community.
Do you really need to walk 10,000 steps a day? Separating fitness truths (“exercise is more important as you age”) from fitness myths (“lifting weights will make you bulky”).
Psycho and the End of the Continuously Showing Movie
Going to the movies used to be a somewhat different experience than it is today: people wandered into a theater at any point in a film and would just watch until it looped back around when they came in. From a piece in the Hollywood Reporter:
Throughout the classical Hollywood era, moviegoers dropped in on a film screening whenever they felt like it, heedless of the progress of the narrative. In the usual formulation, a couple go to the movies, enter midway into the feature film, sit through to the end of the movie, watch the newsreel, cartoon, and comedy short at the top of the program, and then sit through the feature film until they recognize the scene they walked in on. At this point, one moviegoer whispers to their partner, “This is where we came in,” and they exit the theater.
This began to change in the 40s and 50s for a variety of reasons — theater owners and movie studios didn’t like it, movies were getting more complex, the rise of TV, etc. — but the real shift occurred with the premiere of Psycho in 1960. The studio put out a promotional blitz before it’s release stating that no one would be allowed entrance to the theater after the start of the film.
On June 16, 1960, after a saturation campaign giving fair warning, the DeMille and Baronet theaters in New York premiered Psycho with the see-it-from-the-beginning edict in place. In a practice later to be known as “fill and spill,” exhibitors hustled audiences in and out with military efficiency (the staggered showtimes — every two-hours for the 109-minute film — made for a tight squeeze). Uniformed Pinkerton guards were on hand to enforce the policy.
Here’s a video of Hitchcock laying out the policy for moviegoers (via open culture):
Psycho didn’t singlehandedly stop the practice, but Hitchcock’s stand was an important part in shifting moviegoing practices to the set start times we have today.
The Evolution of Hummingbirds
Really interesting video from Moth Light Media about how hummingbirds evolved into the unusual little creatures they are today.
The story of hummingbird evolution is how they have reaped the advantages of drinking a natural energy drink and then have had to evolve alien features to quell the disadvantages that have now gone on to define them.
Other popular videos from Moth Light Media include Evolution of Spider Webs, What Happens to Whale Bodies When They Die?, When Fungus Grew to the Size of Trees, and How Plants Became Meat Eaters.
Painting Elaine Benes dancing into a thrift store painting. 👍💃😂
Tom Vanderbilt on his quest to get some air while mountain biking. “I initially pictured the transition to be merely a shift in terrain. A bike is a bike, after all. But I was vastly mistaken.” Nodded a lot at this; I too have taken up MTB recently.
The Life Cycle Of Superhero Storytelling
In this short video essay, Evan Puschak explores the typical life cycle of superhero storytelling, where things move from standalone stories to crossovers and interconnections, the stakes continually rise, and things get so complicated that entertainment becomes homework. Marvel in particular is in the later stages of this cycle,1 where casual fans are dropping off because they haven’t watched increasingly mediocre movies and full seasons of shows to keep up to date on what’s to come.
Star Wars is getting there too, and Star Trek seems like they’re trying their hardest to catch up.↩
Socials & More