It’s Friday and so we’ll end the week with a pair of poems. Good Bones by Maggie Smith:
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
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A new offering from Swiss hotels: Bees & Friends. “We’re welcoming bees, butterflies, insects and hedgehogs with their own charming little homes, nestled right next to our hotels.”
The Problem with My City Is That It’s a City. “I moved to this city as a wide-eyed twenty-year-old, ready to take on the world with energetic abandon. Now, I’m no longer twenty years old. Something really has changed with this city.”
Old school food blogger Adam Roberts has a new novel out this week called Food Person in which “a young and socially awkward writer takes a job ghostwriting the cookbook for a famous (and famously chaotic) Hollywood starlet”.
The Quilters (trailer) is a short documentary about a group of men in a Missouri prison who spend 40 hours a week making birthday quilts for foster kids and kids with disabilities.
The Quilters follows the daily lives of several quilters inside the sewing room at South Central Correctional Center, a Level 5 maximum-security prison in a small town two hours south of St. Louis, MO. From design to completion, the men reveal their struggles, triumphs, and sense of pride in creating something beautiful in this windowless, sacred space deep within the prison walls.
The tragedy of prevention goes like this: The most effective way to save lives (prevention) is the least noticeable, which leads us to undervaluing it in our individual choices, in what we celebrate, and in public policy. That undervaluing of prevention leads to a great deal of needless death and suffering.
But there’s a second tragedy here, which is that we spend way less time celebrating the accomplishments of humanity than I think we should. If every person who had their life saved by a vaccine, or an airbag, or a clean air regulation felt the same as a firefighter carrying an unconscious person out of a burning building, I think we’d feel a lot better about humanity, and maybe that would help us move forward more effectively.
A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.
Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.
Preparation, prevention, regulations, and safeguards prevent catastrophes all the time, but we seldom think or hear about it because “world continues to function” is not interesting news. We have to rely on statistical analysis and the expert opinions of planners and officials in order to evaluate both crucial next steps and the effectiveness of preparatory measures after the fact, and that can be challenging for us to pay attention to. So we tend to forget that preparation & prevention is necessary and discount it the next time around.
In this video, musician Armin Küpper performs a saxophone duet with the echo of his past self by playing near the end of a large pipe. That’s pretty cool. And it’s also a learning opportunity! Hey wait, come back…you haven’t finished your bowl of physics yet:
What you hear after each note is an echo, a sound wave reflecting off the far end of the pipe and traveling back to him.
Sound travels at around 343 meters per second (1,235 km/h or 767 mph) through air. In this video, the echo takes about 1.5 seconds to return. That means the reflected sound traveled about 514.5 meters (1,688 feet) round-trip, so the end of the pipe is at around 257 meters (843 ft) away.
It seems more like a second to me (so ~563 feet), but whatever…still cool.
Donald Trump is waging war on the future; he’s attempting to destroy America’s democracy, its economic future, a sustainable climate future, and science. “The aim, whether stated explicitly or not, is to erase the future as Americans have understood it.”
I’m Not Going There Anymore. Tony Wheeler (co-founder of Lonely Planet) lists four places he’s not going back to, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the USA.
An Open Letter to Clarence Thomas by Elie Mystal. “You have put yourself in a position where you are the only black man the white supremacists running this joint will even consider listening to. Use your voice to help us.”
George Wendt, who played lovable barfly Norm Peterson on Cheers for 11 seasons, died yesterday at the age of 76. Here’s an 18-minute supercut of every time Norm entered the bar. I loved Cheers when I was a kid; I’ve seen every episode multiple times (though not for many years) and of course Norm was a favorite. 🍺💞
Some advice from Old Man Kottke: if you need readers, get some with good lenses. I had some cheapo ones that gave me eye strain, so I ordered these from Caddis and they’re like 100 times better.
“When does a kid become an adult?” Boy oh boy, this question has manifested in so many ways in our family over the past year (my son turns 18 soon, is off to college in the fall, and is both super smart/capable *and* wildly clueless).
Magnus Carlsen played a game of freestyle chess against 143,000 people (who voted on what moves to make) and was forced into a draw. I’m surprised at the outcome…I didn’t think the wisdom of the crowds would work in a situation like this.
Derek Bolz made a video about what biking does for his mental health. A partial transcript (boldface mine):
Life has been rough lately. I don’t want to air my dirty laundry on the internet, so I won’t go into detail. But for a number of reasons, I am quite stressed out, maybe more than I’ve ever been before. To put it simply: everything is not ok.
But then, suddenly, everything is ok. My hands are on the bars, my feet are on the pedals, the wind is in my face, my mind is clear. All I have to do is clear that jump, rip around that corner, clear that other jump, land that trick, hold that manual, hold that wheelie, hold on for dear life, pedal harder and harder and harder.
That is the beauty of biking. It demands so much of your attention that you have no option but to live in the present. There’s no time to worry. It’s like meditation while moving. And then you always feel a bit better after.
This is one of the reasons I’ve fallen in love with mountain biking over the past few years — riding is so all-encompassing that it forces me out of whatever past or future crisis is occupying my thoughts and into thinking no more than a second or two into the future. And moving through physical space feels like you’re making progress, which is amazing when you’re feeling stuck in the rest of your life.
Depending on the trail, if I lose concentration for a second while biking, I might get seriously injured or die. As someone who has never been into extreme sports, I have no idea why I decided being on the edge of death is fun and stress-relieving, but it is. 🤷♂️
Mountain biking isn’t for everyone — I know others get a similar sense of presence and focus from running, skiing, throwing pots, woodworking, photography, walking, surfing, writing, knitting, meditation, gardening, painting, reading, and the list goes on and on. I feel lucky to have found my thing and would love to hear if you’ve found yours. (via @mmilan)
Lagarto Films is a film collective based in Puerto Rico that makes interactive YouTube videos and games. This is pretty clever actually…they use keyboard shortcuts to skip to different parts of the video, Choose Your Own Adventure style. So you can play a game of Uno:
What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get. “Nearly every aspect of society has been designed by people unfamiliar with not only the experience of living in poverty but the experience of living paycheck to paycheck.”
Fairy Pools is an excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s upcoming novel, Will There Ever Be Another You. “Arugula, she thought. I’m going to die alone in a Scottish castle because people have gotten too good for iceberg lettuce.”
Whoa, look at the interior of this new Japanese restaurant in NYC called Shirokuro — all of the surfaces (floors, chairs, walls, counters, etc.) are painted to look like a 2-dimensional drawing. From Colossal:
“Shirokuro” translates to “white-black.” The New York Times shares that proprietor James Lim was inspired by an immersive, 2D restaurant he visited ten years ago in Korea, and he envisioned one of his own, now open in the East Village. To make the interior pop, he invited his friend, real estate agent and artist Mirim Yoo, to transform the space into an all-encompassing environment.
Here’s what it looks like with people and other non-b&w objects:
This reminds me of Alexa Meade’s work — it would be amazing to see a collab where Meade does up the servers (or guests) for a performance piece.
Justice Sotomayor’s Message to Lawyers: Stand Up, Fight and Win. “Those on the high court often exercise caution in their choice of words. That’s why it was striking when she [delivered] a stern message to the legal profession: stand up for democracy…”
A group of three students at Purdue University have shattered the world record for the fastest Rubik’s Cube solve by robot — their bot solved the cube in just 0.103 seconds (103 milliseconds). As a comparison, the former record was 305 milliseconds and “a human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds”. As one of the students said, “So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”
“The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema — and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong.” (I was slack-jawed by the end of this.)
Hey folks. I’ve been plugging away behind the scenes on some new features and while some of them aren’t ready to go yet, others are. I don’t know if Sunday evening is the best time to do this, but here’s what’s new on the site:
1. Faving posts. For the past several months, KDO members have been able to fave comments in threads and it’s been working well. The feature allows people to applaud/reward good comments, keep track of comments that they particularly like, and, in aggregate, participate in showing the community as a whole which comments are especially popular or meaningful.
Now I’ve extended that capability to posts; members will find a fave button attached to every post on the site. The number of faves a post has will appear next to the fave button. I went around and around on whether to display fave counts or to figure out some alternative way to indicate the popularity of a post, but I settled on just displaying them because it’s easy and everyone understands that if number is big, post is more popular/beloved. (I also went back and forth a jillion times about whether to do faves with stars, faves with hearts, or likes with hearts. Faves with stars felt right because it’s old school. You can tell me I’m wrong in the comments.)
Like I said when I launched the comment faves, there isn’t a limit to the number of posts you can fave, but in the spirit of kottke.org’s community guidelines, try to be thoughtful and community-minded about faves. At their best, faves are a useful communal signal for others looking for the most interesting posts.
Still to do: I’m working on making it so you can see a list of posts you’ve faved and a list of the most-faved posts on the site. And there are other things that can be done with the faves…it’ll take some time to figure out what those are.
Again, this feature is only for members. A few people have been testing this with me for a few months and I’m excited to open it up to members.
2. The main content area is now wider on non-mobile browsers. When I launched the most recent design in March 2024, I said I wanted the site to feel like a contemporary version of an old school blog, which meant a more compact design. For many posts, this works well but the more visual posts — with embedded art, photos, illustrations, and videos — didn’t look as good as they could have. Hopefully the wider content area gives them more room to breathe.
3. Along with that, I made some tweaks to the sidebar: decreased the menu font sizes, decreased the width, and tweaked the design of the logged-in user view (which I’m still not entirely happy with, but we’re gonna go with it and see).
4. For non-mobile browsers, clicking play on embedded videos in posts will now open up the video in a lightboxed player the width of the browser window. If that doesn’t make sense, just give it a try with one of the internet’s favorite videos, Tom Holland lip-syncing to Umbrella:
I’ve had this feature enabled for myself for a few months and I love it — it’s a much better viewing experience than in KDO’s narrow column or on YouTube or Vimeo. And if you do want to click through and watch it on the original site, it’s only one extra click. I’ve also been making sure I put a link to the video in the text of the post so that it’s easy to get to that way. (I suspect some of you are going to hate this feature because it overrides the expected behavior of the video click. But I genuinely believe it’s better for watching videos! Like, this isn’t some weird tactic to keep people on the site — please, go to YouTube if you want, delete your KDO bookmark, shut your computer down, throw your phone in the ocean, walk into the forest, you’re the internet now, you’re free! In other words, give the lightboxed videos a chance?)
(Reminder: clicking on images in non-Quick Link posts will open them in a lightbox as well. I love this feature too.)
Ok, I think that’s all for now. As always, let me know in the comments below (or via email) if you have any questions, feedback, or concerns.
The Internet Phone Book is “an annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.”
Taken on July 29, 1878, Solar Eclipse by canonized landscape photographer Carleton Watkins powerfully, elegantly captures the exact moment the moon completely blocked the sun and cast a surreal shadow over the Earth. Watkins, known for his pioneering work depicting the American West, used this rare event as an opportunity to simultaneously experiment with photographic techniques and record a celestial occurrence. The piece’s resulting artistic and technical achievement is as sublime and awe-inspiring as the eclipse itself. It’s stunning that then, as now, eclipses humble us all by reminding us of our smallness in a vast and fascinatingly ordered universe.
Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii was a pioneer in color photography; he documented his native Russia in color from 1904 to 1915. Here’s his photograph of some flowers (lilacs? hydrangeas?):
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