How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds
An interesting perspective that humans on social media follow the same pattern as a murmuration — a group of starlings that fly together in a synchronized formation. In general I try to skew towards the positive on this blog since there is such a dearth of disheartening information out there. But this article, while it is the opposite of that, is still interesting to consider how our paths in this world may be guided by others more than we realize.
A growing body of research suggests that human behavior on social media — coordinated activism, information cascades, harassment mobs — bears striking similarity to this kind of so-called “emergent behavior” in nature: occasions when organisms like birds or fish or ants act as a cohesive unit, without hierarchical direction from a designated leader.
By Renée DiResta in Noema Magazine
Vending Machines
Artist Eiji Ohashi captures the beauty of vending machines in his Roadside Lights series. (This photo is from Roadside Lights I).
Photographer Eiji Ohashi captures the beauty of vending machines in his collection Roadside Lights I.
One night 14 years ago, I drove through a snowstorm at night. Caught in a whiteout I lost track of where I was, but the familiar light from the vending machines guided me the way. Ever since then, vending machines have become something special to me. They are a window through which to view the world.”
The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes
A fun, modern-day “whodunnit” web app style described at eieio.games.
That H – it represented one byte. One byte represented 8 bits. 8 bits represented 8 checkboxes.
Those chunks of 8 checkboxes formed a repeating pattern that lined up with the URLs. And if I changed something – if I unchecked a box – the pattern immediately reappeared.
A repeating pattern of checkboxes. When the user unchecks some boxes the boxes are immediately re-checked
spookyI hadn’t been hacked.
Someone was writing me a message in binary.”
Me, My Selfies, and I
An interesting take on the fragmentation of ourselves as we accumulate selfies over time.
There is far less research on the long-term effect of this behaviour: how taking and sharing selfies over a period of decades affects a person’s perception of aging or time itself. Women around my age—those of us who live on the line between baby Gen X and elder millennial—are watching our identities shift in real time in a way no previous generation has experienced en masse.
This proliferation of images calls to mind the work of Taiwanese artist Annie Wang. In 2001, the day before her due date, Wang took a photograph of herself sitting on her bed, with the words “My Belly / My Baby” written on her bare midriff. That image was the beginning of a series called “The Mother as a Creator,” where, over time, she photographed herself and her son every year or every few years with the previous portrait in the background. Wang has called the resulting mix of images, the most recent of which was taken in 2022, a “time-tunnel” in which the past and present all seem to exist simultaneously.
–Erika Thorkelson writing for The Walrus
The Making of the Iron Giant
A dear friend, knowing how much I enjoy this classic movie, recommended we watch a short documentary about it. It was, of course, a lot of fun. The documentary is by CinemaStix on YouTube, and its title perfectly encapsulates the behind-the-scenes reality: “When the Animators Are Given Half the Time and Money That Disney Gets.”
The Landlord’s Game
There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as capitalist family fun.”
Sasha Archibald at the Public Domain Review.
The Cloud Under the Sea
An interesting deep dive about the undersea cables that enable the global Internet and the crews that repair them.
The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”
The Verge
What it’s like to care for Yellowstone during its quietest – and coldest – months
If you can accept the obvious bias of me loving this, I heartily recommend this short documentary.
Steven Fuller has worked as the ‘winterkeeper’ of Yellowstone National Park since 1973, caring for its nearly 3,500 square miles across three US states during the months when the park is at its quietest and coldest. This short documentary from the UK filmmakers David Levene and Laurence Topham features scenes from Fuller’s life there today and photos he’s taken across 50 years, including images of the family he raised at his cabin inside the park.
Aeon
A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Faces His Own Death
Powerful.
In his 1996 book about death, Herbert Fingarette argued that fearing one’s own demise was irrational. When you die, he wrote, “there is nothing.” Why should we fear the absence of being when we won’t be there ourselves to suffer it?
Twenty years later, facing his own mortality, the philosopher realized that he’d been wrong. Death began to frighten him, and he couldn’t think himself out of it. Fingarette, who for 40 years taught philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara, had also written extensively on self-deception. Now, at 97, he wondered whether he’d been deceiving himself about the meaning of life and death.
Emily Buder, at The Atlantic
Parasites and Entrepreneur
A wild paper suggesting that perhaps a notable amount of entrepreneurs may also be affected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii.
“…a common parasite, Toxoplasma gondii (TG), known for its behavioral manipulation of warm-blooded animals, can impact human behavior including possibly in relation to entrepreneurship.”
Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Parasite Infection is Associated with Entrepreneurial Initiation, Engagement, and Performance
by Daniel A. Lerner, Lars Alkærsig, Markus A. Fitza, Carina Lomberg, and Stefanie K. Johnson.
The Grizzly Bear California’s State Flag
Mike McPhate puts out some great writing, including historical pieces, at his news site called “The California Sun.” He made this piece available on Medium.
The idea of the strong and self-reliant grizzly bear became a cherished symbol, emblazoned on the state flag in what was said to be the likeness of Monarch. He too became a different kind of symbol: first of ego, then of suffering, and finally of a lost California.
The sad saga of the bear said to be depicted on California’s state flag by Mike McPhate
Tree.fm
What a delightful idea. For sentimental reasons, I’m partial to this forest, but your mileage may vary.
People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, and unwind wherever you are.
tree.fm
Social Internet Is Dead. Get Over It.
Om Malik nails it.
the internet, as we have known it, has evolved from a quaint, quirky place to a social utopia, and then to an algorithmic reality. In this reality, the primary task of these platforms is not about idealism or even entertainment — it is about extracting as much revenue as possible from human vanity, avarice, and narcissism.
Om Malik
The Glass Is Already Broken
“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
From Kottke.org quoting “Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective” by Mark Epstein.
50 (Short) Rules For Life From The Stoics
It’s an admirable list, but I like the conclusion best at the end of the post.
I’ll leave you with the one rule that captures all the rules. It comes from Epictetus: “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
Don’t talk about it, be about it. The whole point of Stoicism is what you do. It’s who you are. It’s the act of virtue, not the act of talking about virtue. Or reading about it. Or writing about it. It’s about embodying your rules and principles. Letting your actions speak for you. So, Marcus Aurelius reminded himself and now us, “Waste no more time talking about what a good man is like. Be one.”
From 50 (Short) Rules For Life From The Stoics by Ryan Holiday
A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future
A wonderful personal essay By Jiayang Fan in the New Yorker. (There’s an audio version, too.) I found myself thinking at times that this is really a prose poem, then a lyrical narrative. Regardless of classification, if there is one, it is sad, poetic, lyrical and beautiful.
Once upon a time there lived a woman who wanted to exchange her present for her daughter’s future. Little did she know that, if she did so, the two of them would merge into one ungainly creature, at once divided and reconstituted, and time would flow through both of them like water in a single stream. The child became the mother’s future, and the mother became the child’s present, taking up residence in her brain, blood, and bones.
Jiayang Fan in the New Yorker
How the Big Bang gave us time
A great video (and transcript) about time and, one of my favorite subjects, entropy.
Entropy is how messy, how disorganized, how random a system is. When things are nice and neat and tidy, they are low entropy. When they’re all messy and all over the place, they’re high entropy. And there’s a natural tendency of things in the Universe to go from low entropy to high entropy. This is called the ‘second law of thermodynamics.’ The real question is: Why was the world ever low entropy to begin with? Why was the world lower entropy yesterday than it is today? The explanation is not completely satisfying, to be honest. The explanation is the following: because it was even lower entropy the day before yesterday. And why was the Universe even lower entropy the day before yesterday? Because it was even lower entropy the day before that. And this chain of reasoning goes back 14 billion years to the Big Bang, to the origin of our observable universe; in a hot, dense state, a very low-entropy state, and the Universe has been increasing in entropy ever since. And this is called the ‘Past hypothesis’ by philosophers- David Albert, who’s a philosopher of physics, gave it this name. So now we say, “If you know that the world is made of atoms, and you know what entropy is, in terms of rearranging all those atoms, and you know the past hypothesis- that the entropy of the universe started really low- then you can explain everything that happened after that. There’s a way of talking about human life and entropy, which I think is misguided, which is that we should think about life. You know, literally living, being a biological organism, taking in food and everything, as a fight against increasing entropy. I think that’s wrong. I think that we owe life to the fact that entropy is increasing, because what would it mean if entropy were not increasing? It would mean that nothing is happening. Nothing interesting is taking place. Without entropy increasing, there’s no memory of the past. Without entropy increasing, there’s no causal effect that we have on the future. You’d just be in what we call ‘thermal equilibrium.’ Everything would be the same everywhere. It would be the maximally boring universe. But what we do have as a scientific question is: ‘Why do complicated complex structures come into existence at all?’ It’s clear that they need increasing entropy to exist, because if entropy were already maxed out, there would be no complexity. But that doesn’t mean they have to come come into existence.
Think about a famous example there: The perfume is all in little bottle. It’s in a big room. You open it, and it all floats through the room. The entropy of the perfume increases. But if you think about it, when the perfume is all in the bottle, it’s very simple. Once it’s all spread through the room it’s also very simple. It went from low entropy to high entropy, but it went from simple to simple. It’s the journey from the simple, low-entropy starting point to the simple, high-entropy ending point, that there’s a large space of possibilities where things can be intricate. There’s more perfume here over there. There can be swirls caused by the motion of the wind in the room and so forth. The Universe is just like that. Our Universe started out simple and low entropy. In the future, the stars will die, the black holes will evaporate. It’ll be dark, empty, and again, simple, but high entropy. It’s in between that things like us- complicated, intricate systems that feed off of the increasing entropy of the Universe- can and do come into existence. We don’t know the whole story there. I think it’s a very fun, active, scientific research area: Why did complex structures like living beings come into existence and exactly the way we did? What is the role of information? What is the down-to-Earth chemistry that is going on here? What is the geology that is going on here? Could it happen on other planets? Very interesting questions- but one thing I do know is that if entropy weren’t increasing along the way, none of it would’ve come to pass.
The Big Think: How the Big Bang gave us time, explained by theoretical physicist Sean Carroll
Lesser Known Apple Watch Workouts
Probably only amusing if you have an Apple Watch or other fitness tracker that sets physical goals, but I think these illustrations by Basic Apple Guy are pretty brilliant.
If you like the sample below, check out part 1 and part 2 on the Basic Apple Guy website.
Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
This struck a chord with me. Part of the very reason this blog exists at all is because I have a constant list of things I’d like to read and feeling unproductive that I postpone attending to so many of them.
this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don’t feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren’t an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.
Oliver Burkeman
The Kite
A moving animated short film by Martin Smatana I discovered on Colossal.
They are both made out of layers, which symbolize their age. The boy has many of these layers… he has all his life before him. But grandfather, on the other hand, has already lost most of his layers, and he has only few left. As he gets older, he also gets thinner, and at the end of his life, he is as thin as a sheet of paper. One day, the wind just softly blows him away and takes him up to the sky…
Martin Smatana quoted in an article on Colossal.
Netflix, Shein and MrBeast
Another fascinating article by Benedict Evans.
“What is MrBeast and his hundred million subscribers in this – is he a star, a show, a showrunner or a network? ‘Yes’.”
Benedict Evans
MrBeast is pretty fascinating. The Lex Fridman Podcast had a great interview with him as well: MrBeast: Future of YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.
More from Benedict Evans:
“YouTube doesn’t buy LA stuff from LA people – it runs a network, and the questions are Silicon Valley questions. YouTube, in both the network and the kinds of content, is a much bigger change to ‘TV’ than Netflix. It’s ‘video’, but it’s also ‘time spent’ and it competes with Netflix and TV but also with Instagram and TikTok (it does puzzle me that people focus on competition between Instagram and TikTok when the form overlaps at least as much with YouTube). And YouTube doesn’t really buy shows or buy users – it pays a revenue share.”
Benedict Evans
Paper Menagerie
“Kan,” she said. “Laohu.” She put her hands down on the table and let go.
A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees.
I reached out to Mom’s creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. “Rawrr-sa,” it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers.
I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring.
“Zhe jiao zhezhi,” Mom said. This is called origami.
I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.
From the Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
A wonderful short story. I almost hate to link to Gizmodo, which allows one to read it for free in its entirety because it’s so ad-ridden. But it’s worth a a read.
As Gizmodo says at the beginning of it’s article:
Ken Liu’s incredible story “Paper Menagerie” just became the first work of fiction to win all three of SF’s major awards: the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award.
Gizmodo
In Praise of Fast Food
A great counterbalance to the common (and, I think, still a good thing to remain critical about) distrust of fast food.
For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. Natural was also usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible.
So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They built granaries, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives–sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye–to make edible foodstuffs.
Unte Reader
In addition, I was surprised that so many international dishes that seemed timeless to me, were invented in the 20th century:
Nor are most “traditional foods” very old. For every prized dish that goes back 2,000 years, a dozen have been invented in the last 200. The French baguette? A 20th-century phenomenon, adopted nationwide only after World War II. Greek moussaka? Created in the early 20th century in an attempt to Frenchify Greek food. Tequila? Promoted as the national drink of Mexico during the 1930s by the Mexican film industry. These are indisputable facts of history, though if you point them out you will be met with stares of disbelief.
Utne Reader
The Commodordion
Clever people can make a hobby out of anything that exists.
In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Åkesson unveiled a playable accordion—called “The Commodordion”—he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together.
-Ars Technica
AI Yōkai
AI Yōkai (AI 妖怪) is a dictionary of monsters from Japanese folklore, whose images have been generated by me using the artificial intelligence program Midjourney.
Maciej Lipiec
Fascinating…and Creepy
Brain cells in a lab dish learn to play Pong — and offer a window onto intelligence
Found in a Library Book
The Oakland Public Library has a fun, voyeuristic, website where they showcase items found n library books.
Well, if you leave them in an OPL library book, or around the library, you might find them featured right here, on our website.
Oakland Public Library
They have a Twitter and Instagram feed, too.
In the Yellowstone
Poets.org, a site by the by the Academy of American Poets, offers a wonderful email service called “Poem-a-Day.” Today’s offering was right in my wheelhouse: poetry AND Yellowstone?
In the Yellowstone
Harriet Monroe – 1860-1936
Little pin-prick geysers, spitting and sputtering;
Little foaming geysers, that spatter and cough;
Bubbling geysers, that gurgle out of the calyx of morning glory pools;
Laughing geysers, that dance in the sun, and spread their robes like lace over the rocks;
Raging geysers, that rush out of hell with a great noise, and blurt out vast dragon-gulps of steam, and, finishing, sink back wearily into darkness;
Glad geysers, nymphs of the sun, that rise, slim and nude, out of the hot dark earth, and stand poised in beauty a moment, veiling their brows and breasts in mist;
Winged geysers, spirits of fire, that rise tall and straight like a sequoia, and plume the sky with foam:
O wild choral fountains, forever singing and seething, forever boiling in deep places and leaping forth for bright moments into the air,
How do you like it up here? Why must you go back to the spirits of darkness? What do you tell them down there about your little glorious life in the sun?
The History of Ketchup
I had no idea that ketchup has seen so many versions and iterations!
The word ketchup is derived from the Chinese word ke-tsiap, meaning a pickled fish sauce. This mixture was mainly added to recipes to season a dish, versus served as a condiment.
Peggy Trowbridge Filippone at The Spruce Eats.
Update: I was looking up this article again for a friend and realized that, for some reason, The Spruce Eats removed their article by Peggy Trowbridge.
Another similar and quite in-depth article I’ll replace it with for any curious travelers to this site is by Stanford University professor Dan Jurafsk on his blog “The Language of Food.”
But walnut or mushroom aren’t the original ingredients of ketchup either. As Samuel Johnson tells us in his great Dictionary in 1755, English mushroom ketchups were just an attempt to imitate the taste of an earlier original sauce that came from Asia.
What was this Asian sauce? It’s clear from the earliest English recipes that the original ketchup was fish sauce, the stinky cooking sauce called nuoc mam in Vietnam, nam pla in Thailand, patis in the Philippines, and made from salting and fermenting anchovies. An English recipe in 1736 calls for boiling down “2 quarts of strong stale beer and half a pound of anchovies”, and then letting it ferment. And here’s a full early recipe for ketchup from Eliza Smith’s cookbook, the book mentioned in my essay on ‘entrée’. Smith’s cookbook, The Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion, was a very popular English cookbook, first published in 1727, and in the 1742 edition the first cookbook to be published in the American colonies.
The Language of Food
Tolkien explains why the Fellowship didn’t fly the Eagles to Mordor
Perfect.
A few things to know before stealing my 914
I am not a knowledgeable car person (although my excellent friend Sean, who forwarded this article to me is), and yet I still found this a delightful and hilarious essay.
This is a Porsche 914. It has a mid-engine layout. The transmission is in the far back of the car, and the shift linkage’s main component is a football-field-long steel rod formed loosely in the shape of your lower intestine. Manipulating the gear shift lever will deliver vague suggestions to this rod, which, in turn, will tickle small parts deep within the dark bowels of the transaxle case. It is akin to hitting a bag of gears with a stick, hopefully finding one that works.
Norman Garrett on the Hagerty website.
What is fire?
Physicist Richard Feynman describes fire.
The Martini FAQ
Brilliant and a must-read for anyone who enjoys good writing and a great martini. I heard of this fantastic site while listening to John Gruber’s “The Talk Show podcast.” Put me in the “shaken” is better camp.
Q: What is a Martini?
A: Do you want the short answer or the long answer?
Q: The short one first, please.
A: A Martini is a cocktail containing unequal portions of gin and dry vermouth (in a ratio of somewhere between 2:1 and 15:1, inclusive) served chilled, in a conical stemmed glass, garnished with either a green olive or a lemon twist.
Q: OK, I’m ready for the long answer now.
A: A highly vocal minority of Martini drinkers, the Prescriptivists,1 insists that the short answer is in fact the only answer. Any deviation from this definition may produce an enjoyable cocktail, but it will not be a Martini. (There is a single exception: one may use less vermouth.)
Strict adherence to the Prescriptivist position brings with it several undeniable benefits. Foremost among these is the quality of the drink itself: it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to truly improve on the classic American Dry Martini. There are also practical benefits, since the Prescriptivist has no need to stock an elaborate bar. Give him an ample supply of the two base ingredients and a fresh stock of garnishes, and he’s set. Finally, there is the bracing sense of keeping the barbarian at the gate, of shielding a flickering flame of culture against the gusts of fad and fashion.
In the end, however, the Prescriptivist position is untenable, because both the English language and the Martini itself are constantly evolving entities.
In truth, there has never been a single definitive version of the Martini: it was born through variations of earlier, similar cocktails; the earliest recorded recipes differ significantly from each other and even more greatly from the classic American Dry Martini; and continuous — sometimes radical — modification of the basic recipe has been a part of the drink’s identity and appeal throughout its history. The rise of vodka as the most popular base spirit and the multitude of Martini variations that became popular in the 1990’s are only the most recent cycles in a process of mixological experimentation and exploration that has accompanied the Martini since its inception.
The difficulty surrounding precise definition is compounded by an additional factor. In a manner shared by no other cocktail, the Martini has become an icon. For many it is a symbol, either of a certain subset of American culture, or of America itself. As Lowell Edmunds discusses in his scholarly deconstruction of the cocktail, Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail, the word “Martini” evokes not only a cocktail, but also an image and an idea. The symbolic potency of the Martini depends very little, if at all, on its ingredients. It depends somewhat on the conical cocktail glass in which it is traditionally served, and it depends above all on the name: if someone identifies a given drink as a Martini, then, for symbolic purposes, it is a Martini.
One may, however, arrive at a workable definition by setting aside consideration of the Martini qua symbol as a matter calling for scholarly exegesis rather than definition, and by adopting a descriptivist stance toward the definition itself. This is what Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown have done in Shaken Not Stirred: A Celebration of the Martini: “a Martini is a short drink made with either gin or vodka and served straight up, in a Martini glass” (14).2 While Prescriptivists may shudder at some of the concoctions that this definition allows into the fold, and while others may be disappointed that their favored avant garde Martini-like drink is not blessed, this definition does accurately describe the drink throughout its history, while remaining narrow enough to distinguish Martinis from other cocktails that happen to contain gin, vodka, or vermouth, or happen to be served in a Martini glass.
—
1 “Prescriptivist”, in my usage here, is not a synonym for “Traditionalist” or “Purist.” Traditionalists and Purists are those who drink traditional Martinis, made according to the short definition. Prescriptivists are those who insist that cocktails made according to the short definition are the only true Martinis, and that deviant varieties should be referred to by a different name.
2 A “short drink” is a cocktail that contains primarily spirits — such as a Martini or Manhattan. A long drink is mixed drink served in a tall glass, containing approximately eight parts non-alcoholic mixers to one part spirits — such as a Screwdriver or Bloody Mary (Miller and Brown 14).
The Martini FAQ, by Brad Gadberry
Endurance: Shackleton’s lost ship is found in Antarctic
Without any exaggeration this is the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen
Mensun Bound, talking to BBC News
The Great Bifurcation
A great article by Ben Thompson at Stratechery about our increasingly double (and more) lives.
In the end, the most important connection between the Metaverse and the physical world will be you: right now you are in the Metaverse, reading this Article; perhaps you will linger on Twitter or get started with your remote work. And then you’ll stand up from your computer, or take off your headset, eat dinner and tuck in your kids, aware that their bifurcated future will be fundamentally different from your unitary past.
Ben Thompson at Stratechery
How to maintain a healthy brain
Dementia is certainly an upsetting thing to ponder, and I try to skew the articles I post to offer at least some potential positive or enlightening takeaway. Despite the topic, I believe this article does both. Kailas Roberts goes into great, but accessible, detail about what steps we all might consider to optimize our chances for brain health. I recommend reading the whole article, of course, but the author is also kind enough to include a list of “key points” that may prevent tl;dr.
- Ageing changes the brain, but it’s not all bad news. It used to be thought that it was all downhill once you reached your 20s, but it’s now recognised that the brain can continue to grow and adapt into old age.
- The roots of dementia run deep. Although dementia usually manifests in the elderly, relevant contributing risk factors and biological processes begin to exert an influence much earlier – offering an optimistic opportunity to intervene.
- Nourish your brain. A healthy diet can help ensure your blood pressure and cholesterol levels are in good shape, which will allow vital nutrients to reach your brain. It also might help dampen inflammation, another risk factor for poor brain health.
- Train your brain. Completing challenging mental activities will build your ‘cognitive reserve’, which could offer you protection from dementia and cognitive decline.
- Care for your mental health (and connect with others). Brain health and mental health are deeply intertwined – socialising is one of the most effective ways to protect both.
- Train your body. Your brain health is also dependent on your overall physical fitness, so aim to exercise regularly.
- Protect your brain. Blows to the head from injury or even from playing sport can harm your brain and increase your risk of developing dementia, so take care of your grey and white matter.
Kailas Roberts at psyche.co
Web3
Notes on Web3 is a great article for those still pondering what this moment in history means. I tend to think blockchain and decentralization are great tools in search of a purpose (in addition to cryptocurrency), but I do think there’s something there. I also think, like this author, that web3 recaptures some of the same excitement, but also unsustainable dreams of web 2.0.
A large fraction of Web3’s magnetism comes from the value of the underlying cryptocurrencies. Therefore, a good diagnostic question to ask might be: would you still be curious about Web3 if those currencies were worthless, in dollar terms? For some people, the answer is “yes, absolutely”, because they find the foundational puzzles so compelling. For others, if they’re honest, the answer is “nnnot reallyyy”.
Robin Sloan
Maple Tree Tunnel
Another addition to my “bucket list” courtesy of Spoon & Tamago.
Joyas Voladoras
A beautiful reflection on the heart, from biological fact to imagined emotional instrument. There’s a good narrated version of the essay, too.
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
Brian Doyle
Stepping out of the firehose
A great essay by benedict Evans.
The first generation of internet services tried to help with filters and settings, but most normal people ignore the settings and don’t want to write filters, and so we very quickly went to systems that tried to help automatically. Gmail has its priority inbox, and social networks build recommendation engines and algorithmic feeds. Given that the average Facebook user is apparently eligible to see over a thousand items a day, it seems (or seemed) to make sense to try to show the video of your niece before the special offer from a restaurant you ate at five years ago. So your feed becomes a sample – an informed guess of the posts you might like most. This has always been a paradox of Facebook product – half the engineers work on adding stuff to your feed and the other half on taking stuff out.
Benedict Evans
A Concerto Is a Conversation
In Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers’s “A Concerto Is a Conversation,” Bowers traces the process of breaking into new spaces through generations of sacrifice that came before him, focusing on the story of his grandfather Horace Bowers. As a young man, he left his home in the Jim Crow South, eventually ending up in Los Angeles. Encountering discrimination at every turn, he and his wife, Alice, nevertheless made a life as business owners.
Half Dome Night Hike Time Lapse
Beautiful time lapse video of traversing Half Dome at night. I discovered the link at The California Sun. Much of it is only for subscribers, but the writing and content are excellent.
Pixel: a Biography
So why do so many people think that pixels are little squares? The answer is simple: apps and displays have fooled us for decades with a cheap and dirty trick. To ‘zoom in’ by a factor of 20, say, they replace each pixel with a 20-by-20 square array of copies of that pixel, and display the result. It’s a picture of 400 (spread) pixels of the same colour arranged in a square. It looks like a little square – what a surprise. It’s definitely not a picture of the original pixel made 20 times larger.
Alvy Ray Smith
I’ve been using Photoshop and other graphic programs for decades, and I absolutely thought pixels were little squares. This is a fantastic and informative essay. Highly recommended.
Loot
“Loot is randomized adventurer gear generated and stored on chain.
https://www.lootproject.com/
Stats, images, and other functionality are intentionally omitted for others to interpret. Feel free to use Loot in any way you want.”
I haven’t been drawn into the NFT craze, but I really do like the idea of something that can be an unalterable creative asset.
Kyle Russell explains how a community has already formed around this set of adventurer gear
In less than a week, a community has gone from lists of text to infinitely many illustrations of those items to worlds for those items to reside in and characters to wield them. All from taking simple primitives and generating context around them that gives them value.
https://collisions.substack.com/p/gimme-the-loot
Video of Aurora From the ISS
Clouds compete for attention in this aurora time lapse over a blue ocean.
Thomas Pesquet
Hyper-Reality
A very dystopian (but somewhat believable) vision of what our augmented reality future may hold. I discovered the link in the always fascinating newsletter by Benedict Evans.
Hyper-Reality presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media.
Hyper-Reality Description on Vimeo
Ode to a Flower
A wonderful video I ran across on brainpickings (I highly recommend that site, too) featuring the famous physicist Richard Feynman explaining why science only adds to the beauty of world.
The API-first world
Postman is a great tool for using/testing APIs. Added to that, they’ve created a fun comic book explaining their vision for “API-first” world. Yes, it’s biased toward their company, but it’s still great.
Now, there’s quite a bit of discussion across the industry these days about what exactly “API-first” means, so we decided to choose an unconventional medium to explain it. Folks here at Postman are big fans of reading, and of science fiction, and of graphic novels, so we decided to create a graphic novel to describe the API-first world.
Postman Blog
Shruthi Venkatesh, a visual designer here at Postman, brought this idea to life with her illustrations in a brand-new graphic novel that I am very excited about sharing with you, “The API-First World.” Please give it a read.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
I stumbled across the book review by Rodrigo García in the Paris Review about his book: A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, where he writes of “the ailing health and eventual passing of his father, the writer Gabriel García Márquez.”
He would say, “I work with my memory. Memory is my tool and my raw material. I cannot work without it. Help me,” and then he would repeat it in one form or another multiple times an hour for half an afternoon. It was grueling. That eventually passed. He regained some tranquility and would sometimes say, “I’m losing my memory, but fortunately I forget that I’m losing it,” or “Everyone treats me like I’m a child. It’s good that I like it.”
the Paris Review
Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was an amazing achievement of world literature and for me, personally, it was my first exposure to magical realism.
The World’s First Carbon Concrete Building Is Under Construction
Despite all the chaos in the world, amazing innovation continues.
From Interesting Engineering:
Specifically, the concrete used for The Cube will be strengthened with carbon fiber yarn, which is made by extracting almost pure carbon crystals via a process of thermal decomposition known as pyrolysis. The yarn is then woven into a mesh that the concrete is poured onto before setting. As the carbon fiber doesn’t rust, the carbon concrete is also more durable over a longer period than steel rod-strengthened concrete. As structures can be much thinner due to the lack of steel rods — which often require more thickness to prevent water penetration — Henn says that this will enable “a future architecture where environmentally conscious design is paired with formal freedom and radical rethinking of the most basic architectural elements.”
Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived.
An evergreen comic/article by The Oatmeal. It’s both humorous, and educational about how truly amazing Tesla was, and, by contrast, how overrated Thomas Edison was/is.
Tesla was known for discovering amazing things and then forgetting to write them down. Edison was known for rushing to the patent office as soon as one of his employees had something.
The Oatmeal
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla
A Little Piece of Earth
A somewhat bittersweet, but beautiful portrait of Charles Bello who has lived a life of creativity and self-reliance in the forest. He reminisces about his wife and kids and the great life they made in the forest. Now 85, and alone, he still finds meaning in living in solitude on 400 acres.
Be active, and be creative, and be alive.
Charles Bello
Pizza Toast & Coffee: Kissa Bugen
Craig Mod is one of my favorite creators (writer, videographer, programmer, and more).
Pizza Toast & Coffee (2021) is a short documentary about kissaten — Showa-era (1926-1989) Japanese cafe — culture. Bugen is a small kissa in a suburb south of Tokyo. It was featured in the book Kissa by Kissa. Proprietor Yamane-san has survived four bouts of cancer and has run his cafe for close to forty-five years. He makes a mean pizza toast with a unique cutting style. Pizza toast is a staple of kissa culinary culture.
Craig Mod
Quoth the Raven
Losing Sight of the Stars
“Lost in Light, a short film on how light pollution affects the view of the night skies. Shot mostly in California, the movie shows how the view gets progressively better as you move away from the lights. Finding locations to shoot at every level of light pollution was a challenge and getting to the darkest skies with no light pollution was a journey in itself.”
The video by Sriram Murali is only three minutes long, and it’s a beautiful and sad illustration of what we are missing in the night sky.