Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
New orca behavior unlocked. They’ve been known to sink boats and wear salmon for hats; now they’re ramming fish so hard they explode. “Orcas were observed to hold sunfish in their jaws while a second whale smashed into the target at high speed…”
It’s our ethical duty to understand large numbers. “Our world is increasingly moving towards extreme values: Damages from climate change, deaths due to genocide, wealth that knows no bounds. We can’t tackle them if we can’t wrap our heads around [them].”
A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out. “Once everyone was back at school on Tuesday, the high schoolers lawyered up during their lunch hour.”
“A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.” (AI bots and prediction market dipshits.)
“In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.” On the good and bad types of nostalgia.
Rebecca Solnit on the Tate brothers, The Odyssey, and the misogyny of classical literature & the contemporary world. “Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.”
Following a prompt from Joanna at Cup of Jo… The local deli or sandwich shop names a sandwich after you. What would be on it? Perhaps another way of asking the question: what’s your favorite sandwich that’s a little bit unusual? I love a classic BLT, banh mi,…
Why are American ambulances so expensive? In part because Medicare pays only a fraction of the actual cost of an ambulance ride and the uninsured often don’t pay at all, so the privately insured get bills of $13,000 for a $2600 ride.
We’re Squandering LEDs’ Potential to Save Our Night Skies. “Our main failure isn’t a technical one. It’s that we have yet to revise our thinking about lighting at night. We use LED technology just as we did the old sources of light.”
In addition to leading the animation studio at the National Film Board of Canada, René Jodoin made several animated films that explored geometric forms and motion, including the one above, A Matter of Form from 1984. Set to the rousing notes of Schubert’s Mili…
An online edition of all 85 of the Federalist Papers, presented as they were originally serialized in newspapers, with on eye on good typography and readability.
“This map shows the predicted density of underground networks created by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These networks form one of Earth’s circulatory systems, moving massive amounts of carbon, nutrients, and water across plant communities.”
Oh wow, The Verge made a 70-minute video on how The Clapper became a viral sensation. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a Clapper, no one I knew had one, and I couldn’t understand why every single household didn’t have one of these magical devices.
Well, this is just absolutely lovely: photographer and artist Jan Erik Waider shot these videos of cracked-but-unbroken Baltic Sea ice undulating with the gentle motion of the sea. Mesmerizing…I could watch these for hours. Tags: Jan Erik Waider · mesmerizing…
What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America? “A menu describes what a restaurant serves — but a menu also describes who is being served. They reflect the class, gender, political, technological, and environmental shifts of history.”
A list of Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail, including an Apple Powerbook 100, a SGI R4000 Indigo, the Motorola Envoy (PDA), and some Thinking Machines CM-5s. “This is a Unix system, I know this!”
There is nothing more I love in this world right now than these two lunch ladies performing Firestarter by The Prodigy.
Using William Blake (aka “the patron saint of unclassifiable artists”) as an example, Evan Puschak’s latest video explores how society often rejects artists whose work doesn’t fit neatly into established categories and frameworks of criticism and commerce. Wha…
A digital museum of video game levels…you can move freely around each level using your keyboard. Heavy on Nintendo games (Mario Kart 64, Wii Sports, etc.) but also includes Portal, Halo, Katamari Damacy, GTA III, and World of Warcraft.
I have lived more than two score and twelve years on this Earth and somehow I didn’t know that there are two copies of the Gettysburg Address written in Lincoln’s own hand in the Library of Congress (and five overall).
The Cassette Tapes of the Great Migration, a collection of oral histories recorded in Michigan in the 1970s of Black people who had previously escaped the Jim Crow South. “If we don’t get it from those individuals, then we can’t get it from anyone else.”
“Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest — and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days.”
Near the end of 1995, the artist and producer Brian Eno wrote the following about new media in his diary, which entries were later collected in a book called A Year with Swollen Appendices. Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new…
Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed. “Google has often said it was ‘sending out more traffic & the web is bigger than ever. And then right next to that is a bunch of publishers whose businesses are getting destroyed.’”
Elephants May Hear Ground Vibrations Through Their Bones, Helping Them to Communicate Over 6 Miles. “Studying elephant hearing isn’t as simple as asking an elephant to wear headphones…”
I’m a Scholar of Genocide. We’re Entering a Terrifying New Era. “It is a future in which other nations or leaders may have an incentive to pursue genocidal policies knowing they will not only get away with murder but may even benefit from it.”
I’m currently doing the thing I do after seeing a movie (The Odyssey) I really enjoyed or found interesting: digging into related media. Yesterday I had an hour in the car, so I listened to this episode of The Daily podcast with Madeline Miller and Emily Wilso…
The trailer for Behemoth!, a forthcoming film written and directed by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Andor) and starring Pedro Pascal & Olivia Wilde. Great trailer: it pulls you in without revealing anything about the plot.
On the use of AI for creative work (type design in this case). “A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.”
Mission Impossible. Oppenheimer. F1. The Odyssey. Top Gun: Maverick. Mad Max: Fury Road. Inception. Dune. Filmmakers and studios who make movies like these love to emphasize their heavy use of practical effects, i.e. real cars jumping real bridges or real peop…