vintage post from Aug 2015
· gift link
This image was tweeted out by the NASA Europa Mission account the other day:
One of these images is of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, and the other eight are frying pans. Can you pick Europa out? Hint: frying pans tend not to have impact craters.
Update: The photos of the frying pans were taken by Christopher Jonassen, whose work I featured back in 2011 (which I had totally forgotten about). At the time, I even joked about the pans looking like a Jovian moon. kottke.org is a flat circle. (thx, tony)
The video rental store as âthird placeâ. “Decades before recommendation algorithms, video stores served as social hubs where conversation and camaraderie became a form of taste-making.”
The End of Google Search. The internet giant is âchanging the formulaâ of its products and media folks are beginning to assume that there will be no search traffic in the futureâ¦and fretting about their survival.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
Media Matters: “ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 194 segments about the three major heat eventsâ that hit the US this summer and not a single one of them mentioned climate change. Not one!
Fun little review by Marcin Wichary of a 1984 flying video game called Sopwith, which was never supposed to be released to the public (an event that the gameâs creator didnât learn about until years later).
I love this little video of burbling pasta sauces (sound on). Wish there was a 10-hour YT version for work background noise…
Iâd Be Lead Harpooner on the Pequod If It Wasnât for These DEI Hires. “Iâm just telling you that itâs getting hard out there for us blue-collar Nantucket lads when all the shipsâ owners are catching the Abolitionist Mind Virus.”
25 things that explain America, including personal injury lawyer advertisements, Crest Whitestrips, Costco rotisserie chicken, and the Pizza Hut lamp. “The T-shirt cannon merges three American obsessions: guns, sports and freebie giveaways.”
This is a completely fantastic look at how the Enigma Machine works. Jared Owen constructed a 3D model of the German cipher device and clearly walks the viewer through how the electricity flows through the machine to scramble and unscramble secret messages.
When electricity travels through one rotor it changes the letter once. But remember, we have three of these rotors and they each have different wirings on the inside. When electricity travels through all three of them it changes the letter three times.
Then at the end, we have the reflector. This also has 26 metal contacts. Inside is more wiring that connects the letters in pairs. So it goes in as one letter and then comes out as another letter.
To the right of here is the input wheel. It has 26 wires that go in and connects to the 26 metal contacts.
Let’s put this all together. Electricity flows through one of the 26 wires, let’s say the wire for the letter Y. Then it gets changed to a different letter at all three rotors. Then it hits the reflector, which again, changes the letter. And then it goes back through the rotors again which changes the letter three more times. And it comes back out on a wire that represents a completely different letter. And if you were counting, this means the letter was changed seven times.
Seriously, this is one of the best explanations Iâve ever seen of anything on YouTube â by the end of it, I was pretty sure I could now build an Enigma Machine if I needed to. (via benn jordan)
How Wildfire Smoke Is Reshaping Childhood. “Repeated smoke events are changing childrenâs daily routines, limiting opportunities for outdoor play and social interaction and reshaping how many families experience summer.”
Astronomers have measured the size of the largest galaxy: itâs 1.7 million light years across (17x the diameter of the Milky Way) and contains ~3.4 trillion solar masses in stars.
“In this video, Iâll take you from farm to factory to show you how chocolate is made, and at the end, weâll use all the chocolate youâll see in this video to attempt the Guinness World Record for the worldâs largest chocolate bar.”
The Computer That Helped Win World War II. “â¦it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the fascination of a Colossus at work: its sheer bulk and apparent complexity; the fantastic speed of thin paper tape round the glittering pulleys…”
Do you remember the video I posted last summer of YouTuber Benn Jordan where he “uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the birdâ? So cool. Jordan is back with more data encoding tricks in his latest video, There Are Files Stored in This Video (or: How To Hide Shit In Media).
Here’s his intro, which sounds completely bonkers but he demonstrates everything he says heâs going to:
This video is a very deep dive on all of the different ways that you can covertly send and receive data. I’m going to show you how to secretly store encrypted files in music that sounds completely normal to the human ear. I even made a little web app where somebody could paste a link to a Spotify song and it unlocks a completely secret separate audio stream. I’m going to show you how you can send and receive encrypted messages via ultrasound with no cell service or Wi-Fi required by turning your phone into a modem. We’re going to be exploiting Meta’s copyright protection to store ebooks inside Instagram videos. And I’m going to show you how I stored, hosted, and shared malware inside of a harmless Facebook photo of my [dog].
This is a pretty dense video and, Iâm going to be honest, some of it went right over my head. But it is also genuinely mind-blowing and makes me want to watch a Sneakers-esque hackers movie where the characters do things like:
So if you ever want to send someone a selfie over PA system in a place with no Wi-Fi or cell service, I guess we’ve made that possible today.
If you want to play around with any of the stuff in the video, Jordan coded a bunch of demos and tools and put them up on his website.
I also ran across this recently: a system that can transfer data at 190 KB/s between two phones by pointing the camera of one phone at a QR video.
Lidar and other discoveries continue to show that the Amazon rainforest was home to a âsprawling ancient civilization much bigger than researchers expectedâ (possibly up to 3 million people around 100-300 CE).
Hey folks. I just wanted to hop in here quickly to let a cat out of a bag: I am in the midst of moving. Not going to get into the wheres, whys, and hows right now; thereâs a bigger post coming at some point about all of that. Iâm excited and anxious about the transition (itâs a pretty big one), but itâs been taking up a lot of time, energy, and bandwidth that I would usually be putting into KDO.
The move is happening in early Sept, and Iâm probably going to be taking some time off between now and then (timing tbd) to get everything packed & organized, spend time with family & friends before I go, and generally not run myself completely into the ground. Thanks for your patience & understanding; Iâm excited to get back to focusing on the site in mid-Sept. âï¸
This is an old list but still interesting: the 12 most linguistically influential American movies since 1980. If you were compiling a list of linguistically influential movies since 2000, what would be on it?
Tressie McMillan Cottomâs reading list for fighting back against Big Tech. “Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people.”
Surfing Alaskaâs Turnagain Arm (home to a twice-daily tidal bore wave) can be fun (10-foot waves you can ride for miles) but also dangerous: “You need a Plan B, a Plan C and a Plan D because no one is coming to rescue you.”
In recent years, science has been learning more and more about how central the role of inflammation is to our health. “The paradox that often makes treating chronic inflammation so difficult: It can be vital and harmful at the same time.”
Huh, hereâs the trailer for a new directorâs cut (of sorts) of the second X-Files movie (called I Want to Believe, orig. released in 2008) that, per Wikipedia, “will restore horror elements that were previously removed”.
I donât know what sort of neurodiverse bucket this puts me in, but I think a lot about mowing the lawn1 relative to how much time I actually spend mowing lawns (~6-7 hours per year). And so I was completely fascinated by The Puddingâs latest post on optimal lawn mowing paths and “why some people mow a lawn better than othersâ.
They built several digital lawns for people to mow and recorded all of their moves, how often they paused at certain times, and who mowed an optimal path.
Solving the lawn mowing problem is formally called Coverage Path Planning, and is related to one of the most famous path planning problems in computer science: The Traveling Salesman Problem.
Humans turn out to be pretty good mowers, especially those who take their time and have played some video games (including, one would assume, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Mr. Do!, and any other game where you need to worry about dead-ends).
Sarah, one of the best mowers, spent her attention unevenly on purpose. She had a theory about why.
âThe bigger spaces have more cognitive load for you to figure out what the best path is. Whereas the smaller spaces…there are fewer decisions to make.â
She planned the tight, trap-prone sections carefully and winged it on the open ones.
So itâs not about thinking more or faster, but when thinking happens. Thatâs what a good heuristic does: it spends your attention on the decisions that matter and nothing on the ones that donât.
The piece is interactive so you get to try your hand at digital mowing as well.
My actual lawn is very irregularly shaped with a few dead-ends & choke points and an added wrinkle that I canât blow grass clippings into the flower beds (so I can only go one-way the “wrong way” in those areas). So every time I mow, Iâm trying to figure out the optimal path so I donât end up backtracking too much. I probably end up saving about 45 seconds of actual time but boy is it fun from an intellectual standpoint.
“poetry camera is a new way to see your world. take a photo with the camera… poetry camera thinks… and prints out a poem about the scene.”
The Phone in Your Hand. âA layer-by-layer teardown of the most intricate object youâve ever held.”
Using high-definition open source videos and photos from NASA and his own music, John Boswell (aka Melodysheep) created this mesmerizing eight-minute video recap of the Artemis II mission that enchanted us all back in the spring. Like all of his videos Iâve featured on KDO, this one is really well done.
See also Animated Artemis II Photos Reveal Satellites Buzzing Around Earth and Stunning Artemis II Phone Wallpapers. (via colossal)
The Past Catalog Archive is a throwback to fun & modest personal projects on the web. “There is no reason to keep these old catalogs to myself, or only allow them to be viewed. Share them and let everyone take a trip down memory lane.”
Reading Maps: Journeys from books & films (Moby-Dick, Murder on the Orient Express, The Hunt for Red October, The Muppet Movie, etc.) plotted on a map.
Work vs gym: a simple way to decide whether to use AI for a task. âAt the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isnât to move heavy things across the room; itâs to actually lift those heavy things.”
vintage post from Dec 2019
· gift link
This video catalogs every borrowed sample from Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys, from the soundtrack to Car Wash to the Sugarhill Gang to the Eagles to the Ramones to the Beatles. They play the original first and then what they did with it on the album.
Somehow this video only has 31,000 views?! You can also listen to this remix of Paul’s Boutique on Soundcloud, which combines the source tracks with Beastie Boys vocals and some audio commentary.
Tim Carmody made a Spotify playlist of all the sampled songs or you can download zip files of the original songs sampled in Paul’s Boutique and five of their other albums.
They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore, mostly because clearing all of the samples would be prohibitively expensive if not impossible.
Hip-hop sampling began as a live technique, with DJs working turntables at parties and clubs. Whether it was strictly legal or not, nobody was going to try to sue anyone about it. As the genre’s popularity grew, people naturally started recording performances and releasing them as albums. Early sampling tended to come fast and furious. In the ’80s, short clips of existing recordings were the order of the day, often â as in the case of the Beastie Boys â lots of them, layered and shuffled in a clearly creative way. As hip-hop pushed further into the mainstream, however, the stakes got bigger and so did the samples.
1990 saw the release of both M.C. Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice, Baby.” Not only did both songs sample, they each relied heavily on one particular sample â the baselines from Rick James’ “Superfreak” and Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” â for their main hook. Both hits resulted in legal controversy.
âLong live Hyrule jazz!” The Z Suites is âa modern jazz reinterpretation of the music from The Legend of Zeldaâ.
How Podcasts Ruined America. This is an odd claim and article. No mention of the clear precursors to right-wing podcasts (talk radio, blogs, Twitter) and the general shift towards less accountability for public speech, esp. by conservatives. ð¤
So, I donât know what kind of nerd you are, but my brand of nerdiness dovetails neatly with this video about the origins of some of the most common symbols on your keyboard: #, @, &, §, *, ¶, â , and â¡, as well as â.
The âandâ symbol or ampersand does not look like a word, but it is one. In fact, it is a full one. It is the Latin word for âandâ: “et”. The Romans themselves used this. How do we know? Because we have this: the earliest known example of it, graffitied onto a wall in the doomed Roman city of Pompeii.
See also Where the $&%@# Did Grawlixes Come From?
What Climate Science Can Tell Us About the Lost World That Inspired The Odyssey. âA new climate study suggests that centuries of repeated severe drought added to the pressures on that collapsing world.”
This is fun: BoxSquad. Limbs & borders are all draggable.
“A Los Angeles Costco parking lot [has] become a hotspot for skaters over 40. Its long, low curb lets us keep doing tricks on safer, lower-risk terrain [â¦] Curbs represent the twilight of skateboarding, the end being closer than the beginning.â Lovely.
This 17-minute interview about the Odyssey with Christopher Nolan conducted by philosophy doctoral student Zhong Shu is one of the better ones Iâve seen.
The first two questions are:
- Do you consider yourself a bard for a civilization at dusk?
- Have you Christianized The Odyssey?
And nary a comment or question about filming in IMAX.
Google Earth stupidly launched an AI image-gen feature with no guardrails then put it on pause after a huge outcry. “Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran.”
The Listening Museum: “36 mechanical keyboards and switches, curated and sound-mapped. From IBM Model M (1985) to Topre to thocky modern customs. Click any card, type on your real keyboard, hear it as if it were on your desk.”
The Onion: Translator Of Original âMinionsâ Epic Poem Slams âSexless, Bloodlessâ Film Adaptation. The actual Wilson on Bluesky: “No professional accomplishment has ever made me happier than this.â Most fun movie discourse since Barbenheimer.
I ran across this post on Threads the other day: “What’s the hardest record in sports history to ever break?â A sampling of the replies:
- “Bill Russell’s 11 NBA championships including 8 in a row.”
- “Lionel Messi scored 91 goals in the 2012 calendar year.”
- “Cy Young 749 complete games.”
- “Fernando Tatis (Sr) - 2 Grand Slams in the same inning. Most of the others mentioned here are highly improbable, but thereâs no way anyone ever hits 3 slams in one inning.”
- “Lionel Messiâs 8 Ballon dâor”
- “Sir Donald Bradmanâs batting average in Test cricket. His 99.94.”
- “Russian wrestler Aleksandr Karelin. Undefeated for 13 years. 887 wins and 2 losses, both by single point.”
Last year, The Athletic offered a list of their own, which included Wayne Gretzkyâs 1,963 career assists, the furthest goal in soccer (96.01 meters), Michael Phelpsâ 23 Olympic golds, and Wilt Chamberlainâs 100-point game.
Poking around the internet a bit, thereâs also FloJoâs 100m record, UConn womenâs basketball teamâs 111 wins in a row, Cal Ripkenâs consecutive game streak, and Simone Bilesâ 30 world championship medals.
Any additions to the list?
A Telegram Arrived â And I Had to Choose Between My Head and My Heart. “On Boxing Day, I rang my father and told him my news. He was momentarily silent until his delayed shock was so great that he dropped his favourite coffee cup and I heard it smash.”
Comedian Mo Welch has a new show on PBS called The Drawing Room, where she interviews people while she draws them (and her guests draw her). What a great idea for a show.
The first three episodes are live already: Brett Goldstein, Sarah Silverman, and violinist Vijay Gupta; hereâs the premiere episode with Goldstein:
Each episode is only 10-12 minutes long. The lineup of guests for the rest of the season include Demi Adejuyigbe, Tig Notaro, Adam Conover, and Aparna Nancherla.
The Beauty of Doing Nothing Together. “What youâre doing hardly matters. What matters is inviting someone into the ordinary parts of your life instead of waiting for an occasion that feels worthy of an invitation.”
Volcanologist Laszlo Kestay took this photo of a lava skylight in 1996 while conducting field work at Kīlauea on Hawaiʻi. The hardened lava flows strongly resemble doomed souls being sucked into hell or the damned escaping the underworld.
The legacy of the Luddite movement changes when you zoom out a bit. “The development of cooperatives around the world is another story that should not end too abruptly. We could still be weaving it today.”
The trailer for Wicker (starring Olivia Colman, Alexander SkarsgÃ¥rd, Peter Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki). “An outcast in a fishing village commissions a husband for herself made out of wicker.â Looks unhinged (complimentary).
The coffee shop where 162 regulars have their own mug (1977). “The cups may not be such a small thing after all. They are a town register and a history and a confirmation that life goes on in a small American town.â
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