French electronic duo Air performs a Tiny Desk Concert. Setlist: Le Voyage de Pénélope, Cherry Blossom Girl, Highschool Lover, and Dirty Trip.
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Fran Sans is a font based on the display type of SF’s MUNI light rail trains. The N-Judah was my train when I lived there, so I’m very familiar with that display typeface. (Great name too.)
The Land of Giants, a conceptual proposal to build power line towers so that they look like people.
kdo rolodex · a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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Present & Correcthttps://presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog -
Rosecrans Baldwinhttps://rosecrans.substack.com -
The Casual Optimisthttps://casualoptimist.com -
Neal.funhttps://neal.fun -
Every Frame a Paintinghttps://youtube.com/@everyframeapainting
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The Fascinating Map of Fungi
From Domain of Science, the Fascinating Map of Fungi.
The zombie ant fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, infects ants by piercing the exoskeleton with enzymes and spreads fungal cells throughout the body. It then secretes special neurological compounds that hijack the ant’s central nervous system, forcing it to climb high into a tree and lock its mandibles onto a leaf with a death grip. This makes a nice stable platform for the fungus to grow a fruiting body to disperse spores in a large area to infect more hosts.
And here’s a video explanation of everything on the map.
See also this Classification of Plants & Fungi poster and its corresponding video explanation.
Bloomberg’s Jealousy List for 2025, a collection of journalism admired by the magazine’s writers and editors.
I’m actually surprised how well Santa answers these difficult questions in the face of a full on press from the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner.
Where Did These Famous Hip Hop Screeches Come From?
Two of the most famous screeches in music history are from House of Pain’s Jump Around and Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Brain — you likely heard both of them in your mind just reading the names of the songs. This short video explains where those samples came from and which one of them is a horse (and not Prince).
Dollar stores are overcharging their customers at checkout. “Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50.”
Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation? “When you consider all the impressive work Generation X has made, it’s funny that one of the most persistent stereotypes about them is that they’re slackers.”
Gemini and Mercury Remastered is “a collection of hundreds of newly-restored images and untold stories from the NASA archives” about the early manned space programs by the person who did the excellent Apollo Remastered.
Really interesting take on Wake Up Dead Man and the other Knives Out films. Benoit Blanc’s primary motivation is not solving the murder but protecting the innocent from the rich and powerful.
Pantone choosing a shade of white for its color of the year is a little too on the nose, especially when you consider they chose a color called Mocha Mousse last year.
Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations With Snakistan. “Relations between the two countries grew stale in 1994, when Fritolaysian rufflelutionaries crossed zestablished borders and forced Snakistan to dispatch cheesekeeping forces.”
“Change starts with smaller actions, with going against the odds. And the strangest possibilities can sometimes lead to the biggest gains. So open every door you can to the future that you want to see.”
“The breakneck speed of New England’s transformation makes it the fastest-heating area of the US, bar the Alaskan Arctic, and the pace of its temperature rise has apparently increased in the past five years.”
What ‘67’ Reveals About Childhood Creativity. “Through these quaint ready-made formulas the ridiculousness of life is underlined, the absurdity of the adult world and their teachers proclaimed…and the curiosity of language itself is savoured.”
How Ferrari’s F1 Team Improved Medical Care for Children
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) in London improved their surgery-to-ICU handoff process by observing how Ferrari’s F1 team handled pit stops.
GOSH doctors visited and observed the pit crew handoff in Italy. While visiting the Formula One pit crew the GOSH doctors became interested in the way they addressed possible failure. The crew sat around a big table analyzing and reanalyzing, asking, “What could go wrong?” and “What are we going to do if it does go wrong?” and “How important is it if it goes wrong?” Everyone’s ideas were given equal weight until the group ranked them using the failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA).
This anticipatory planning made the pit crew more prepared than the medical team whose strategy tended to be waiting until something went wrong to work out what they should have done. Observing the pit crew, the GOSH doctors noted the value of process mapping, process description, and trying to work out what people’s tasks should be. They learned the keys to a successful pit stop:
– The routine in the pit stop is taken seriously
– What happens in the pit stop is predictable so problems can be anticipated and procedures can be standardized
– Crews practice those procedures until they can perform them perfectly
– Everyone knows their job, but one person is always in charge
Among their findings that led to improvement:
While the main theme changes were more sophisticated procedures and better choreographed teamwork, another aspect of the Formula One handover process easily transferred to the hospital setting. The lollipop man is the one who waves the car in and coordinates the pit stop. He maintains overall situation awareness during the pit stop. In the old hospital handover there was no one like the lollipop man so it was unclear who was in charge. Under the new handover process, the anesthetist was given overall responsibility for coordinating the team until it was transferred to the intensivist at the termination of the handover. These same two individuals were charged with the responsibility of periodically stepping back to look at the big picture and to make safety checks of the handover.
According to this video about the hospital’s study, they were able to reduce the number of errors in the handover by 66%.
(thx, meg)
Really interesting post about Hammersmith Bridge, which has been closed since 2019, a presumed “loss” of 25,000 daily car trips. “The local economy has adapted, air quality has improved, and overall traffic congestion has lessened.”
To Grow, We Must Forget… but Now AI Remembers Everything. “What if human forgetting is not a bug, but a feature? And what happens when we build machines that don’t forget, but are now helping shape the human minds that do?”
Sound Designing a Life
This is a charming short film on how a Foley artist would sound design a day in an ordinary life. Running hands through spaghetti noodles stands in for hair washing, a spray bottle sounds like rustling sheets, that sort of thing.
See also this fascinating short documentary about what a Foley artist does.
Matthew Rhys & Netflix are plotting an adaptation of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. The consensus is that The Power Broker is unadaptable. But, the consensus also was that a 50-billion-page book about Robert Moses was not going to work but here we are.
How MacKenzie Scott is giving away her billions. “Once you begin to see Scott as [Toni] Morrison’s mentee — rather than as a certain Amazon founder’s ex-wife — you can’t unsee it. She gives more like an artist would.”
An irresistible video title: Army of Crabs Protect Spy Robot From Stingray. “A 4-meter stingray can eat 50 crabs a day.”
Sweats & Swots
“Ugh, this kid is so sweaty!” my son exclaimed as he came under attack in some game he was playing. This was a few years ago; my ears perked up and I asked him what he meant. He explained that “sweaty” was a derogatory term for gamers who were trying super hard to win. Such players were referred to as “sweats”.
Recently I read something — can’t remember what — and came across the word “swot”. I hadn’t heard that before, so I looked it up. “Swot”, a dialect variant of “sweat”, is a derogatory word in informal British English meaning “a person who studies hard, especially one regarded as spending too much time studying”.
I wonder if these two meanings evolved independently from each other; that would be super interesting. Know Your Meme traced “sweaty” back to its use among those who played the FIFA game series in 2014. It’s possible that British gamers smuggled “swot” into gaming terminology and it quickly evolved into “sweat”. I’m not sure how common “swot” is in Britain…or if “sweat” is used interchangeably with “swot”. But if I had to guess, I’d say they weren’t related. If any etymologists out there are looking for a challenge…
How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life. “It’s like Zen. There are times when it is just very relaxing to be standing in front of the machine and slowly cleaning it, tweaking the adjustment so visually things start to really line up.”
An Online Collection of Found Cassette Tapes
Intertapes is a collection of found cassette tapes — some contain music and others voice memos. Each entry includes images of the tape, a description/track listing, and the actual audio (on Soundcloud).
This one was recorded off of a NYC radio station in 1994 and includes tracks from Mary J. Blige, Wu-Tang, Snoop Dogg, and Heavy D.
This tape found recently in Berlin was also recorded in 1994 by someone named Sven and includes tracks by Underworld & Laurent Garnier.
“If new proposals detailed in an FDA memo are put into place, experts told me it would mean the end of annual flu shots. And end of most vaccines for pregnant people. And maybe the end of updates to pneumonia vaccines. And more.”
I love the remix of Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place in the midst of Kelly Lee Owens’ Boiler Room set (~33:50 mark). Had me chair dancing this AM!
Janet Sobel, a Forgotten Pioneer of Abstract Art
The painting above was made in 1945 by self-taught artist Janet Sobel; it’s called Milky Way. Sobel was a Ukrainian-born artist who was a pioneer in abstract expressionist art and in drip painting; her work directly influenced that of Jackson Pollock. From Why This Pioneering Abstract Painter Disappeared From the Art World at the Height of Her Fame:
The next year, Sobel had her first solo show at New York’s Puma Gallery, where the legendary art critic Clement Greenberg visited — with Pollock. In an update to his essay “American-Type Painting,” Greenberg wrote that they “admired these pictures rather furtively,” adding: “Later on, Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him.”
Here’s one of Sobel’s paintings circa 1946-1948:
Compare that with Pollock’s first drip painting in 1946. Hmm!
Sobel’s “outsider” status, gender, and age, as well as a move away from NYC and the loss of her primary patron, all contributed to her short career, lack of recognition, and limited legacy (for someone who was described in 1946 as an artist who will “eventually be known as one of the important surrealist artists in this country”).
In 2021, Sobel was the subject of a belated obituary in the NYT’s Overlooked series.
How exactly Sobel entered the art world is a bit of folklore. As one story goes, Sobel’s son Sol was an art student who in the late 1930s threatened to quit his studies at the Art Students League, a storied nonprofit school in Manhattan that counts Norman Rockwell, Georgia O’Keeffe and Mark Rothko among its alumni.
According to historians and family members, Sobel criticized one of Sol’s paintings, prompting him to throw down his brush and tell her to take up painting herself instead.
And here’s a MoMA video about Sobel’s Milky Way:
The best telescopes for astrophotography. Boy, if I needed an expensive new hobby, this might be the one at the top of the list.
What’s the best way to lift people out of poverty? “Cash giving programs believe the people experiencing poverty best understand what they need to escape it.”
A much-touted 4K remaster of Mad Men recently premiered on HBO Max and they forgot to apply digital effects to scenes in some of the episodes so you can see crew in the background, etc.
An Astonishing Graph
For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway.
This dramatic decline has resulted from better nutrition, clean water, sanitation, neonatal healthcare, vaccinations, medicines, and reductions in poverty, conflicts, and famine.
Before ~1800, almost every parent lost a child; now it’s such an uncommon experience that people have forgotten and want to ban vaccines.
Very Good Music Fun Facts from Go Jeff Go including: “Hall and Oates never referred to themselves as “Hall and Oates.” All their records say Daryl Hall and John Oates. Also, there is a 9-inch height difference between Hall & Oates.”
Retrospekt refurbs and sells retro technology (VHS tapes, cassette players, instant cameras, typewriters, iPods).
A Line in a Tom Stoppard Play Inspired a New Breast Cancer Treatment
In a letter to the Times of London, Dr. Michael Baum tells how a line in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard sparked an idea which resulted in adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, a therapy Baum helped pioneer which greatly increased the survivability of breast cancer.
Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.
Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.
Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
Certainly drives home the value of a robust and diverse culture of humanities in contradiction to the current backlash. (via @harrywallop.co.uk)
I’m in Charge at This Hertz Location, and Buddy, You’re Not Getting a Car Today. “Tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were going to set aside a special little car just for you? Seriously?”
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
In just a few days (Dec 5), the entirety of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill duology will be released in theaters as one four-hour-long film. Here’s the trailer:
Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR unites Volume 1 and Volume 2 into a single, unrated epic—presented exactly as he intended, complete with a new, never-before-seen anime sequence.
And there will be an intermission. I haven’t seen KB in awhile and am looking forward to this.
Oh, and QT has a Kill Bill collab with Fortnite? Apparently in the original script, there was a scene where Yuki Yubari (Gogo Yubari’s twin sister) tries to get revenge on Kiddo, but it was cut because the director deemed it “too much to chew” for one shoot. Using Unreal Engine 5, Fortnite characters, and a motion-captured Uma Thurman, Tarantino has finally made the scene a reality. You can find it in the game or watch it on YouTube:
A list of 25 Things to Say to Your Children, including “You can do hard things. I’ve seen you do them before and you can do them again.”; “I’m proud of you.”; and “It’s so brave to feel your feelings.”
Paul Ford on normalized AI & what happens when bubbles burst. “When the bubble is big, every idea feels like a billion-dollar idea. I yearn for cheap ideas from strangers.”
David Byrne’s Tiny Desk Concert
There are a few artists where you hear their name and “Tiny Desk” together and you think, well, that’s going to be great. David Byrne is one of those and his performance does not disappoint.
Though Byrne and his band do normally spread out across large stages, the set design for each show is almost completely bare, without any cables or amps, and the artists wear or carry compact, custom-made instruments to make it easier to move, almost like a marching band.
It’s cozy, but Byrne and his band, in matching, brilliant blue suits, squeeze behind the Desk to perform four songs, opening with the euphoric “Everybody Laughs,” followed by “Don’t Be Like That,” both from his new album. They also perform two Talking Heads songs: “(Nothing But) Flowers,” from the 1988 album Naked, and a show-stopping version of “Life During Wartime,” from 1979’s Fear of Music.
100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025. The big end-of-year lists mostly feature books from big publishers; this list aims to spread the attention to smaller publishers.
Keene, NH has been replacing their stop-lighted intersections with roundabouts, resulting in big reductions in pollution, accidents & injuries, and costs. “Slowly moving is better than waiting at a light any day.”
Why Is Everyone Running In Rom-Coms?
I am not generally a fan of rom-coms so I didn’t think I was going to post Evan Puschak’s newest video, but he’s so good at them. Puschak argues that rom-coms are compelling because they reflect the modern challenge of finding meaning as individuals.
In the modern day, we live in a world without a cosmic moral order, a framework of meaning to which everyone automatically subscribes. We had one for a while. But round about the year 1700, give or take a century, that framework started cracking, fragmenting, losing its authority, and the burden of finding meaning shifted onto individuals. We all became desperate seekers in a confusing and disjointed world.
It’s no coincidence that this shift roughly coincides with the emergence of the novel as a form of storytelling. In a profoundly new way, the novel concerned itself with individuals, ordinary individuals — their internal motivations, their inner lives, their ability to overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. Novels both reflected and shaped the way modern people saw their identities as narratives; as stories with a beginning, middle, and end; as quests for meaning.
And if that’s not interesting to you, turn down the sound and enjoy the kinetic pleasure of watching people — Tom Cruise, Meg Ryan, Dustin Hoffman, Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant — sprinting in a great 4-minute supercut.
I Was Stabbed in the Back With a Real Knife While Performing Julius Caesar. “I realised what had happened while acting out my character’s death, and thinking: I have to lie here until the lights go down.”
On next-gen GLP-1 drugs. “A mere decade ago, obesity drugs powerful enough for people to routinely drop double-digit percentages of their body weight were unheard-of. Today, there are two, and they feel ubiquitous.”
A short video that explains *a lot* about the modern world & conservatism. “They also want to feel normal. They want to walk around and see that most other people have made the same choice they made.” And that last line!
This Is Always Interesting: “52 Things I Learned In 2025”
One of my favorite end-of-year lists is Tom Whitwell’s annual record of 52 things he’s learned in the past year. Some favorites of mine from the 2025 installment:
4. You can unlock the wheels on a shopping cart by playing sounds on your phone. [Joseph Gabay]
5. In the UK, water companies and offshore rigs communicate by bouncing radio waves off trails created by millions of small meteorites as they burn up in the atmosphere. [Meteor Communications Ltd]
14. Nearly 0.7% of US exports, by value, are human blood or blood products. [dynomight]
16. The Ceremonial Bugle is a small plastic device that slides into a real bugle and allows a non-musician to perform at a funeral. It has a discreet switch to select ‘Taps’, ‘Last Post’ or one of ten other calls. [Simon Britton via Nicolas Collins]
27. Researchers at MIT have developed a fibre computer that is stretchable and machine washable with 6 hours of battery life, weighing about as much as a sheet of A4 paper. [Nikhil Gupta & co]
49. Marchetti’s Constant is the idea that throughout human history, from cave dwellers to ancient Greeks to 21st century Londoners, people tend to commute for about an hour a day — 30 minutes out, 30 minutes home. So faster travel leads to longer distances, not less time. [Cesare Marchetti, plus a 2025 update]
Photographing the Microscopic: Winners of Nikon Small World 2025. “Overall Winner: A rice weevil perched on a grain of rice.”
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