“A group of runners starts jogging around a circular track, with each runner maintaining a unique, constant pace. Will every runner end up ‘lonely,’ or relatively far from everyone else, at least once, no matter their speeds?” [quantamagazine.org]
Jay Graber is stepping down as CEO of Bluesky to “transition to a new role as Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer”. And they’re looking for a new permanent CEO. [bsky.social]
“What if we taught students to use AI critically, rather than insisting they ignore it or assume they’re using it to cheat?” asks college freshman Maximilian Milovidov. “Students will reach for these tools, whether universities ban them or not.” [npr.org]
New web game that takes 2 min to play (and perhaps a lifetime to master?): Outsmart. “Five rounds, first to 3 wins. In each round, the higher bet wins. You have 100 total points, so bet wisely. Can you outsmart the machine?” [labs.davidbauer.ch]
The Library of Congress recently discovered a copy of a film made in ~1897 called Gugusse and the Automaton, which "had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century" and "was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot". [kottke.org]
GPS jamming and spoofing is becoming commonplace in war. “Ships in the region’s waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire, erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land.” [cnn.com]
The fish doorbell in Utrecht is back for another season! “Did you spot a fish? Press the Fish Doorbell! Then our lock keeper can let the fish through.” [visdeurbel.nl]
Great interview with Rebecca Solnit. "Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war." [kottke.org]
The NY Times went back through a century of women’s obituaries “to re-examine them with the benefit of distance — to see what was emphasized, what was minimized, what might have been left unsaid”. https://bsky.app/profile/prisonculture.bsky.social [nytimes.com]
Great data analysis of what would US would be like if it were just an average country in its cohort of wealthy democracies, e.g. “the nation that would exist if our democracy functioned to serve the public rather than protect the already powerful”. [kottke.org]
Street artist Mathieu Tremblin paints over graffiti tags and makes them more legible. (Think converting scrawled tags to Arial.) [kottke.org]
An engaging archive of well-designed postage stamps that emphasize "iconography, form, typography and branding". [kottke.org]
Dozens of former employees of Noma tell of abuse & violence at the hands of its chef/owner, René Redzepi. Punching, screaming, shoving, stabbing, slamming, intimidation, ridicule, blacklisting. What an asshole. [nytimes.com]
An hour-long set of Seu Jorge singing David Bowie covers in Portuguese (from Wes Anderson's Life Aquatic) to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie's death. "Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo." [kottke.org]
City Map Poster Generator can create printable minimalist map posters for any city in the world. [kottke.org]
KDO members can now freshen up their profiles with a profile pic or a short bio. "The idea with this feature is to provide a lightweight way for KDO members to get to know who they're conversing with in the comments." (It's Just Enough Social...) [kottke.org]
Let's-a-fucking-go
Lots of great defecation physics here: “66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It’s a…small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog’s, at 10 milliliters.” [pbs.org]
The New School Cancelled Their Class on Soccer and World Politics. We Are Going To Teach it Anyway. Enrollment is now open; the class will deal with questions like “Which regimes are using this tournament to launder their reputations?” [karenattiah.substack.com]
SETI might be missing alien signals because “stellar ‘space weather’ may blur ultra-narrow radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations before they leave their home star systems”. SETI usually looks for “extremely sharp frequency spikes”. [seti.org]
Colonel Sanders visited a KFC with a NY Times food critic in 1976 and had nothing good to say about the food. "This ain't no goddam Tennessee Fried Chicken, no matter what some slick, silk-suited son-of-a-bitch says." [kottke.org]
The Met Introduces High-Definition 3D Scans of Dozens of Art Historical Objects, including Egyptian temples, Greek oil flasks, van Gogh paintings, and cuneiform tablets. [thisiscolossal.com]
“If measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates decline 1% annually for the next five years, associated medical and societal costs could reach $1.5 billion.” (That 1% is a conservative estimate “given current policy and coverage trajectory”.) [beckershospitalreview.com]
Director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Poker Face) wrote the review of the Thursday crossword puzzle for the NY Times today. “I love a good Thursday. The baffling special graphics, the wait-that-can’t-be-right puzzlement and that glorious ah-ha moment…” [nytimes.com]
Earth’s gravity is lumpy. “The gravity in East Antarctica is measurably weaker than anywhere else on the planet.” [popularmechanics.com]
Arresting Photos of Big Tuskers. "The term 'Big Tusker' refers to an elephant with tusks so large they scrape the floor." There are only ~25 of these elephants left in the entire world. [kottke.org]
This is kind of amazing: World Monitor is a real-time global intelligence dashboard. Includes military activity, climate anomalies, live webcam feeds in warzones, internet outages, active fires, and even the Pentagon Pizza Index. [worldmonitor.app]
Yes, let’s retire the restaurant monologue. “The urge to direct diners through every bite of a meal runs counter to what I love about dining out, one of just a few cornerstones of American life that have not yet been optimized into oblivion.” [archive.ph]
From ProPublica, a database of financial disclosures from the Trump regime’s political appointees. “Use this database to explore potential conflicts of interest for President Donald Trump and his team.” (via @dansinker.com) [projects.propublica.org]
I don't check in everywhere, but I still use Swarm on a weekly basis! swarmapp.com
