December 31
52 things learned in 2018. "As late as 1939, the United States had a well-developed plan to invade Canada."
Guesstimate is a spreadsheet for making estimated calculations. "Guesstimate uses Monte Carlo sampling to correctly estimate uncertain results."
I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America. "'It's just, when he has Fox, he has Obama to hate. If he doesn't have that ...' She kept looking over her shoulder. She was terrified of him."
December 28
Apple is offering 6 free audiobooks read by celebrity narrators. Titles include Pride and Prejudice, The Time Machine, and Frankenstein.
It's the dawn of the age of insightful computers. But how long will it last for us slow-witted humans?
December 27
Author Elizabeth Wurtzel finds out the truth about her parents. "It turns out that the man I have spent 50 years believing to be my father is not my father."
Andy Clarke shows us how websites were designed back in 1998, with spacer gifs, frames, and tables galore. Ahhh, this takes me back.
December 26
From Popular Science, the 100 greatest innovations of 2018. This is a good list...they dig beyond gadgets & apps into aerospace, health, etc.
Trailer for "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo". This series on the KonMari method is coming to Netflix on Jan 1.
December 23
December 21
A call to arms, a manifesto! by @jason_koebler. "My original sin wasn't making a Facebook account, it was abandoning my own website that I controlled."
The CDC has created a free-to-play Oregon Trail-type game about influenza in 1918. It's called (of course!) "Pandemic Trail":
The @apollo_50th Twitter account is live-tweeting the Apollo 8 mission as it happened 50 years ago. Liftoff was about an hour ago (7:51 AM EST on 12/21).
December 20
December 19
From @kathrynschulz, The Best Facts I Learned from Books in 2018. "If you need to call a coin toss, be advised: coins are slightly biased toward ending up the same way they started."
Kickstarter campaign to produce the first detailed 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy. The results will be released freely under a Creative Commons license for researchers, students, and anyone else who's interested.
The Colossal shares its most-viewed posts of the year. I love The Colossal...it's consistently one of the best sites on the web, a true gem.
"What If Brexit Were a Restaurant?" A scathing review of NYC's newish restaurant, Bluebird London. "Atmosphere: Cafe in the front, bar in the middle, dining in the back. Desperation all around."
A long, fascinating look at how Rupert Murdoch & Fox outbid the Big Three networks to get NFL football on Fox. If this didn't happen, then Fox News pretty much wouldn't exist.
December 18
Penny Marshall dies at age 75. She directed Big, Awakenings, and A League of Their Own.
"Dotsies is a font that uses dots instead of letters" and is "optimized for reading". Congratulations, Silicon Valley, you've invented shorthand (again).
A collection of interactive explorations of complex systems. Warning: you might get sucked into these for hours.
December 17
The Best Video Essays of 2018. Many of these are new to me.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took photos of the InSight lander on the surface of Mars. When this sort of thing happens, humans seem like a true space-faring species, if only for a moment.
Teaser trailer for the Downton Abbey movie. Premieres September 2019.
The 25 most-read New Yorker stories of 2018. Lots of good stuff in here.
December 16
My Dad's Friendship With Charles Barkley. "'It gives me great memories and great joy to know that I was a friend of his,' Barkley said."
December 14
Remarkable pictures, outstanding detail, significant impact on understanding future eruptions. "What follows is a summary of key volcanic events in Kilauea's 2018 outburst, in the order in which they occurred."
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is adding Radiohead, The Cure, Def Leppard, Stevie Nicks, The Zombies, Roxy Music, and (finally!) Janet Jackson
Reminder that @kottke's newsletter, Noticing, is published every week and recaps the best of the site's posts and quicklinks. This week's edition is here:
An oral history of Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas! I love this movie so much. "RIVERBOTTOM NIGHTMARE BAND!"
Sondra Locke died last month. What a bummer...she was a great actress and garbage human Clint Eastwood blackballed her out of a career.
December 13
Money lenders in China are requesting nude photos as collateral for loans, e.g. "we'll show these to your family & friends if you don't pay us back"
December 12
Which US cities have the most unpredictable weather? Places like Rapid City, Billings, and Kansas City. (San Diego & Phoenix are among the most predictable.)
How Ansel Adams took one of his most famous photos, "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico". He couldn't find his light meter so he did a seat-of-his-pants exposure time calculation based on the Moon's luminosity.
Paul Romer got married Monday morning and later that day accepted the 2018 Nobel Prize for economics
December 11
Wes Anderson's Rushmore came out 20 years ago today. Still one of my all-time favorite movies.
Little-known computer pioneer Evelyn Berezin built & sold the first computerized word processor. She died recently aged 93.
December 10
What makes Paris look like Paris? According to a visual algorithm that studied Google Street View images: "doors, balconies, windows with railings, street signs and special Parisian lampposts".
Culture Is Not Always Popular: Fifteen Years of Design Observer. Love that cover.
December 7
The Incans didn't write, but they had a powerful, intricate culture that counted (and maybe, recorded history and told stories?) using an intricate series of knots in cords that we're only beginning to understand
At BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen sings the praises of one of my all-time favorite kids' shows, Square One Television. Especially good are her reflections on the show's best segment, MATHNET
December 6
Could this new "dark fluid" theory explain the universe's missing matter? "In the new study, I propose a modification to Einstein's theory of general relativity to allow negative masses...to be created continuously."
"2 New Yorkers Erased $1.5 Million in Medical Debt for Hundreds of Strangers". Feel-good story or an indicator of our society's massive structural defects?
Another list of the best podcasts of 2018. Slow Burn & Caliphate are definitely on my top 10 list as well.
The Wu-Tang Clan reunites for a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR. "When the Wu-Tang Clan comes together, they still bring a love for the culture and for their brotherhood."
December 5
The super secret method to get your kids to eat the same food you do is…to feed them the same food you eat. No fancy jarred food. No second dinners. The end.
I can't believe how close this person got to the latest Soyuz launch. What is that, a couple hundred yards?!
I missed this news late last month: Slow Burn's Leon Neyfakh is leaving Slate to do a podcast called Fiasco. Their first two shows will be about Bush/Gore 2000 and Iran/Contra affair.
If something like this happened in, say, South America or Africa, it would be rightly denounced in the US as deeply undemocratic and corrupt. But it's becoming commonplace politics for Republicans.
December 4
An ode to Russ & Daughters, a true gem of NYC. "Here is the shining pink lox, that fatty, salty, cured-belly lox that, with cream cheese on a bagel, has given its name to the greatest sandwich ever produced by humankind."
The Large Hadron Collider is being shut down for two years to perform upgrades. "Scientists hope the upgrades will produce four times more 'God particles' a year..."
A heated meeting about NYC's plan to scrap testing for admission to specialized high schools. "The proposal would significantly increase the proportion of black and Hispanic students who are admitted."
The MSG headache & Asian food: "The persistent, racist myth of 'Chinese restaurant syndrome' just won't die." The Chinese place near my house has a "We don't use MSG!" disclaimer on their menu and it makes me sad.
December 3
Fossil algae can now be used to trace CO2 levels back 500 million years in a continuous record. "The data confirms the idea that rises in CO2 levels that used to take millions of years are now happening in a century."
December 2