In my XOXO post on Monday, I said that Nolen Royalty, the creator of One Million Checkboxes, had told “one of the wackiest internet nerd stories I’ve ever heard”. Well, Royalty has now put that story online, both in the form of a blog post and a YouTube video:
I panicked. There were URLs in my database! There were URLs pointing to catgirls.win in my database!! Something was very very wrong.
I assumed I’d been hacked. I poured over my logs, looking for evidence of an intrusion. I read and re-read my code, searching for how somebody could be stuffing strings into a database that should have just contained 0s and 1s.
I couldn’t find anything. My access logs looked fine. My (very simple) code was ok. My heart rate increased. My girlfriend patiently waited for me to join her for dinner. And then — wait.
Wait!
I saw it.
It’s a great story — read/watch the whole thing. It reminds me of the palimpsest (layered communication) that the aliens use to communicate with Earth in Carl Sagan’s Contact (and the 1997 movie). Not only because of the in-game message left for Royalty but for the way that there turned out to be many ways to “play” or “beat” OMCB.
Hey folks. I’m gonna be on vacation with my family for the rest of the week, so I won’t be posting here that much, if at all. September is going to be busy — kids back to school, Ollie applying to college, mtn biking — so I’m gonna recharge the ol’ batts at the beach.
Even though next month will be hectic, I’m looking forward to getting back to mucking about with the guts of the site after taking the summer off from that. I’ve got some rough ideas about improvements for the comments section, adding social features, and a few other things.
Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japan’s borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodo routes — the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii Peninsula — took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. While passing the peninsula’s shrinking villages, Mod found himself reflecting on his own childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experiences as an adoptee, his unlikely relocation to Japan as a student at age nineteen, and his relationship with one lost friend, whose life was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. As the days passed, he considered why he has walked so rigorously and religiously during his twenty-five years as an immigrant in Japan, contemplating the power of walking itself. For Mod, solo walks are a tool to change the very structure of his mind, to better himself, and to bear witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left are long.”
The way Craig has gone about writing and publishing this book is unique. In November 2023, he published an exquisitely designed fine art edition with color photography, limited to 2500 copies (of which ~900 remain), and priced at $100. The mass market version, published by Random House, is an expanded version of the fine art edition retailing for $31 ($15 on Kindle). Craig explains:
Wait? Didn’t you already publish this book in November 2023? Yes! Yes we did! (Where we = me, Craig.) That was the fine art edition. Limited in quantity. Printed and bound in Japan, in full color on Heidelberg presses with a silk screened and foil stamped cover. Retailing for $100. This Random House edition is a significant expansion of that fine art edition — more than double the length in text with a dozen additional photographs. There is so much more context about me and my relationship to Japan, and more Japanese historical context as well. The Random House edition is printed and bound as a standard trade hardcover (and retails for $31 USD), with images printed in black and white. I’m tempted — almost! — to call them different books that emerged from the same source material.
What We Learned In Our First Year of 404 Media. “We are very proud and humbled to report that, because of your support, 404 Media is working. Our business is sustainable, we are happy, and we aren’t going anywhere.” Fantastic.
I just got back from attending the XOXO Festival in Portland, OR. What a whirlwind few days — I talked to more people than I have in literally years. I feel grateful for the opportunity to attend and participate this year, so I wrote some thank yous.
Thanks to Craig Mod for coming all the way from Japan to share the stage with me for a too-brief chat about membership programs. In the run-up to this, Craig and I had three extensive conversations about memberships, the open web, the value of writing your own software, Walt Disney’s corporate strategy chart, and many more things. I wish you could have heard those chats as well. Maybe we’ll have to do another podcast.
Thanks to my pal Tim Shey, who shared with me the Japanese word komorebi, which is scattered sunlight that is filtered through tree leaves. Komorebi was the visual theme for this year’s XOXO, as seen in the XOXO Field Notes notebooks.
Thanks to Powell’s City of Books for the reminder that bookstores can be more than just places of commerce. Curated by people who love reading & books & people who read, great bookstores make your brain fizz with ideas just by browsing the shelves. Your algorithm could never.
Thanks to Portland for being so cool + weird. This was my fourth or fifth visit and I gotta say, I was pretty charmed. The food in particular blew me away — I can’t remember eating so well. Luce was a delicious local Italian place — I’d eat here once a week if I lived in Portland. Eem was so good, my favorite meal of the weekend. Solid pies at Apizza Scholls with great company. Ramen at Kinboshi, katsu sandwiches at Tanaka, a gin & tonic at Pacific Standard, and a banh mi at Lardo.
Thanks to the folks I saw wearing kottke.org t-shirts, including the guy wearing a design squiggle shirt who I said “nice shirt!” to without any further explanation.
Thanks to Annie Rauwerda of Depths of Wikipedia for the heartiest laugh I’ve had in many weeks. Seriously, she had the entire hall rolling in the aisles.
Thanks to Erin Kissane, not only for her great talk but for her work, alongside Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, on The COVID Tracking Project. Truly one of the heroic efforts of the pandemic that saved lives and helped millions make safe choices — talk about making a dent in the universe. (An extra thanks to Erin for not laughing too much when I introduced myself as “Erin” when I ran into her at Powell’s. Never meet your heroes…you’ll only make an awkward ass of yourself.)
Thanks to Ed Yong, whose talk was just incredible and the one I most needed to hear this year. Like Ed, I spent a couple of years fully immersed in all things pandemic so that I could keep my readers (hopefully) well informed about what Covid was doing to us and how to stay safe. Even though I didn’t go nearly as deep as he did with his essential reporting, there were many parts of his talk that resonated strongly with me, particularly the burnout part (which led to a sabbatical in both cases). I’m definitely going to link to his talk when it gets posted.
Thanks to…the universe? (This one doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to the thank you note format.) The day after the conference, I walked around Portland for a few hours and thought of Heather, with whom I spent a few lovely days here in 2015. I hope you’ve found your peace, my friend.
Thanks to all the kottke.org readers who came up to say hi during the conference (and at the airport!); I appreciate you all and hope I wasn’t too awkward in response. 😬
Thanks to Neal Agarwal for showing off some of his many web experiments.
Thanks to Nolen Royalty, creator of One Million Checkboxes, for telling one of the wackiest internet nerd stories I’ve ever heard. I hope a recording of his talk or a writeup of it makes its way online…it’s an amazing story and I’ll link to it on kottke.org when it becomes available.
Thanks to my fellow indie media travellers — Platformer, 404 Media, Garbage Day, and Aftermath. I’ve enjoyed watching you folks strike out on your own, supported and trusted by your readers to punch above your weight without corporate heavy-handedness. 👏
Thanks to all my friends who, when I ghosted from a conversation or begged off sharing a meal, understood I needed some time to myself to recharge the ol’ social battery. 🪫
And most of all, thanks to the Andys (Baio, McMillan) for putting on XOXO for all these years. It is a singularly impactful gathering that’s touched/changed/bettered too many lives to even count. XOXO is perhaps the most thoughtful thing I’ve ever experienced — I can’t imagine how difficult it’s been for them to sustain that level of kindness and attention to detail across this many festivals and years. As life’s works go, this one is pretty good. The Andys said this was the last XOXO and I’m inclined to believe them this time — buuuuut if that changes, I will totally come to the next one.
I just got back from the XOXO Festival and one of things that happened was that Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou showed their new short film The Second and their first new Every Frame A Painting video essay in eight years!! And now the video essay is on YouTube:
It’s a quick one about the sustained two-shot, a type of shot that was used a lot in the olden days but still has its uses today — and gives actors room to actually act.
So happy to see Ramos and Zhou back at it. I’m not sure if I should even say this, but they indicated during their XOXO appearance that there will be more to come (in fewer than 8 years).
Conservation biologist Tim Shields is trying to save the Mojave Desert’s desert tortoise population, which is under threat from ravens, an invasive species brought to the area by habitat-encroaching humans. Working with an engineer, he’s trying to train the ravens to leave the tortoises alone — their work is the subject of the short documentary Eco-Hack!
Together, they embarked on what Shields calls a campaign of “aversive training” for ravens, which, among the various threats to desert tortoises, he says seemed like the easiest to address. They set about booby-trapping the desert to train the birds to leave the tortoises alone. Their methods seem like a sophisticated version of sitting in the driveway and burning ants with a magnifying glass: placing laser emitters on terrestrial rovers; building and deploying 3-D-printed fake tortoises laced with artificial grape flavoring, which ravens evidently hate. They give their creations proud retro names: the Techno-Tort, the Blastoluxe. “The idea is just to make the haunted landscape where there’s just no relief from the surprises, and all the surprises are bad,” Shields says of the ravens, one of the collective nouns for which is, fittingly, an “unkindness.”
Artist and illustrator Andrew DeGraff makes maps that show where the characters travel during movies — imagine Billy’s trail maps from Family Circus but for films like Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Pulp Fiction, and Mad Max: Fury Road.
Not sure why I didn’t know that Chris Ware has released two volumes of sketchbooks, but the third one comes out this fall. “Ware finally succumbs to imaginary public pressure by concluding his tiresome experiment in reader trust…”
Back in 2020 we had to chuck the kids’ baby shoes out 😱, so I decided to keep the first ones and draw the rest, in order, starting with pre-walking socks.
When I look at photos of my kids from when they were younger, my eye is always drawn to their shoes and clothes — some of them are so iconic in my mind they almost function as logos for my kids at different stages.
On the genius design of Super Mario Bros’ World 1-1, which teaches players how the game works without needing a tutorial. “In order to pass this first little guardian, the player must learn that the A button makes Mario jump.”
Sacred Sites. “From Machu Picchu to the Louvre — the book journeys through sacred sites in art and ancient history.” I’ve always loved places and architecture that feel awe-inspiring or numinous.
Honami is a skilled draughtswoman by trade, having obtained an MFA in architecture and working at a well-known Japanese architecture firm. But the grueling hours and workload eventually weighed on her physical and mental state and she fell ill, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Enya’s doctor advised her to take some time off, and find a place where she can relax and warm her body. That’s how she discovered Kosugiyu, her local sento in Koenji. She quickly fell in love with her local hotbath and not only started working there but also began employing her architectural rendering skills to create illustrations of the space. Soon, others began asking her to draw their hotbaths as well and her clientele expanded from sento and even spread to kissaten.
As one of the top trials riders in the world, Danny MacAskill can certainly do a wheelie. In this fun video, he does wheelies all over the place, joined by a bunch of friends. The behind-the-scenes video is just as fun. And I watched the “how to do a wheelie” companion video with interest because I’ve never been able to do a wheelie on a bike for more than a couple of seconds and it’s probably time to learn — even though a manual would be more useful for mountain biking. (via the kid should see this)
The life-changing magic of being in the groove. “Scientists have long known the mental and creative benefits of the flow state, in which total absorption in an activity banishes anxiety.”
I ran across an interesting term/concept in Miranda July’s All Fours: third things. A character in the book attributes it to “the Quakers” and describes it like so:
It’s a topic of conversation that doesn’t belong to either party. The soul, usually so shy, can speak more easily through this Third Thing, at a slant.
In his book A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, Quaker writer Parker J. Palmer talks about “third things,” how people can make emotional connections while talking about something they’re experiencing together. This can happen when people attend a concert or play, view a painting or even watch a baseball game.
Palmer believes that the soul is shy and that asking another person to immediately share something very vulnerable can scare them off. Connecting while engaged in third things is a gentler way to communicate.
Many people have fond memories of special conversations that transpired while they were doing the dishes with a parent or going fishing with a friend. This third thing they do together makes it easy and comfortable for them to converse more deeply, often without even making eye contact.
Many of the best conversations I have with my kids are facilitated by third things: watching a movie, playing video games, kicking a soccer ball around, playing mini golf, or running errands in the car. Conversation is no different that any other activity (like, say, shooting free throws or dancing): it’s much easier and open when you’re not actually thinking too hard about it.
For as long as I can remember, Americans have been concerned that the government’s Social Security program will run out of money by the time they get to use it because the Baby Boomers will suck the well dry. But as former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains, Social Security trustees planned for the Boomers but will face a shortfall in the next decade because of increased income inequality in the US.
The Social Security trustees anticipated the boom in boomer retirements. This is why Social Security was amended back in 1983, to gradually increase the age for collecting full retirement benefits from age 65 to 67. That change is helping finance the boomers’ retirement.
So what did the trustees fail to anticipate? Answer: the degree of income inequality in 21st century America.
Put simply, a big part of the American working population is earning less than the Social Security trustees (including me) anticipated decades ago — and therefore paying less in Social Security payroll tax.
Had the pay of American workers kept up with what had been the trend decades ago — and kept up with their own increasing productivity — their Social Security payroll tax payments would have been enough to keep the program flush.
At the same time, a much larger chunk of the nation’s total income is going to the top than was expected decades ago.
Here’s the thing: Income subject to the payroll tax is capped. Every dollar of earnings in excess of the cap is not subject to Social Security payroll taxes. This year’s cap is $160,200.
My hot take as a military kid who has continued to move around is that I think it’s a little weird how people gatekeep being a “local.” If you’ve lived somewhere long enough that you know your way around, have connected yourself with other locals and the local culture, are invested in the community, & see yourself continuing to stay there long term, I think you’re a local. Local to me is about the relationship to a place, not a chunk of time.
I had a friend move from CA to PA. He told me that people move to CA and build new lives and new families, and generally people are accepting of transplants. Meanwhile, he has a hard time acclimating to PA bc people tend to stick in the area where they grew up - it’s hard to break into an area where everyone’s great grand parents knew everybody’s great grandparents.
I liked this distinction:
Depends on where your heart is. You can be local by proximity, but not necessarily culturally. Like, knowing the area and how to live there. But some of those folks move and want to change the culture of a place. Or they come in and simply don’t honor the history and memories of the place ..and tbh, if you don’t know and honor that, then you don’t actually know the people and therefore, you don’t really know the place….so you local, but not a local.
And I feel this one as someone who currently lives in VT:
In New England, the rule is simple. You are considered a local as soon as you have three grandparents who were born in the town where you live.
I’ve lived here for 8 years now and I could live here for 8 more and not really feel like a local, nor be accepted by actual locals as one. For the first three years I lived in my small town, I felt like people were always looking at me when I went to the grocery store — like, “who’s this new guy in here on a random Tuesday in stick season?” They could smell the NYC on me. I don’t really mind though — I’m in a bit of a weird situation where I don’t actually want to be a local (or even really live here at all (long story)).
I lived in NYC for 13 years and 100% wanted to be there, to be involved, to feel like I had a tiny hand in making the city what it was. Calling yourself a New Yorker while not having grown up there is a bold move, but I dunno, I feel like I’d gotten there before I decided to leave.
Since 1982, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has celebrated the opening lines of imagined horrible novels. The winners of the 2024 competition have been announced and there are some real doozies in there, starting with the overall winner:
She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.
Here are a few of my other favorites:
Mrs. Higgins’ body was found in the pantry, bludgeoned with a potato ricer and lying atop a fifty-pound sack of Yukon golds, her favorite for making gnocchi, though some people consider them too moist for this purpose.
That sweltering Friday evening she not so much walked but slithered into my shabby strip mall P.I. office, showing off all her curves, and I knew then I was in for a weekend of trouble because Dave’s Reptile Emporium next door, from which the ball python had escaped, was closed until Monday.
Sir Arthur Pendragon, High King of the Britons, son of King Uther Pendragon, nephew of King Aurelius Ambrosius, who was in turn the son of a long list of people who weren’t kings and thus don’t matter, only slept with his sister once, but boy did it come back to bite him in the ass.
His burnt flesh sizzling like a burger on the grill, blood pouring from his wounds like an overshaken cola, and sweat as salty as French fries pouring down his face, John knew that after this mission was over, he was getting McDonald’s for dinner.
“I do enjoy turning a prophet,” said Torquemada, as he roasted the heretic seer on a spit.
The different kinds of sounds that carmakers have had to come up with to make EVs audible to pedestrians, bikers, and other drivers are wild: orchestras, pitch-shifted didgeridoos, gas car noises.
For over a century, the internal combustion engine powered vehicles with an intricate combination of moving parts and tiny explosions. That combustion process inevitably made noise, and that noise came to define the background soundscape of our roads, cities, and day-to-day life. But as hybrids and EVs became increasingly mainstream — and more of their near-silent electric motors filled the streets — it became clear that silent vehicles didn’t fit in the ecosystem we’d built around cars.
Spearheaded by associations of the blind and visually impaired, legislation eventually began to require electric vehicles to emit an artificial engine noise out of hidden external speakers. These hidden speaker systems, called “Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems” — or AVAS — had to meet certain sonic criteria. But they were also a blank slate for sound designers to decide how the cars of the future should sound.
Scientists are puzzled by the presence of “little red dots” found by the JW Space Telescope: tiny galaxies that have left no trace. “Why did they vanish? Or what did they morph into? Their sudden disappearance is a profound enigma.”
For his project The Disciples, photographer James Mollison took photo montages of fans outside of music concerts. See if you can guess which concerts these groups of fans attended:
Here’s Mollison on the project:
Over three years I photographed fans outside different concerts. I am fascinated by the different tribes of people that attend them, and how people emulate celebrity to form their identity.
As I photographed the project I began to see how the concerts became events for people to come together with surrogate ‘families’, a chance to relive their youth or try and be part of a scene that happened before they were born.
Fascinating! From top to bottom: Lady Gaga, Merle Haggard, 50 Cent, The Casualties, and Tori Amos. Here’s a video featuring some of the photos accompanied by music from the corresponding artists:
Costco in Cancún, a piece about Costco’s travel service and how the company’s warehouse shopping experience (“Everything Is a Good Deal”) relates to the all-inclusive hotel vibe (“Everything Is Paid For”).
I’ve been enjoying watching these livestreams of watering holes in the arid regions of Namibia. As I’m looking now, there appear to be some zebras and giraffes hanging out — previous sightings include hyenas, ostriches, cheetahs, wildebeest, oryx, and even honey badgers. You can find more cams and archived footage at @NamibiaCam.
I’ll start. I finished the superb Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham and Miranda July’s excellent All Fours within the last few weeks. I’m about halfway through Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I could not finish Frankenstein — I was so excited and the book was so not my thing.
A friend recommended that I read North Woods by Daniel Mason next but I’ve also got my eye on There There by Tommy Orange and The Missing Thread by Daisy Dunn (which I posted about this morning). It’s just over a month until Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo drops…the excerpt piqued my already excited interest.
What’s everyone else reading these days? Or are looking forward to reading?
The Howtown crew explains how food manufacturers, the USDA, and food label services figure out how many calories are in the foods we eat. Spoiler: it’s not just a matter of burning food to see how much energy is produced — different nutrients are absorbed more or less efficiently by the body so you need to measure the output and compare it to the input.
And don’t forget to check the comments for Joss Fong’s banana oat blobs.
Humans are the first and, to our knowledge, only entities on Earth to develop general intelligence, which has allowed us to dominate and alter the planet in a way and at a speed that no other entity has managed. Now, some people are working towards building an artificial general intelligence. So what happens when humans are matched or even far outclassed by this new general intelligence?
Such an intelligence explosion might lead to a true superintelligent entity. We don’t know what such a being would look like, what its motives or goals would be, what would go on in its inner world. We could be as laughably stupid to a superintelligence as squirrels are to us. Unable to even comprehend its way of thinking.
This hypothetical scenario keeps many people up at night. Humanity is the only example we have of an animal becoming smarter than all others — and we have not been kind to what we perceive as less intelligent beings. AGI might be the last invention of humanity.
Jamelle Bouie: “If Democrats win control of Washington in November, they should make reforming our democracy a priority” because the Republicans’ “ability to win power without winning votes is a powerful disincentive to change” their extremist ways.
The musician Nick Cave was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week (full interview) and he read a letter from his Red Hand Files, an AMA project where fans write in with questions and he answers them. The question was:
Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?
In a lovely letter in response (which he reads in the video above), Cave writes that “much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt” and that “it took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope”. That devastation was the death of his 15-year-old son in 2015, which he talks more about in this interview and in this book. Cave’s response concludes:
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.
I promise, your day will be better if you take a few minutes to watch or read this letter. And the entire interview is worth watching as well — there is no better interviewer on the topic of loss and grief than Stephen Colbert.
A few years ago, he read about imiquimod, a drug that, among other uses, is approved to fight one form of skin cancer and has shown promise against several more. Typically, imiquimod, which can help destroy tumors and usually comes in the form of a cream, is prescribed as a front-line drug as part of a broader cancer treatment plan, but Heman wondered if it could be made available more easily to people in the earliest stages of the disease. A bar of soap, he reckoned, might be just the delivery system for such a lifesaving drug, not just because it was simple, but because it would be a lot more affordable than the $40,000 it typically costs for skin-cancer treatment.
“What is one thing that is an internationally impactful idea, something that everyone can use, [regardless of] socioeconomic class?” Heman recalls thinking. “Almost everyone uses soap and water for cleaning. So soap would probably be the best option.”
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis, it’s being released on vinyl. “A full circle moment to honor the weird little chiptune album that changed my life for the better.”
I read a lot of comments about political logos… Having helped shape the logo of every Democratic president in the twenty-first century (hflr.io/biden, hflr.io/obama), let me say from experience that campaign typography is *completely* unlike graphic design: it’s a strange and fascinating agility sport, marked by limited information, a ticking clock, unimaginable pressures, and serious consequences. It’s Iron Chef, but in Adobe Illustrator.
Imagine a client asking for a logo in 24 hours, but not telling you the name of the company! That’s what it’s like to participate in the veepstakes. Nobody who commented on the Biden/Harris logo realized that Robyn Kanner and I were busy developing *dozens* of possible identities in parallel, completely firewalled from the political side of things, awaiting the news until 40 minutes before press time.
This 4K drone video from @liulangCooki takes us on a journey from the base camp at 17,400 feet all the way to the summit of Mount Everest. Along the way, you can see tiny little people hiking up and the paths they take. Very cool.
Is Ben scrolling TikTok right now? “This site reveals, in real-time, whether I — artist and professor Ben Grosser — am currently scrolling TikTok. Think of it as a last-ditch effort, a sort of public confessional as therapeutic tool…”
Mark Rober built a robot that solves jigsaw puzzles and pitted it against Tammy McLeod, one of the world’s faster human solvers. The design and build process is fascinating, especially the fine-tuning enabling the robot to “wiggle” each piece into its place.
When we first tried to assemble the puzzle, almost none of the pieces fit together perfectly. This was before we had corrected the errors in the computer vision code as described earlier.
However even after we improved the computer vision code, some small errors remained. Many pieces would fit together perfectly, and then you would see one that was ever so slightly out of place, and that could ruin the alignment for the rest of the puzzle if left unresolved.
To solve this, we took inspiration from humans. If you try to place a puzzle piece with your hands, you’ll find that often you need to wiggle the piece around to get it to snap into place. So we programmed the robot to do the same thing.
Recent CDC report: “Among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths…”
Kurzgesagt explores what happens when a virus or bacteria enters a human body and the essential role fever plays in helping your body fight off disease.
Fever feels bad. So we take medication to suppress it — but is this a good idea? It turns out fever is one of the oldest defenses against disease. What exactly is a fever, and how does it make your immune defense stronger? Should you take a pill to combat it?
We often mistake fever for the disease…it’s actually part of the cure. When my kids were young, I vividly remember our laissez-faire French pediatrician urging us not to give them medication to get rid of their fevers because that was the body fighting back and doing useful work — unless their temps got too high of course.
Lethonomia “refers to the inability to recall someone’s name”. I can never remember the name of the actor who plays Frodo in LOTR or Spider-Man from Sam Raimi’s movies.
August 1st was Earth Overshoot Day for 2024. “In the past 7 months, we’ve used everything our planet can regenerate this year. For the rest of the year, we’ll deplete our children’s future.” We’re using the resources of 1.75 Earths per year.
This piece by Lydia Polgreen on The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids is so good — straightforward and informative, especially when compared to the incoherent nonsense that the NY Times has run about trans people over the past few years. The piece is about, in Polgreen’s words, “the sneaky effort to use what looks like science to justify broad intrusions in our personal freedom”.
I usually don’t do this, but I’ve excerpted the article’s conclusion here because it just gets right to the heart of an urgent concern: the freedom to control our own bodies.
Imagine that your health care required objective justification, if access to birth control or erectile dysfunction medications required proving that you were having monogamous sex, or good sex, or sex at all. Or if fertility care was provided only if you could prove that becoming a parent would make you happy, or you would be a good parent. Or that abortion would be available only if you could prove that it would improve your life.
In a free society we agree that these are private matters, decided by individuals and their families, with the support of doctors using mainstream medical science as a guide, even when they involve children. We invite politicians and judges into them at great peril to our freedom.
A pilot program in Copenhagen was designed to encourage tourists “to act a bit more responsibly and think about their impact on the environment” during visits. Visitors got free lunch for urban farm work or free kayak rental for trash cleanup.
The way the Fields sisters see it, and I think they’re right: race is a fiction, it doesn’t exist biologically, it’s a social construction, it’s designed to categorize, and it often obscures far more than it explains. But racism is real, right? Racism, the action, is real, it’s material, it affects people’s lives, it has life or death stakes, it structures the way that we engage in, and are received by, the society in which we live.
The example they give in the beginning of the book is: imagine a Black police officer is killed by one of his white colleagues. He’s undercover and he’s shot and killed. The news would say that this police officer was killed because he was Black. But the Fields sisters would say, wait a sec. Did the white officer shoot because he was white? That the Blackness caused the death, that the whiteness caused the shooting? No, of course not. What happened was that a white officer relied on racist assumptions about people of African descent to come to a set of conclusions, then acted on those conclusions.
Knolling is the practice of organizing objects in parallel or at 90° angles. The term has been popularized by artist Tom Sachs; he picked it up from Andrew Kromelow when both were working at Frank Gehry’s furniture fabrication shop. Gehry was designing chairs for furniture company Knoll, and Kromelow would arrange unused tools in a manner similar to Knoll furniture. Hence, knolling.
Republicans Will Refuse to Certify a Harris Win. “There are more than enough [pro-Trump election conspiracists] in these key posts to bring us to a constitutional crisis.” (Have you noticed Trump isn’t really campaigning? This is one reason why.)
Nancy Pelosi’s Art of Power, a short profile by David Remnick. My friend Meg sent me this, saying that this Pelosi quote should be on a t-shirt: “You have to be willing to throw a punch. For the children.”
The Mushroom Color Atlas is a resource and reference for everyone curious about mushrooms and the beautiful and subtle colors derived from dyeing with mushrooms. But it is also the start of a journey and a point of departure, introducing you to the kaleidoscopic fungi kingdom and our connection to it.
Scott Heiferman sold his dotcom company in 1999 and then went to work the counter at McDonald’s “to help get back in touch with the real world”. One takeaway: “most of my mcdonald’s co-workers did their jobs much better than i ever could.”
What “Center” Is That, Exactly? A.R. Moxon on the continuing pleas from political “centrists” for the Democratic Party to find common ground with a party dedicated to extremist white Christian nationalism and whose party members joyously brandish MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs at party conventions.
It must be a center that exists between two points one of which pretty clearly reads MASS DEPORTATION NOW, and I suppose Chait would have it that the other point is apparently so far to the right of basic acts of governance like feeding hungry schoolchildren that such acts don’t appear in between. The center is apparently now a cruel enough place that decency doesn’t live there, and Chait, who has never believed that Democrats should ever do anything other than seek the votes of those who hate decency, now believes that Democrats should once again run away from decency, as a strategic matter.
So maybe “the center” isn’t a position. Maybe it’s an alignment, one that sees unity as a constant and never-changing agreement with supremacists, a certification that supremacists and only supremacists are part of “us,” and any attempt to make common cause with unwanted groups that supremacists consider to be their enemies represents polarization and disunity, in a way that supremacist violence itself never will.
Maybe “the center” is just whatever no-man’s land currently happens to occupy the space between the worst atrocities we can imagine, and however far we’ve travelled toward those committing them to try to get them on our side, a journey we undertook so that we won’t have to do the work of opposing them.
I think it might be that.
Such a center is a center that will make itself comfortable with any atrocity, because comfort is its only goal.
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
The Babylonian map of the world is the oldest map of the world, in the world. Written and inscribed on clay in Mesopotamia around 2,900-years-ago, it is, like so many cuneiform tablets, incomplete. However, Irving Finkel and a particularly gifted student of his — Edith Horsley — managed to locate a missing piece of the map, slot it back into the cuneiform tablet, and from there set us all on journey through the somewhat mythical landscape of Mesopotamia to find the final resting place of the ark. And yes we mean that ark, as in Noah’s ark. Although in the earlier Mesopotamian version of the flood story, the ark is built by Ziusudra.
Finkel could not possibly look more like a British Museum curator than he does.
Btw, I first heard about the earliest Mesopotamian version of the flood story in a mythology class I took in college. I’d spent a lot of my youth going to church but religion didn’t click for me and I was never a believer. Hearing that flood story clinched it for me — the Old Testament of the Christian bible is just as mythological as the Greek or Mesopotamian gods (everything is a remix) — and I’ve been solidly atheist ever since. (via open culture)
Saturday Night is a forthcoming movie directed by Jason Reitman about the premiere of Saturday Night Live.
At 11:30pm on October 11, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television — and culture — forever. Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Gil Kenan & Reitman, Saturday Night is based on the true story of what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live. Full of humor, chaos, and the magic of a revolution that almost wasn’t, we count down the minutes in real time until we hear those famous words…
According to Wikipedia, Succession’s Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg) plays both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson in the film. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
Is this a new streaming device for your TV or the bar of soap in the shower that’s been worn down to a sliver but your parents won’t throw it out because “there’s still a lot of soap there”?
Immediately after Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s VP pick, the memes started. Most zeroed in on Walz’s potent Midwestern dad energy; he’s the kind of guy who would help a neighbor fix a car, pick you up from the airport, or bring you some soup when you’re sick. For his supporters, Walz is bringing the same kind of energy and hope to the presidential race as Obama did in 2008 and Bernie Sanders did in 2016.
And so of course someone made Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle; it’s a collection of things Walz would do for you because he’s just that kinda guy.
Each time you refresh the page, you get a new saying; some of the other ones:
Tim Walz remembers where you parked your car.
Tim Walz has room for a little slice of pie.
Tim Walz is glad to give you a hand with your stroller down those stairs.
Honan even turned the site into a book. A few months later, folks on Twitter started sharing all the wonderful things that would happen when Obama won the Democratic nomination and I collected a bunch of those tweets into this site.
The Portable Feminist Reader, edited by Roxane Gay. Includes writing by Agrippa, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, The Guerrilla Girls, and more.
I watched the men’s Olympic mountain biking race last week and something one of the announcers said caught my attention. She was describing the electronic shifters the cyclists use and then said that many of the competitors were also using an AI-controlled suspension system that automagically adjusted the level of suspension according to the terrain and rider preference.
The S-Works is the first production bike to debut with the latest version of RockShox’s Flight Attendant Ai suspension. This uses sensors in the SID Ultimate fork, SIDLuxe Ultimate shock, Quarq XX SL power crank, XX SL rear mech and XX shifters to build a comprehensive ride ‘picture’. It then automatically switch the fork and shock between open, pedal and lock modes depending on incoming impacts, bike orientation, pre-emptive shift signals and rider referencing ‘effort states’.
Flight Attendant is comprised of two primary components: a fork module and a rear shock module. The fork module sits atop a special Charger damper that comes inside a Pike, Lyrik or Zeb, while the shock module is built into the piggyback reservoir of a Flight Attendant-specific Super Deluxe Ultimate shock. These two modules communicate wirelessly, and decide whether the suspension should be in one of three predetermined compression settings: Open, Pedal or Lock.
The system makes these decisions based on input provided by an array of sensors. Inside the fork and shock modules you’ll find an accelerometer and an inclinometer, which allows the bike to detect both bump forces and pitch. There’s also a sensor within the crank spindle to detect if you’re pedalling or coasting.
With this combination of sensors, Flight Attendant builds a picture of the terrain and the rider’s pedalling input. Based on that picture, it automatically adjusts the suspension to the ideal setting. Put simply, it’s designed to firm up the suspension to improve pedal efficiency on the climbs and along smoother terrain, while allowing the suspension to open up for the descents and on rougher trails. And all without your hands ever having to leave the grips.
And does it work? Again from Mountain Bike Rider:
In fact I’d actually say RockShox’s claimed 1.8% faster over a 90 minute event is an underestimation for most riders. Even XC GOAT Nino Schurter found the Flight Attendant changed modes over four times more often (1,325 switches rather than 300) than he normally would with a manual lockout. That experiment also ended in the first of several World Cup wins for SID Flight Attendant prototypes in 2023 including some by Victor Koretsky on a modified version of the previous Epic Evo.
A lot of that is MTB jargon but I hope you get the jist. What I couldn’t find is any evidence that Flight Attendant or any of the similar systems are actually using AI or machine learning to assist with these adjustments. I did find this article on Pinkbike about Shimano’s plans for a suspension system that a rider can train.
Automatic control of suspension itself is nothing new. Fox Live Valve, RockShox Flight Attendant and more recently, SR Suntour’s TACT suspension products have been automatically adjusting suspension damping, with varying levels of success, for a good number of years now. However, the programming behind the function of these products is relatively fixed. There is no scope for the rider to give the system feedback on its performance. It can’t “learn” what the rider’s preferences are.
It could be that the Olympic riders are using pre-market prototypes that use machine learning to adapt to individual rider preferences, but I don’t know. I’d love to hear from folks out there if you know any more details!
Michelle Goldberg writes about a new book, a fascist manifesto, written by antisemite and white nationalist Jack Posobiec (and his ghostwriter) called Unhumans.
The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.
As Goldberg notes, the endorsement of the book by prominent Republicans is a reminder of how extremist and far away from reality the Republican Party is now. Trump’s running mate JD Vance wrote a blurb for it and so did Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Michael Flynn, Trump’s National Security Advisor. Steve Bannon wrote the foreword. These guys are weird and unhinged and dangerous because they are somehow at the center of the Republican Party. (See also Project 2025.)
Utah is basically burning books now. “State has ordered books by 13 authors, 12 of them women, to be removed from every public school, classroom and library.” Includes books by Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, and Rupi Kaur.
Why the word “Taiwan” is banned at the Olympics. “Taiwan is one of just three teams whose flag is banned at the Olympics. The other two are Russia and Belarus — banned as punishment for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.”
The EP–1320 Medieval is, amazingly, a real gadget being sold by Teenage Engineering — it’s a “beat machine” (or “instrumentalis electronicum”) loaded with a bunch of musical phrases and instruments from the Dark Ages.
Hurdy gurdys, lutes, Gregorian chants, thundering drums and punishing percussive Foley FX. The EP-1320 is the first of its kind: featuring a large library of phrases, play ready instruments and one-shot samples from an age where darkness reigned supreme, the instrumentalis electronicum is the ultimate, and only, medieval beat machine.
The theme for the Cooper Hewitt’s upcoming Design Triennial (in collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture) is Making Home.
3. Walz credits his rural upbringing for his values: “A town that small had services like that and had a public school with a government teacher that inspired me to be sitting where I’m at today. Those are real stories in small towns.”
6. Walz’s father, a school administrator, died of lung cancer when Walz was 19. Walz said this moment fueled his views on health care access: “The last week of my dad’s life cost my mom a decade of going back to work to pay off hospital debt.”
15. He was the faculty adviser for [Mankato West High School’s] first gay-straight alliance chapter in 1999.
24. Walz won re-election five times in southern Minnesota’s mostly rural, conservative 1st District, serving in the House for 12 years.
28. Walz once earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association and the group’s endorsement. In 2016, Guns & Ammo magazine included him on its list of top 20 politicians for gun owners.
29. He later denounced the NRA and supported gun-control measures, such as an assault weapons ban. During his first campaign for governor in 2018, the NRA completely downgraded his rating. “I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s. And I sleep just fine.”
33. Walz frequently defends his policies, such as the universal school meals bill signed into Minnesota law earlier this year, as common sense: “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn and women are making their own healthcare decisions,” Walz said jokingly.
Klein: If a Democrat is president in 2025 and there’s a governing trifecta, what do you think Democrats should pass first? What would make the biggest difference for people?
Walz: I think paid family and medical leave. We’re the last nation on earth basically to not do this. It is so foundational to just basic decency and financial well-being. And I think that would start to change both finances, attitude — strengthen the family.
If JD Vance is right about this: that we should make it easier for families to be together, then make sure that after your child’s born, that you can spend a little time with them. That’d be a great thing.
K: Great way of also seeing who in politics is actually pro-family and who just likes to talk about it.
“Right now, Minnesota is showing the country you don’t win elections to bank political capital,” Walz said last year. “You win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.”
Reading that quote, I immediately thought of Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society; there’s a great podcast series about it hosted by Melody Barnes.
Amazing stat about the disappearance of bands from the UK music charts (29:40 mark): in the first half of the 80s, bands were #1 for 146 weeks; the first half of the 90s, it was 141 weeks. In the 20s so far: 3 weeks that songs by bands were #1. 🤯
I haven’t watched too much of the Olympics this summer so maybe the announcers explain this every single time they show a medals ceremony, but in case you didn’t know, the long, thin boxes given to the medalists along with their medals contain the official poster of the Games (and a plushie).
The poster was created by illustrator Ugo Gattoni and is a sort of Where’s Waldo / Busy Busy Town representation of the Games and its venues.
The designer had total creative freedom. While working to a brief and respecting the look of the Games, he still managed to maintain his own playful and joyful style.
This is why eight mascots are hidden within the posters. In fact, whatever age you are, there is something within the artwork that you will be able to enjoy.
The biggest images of the poster I can find are here if you want to zoom in to see the details. There are also zoomed-in images and videos on Gattoni’s Instagram.
The Olympic poster is the twin of the poster for the Paralympic Games, also created by Gattoni:
Forthcoming book: The Marvel Comics Covers of Jack Kirby Volume 1. This volume contains covers from 1961 to 1964, including art from The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, and The X-Men.
Chinatown’s tenements are in the foreground, while the skyscraper canyons of Lower Manhattan rise above. This shows the area of Chinatown bordered by Bowery, Canal Street, and Columbus Park.
It took him around 60 hours to complete; he made a time lapse video of its creation:
A deep dive into Null Island. “Null Island is a long-running inside joke among cartographers. It is an imaginary island located at a real place: the coordinates of 0° latitude and 0° longitude.” Its shape is a reference to the video game Myst.
YES YES YES: “Campaigns from Harris for President on down should clarify that they will post to Twitter only after updating other platforms. Steering the media away from Twitter helps democracy.” Time to stop helping Musk’s disinformation campaign.
If you watch any of Steven Spielberg’s movies, you’ll notice a distinctive element: the Spielberg Face.
If Spielberg deserves to be called a master of audience manipulation, then this is his signature stroke.
You see the onscreen character watching along with you in wonder, awe, apprehension, fear, sadness. It’s the director’s way of hitting pause, to show the audience this is a critical scene, to reinforce how the audience should be feeling in that moment.
Cooking with Pixar, a playlist of videos with recipes inspired by Luca (trenette al pesto), Turning Ref (congee), Coco (tamales), and Incredibles 2 (cookies).
If you spend any amount of time on the internet — and if you’re reading this, you probably do and perhaps even feel shamed by your weekly Screen Time notification — you’ve probably seen the statistic that 5% of the Earth’s population is related to 13th century ruler of the Mongol Empire and presumed prolific father, Genghis Khan. In this episode of SciShow, Hank Green explores if that’s true and how researchers investigate relations across dozens and even hundreds of generations.
Over the last century, athletic performances have dramatically improved because of better training, improved nutrition, a bigger pool of people to draw from, technology, increased financial support, and the human desire to build on each others’ successes. It’s actually shocking how much better athletics have gotten, as you can see from these “then & now” videos from the Summer Olympics. Here’s the men’s pole vault from 1912 and then 2020:
The women’s javelin in 1932 (Babe Didrikson!) vs. 2020:
And perhaps the most stark difference: the women’s 10-meter platform diving in 1912 and 2020; it’s like watching two completely different sports:
Carl Zimmer’s new book sounds fascinating & relevant: Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. “The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down.”
If you’re curious about how USA’s Kristen Faulkner shocked the top riders in the women’s road race, thesethreads go into some of the strategy involved. “Road cycling is built upon prisoner’s dilemmas like this.”
The D.M.V. is a beacon of equality in this country. Celebrate the place where you can watch a celebrity fill out the same forms that you do. We should revel in the fact that there is no express lane for beautiful, rich people to renew their licenses. When you sit in those hard chairs waiting for your number to appear on a screen, you should be delighted that no one else is sitting in a cushier chair. Look around that room and see your fellow Americans, the huddled masses, gathered at the feet of a woman asking for the paperwork to be a law-abiding citizen.
She also adds that “The D.M.V. is one of the few places where privileged people — especially privileged white people — will ever encounter a woman of color with unquestionable authority.”
It sounds like an innovative answer to the problem that everybody faces at an amusement park, and one perfectly in keeping with the approaches currently in place at airports and even on some crowded American highways — perfectly in keeping with the two-tiering of America. You can pay for one level of access, or you can pay for another. If you have the means, you can even pay for freedom. There’s only one problem: Cutting the line is cheating, and everyone knows it. Children know it most acutely, know it in their bones, and so when they’ve been waiting on a line for a half-hour and a family sporting yellow plastic Flash Passes on their wrists walks up and steps in front of them, they can’t help asking why that family has been permitted the privilege of perpetrating what looks like an obvious injustice. And then you have to explain not just that they paid for it but that you haven’t paid enough — that the $100 or so that you’ve ponied up was just enough to teach your children that they are second- or third-class citizens.
On social media this morning, I ran across this evergreen quote from Toni Morrison about the true function of racism:
It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Morrison said this during a speech titled The Humanist View at Portland State University on May 30, 1975. The text above, which is slightly different than you’ll see on social media or Goodreads, is taken directly from the transcript. You can also listen to Morrison’s full remarks on Soundcloud:
The snippet quoted above starts at about 35:45. (via @greg.org)
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