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Beautiful Seamless Ride
A lovely little mountain biking video with some incredible locations and cinematography. The drone piloting is A+. Also available on Vimeo. (via alastair humphreys) Tags: cycling · video
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Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates
Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates drawings of fish. There’s an option to slow the animation down so you can watch it draw the fish line-by-line.
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How Hunting Owls Use Sound to “See” Under the Snow
The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter. The owl’s large facial ruff, form
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How many shots are in the average movie? How does it
How many shots are in the average movie? How does it compare to the past? “You might expect the editor to be the most important factor in the number of shots, but in fact, knowing who directed a film accounts for 70% of the variation in its cutting pace.”
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Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World. “The epic
Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World. “The epic story of how a handful of surprisingly simple mathematical ideas have sparked today’s technological breakthroughs — from Netflix’s recommendation algorithm to medical imaging to AI…” Interesting!
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Where You Should Live: Five Factors to Keep in Mind
I ran across this post on Instagram by Bobby in Space (who posts about design and the psychology of place) and wanted to pull it onto the actual internet. Here are some snippets of his “5 hills I will die on as someone who studies the psychology of place”. I don’t think these are universal (e.g. people who live in rural areas likely prioritize other needs) or even necessarily the most important considerations (climate, sunlight, crime, schools), but they resonated with me.
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Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings
Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Maybe this isn’t the best show in the world, but I have been enjoying it. I thought s02 was better than s01 so at least the trajectory is promising.
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Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts
Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts and no server that holds your work. Every document lives in the address of its page… Copy the link and you have copied the document.” Includes a word processor, spreadsheet, calculator, etc.
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The Muffled Thud of Fire in the Hole
From a 2014 article on The Dark Power of Fraternities by Caitlin Flanagan, this is one hell of an opening paragraph: One warm spring night in 2011, a young man
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It’s time to de-privatize the US government. “The problem
It’s time to de-privatize the US government. “The problem is not just that privatization is often inefficient because it adds a nontransparent layer of profiteering on top of government functions. The problem is that government loses basic capacity.”
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Q: “An AI tool with all your passwords or a bear in the
Q: “An AI tool with all your passwords or a bear in the woods?” Signal president Meredith Whittaker: “Look, I know social media wants this. I know you guys want this little clip. But what the fuck? What the fuck?? Both are bad!”
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May Peace Prevail on Earth
Here are some photos I’ve taken during my time in Tokyo so far. I’ve been posting new stuff more or less daily to Instagram. Somehow I’m already about halfway through my stay.
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“‘Digger’ has a lot of haters. Here’s why they’re wrong.”
“‘Digger’ has a lot of haters. Here’s why they’re wrong.” Digger is fascinating — I can’t remember another big movie where public opinion has been so divided (it’s either genius or garbage). I saw it with a friend and he loved it so much he went again.
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Anthropic says that, as of Sept ‘26, they were merging
Anthropic says that, as of Sept ‘26, they were merging 30,000 code changes per day, a 12-fold increase from just four months earlier. The volume increased so much that they wrote their own Git alternative.
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Whoa, the Lion Nebula!
NASA’s JWST recently snapped this image of the Lion Nebula (NGC 2392). Massive stars undergo supernova explosions at the end of their lives, but these kinds of events are few and far in between. Most of the universe’s stars have lower masses, like the one belonging to NGC 2392. When a lower-mass star can no longer sustain itself with nuclear reactions in its core, the star becomes unstable and pulsates, losing its mass by shedding its outer layers, which then turn into shells of gas and dust called a planetary nebula.
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The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting
The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out by Lindsay Crouse. “When perseverance turns against us, quitting isn’t just a way out. Often, it’s the first step to something better. A pivot. A break. A chance to go further — or be free.”
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“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields
“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.” OpenAI recently released 350+ proofs of mathematical theorems, all in one go. “I imagine many mathematicians, like me, felt like they got punched in the stomach yesterday,”
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The first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The
The first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. I love Gerwig and I know this will be good, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it will be great. (I still forever have “Chronicwhatcles of Narnia” stuck in my head tho…)
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Girls is coming back to HBO for a 5-episode run. Lena
Girls is coming back to HBO for a 5-episode run. Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, and Andrew Rannells are all returning. I loved this show and will tune in for sure.
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So Many Different Mes
Japanese photographer and artist Tomoko Sawada works primarily in self-portraiture. For her first project, she visited ID photo booths to take hundreds of photos of herself, dressed, posed, and presented differently. Eugenie Shin of Tokyo Weekender calls that 1998 project, ID 400, “a dizzying grid of strangers who are all actually the same woman”.
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ArtCraft is building open source versions of what looks
ArtCraft is building open source versions of what looks like most of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. Oh, and a word processor and a spreadsheet app because why not?
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Reelizer: A Trove of Movie Art
Reelizer is a personal project by Roger Erik Tinch that is a collection of movie art: prints, posters, illustrations, albums, books, covers, etc. Careful, you can lose hours here…Tinch has a great eye. A few of my favorites:
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Thing I am going to make time for in the next few days
Thing I am going to make time for in the next few days: Harry Styles and Thom Yorke in conversation. “My laptop has been dead for about 6 years. I don’t know where my charger is.” There’s an accompanying Rolling Stone cover story.
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The People Holding Up the Internet. Amazing to see how
The People Holding Up the Internet. Amazing to see how much of the modern internet still depends on the volunteer work of individual people. 4 billion phones rely on the time zone database, a text file edited by just two people in their spare time.
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Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net
Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive. “Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer…”
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“I’m forced to admit that these AI-decompiled web browser
“I’m forced to admit that these AI-decompiled web browser ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: CE, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Skate 3, and The Simpsons: Hit and Run actually seem to run very well.”
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Improving Conversation on KDO
I’ve been really pleased with how KDO comments are working lately — you folks have been lively, informative, fun, and pushing conversations beyond what I can individually manage. And the vibe of the threads are more closely matching the vibe of the community guidelines. All good! The one-size-fits-all-ness of social media has its advantages, but some are looking for quieter spaces and more orientation around community and shared sensibilities. Through the comments, KDO has been growing into one of those places.
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Prompting as Self-Portrait. “We need the blank page and
Prompting as Self-Portrait. “We need the blank page and the silence to go deeper into our thoughts and our understanding of ourselves and of the world.”
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Nearly 4M Records of Enslaved People in 20 Former British
Nearly 4M Records of Enslaved People in 20 Former British Colonies Now Searchable Online. “The Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers contains about 300,000 pages recording enslaved people across former British colonial dependencies…”
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Why I Did Not Leave Nazi Germany in Time. “Many of us
Why I Did Not Leave Nazi Germany in Time. “Many of us feared the shock of being uprooted and tried to avoid it if at all possible. But to understand this reaction…I say that nobody could possibly have foreseen the ‘final solution.’”
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The Worst Way To Get To Space. I’d never heard the story
The Worst Way To Get To Space. I’d never heard the story of the manhole cover possibly propelled into orbit by a nuclear blast — it was estimated to be moving at ~42 miles/sec. “Some speculated it became the first manmade object to enter Earth’s orbit.”
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All the Percents on Star Trek: TNG
I 100% love this video of every time someone says a percentage on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the word “percent” has lost all of its meaning due to semantic satiation. (thx, caroline) Tags: language · Star Trek · TV · video
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My friend Matt was recently here for a week in Tokyo and
My friend Matt was recently here for a week in Tokyo and wrote up his experience and observations. “I don’t think humans were ever meant to experience that many eyes and faces at once, so it was a unique experience.”
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Crossword Clues Where It’s Clear the Puzzle’s Creator Got
Crossword Clues Where It’s Clear the Puzzle’s Creator Got Themselves into a Jam Letter-wise. Incl. “Could be found on the second to last line of an optometrist’s vision chart” and “The sound a cow might make when spanked”.
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Unseen Places: Rediscovering the Art of Observation by
Unseen Places: Rediscovering the Art of Observation by Anna Kodé. Looking forward to this one…Kodé is one of my favorite journalists covering urban culture. “Observation…is not a passive act, but a powerful and radical way of connecting…”
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Every US Electrical Outlet Explained
This video from Practical Engineering was very illuminating to me, a naive person who thought there were only three types of electrical outlets used in the US — the two-prong, the three-prong, and the 240V — and not the real number, which is more than 35 types of electrical outlets! Oh and “two-prong”? Not that plug’s actual name! (via unsung) Tags: electricity · engineering · video
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Japanese book rave. A club in Tokyo spread carpets on the
Japanese book rave. A club in Tokyo spread carpets on the dance floor, played ambient music, and invited daytime clubgoers to chill out and read. Would 100% frequent a bookstore/cafe that did this regularly.
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Weball allows you to roll up websites into a Katamari
Weball allows you to roll up websites into a Katamari ball. You can even roll up KDO. This is too much fun. See also Destroy Any Website.
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Is This Weird Quiz Game the Toughest F1 Video Game Ever?
It might be that this text-only quiz game from 1993 is the most challenging F1 video game of all time. Here are a couple of the 23 questions from Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz:
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Bill McKibben: I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We
Bill McKibben: I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This. The human nervous system wasn’t designed for the polycrisis. “Among all the other dangers these developments represent, they’re simply wearing us out.”
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In 1996, the Blondin family drove all around the US
In 1996, the Blondin family drove all around the US, blogging about it all before “blog” was even a word. “We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.”
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Chasing a Plane Across the Moon
Agustín Ferrando Trenchi became a little obsessed with the moon as a kid. As an adult, he’s taken tons of photos and hundreds of hours of footage of the moon. After seeing an airplane fly close to the moon while he filmed, Trenchi began a quest to capture a plane flying across the face of the moon.
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Abolish Frat Culture. “This is going to be uncomfortable
Abolish Frat Culture. “This is going to be uncomfortable for anyone with a kid in a fraternity to hear: If your son finds himself in a group that would send a ‘free pussy’ text, it’s too late. The group is the disease, the text is the symptom.”
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