The nucleus of Comet ATLAS (C/2024 G3) held together during a brutal perihelion but not for long. Lionel Majzik of Hungary was the first to report and record dramatic changes in the comet between January 18th and 19th. The bright, strongly condensed head rapidly became more diffuse, a sure sign that its nucleus was disintegrating based on past observations of crumbling comets. His superb sequence, photographed remotely from Chile, clearly reveal the dramatic transformation, which was later confirmed by Australian observers.
The tail will be visible for a few days after the breakup — such comets are called “headless wonders” by astronomers. (via @philplait.bsky.social)
In order to leave comments on posts, you need to be a current kottke.org member. If you'd like to sign up for a membership to support the site and join the conversation, you can explore your options here.
Wikenigma is an encyclopedia of known unknowns. That is, a listing of “scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer”.
I love to be on a bus that’s so crowded that there’s people hanging outside the door when the bus takes off and then they settle in like cornflakes settle into a box, and there’s always room for one more body.
If you’ve never been on a bus or train like this, have you even travelled?
I just love to expose people to examples of things they would never encounter at home. Culture shock is a constructive thing. It’s the growing pains of a broadening perspective. To me, there are two kinds of travel: There’s escape travel, and there’s reality travel. I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a little better citizen of the planet.
I love escape travel (my recent trip was 90% escape) but the trips I really value are the ones that change me.
Media consumption modes could also probably be sorted into escape and reality. I’ve watched/read a lot of escape/comfort/easy media over the past year and am trying to ease myself back into stuff that’s a little more challenging.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, Travel makes a person wiser if less happy. I’ve always had this hunger to be more engaged. Not necessarily more happy, but more engaged.
As someone who is often puzzled by how to answer the “are you happy?” question, I appreciate this perspective. Happiness is generally not my goal, something closer to engagement is.
Lulu, I’m in this sort of thing in my teaching where I remind people there’s three kinds of travel: You can travel as a tourist, a traveler or a pilgrim.
Ok Steve, is it two kinds of travel or three? 😉 Here’s his explanation of the three types:
Most travelers I know, they’re proud to be known as a traveler as opposed to a tourist: “I’m more thoughtful — I’m not just here to shop and get a selfie. I’m here to immerse myself in the culture and learn.” That is a traveler, to become a temporary local. A traveler learns about the world, but I think a pilgrim learns about themselves, and you learn about yourself by leaving your home and looking at it from a distance. You learn about yourself, I think, by trying to get close to God in your travels
Yeah, the pilgrim thing definitely resonates with me — “transformational travel” he calls it a paragraph later.
The most frightened people are the people who have never traveled, whose worldview is shaped by commercial news media. And the people that are not afraid are the people who have been out there and met the enemy. My most powerful travel experiences have been going places where I’m not supposed to go: Cuba, Palestine, Iran. The friendliest people, the most curious people, the people that need to meet me and I need to meet them. When they meet me, it’s tougher for their propaganda to demonize me, and when I meet them, it’s harder for my country’s propaganda to dehumanize them. It’s a powerful thing.
In his ongoing series Cartoon Evolution, Dave Lee looks at how the character of Bugs Bunny has changed and evolved since his debut in 1938 as an unnamed rabbit in Porky’s Hare Hunt. It didn’t take long for the character to find its stride. From Wikipedia:
While Porky’s Hare Hunt was the first Warner Bros. cartoon to feature what would become Bugs Bunny, A Wild Hare, directed by Tex Avery and released on July 27, 1940, is widely considered to be the first official Bugs Bunny cartoon. It is the first film where both Elmer Fudd and Bugs, both redesigned by Bob Givens, are shown in their fully developed forms as hunter and tormentor, respectively; the first in which Mel Blanc uses what became Bugs’ standard voice; and the first in which Bugs uses his catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc?” A Wild Hare was a huge success in theaters and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cartoon Short Subject.
A calque is a word that has been loaned *and translated* from another language. Some English calques: flea market, potsticker, beer garden, iceberg, refried beans, superman, scapegoat, stormtrooper, killer whale.
In 2017, Audible released a pair of immersive audio dramas of The X-Files, with David Duchovny as Mulder and Gillian Anderson as Scully, that fit “somewhere between season 10 and 11” of the TV series. Then at some point, Audible removed them from their site/service, making them completely unavailable. So, a fan put them up on YouTube for X-Files fans to enjoy.
Since 1997, using only Middle Ages tools & technology, a group has been building a medieval castle in a French forest.
In the heart of Guédelon forest, in an abandoned quarry, a team of master-builders is building a 13th-century castle from scratch. Quarrymen, stonemasons, carpenter-joiners, woodcutters, blacksmiths, tilers, carters and rope makers…are working together to revive heritage craft skills and to shed light on the world of medieval construction.
Instances of haptic nostalgia (“the poignant memory of the physicality of an obsolete thing”) include shifting gears in a manual transmission, pulling the edges off of dot matrix printer paper, and twisting the phone cord around your finger.
How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days. “In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means.”
A sick sunfish stopped eating after its aquarium closed for renovations so the staff put cutouts of humans and pictures of smiling faces outside the tank and then it started eating the next day.
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens, i.e. “choosing what to ignore, learning how to resist low-quality and misleading but cognitively attractive information, and deciding where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities”.
I finished the last half of Shōgun, James Clavell’s 1200-page 1975 historical novel, on my recent vacation, riveted the entire time. I loved reading it and possibly enjoyed it more than Hulu’s TV series (which is saying something). The TV version hews pretty closely to the text but the major difference is in the amount of detail and explanation available to the book’s readers. There’s just so much more intrigue & plotting in the book and the reader is much more aware of what’s going on than in the show (the reader has access to the inner dialogue of multiple characters), but without sacrificing any of the suspense or drama. And the end of the book is devastating — I was completely gutted by it.
Anyway, I’ve been poking around to see what else I can read/watch/listen to about Shōgun and the historical period in which it’s set. Here’s what I’ve found so far:
Just before the 1980 miniseries was broadcast, a group of scholars published a book called Learning from Shōgun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy. “This book is intended for those who have read James Clavell’s Shōgun and who are curious about its educational significance as ‘A Novel of Japan.’” The book is out of print but I found this PDF copy on Columbia’s website and have been reading it with interest. I wonder though how contemporary scholars would react to Shōgun.
Naturally, there are podcasts. The Hulu series has an official podcast (also available on YouTube). The Prestige TV Podcast did 60-minute+ recaps on all the episodes (first episode on Apple & Spotify). A Short History of Japan podcast runs 35 episodes…it looks like the last few cover the period in question. (I haven’t listened to any of these yet, so ymmv.)
If anyone has any advice on what to watch/read/listen to about this period of Japanese history, please share it in the comments. The resources I found are mostly Western, so I’d be especially interested in English translations of Japanese resources.
For the final video in their current series, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting tackle one of the fundamental questions in filmmaking: where do you put the camera? I was especially struck by Greta Gerwig’s comments about camera movement in two of her films:
Well, I kind of had an image of Lady Bird that I wanted it to be almost like stained glass windows in churches, because it is Catholic school and all of that. I was thinking of everything as a presentation within a frame. But then when I got to Little Women, I had the opposite feeling. I felt like I wanted the camera to be alive and curious and a dancer. Like I almost wanted the camera to start young and then get older, like the girls did.
So that’s all for now from Every Frame a Painting…hopefully they will be back soon with a new project because I truly love their perspective on how films are made.
Every Star Trek Movie, Ranked. I think the top 5 here are correct, although you could maybe swap them around a bit. I might put First Contact ahead of The Undiscovered Country for instance.
Moon Lidar is a visualization of the data collected by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) mission. According to this factsheet, the visualization includes nearly six billion measurements.
LOLA data was captured by a polar orbiting laser altimeter. Think of it like the range finder you would use to measure how far away the hole is from your current position at a golf course, except you press the button six billion times, save the position from where you are measuring, save every distance measurement on a hard drive, and then phone that data back to earth.
The console looks a lot like the original, but it’s bigger. In the video, the Joy-Con controllers are black with colored accents, and they attach to the side of the console instead of sliding on and off. The Joy-Cons appear to snap on quite easily — leaks have suggested they could be attached via magnets.
It looks like there’s going to be a new Mario Kart game (huzzah!) and the Switch 2 will play Switch games, although “certain Nintendo Switch games may not be supported on or fully compatible with Nintendo Switch 2”. As for what Nintendo hasn’t revealed at this time, it’s a long list — and The Verge has some questions:
Perhaps the most glaring omission in the Switch 2 reveal was the fact that Nintendo didn’t say anything about how powerful the new console is. We can see that the console is bigger, but what’s the screen size? Is it OLED or LCD? Is the screen resolution still 720p? Is 4K resolution supported?
Though visible for a few brief moments, the reveal video showed off the Switch 2’s new dock. What’s the docked resolution? Is it just a charging shell, or is it still required for TV play? Can you dock the Switch 2 in the original Switch dock, or will it support all the super-portable third-party docks?
Very excited for the Switch 2, but I’ll admit I will be slightly less enthused if it doesn’t support 4K resolution while docked.
Here’s the archived Biden White House website in the National Archives. “This is historical material ‘frozen in time’. The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.”
Mike Monteiro on how to survive being online. “The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.”
Following on from last year’s successful trial, the Australian Open is once again broadcasting all their matches, nearly live and in their entirety, on YouTube — but with animated avatars in place of the players. Here’s how it looks in practice, kind of Wii Tennis; this is a match between Coco Gauff and Jodie Burrage from a few days ago (the animation starts just before the 35-minute mark:
The matches are only delayed by two minutes (the system needs some rendering time) and viewers get to hear the the audio & commentary from the actual match. From The Guardian:
The technology made its debut at the grand slam last year and audiences peaked for the men’s final, the recording of which has attracted almost 800,000 views on YouTube. Interest appears to be trending up this year and the matches are attracting roughly four times as many viewers than the equivalent time in 2024.
The director of innovation at Tennis Australia, Machar Reid, said although the technology was far from polished it was developing quickly. “Limb tracking is complex, you’ve got 12 cameras trying to process the silhouette of the human in real time, and stitch that together across 29 points in the skeleton,” he said. “It’s not as seamless as it could be – we don’t have fingers – but in time you can begin to imagine a world where that comes.”
Finally! Soup you can suck on! “It’s Progresso Chicken Noodle Soup like you never expected — a convenient, on-the-go soup experience.” Who says innovation is dead?
The USPS has announced that they will be issuing stamps based on the children’s classic Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd, and first published in 1947.
The Postal Service notes that “these designs are preliminary and may change”. Goodnight Moon was the very first bedtime book for our kids — we read it to them so so so many times. I will be buying some of these stamps for sure.
The Forgotten Woman Who Transformed Forensics (by inventing the rape kit). “In a cruel irony, a woman who drove major social change failed to get her due as a result of politics and sexism.”
“Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce.” Great perspective.
This video includes a significant amount of footage from the endings of several films, most notably “Challengers,” “The Substance,” and “I Saw the TV Glow.”
The musical choice for Nosferatu had me cackling — an absolute perfect selection. Here’s the full list of his selections:
25. The Outrun
24. The Breaking Ice
23. Megalopolis
22. Hard Truths
21. The End
20. Babygirl
19. Juror #2
18. The First Omen
17. Between the Temples
16. The Brutalist
15. Flow
14. All We Imagine as Light
13. Evil Does Not Exist
12. The Substance
11. Close Your Eyes
10. I Saw the TV Glow
9. Nosferatu
8. The Beast
7. Challengers
6. A Different Man
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
4. Anora
3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
2. No Other Land
1. Nickel Boys
On a personal note, I’ve seen only two of these films — three out of the six movie theaters I usually go to within an hour’s drive of my house permanently closed in 2024. There’s a lot less diversity in offerings now…everyone has to show the same blockbuster stuff because that’s what most people want to see and I don’t really care for the experience offered by the one remaining theater that shows more arthouse stuff. As usual, Ehrlich has got me fired up to fill in the gaps in my film watching, though it’s going to be impossible for me to see Nickel Boys until it comes out on streaming in like April or May.
Over the last few days, I’ve been reading Ken Liu’s new translation of Laozi’s Dao De Jing. (Liu translated the first and third books in The Three-Body Problem trilogy.) Today, on a dark day for America, I thought that we could all use some of his wisdom.
Favor takes power from you. When you don’t have it, you crave it. When you do have it, you dread losing it.
…
Thus, only those who can value the body politic as their own body should be entrusted with power; only those who love the body politic as they love themselves deserve authority.
On leaders:
The best sort? The people don’t even know they’re there. The next-best sort? The people love them and praise them. A rank below that? The people fear them. The worst? The people are contemptuous of them.
…
A country teetering on the edge of collapse is filled with patriots.
…
Why does a lord of ten thousand chariots treat the fate of the world so lightly?
…
Delight not in victory, for to delight in victory is to delight also in killing. Pleasure in killing will never win over the world.
…
Lords stride about in glorious clothes, carry sharp swords, eat so much good food that they’re sick of it, and hoard wealth beyond measure. They’re bandits and robbers, having wandered far from Dao.
…
The more people arm themselves, the more chaotic the country.
…
The people go hungry when those above eat too much. The people are hard to govern when those above crave great deeds. The people care little for lives when those above care too much about good living.
…
The soft and yielding overcome the strong and powerful.
This ain’t no thing, man, you know what I mean? You come in here, man, and get your mind right — get in here and you do two days: that’s the day you come in this motherfucker and the day you get out this motherfucker.
Minds right, everyone. I’ll see you tomorrow, no matter what.
Hey folks. After a busy and productive fall & holiday season, kottke.org will be closed this week for some much-needed rest, relaxation, and recharging. I will be back next week, ready to gooooo!
I paged through this illustrated retrospective of Hayao Miyazaki’s work at the bookstore a few months ago and it was gorgeous. “The book is artistic biography, aesthetic treatise, creative process explication, and celebration of the filmmaker’s work.”
A British company is selling a wristwatch that’s a shrunk-down replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer interface that the Apollo astronauts used to maneuver their spacecraft to the Moon and back. From Gizmodo:
The original AGCs were used by astronauts for guidance and navigation, which you cannot do with the watch — and no offense, but you probably don’t have a spacecraft anyway. But it does function in its own way. The watch has a built-in GPS, a digital display, and a working keyboard. It’s also programmable, built atop an open-source framework that is compatible with a number of coding environments including Arduino and Python. So if you have some features you’d like to run, it’s open to input.
Stay Connected