kottke.org Quick Links for March 2019

March 31

An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden. "Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?"

Rebecca Traister: "Joe Biden Isn't the Answer". Seriously, this guy should not run for President. Enough already.

Salvator Mundi, the $450 million Leonardo da Vinci painting, has been missing for months.

NYC will adopt congestion pricing in the next few years. All vehicles entering Manhattan below 60th Street will be charged a toll.

March 29

If it's super satisfying to see the DVD logo bounce perfectly into the corner of the screen, 100 bouncing logos must be even more satisfying?

I'm kinda fascinated by the energy and drive of Elizabeth Swaney, an American who represented Hungary in halfpipe skiing at the 2018 Winter Olympics

Garfield phones have been washing up on a French beach for the last 35 years...and they finally solved the mystery of where they were all coming from.

March 28

The final round of the 2019 Tournament of Books is tomorrow. The matchup is Michael Ondaatje's Warlight vs. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite.

"Fox News has made targeted harassment a regular part of their programming — with a specific penchant for putting women in the crosshairs"

On "sober curiosity" and being more intentional about alcohol consumption and what it does to your body and life. "How different would our lives be if we stopped drinking on autopilot?"

The Broken Chains blog is seeking out and documenting restaurant and retail chains that were thought to have vanished

March 27

Listen to what a mic'd referee says during a soccer match

Remastering Star Trek: Deep Space Nine With Machine Learning. Promising results. Much of the series was shot on video, so remastering it in the usual way would be expensive.

"Pledge Parental Leave is setting the standard for paid leave benefits in the U.S. creative industry"

Microsoft will not participate in the tiresome internet tradition of April Fools' Day. A good start but how about a pledge by the media to not cover AFD pranks?

Excited for Serious Eater, a memoir by Ed Levine about how he and his team built Serious Eats into one of the best food sites on the web

The French Laundry serves mushroom broth out of a bong for food industry folks as a winking reference to a poor review by Pete Wells

Q is a genderless voice "created to end gender bias in AI assistants"

All 36 of Vermeer's paintings in one place

March 26

Watch Anthony Miracola make 31 NBA 3-pointers in a row in under a minute. Form's not great but they all go right in.

This is an entertaining interview with a couple who got married 2 weeks after they met (and have now been married for 22 years).

88 Important Truths I've Learned About Life. "Every problem you have is your responsibility, regardless of who caused it."

The writing of Rihanna's Umbrella began with a default GarageBand drum loop

Stepping Into the Uncanny, Unsettling World of Shen Yun. The near-ubiquitous dance troupe is affiliated with Falun Gong.

Warner Music has signed an algorithm to a record deal; it'll create 20 albums this year.

March 25

"The original Nazis were also trolls, and contemporary observers also mistook that weaponized insincerity for complexity."

Gizmodo's Joe Veix rode an e-scooter across the Golden Gate Bridge and all the way to the ocean in Marin before its battery gave out

The great-great granddaughter of etiquette authority Emily Post has written a book called Higher Etiquette on the dos and don'ts of enjoying cannabis. "How to tackle pot faux pas such as 'canoed' joints and 'lawn-mowed' bowls..."

Sample chapter about Uber from @monteiro's Ruined By Design: Ayn Rand Is a Dick. "I got mine, fuck you."

Opting Out of Vaccines Should Opt You Out of American Society

"Money has healed me. It's protected me. It's given me security. It's given me peace in my home. It's given me a lot of really meaningful things in my life."

March 22

Boeing 737 Max safety features as in-app purchases. I don't know what's more disturbing: that Boeing charges extra for safety systems or that some airlines don't purchase them.

"PACER—Public Access to Court Electronic Records—is a judicially approved scam… It has been a scam since it was launched and, barring significant structural changes, will be a scam forever."

A 30th anniversary oral history of Bonnie Raitt's fantastic "comeback" album Nick of Time. Great insights by Raitt, producer Don Was, and manager Danny Goldberg, among others.

Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, writes about a harrowing pair of aneurysms she suffered soon after she started on the show. "At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged."

The trailer for The Last Black Man in San Francisco. This is Joe Talbot's feature-length debut for which he won best director at Sundance.

The Global Architect Card says in 14 different languages: "I am an architect. I am here to see this significant building." You show it to building staff who are not used to dealing with curious "foreigners with funky glasses".

March 21

"In a world where it often seems impossible to eat, shop, drive, travel, or pretty much do anything without causing some measure of harm to others and the planet, leading an ethical life seems like a very tall order indeed."

From Emily Wilson, a pronunciation guide to some of the place and character names in The Odyssey. I was pronouncing Telemachus incorrectly for at least half the book.

Alphaputt, an iOS mini-golf game where the courses are shaped like letters of the alphabet

A never-ending CVS receipt made with HTML, CSS, and Javascript

The person in Edvard Munch's The Scream isn't screaming...they are being screamed at

They are making a third Bill & Ted movie

March 20

The trailer for Stranger Things season 3. Man, this show does 80s nostalgia so so well. Not what the 80s were actually like but what they felt like (from the vantage point of 30 years later).

An exclusive look at an early iPhone prototype before they shrunk all the electronics down to fit inside a pocket-sized device

March 19

Ancient History Family Trees Poster, "a wallchart displaying the genealogy of Ancient Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, India, China, and more". It's by Matt Baker, who did the viral Evolution of the Alphabet chart.

Interesting video from Vox on how golf ball construction affects the distance golfers can drive it

A site of "endlessly unique ambient music". Each piece is generated using a unique system and played infinitely without repetition.

"One year in, Facebook's big algorithm change has spurred an angry, Fox News-dominated — and very engaged! — News Feed"

A copy of the Mona Lisa probably painted in the 17th century just sold at auction for $1.69 million

The first full trailer for Toy Story 4

March 18

According to a survey, "nearly 60 percent of people who have filed for bankruptcy said a medical expense...contributed to their bankruptcy". Lack of guaranteed healthcare is an anchor on our national well-being.

A large study of Apple Watch wearers shows that the Watch may assist in the early detection of atrial fibrillation, a condition that leads to increased stroke risk

Making music from financial data, so you can hear how the US Treasury yield curve changes over time

The Kindle version of William Gibson's seminal Neuromancer is just $1.99 today

New book by @monteiro –> Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It. I heard Mike do a talk on this 5 years ago and he blew the doors off the place.

This was actually really tough: "Who Wrote It: Beto O'Rourke or Karl Ove Knausgaard?"

March 15

This essay by Alan Jacobs is not such a great introduction to John Ruskin per se, but it is a great reminder to read John Ruskin

Oooh, 20x200 is selling prints of a 1907 painting by Hilma af Klint

March 14

Trash Plastic is a practical how-to guide about how to use less plastic in your life

A guide to making a "low tech" website (one with a low carbon footprint)

Birdpunk, a combination of two seeming very different disciplines: bird watching and punk rock.

NYC's new Hudson Yards development: "A relic of dated 2000s thinking, nearly devoid of urban design, it declines to blend into the city grid."

The official trailer for Avengers: Endgame. I am irrationally excited about this movie.

Emma Haruka Iwao used cloud computing to smash the world record for calculating the most digits of pi: about 31.4 trillion decimal places. The old record was about 22.5 trillion.

March 13

NYC public schools will adopt "Meatless Mondays" in the fall to help "improve New Yorkers' health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions"

"Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they've performed the first experiment that proves it."

Fun math shortcut: if calculating 4% of 75 is giving you trouble, just do 75% of 4 and it'll give you the same answer

C. Max Magee shares the lessons he learned growing his site The Millions from a tiny blog to an online magazine with 30+ staffers

The Cold Case Factory by @sarahw on the use of forensic genealogy to generate suspects for unsolved murders and other crimes (as happened in the Golden State Killer case last year)

VT Craiglist post looking for a tenant specifies "white Vermonters only"

March 12

Upcoming book of playful and funny charts from @TheRialMichelle: Am I Overthinking This?: Over-Answering Life's Questions In 101 Charts

Spotify Premium now includes Hulu for no extra cost (!!!)

Hong Kong's Victoria Peak carved into a roll of duct tape by Takahiro Iwasaki

"New Yorkers do not walk too fast: You walk too slow. Most likely you grew up in a place where people got around in cars, which means your walking muscles are weak..."

But is it really an endless horse?

"Two decades after vanishing, her daughter suddenly showed up with children, a new identity — and speaking Spanish"

30 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee wrote "Information Management: A Proposal", which described what became the World Wide Web for the first time

March 11

13 Reasons We Type in Lowercase. Fun fact: the first year or two of @kottke posts were entirely in lowercase (for intimacy/casualness reasons).

Learned about swerve skiing this weekend. It involves wearing track pants, doing unconventional tricks, and a ton of athleticism.

Bill Gates lists 10 breakthrough technologies for 2019, including new-wave nuclear power, custom cancer vaccines, and cow-free burgers.

The Unintended Benefits Of Vaccines. As demonstrated by a recent study, they often protect against illnesses and diseases other than their target disease.

Hilarious video about all of the sequels to Tetris, including Hatris and a game called Faces... Tris III (not making this up).

This portmanteau generator is a pun-lover's paradise. Lexiconoisseurs will be able to gramurder folks with cleverbs & wittyoms.

March 8

Only 7 percent of the LOC's National Film Registry — a list of culturally significant films — are directed by women

The 50th edition of Noticing, the @kottke newsletter, just went out. Hot Shit Science, Ancient Wisdom, Pop Stars In New Contexts, and a little meta self-reflection to close things out; this newsletter has it all

Video: Director Todd Douglas Miller discusses his documentary about the Apollo 11 moon landing.

"Music: A Subversive History", a forthcoming book by music historian and critic @tedgioia. "Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions..."

March 7

Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San Francisco Alive. "Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and Pinterest plan to go public. California's newly minted rich will be hungry for parties, houses, boats, bikes..."

Real estate developers are trying to rezone some lots to build 39-story towers that would block sunlight from reaching the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The White Horse Tavern has been sold to a "notorious landlord". This doesn't sound like a promising new chapter for a storied NYC institution.

Sleeping more on weekends does not make up for past sleep loss

March 6

Jeopardy host Alex Trebek announces that he has stage 4 pancreatic cancer

Why Walking Helps Us Think

A concept cafe in Japan was staffed by people with disabilities who remotely controlled robotic servers. The goal was to "enable physical work and social participation" by those who may otherwise find those activities impossible.

I am not generally a huge party game person, but the concept of Wavelength sounds super interesting

Richard MacManus, an OG blogger himself, interviewed me for @readcreators about why I'm sticking with an unfashionable media format. I enjoyed working in a reference to Marshawn Lynch explaining Beast Mode.

This is intense: a guy films a tornado hitting his house

Pocket, an ace short film about the digital life of a teen. "If something happens but you didn't capture it on your phone, did it even happen?"

March 5