May 31
May 30
North Face should be ashamed for taking advantage of a public resource like this. Wikipedia is not something to exploit for advertising purposes.
May 29
A short analysis of the wines produced by Chateau Picard in the Star Trek: Picard trailer. "At this point in the Star Trek timeline, you're talking about the Gran Cru regions having literally 600 year old vines."
May 28
New York Public Library's Top 10 Best Kept Online Secrets. Declassified documents database, fashion library, American history database, etc.
May 26
May 24
These wedding invitations are spot on. "Together with their Conservative Parents, Your Screw-up Friend from College and The Person You Assumed Was Just a Drunken Hookup invite you to their inexplicably fancy wedding."
Some of Liverpool's recent success in the Champions League & Premier League can be attributed to their Moneyball efforts. "I don't like video. It biases you."
Neus Català, Dogged Anti-Fascist and Camp Survivor, Dies at 103. "She rescued orphans in the mayhem of the Spanish Civil War, joined the French Resistance and survived two concentration camps."
May 23
"Once-In-A-Hundred Year" Sightings of Bamboo Blossoms Reported In Japan
Muslims came to America more than a century before Protestants, and in great numbers. How was their history forgotten?
Researchers have found what they think is the oldest human footprint in the Americas, left 15,600 years ago in Chile. Evidence continues to mount that the peopling of the Americas happened earlier than commonly believed.
A new Terminator movie with Linda Hamilton & Arnold Schwarzenegger that takes place after Terminator 2 will be out in November. Not gonna lie...watching the trailer gave me goosebumps.
May 22
A former FBI agent reveals how to read body language. "You can have a poker face, but you can't have a poker body."
Laugh track history. "Ancient Athenian performer Philemon routinely defeats his rival Menander at comedy competitions, not because he's funnier, but because he hires audience members to laugh loudly at his jokes to sway the judges."
Clive Thompson writes that tech in SF is becoming a monoculture: "You go to dinner and tech is literally all people talk about: tech, tech, tech." That's exactly why I moved away from SF 17 years ago...tech was all anyone ever talked about.
May 21
The Atlas of Urban Expansion is a website dedicated to the study of how cities from around the globe expand. Wow, there is a ton of data here.
Why the writing in Game of Thrones' season 8 feels off: the writing approach has changed. "Plotters create a detailed outline before they commit a word to the page. Pantsers prefer to discover the story as they write it."
New Coke is back!! Is it weird to have nostalgia for 80s consumerism? It seems so quaint now...
Can indie social media save us? "The IndieWeb lacks the carefully engineered addictiveness that helped fuel the rise of services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram."
May 20
When comparing it to the actual footage, the helicopter crash on last week's episode of Chernobyl was really realistic. It just seems to melt in the air.
How democratic is the EU? As an American who knows little about the EU, this was helpful in providing some context.
May 17
Abortion rights in the US are eroding. Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that: "Congress should pass new federal laws that protect access to reproductive care from right-wing ideologues in the states."
Fire: The Next Sharp Stick? by @hodgman
May 16
An analysis of the typography & design of the 2020 Presidential campaigns. "The Y in Yang looks like — what, a slice of bacon using a playground slide in an unsafe way?"
May 15
The Apollo 11 movie that I blogged about a few months ago, featuring recently rediscovered 65mm footage, is now available online. But it might be worth getting on Blu-ray to see it as crisp as possible.
Limiting Your Child's Fire Time: A Guide for Concerned Paleolithic Parents. "Fire is nice, but there's a time and a place for it. So institute specific fire-watching times, and stick to them."
May 14
Tim Conway dies aged 85. I loved watching him on reruns of The Carol Burnett Show when I was a kid.
Walmart has applied for patents on drone scarecrows and robot bees. "Pollination drones could help offset the loss of bee populations over the past few years."
Adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin floated across the Atlantic in 127 days in a capsule made from plywood. On purpose!
May 13
Amazon boxes are always smiling. But are the warehouse workers?
A collection of cat images from the Library of Congress archives w/ no usage restrictions. Fire up your meme engines!
May 12
May 10
May 9
How did a cube of uranium from the Nazis' failed nuclear reactor end up in Maryland in 2013? "[Werner] Heisenberg had escaped earlier by absconding east on a bicycle under cover of night with uranium cubes in his backpack."
The trailer for Watchmen, the new HBO series based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
"Better Than IRL is a collection of true stories about finding your people on the untamed internet."
How to eat sustainably (with an eye on climate change). "What you eat matters a lot more than whether it's local or organic, or what kind of bag you use to carry it home from the store."
Dentistry is much less scientific than you think. "Today, an increasing number of dentists acknowledge that adults with good oral hygiene need to see a dentist only once every 12 to 16 months."
Denver is the first US city to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms. "Psilocybin possession would remain illegal but would become police's 'lowest law-enforcement priority'".
May 8
Formation is a MacOS setup script for front-end development by @minamarkham. You run it with "slay" and customize it in a "~/.hot-sauce" file.
A supercut of film moments about obsession, feat. Taxi Driver, Black Swan, There Will Be Blood, Rear Window, Fitzcarraldo, Nightcrawler, etc.
May 7
FCC fact page on the 'one ring' phone scam. This explains why I've been getting calls from Sierra Leone and Lithuania.
May 6
A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report PDF. "As such, there is no searchable text, the document will not reflow on different devices and most importantly this document is not Section 508 compliant."
The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870-2015. "What is the aggregate real rate of return in the economy?"
Why are our allergies so bad? Because most of the trees in our cities are pollen-spreading males that were selected because they "shed no messy seeds, fruits or pods".
May 3
An end to AIDS in sight? "A landmark study found men whose HIV infection was fully suppressed by antiretroviral drugs had no chance of infecting their partner."
May 2
Avengers: Endgame and GoT's Battle of Winterfell, which had the better fight sequence? The answer might surprise you.
A "mammone" is an adult Italian man who is still physically and emotionally dependent on his mother. "72.7 percent of adult Italian males between the ages of 18 to 34 still live with mothers who take care of them."
May 1
A food blogger is testing baking recipes in blind-tasting bake-offs. Recipes from indie blogs tend to fare better than those from big publications.
A history of the Star Trek franchise's LGBTQ+ representation. Despite the "infinite diversity" of the Trek ethos, gay characters have been rare.