In the last several months, semaglutide, a drug originally developed to help manage type 2 diabetes, has been in the news for its “breakthrough” weight loss abilities. This video from Vox is a good overview of what the drug does and the interest & controversy around it.
Both Ozempic and Wegovy, Ozempic’s counterpart approved specifically for weight loss by the FDA, are brand names of a drug called semaglutide. Semaglutide is one of several drugs that mimics a crucial digestive hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1, or GLP-1. It amplifies a process our bodies perform naturally.
GLP-1 is released in our intestines when we eat, and there are receptors for the hormone in cells all over the body. In the pancreas, GLP-1 promotes the production of insulin and suppresses the production of glucagon. This helps insulin-resistant bodies, like those with type 2 diabetes or obesity, manage blood sugar levels. In the stomach, GLP-1 slows gastric emptying, extending the feeling of being full. In the brain, GLP-1 suppresses appetite, which also promotes satiety and curbs hunger, so we eat less.
But, as I kept reminding Ozempic-curious friends, these medications were designed for chronic conditions, obesity and diabetes. For people who are dealing with those conditions, Ozempic appears to create a path toward a healthy relationship to food. For those who aren’t, it might function more like an injectable eating disorder. As the side effects make clear, it’s not a casual thing to drastically alter your body’s metabolic process, and there is no large-scale data about the safety of these drugs when taken by people who are mainly interested in treating another chronic condition, the desire to be thin.
I can see my anxiety mirrored in the wave of reactions starting to appear — op-eds, TV segments, people explaining why it’s good, actually, that the vast majority of those using this drug lose a quarter of their body weight. On social media, fat activists are pointing out that our lives were worthy even without this drug. The wave of opinion will not crest for years.
And that’s fair because this is new — not just the drug, but the idea of the drug. There’s no API or software to download, but this is nonetheless a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old-and now the sin is washed away. Baptism by injection. But I have no more virtue than I did a few months ago. I just prefer broccoli to gloopy chicken. Is this who I am?
Even outside the context of drugs, I find the tension between accepting who you are versus trying to change some behavior you find unappealing is challenging to navigate — it’s something that comes up in therapy a lot. (thx, anil)
Do you want to sit in on a 30-minute cinematography masterclass with Roger Deakins as he talks about the process behind some of his most iconic films? We’re talking Sicario, The Shawshank Redemption, 1917, Fargo, Blade Runner 2049, and No Country for Old Men here. Of course you do. And when you’re done with that, you can listen to all of these other filmmakers and actors talking about their films.
This is a clever little promo from A24 for the rerelease of Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, a concert film from 1984 featuring The Talking Heads — it, the promo, features David Byrne dropping into his dry cleaners to pick up an old, big suit. As for the film, it’s getting a 4K restoration and will be out sometime later this year.
“Stop Making Sense” stars core band members David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison along with Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steve Scales, Lynn Mabry and Edna Holt. The live performance was shot roughly 40 years ago over the course of three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in December of 1983. It features Talking Heads’ most memorable songs, including “Burning Down the House,” “Once in a Lifetime” and “This Must Be the Place.”
“There was a band. There was a concert,” the Talking Heads said in a statement. “This must be the movie!”
The legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael loved the film, calling it “close to perfection” in this contemporary review:
The director, Jonathan Demme, offers us a continuous rock experience that keeps building, becoming ever more intense and euphoric. This has not been a year when American movies overflowed with happiness; there was some in Splash, and there’s quite a lot in All of Me — especially in its last, dancing minutes. Stop Making Sense is the only current movie that’s a dose of happiness from beginning to end. The lead singer, David Byrne, designed the stage lighting and the elegantly plain performance-art environments (three screens used for back-lit slide projections); there’s no glitter, no sleaze. The musicians aren’t trying to show us how hot they are; the women in the group aren’t there to show us some skin. Seeing the movie is like going to an austere orgy — which turns out to be just what you wanted.
As I’ve discussed previously, the Piper Super Cub is an amazing short takeoff and landing airplane that can, under the right conditions, takeoff and land in as little as 10 or 20 feet of runway.
In a recent stunt for Red Bull, Luke Czepiela landed a Super Cub on an 88-foot-wide helipad located on the 56th story of the Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai. Fantastic. And I love what he did right afterwards… (via digg)
Musician Andrea Boma Boccarusso’s tour of rock ‘n roll history through guitar riffs is a lot of fun. Each year from 1965 to 2022, Boccarusso plays one iconic riff that represents the vibe of rock at the time. Here are a few that made the list:
1965 - The Rolling Stones, Satisfaction
1975 - Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody
1977 - David Bowie, Heroes
1982 - Michael Jackson, Beat It
1985 - Dire Straits, Money for Nothing
1992 - Rage Against the Machine, Killing in The Name of
1995 - Oasis, Wonderwall
2003 - The White Stripes, Seven Nation Army
The riffs get a little less iconic as the 2000s go on, but that’s to be expected in the age of the ascendancy of hip hop. (via digg)
Any Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less. The “meet in the middle” algorithmic trick can help a computer program solve a Cube in minutes or hours instead of millenia.
If you’re interested, there’s a lot more information about algorithms and Rubik’s Cubes in the video’s description.
For his new video series, David Friedman of Ironic Sans finds out the secret behind an unusual object that Joe Biden has placed in the Oval Office: an empty picture frame. The object turns out to be….well, I won’t spoil it, but a few other presidents have had this thing in their Oval Offices as well.
Joe Biden put an empty picture frame in the Oval Office and it’s got a lot of people asking questions. Has a photo been removed? Is something being censored and hidden from the public? I have the answer! And it takes us down a bit of a rabbit hole.
Say what you will about The Algorithms, but YouTube’s reliably informs this art history lover of every new episode of Great Art Explained and for that I am grateful. This latest episode is about the pointillist masterpiece by Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. I had a chance to see this painting in person last summer at The Art Institute of Chicago — spent quite a bit of time looking at it from all angles and distances — so this episode was the perfect accompaniment to that visit.
The lack of narrative means we really should look to the artist’s obsession with form, technique and theory — which is practically all he wrote about — and not to meaning or subject matter - which he didn’t write about at all. The painting is really his manifesto. His protagonists don’t have faces or body language, neither a history nor individuality. They are reduced to a hat, a corset, or a pet. They are just characters in his frieze. They exist only to give perfect balance to the composition.
Some paintings are designed for the viewer to “empathise with” but Seurat keeps us at arm’s length. We are not invited to “participate” in the promenade, and their psychological distance is clear. Both with their neighbors, and with us. It was ancient art that Seurat looked to — of Egypt and Greece. He once said that he “wanted to make modern people move about as they do on the Parthenon Frieze”, and placed them on canvases organized by harmonies of colour. It is what makes the painting so intriguing.
I am not a particular fan of fantasy games, but I do like watching people draw and talk about their process, particularly when it’s accessible to beginners. On his YouTube channel, JP Coovert shows people how to draw maps for fantasy games, books, and other media. Here’s a few examples to whet the appetite.
I loved Everything Everywhere All at Once so much when I saw it in the theater last spring. It caught me in a low moment and swept me up in a protective embrace; it was magic. I was afraid this joyously weird movie would get lost in the Very Serious Film shuffle come awards time but I was beyond thrilled when I woke up this morning to the news that EEAAO swept the major categories for which it was nominated at the Oscars. Here are all the film’s wins from last night:
Best Picture - Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, and Jonathan Wang, producers (acceptance speech).
Best Director - Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (acceptance speech).
If you live in any sort of winter climate, you have, at one time or another, wrestled with the two great mysteries of cold weather life:
1. Why does 50°F in the fall make you want to bundle up while 50°F in the spring makes you want to go for a walk in short sleeves?
2. Why the hell do kids wear shorts during the winter or go without coats when it’s literally freezing out? Like seriously, what the hell?
This short video answers both questions with one magical substance: brown fat.
55 degrees in the summer feels colder than 55 degrees in the winter. And 55 degrees as an adult likely feels colder than 55 degrees as a kid. But it’s not just a feeling. It all has to do with how our bodies use fat - specifically brown fat, a lesser-known type of fat that can produce roughly 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body.
Brown fat isn’t the type of fat that adds to our weight (that’s white fat). Brown fat has the sole purpose of being burnt for heating the body, and it’s extremely effective at that. It only appears in specific parts of the body: around the neck, spine, heart, and kidneys. (It clumps around major blood vessels, in order to warm the blood as it passes through the body.)
In brief: 1. We have more brown fat in the spring, and 2. Kids have more brown fat in their bodies than adults. Cool! (har har)
In this final installment of Everything is a Remix, Kirby Ferguson offers his perspective on image generation with AI, how it compares to human creativity, and what its role will be in the future. In watching the part about the anxiety in the creative community about these image generators, I was reminded of what Ted Chiang has said about fears of technology actually being fears of capitalism.
It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us.
I agree with Ferguson that these AI image generators are, outside the capitalist context, useful and good for helping humans be creative and express themselves. Tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion allow anyone to collaborate with every previous human artist that has ever existed, all at once. Like, just think about how powerful this is: normal people who have ideas but lack technical skills can now create imagery. Is it art? Perhaps not in most cases, but some of it will be. If the goal is to get more people to be able to more easily express and exercise their creativity, these image generators fulfill that in a big way. But that’s really scary — power always is.
The Oscars are this weekend and in this video, some of the nominees — Paul Mescal, Rian Johnson, Todd Field, Camille Friend (hairstylist for Wakanda Forever) — read rave reviews of their work from Letterboxd. Watch to the end — Ke Huy Quan’s letter, and his reaction to it, is especially wonderful.
Ten years ago, I met the founders of Letterboxd in New Zealand. The site was tiny then and had just gotten out of invitation-only mode. But they were enthusiastic and had a vision of making an online space for discussing and reviewing movies. It’s wonderful to see the site become such a key part of the film industry. (via @jasonsantamaria)
The other day on the chair lift, my kids and I were talking about our top skiing speeds (me: low 40s, them: 50+) and one of us mentioned that it would be cool if your current speed was shown on a heads-up display in your goggles. So this morning I went looking for AR ski goggles and of course they exist. Here are a pair of demo videos from Sirius (made by Oostloong) and Rekkie.
These googles include features like real-time speed, clock, temperature, friend finding/tracking, wayfinding (directions, compass, elevation), HD recording, and phone notifications. Skiing is a natural use for AR — you’re wearing the bulky goggles for safety anyway, so you can hide all the necessary tech in there without lookingridiculous, and taking your mittens on and off to check the time or send/read texts is annoying.
I’d love to try some of these, to see how the interface and notifications work — I worry that it would be unsafe because it requires too much of the skier’s attention. Being on anything but the bunniest slopes with people who are reading text messages and clocking their speed as they’re skiing is not something I’d be into — the idiots with the GoPros on selfie sticks are bad enough. I’m also skeptical that the electronics and control buttons on these devices will be able to withstand the beating that ski goggles undergo over the course of a season, especially if they’re subjected to any skiing in the woods. If they could get it right though, I could see these being fun and useful.
This is fascinating: an instructional video from 1988 for British Royal Military Police personnel to watch before travelling the 103 miles of autobahn across East Germany to West Berlin. (A Cold War refresher: West Berlin was completely surrounded by East Germany — the city was not on the border.) Those in transit had to follow many rules:
Approach the Soviet sentry who will be standing close to the small hut on the left of the road. He will salute you. You must, irrespective of your sex, status, or form of dress, return his salute.
They also couldn’t stop anywhere but a few designated areas, could only deal with Soviet personnel (and not East German personnel), were forbidden from speaking Russian, and obviously couldn’t take photos. What a time capsule!
*sigh* I get it. I get why people are so enthused about this Jon Stewart video. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a clip from Stewart’s show on Apple+ where he’s debating a Second Amendment purist gun nut who also happens to be a state senator from one of the states that’s trying to take away health care, reproductive rights, and persecute/prosecute LGBTQ+ people for daring to exist in public — basically a real “rights for me but not for thee” dickbag.
Anyway, I guess it’s fun to see Stewart dismantle this guy but arguing with a dimwitted ideologue in this manner is like that old saying: “What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig? You both get all over muddy…and the pig likes it.” Conservatives in America want what they want and don’t care about the arguments against it or facts or consensus or bipartisan anything. They only care about their radical ideology and their constituents who agree with them (and their constituents who don’t can go fuck themselves, I guess). In fact, they welcome arguments because it wastes the time and energy of people who would argue with them and they can’t lose because they don’t care about facts and they increasingly have no shame. See also Can You Really ‘Back The Blue’ If You’re Weak on Guns? from the same show.
Anyway, anyway, anyway…it’s gonna be a fun Monday here I guess.
I randomly came across this YouTube video from an engineer (civil, not railroad) who was building virtual railroads using wooden toy tracks, you know from when you were a kid. Anyway, it turns out that he was playing an open-world game called Tracks, which is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox. Looks fun — if I ever get any free time again, I might give this one a shot.
Ok, this is one where you’re going to have to trust me and just watch it. Grands Canons is a stop-motion animated video by Alain Biet of thousands of meticulously hand-painted images of everyday items moving and dancing to music.
A brush makes watercolors appear on a white sheet of paper. An everyday object takes shape, drawn with precision by an artist’s hand. Then two, then three, then four… Superimposed, condensed, multiplied, thousands of documentary drawings in successive series come to life on the screen, composing a veritable visual symphony of everyday objects. The accumulation, both fascinating and dizzying, takes us on a trip through time.
It’s really just wonderful — once you get into it, you won’t be able to stop watching. More of Biet’s work can be found on his website or on Instagram. (via waxy & colossal)
The official trailer for the now-confirmed final season of Succession (until they do one more, like 12 years from now). Premieres on HBO Max March 26. As I said when the teaser trailer dropped in January, Succession is my current pick for The Best Show on TV Right Now and I’m excited (and sad) for this final season!
In a 1959 talk entitled There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, physicist Richard Feynman casually invented nanotechnology, inviting the audience and then the world to imagine exploring and making use of the “inner space” of the micro and nano realms. In this video from Kurzgesagt, thye imagine how things would seem if you could somehow shrink yourself down to the size of a grain of sand or a molecule or even smaller, sort of a more educational (but still fun) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
You are the size of a grain of sand just 2 mm high, standing on a blade of grass that seems as tall as an eight storey building to you. A square meter of lawn is now a dense metropolitan area, with 100,000 blades, or two Manhattans worth of grass towers. From your new tiny perspective, the park that you could quickly stroll through before, is now the size of France. Crossing it would take at least a week. Human-sized humans loom over you, 4 times taller than the Empire state building, their steps falling from horizon to horizon.
A bee the size of a helicopter lands near you, making the ground shake, as its hairy carapace vibrates with each wingbeat. You try to escape but are barely able to move because the air is so… gooey. Before you clicked the button air resistance was barely noticeable — but as you’re now a thousand times smaller, it is as if the air has become a thousand times denser. It feels like you are moving through honey.
Flying insects like bees use this to their advantage. Their wings are not made for gliding but like paddles that row through the air. Scaled up to human size, the bee would outrun a Concorde Jet — except it couldn’t even take off because it would be too heavy for its wings.
From Vox, an inflation explainer video that sums up the three primary explanations for the current rise in prices worldwide — Too much money, supply shocks, massive markups (aka corporate price gouging) — and what governments can do about it.
Right now, inflation is inescapable. At the grocery store, the gas station, and in almost every country in the world, people are playing more — way more — than they did just a couple of years ago for everything.
In this video, we explore three explanations for why prices are rising, as well as different policy options for bringing them down.
Bill Neil is a movie trailer editor at Buddha Jones and in this video he guides us through a short history of movie trailers — from Dr. Strangelove in the 60s to Neil’s own Nope trailer — and gently picks them apart to show us how they work. I enjoyed hearing all of the vocabulary for the techniques that they use: rug pull, bumper, diegetic, rise, and signature sound (aka leitmotif).
The promise of 3D movies is that they are supposed to draw the viewer further into the world of the film — the all-important immersive experience. In this video, Evan Puschak argues persuasively that the 3D effect actually has the opposite effect, for four main reasons:
1. The different focus and convergence points.
2. The darkness of 3D movies
3. 3D glasses shrink the screen
4. 3D forces you to look at only what’s in focus
I’ve long disliked 3D movies so Puschak’s explanation makes me feel vindicated about my stance. I’ve only ever seen two of them that were any good: the original Avatar and Tron: Legacy. Tron in particular was one of my peak movie-going experiences: I saw it, nearly alone, in a 3D IMAX theater from the best seat in the house. When the lightcycle match started, the 3D effect brought the playing field right into the theater a few inches from my nose and I just gaped in wonder like a little kid for the rest of what is essentially a 125-minute Daft Punk music video (nothing wrong with that!). If all 3D movies were like that, sign me up! But otherwise, I’m gonna stick to 2D.
Genetics determines most of how tall children will grow as adults, but environmental factors affect it too. As the wealth of many countries around the world has increased over the past 100 years, living conditions and access to nutrition have improved and people have gotten taller.
A century ago, humans were quite short. For example, the average South Korean woman was about 4-foot-7, or 142 centimeters, while the average American woman was about 5-foot-2, or 159 centimeters. Humans were fairly short by today’s standards, and that was true throughout nearly all of human history.
But in the past century, human heights have skyrocketed. Globally, humans grew about 3 inches on average, but in South Korea, women grew an astounding 8 inches and men grew 6 inches.
South Korea is almost unique in how quickly their population has gotten taller because they went from a relatively low-income country in the 1950s to well on their way to being a rich, industrialized country by the 90s. And the difference is particularly stark when you compare the heights of South Koreans with those of North Koreans, where the living standard is much lower and access to nutrition is restricted.
I really like the show-your-work vibe of this video, along with this recent one on the greatest unexpected performances in the NBA. These videos are not only relating something interesting to the audience, they’re showing us how the data analysis works: where the data is from, how it’s analyzed, and what it all means, which builds data and statistical literacy in a society that desperately needs it.
The Oscar voters haven’t always gotten their top picks right, but there’s no denying that this visual showcase of Best Cinematography winners from 1967-2021 contains some fantastic work. Just to call out a few of the films recognized: Bonnie and Clyde; Barry Lyndon; The Killing Fields; Schindler’s List; Titanic; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Master and Commander; There Will Be Blood; Inception; Blade Runner 2049; and Dune.
There’s an interesting shift in the winners (presaged by Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977); they move away from historical realism and towards fantasy, sci-fi, and the future: Crouching Tiger (2000) and Lord of the Rings (2001) and then, more definitively, Avatar (2009) and Inception (2010). But the shift is not by any means total: The Revenant (2015), Roma (2018), 1917 (2019), and Mank (2020) are all firmly in the realist realm.
Shetland Islanders, descendents of Jamaican immigrants living in London, and African Americans all tend to say “axe” or “aks” instead of “ask” when speaking. Linguist Geoff Lindsey traces the history of differing pronunciations of ask/aks from all the way back to the beginnings of written English up to the present day.
First, it’s important to understand that, as English goes, “ax” is a perfectly normal thing to have happened to a word like “ask.” Take the word “fish.” It started as “fisk,” with the same -sk ending that “ask” has. Over time, in some places people started saying “fisk” as “fiks,” while in others they started saying “fisk” as “fish.” After a while, “fish” won out over “fiks,” and here we are today. The same thing happened with “mash.” It started as “mask.” Later some people were saying “maks” and others were saying “mash.” “Mash” won.
With “ask,” some people started saying “aks,” and some started saying “ash.” But this time, it wasn’t “ash” that won out. Instead, for a while “aks” was doing pretty well. Even Chaucer used it in “The Canterbury Tales,” in lines such as this one: “Yow loveres axe I now this questioun.”
There is an element of chance in how words change over time, and we will never know why “aks” and “ash” lost out to “ask.” All we know is that the people whose English was designated the standard happened to be among those who said “ask” instead of “aks” - and the rest is history.
ASMR videos don’t really do anything for me, but I could watch videos of gears and mechanisms doing their thing all day long. I watched this video of 20 mechanical Lego widgets being combined into one useless machine, absolutely rapt. Bevel gears, rack and pinion, camshaft, worm gear, universal joint, Schmidt coupling — this thing has it all.
A rule of thumb for me in evaluating what movies to watch with my limited free time these days: I will often go for something visually impressive or inventive over other options. So this short reel featuring the nominees for Best Visual Effects Oscar talking about scenes from their movies — All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Batman, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Top Gun: Maverick — is right up my alley. (via @tvaziri)
Ok this video from The Pudding is cool for two different reasons. First, you learn about which NBA player had the most unexpectedly great performance since 1985 (e.g. when a guy who is usually good for 6-8 pts inexplicably drops 50). But, you also get a fun little tutorial in how statistical analysis works and the importance of paying attention to the right data in order to get an answer that’s actually meaningful and relevant. How to interpret data in this way is an under-appreciated aspect in the bombardment of data and statistics we see in the media these days and teaching more people about it doesn’t have to be boring or stuffy.
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