February 27
Gene Hackman (1930-2025)
Priming is a major source of cognitive errors
It is not easy to avoid the habit of relevance-mongering, of explaining to people that they ought to read this piece about some long-ago moment in history or some far-away place because—and by implication only because—it is a distant mirror that tells us something about us. from All the Distant Mirrors by Alan Jacobs [The Hedgehog Review]
February 26
Engineer's Disease* Writ Large (Which We're All Now Suffering From)
Silicon Valley's Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions [ungated] - "The tech 'canon' of books and ideas over-indexes on great men and celebrates small teams that changed the world." [more inside]
CSS Puzzle Box
A collection of interactive puzzles implemented entirely in HTML and CSS, with no Javascript at all. How it was done. Some of it was made with the <details> and <summary> tags you can use on this very site to hide spoilers! The Puzzle Box was made by blackle mori, who also made The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme (Previously).
Hairy caterpillar warning after 6yo nearly dies from touching nest
Hairy caterpillar warning after 6 year old nearly dies from touching nest. Yarren was climbing a tree when he collapsed in anaphylaxis and began having seizures after touching a hairy caterpillar nest. (Australia)
30 Years of LyX
"LyX is an open source, graphical user interface document processor based on the LaTeX typesetting system. ... LyX is popular among technical authors and scientists for its advanced mathematical modes, though it is increasingly used by non-mathematically-oriented scholars as well for its bibliographic database integration and its ability to manage multiple files. LyX has also become a popular publishing tool among self-publishers." - Wikipedia [more inside]
Why did people disagree about the dress?
A decade after the dress, we’ve learned a lot about how people could see a simple image so differently from one another. The dress is of particular interest to me as a researcher who studies differences in perception and cognition between individuals. While the colors of a piece of clothing might be a trivial thing to disagree about, we can all learn a thing or two from the dress about how to navigate high-stakes disagreements. from It’s Been 10 Years Since “The Dress” [Slate, ungated]
"An antidote to entrenched social, racial, and class inequalities."
What Harm Reduction Really Looks Like (On harm reduction in Minneapolis, Tim Evans for The Nation (supported by the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, archive.ph)
A fentanyl czar and the end of progressive drug policy
It comes at a time when we’re facing a country-wide backlash to harm reduction measures like safe consumption sites, safe supply drugs, and decriminalization. With Trudeau, who has overseen many of those policy shifts, about to leave government, it feels like the end of a relatively progressive era for drug policy in Canada. [more inside]
Michelle Trachtenberg, 1985-2025
Variety: "Michelle Trachtenberg, 'Gossip Girl' and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Actor, Dies at 39." More obituaries: The Hollywood Reporter; CNN; and NYT (ungated). Entries at IMDb, Letterboxd, and Wikipedia. Trachtenberg's work readily available online includes Human Kind Of, "an animated comedy about a nerdy teenager who finds out her estranged father was an alien," released on Facebook Watch and underappreciated in a crowded field of acerbic SF/F cartoons (IMDb).
"Free speech and free markets."
Jeff Bezos bans Washington Post opinion writers from opposing ‘free speech and free markets’ "In a move promoted as supporting freedom of speech, The Washington Post will no longer publish opinion columns that oppose the core views of Post owner and Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos, Bezos has reportedly told staff. " (The Verge link, does not appear to be paywalled.) Opinions editor David Shipley, who is not "hell yes" over this, has now left (NYT). [more inside]
Shantyboats
“Shantyboats were the last resort of those who were too poor even to own a horse, let alone homestead an acre patch of hard-scrabble dirt. They could be cobbled together from discarded planks, canvas, scrap metal and driftwood and rafted up with others, rent free, along the banks of any navigable waterway. And there were plenty of places to which they could drift: most of America’s rivers and their tributaries are part of what looks, on a map, like a huge, intricately interconnected arterial system nourishing the entire eastern half of the continent[…]”
Can Ultimate Frisbee Heal the Middle East?
The soft power of Ultimate Frisbee in the Middle East, friendlier than bombs or bullets. It's not just about the low cost or the novelty. Ultimate is governed by a principle called Spirit of the Game, an honor system that counts on players to call their own fouls and enforce the rules themselves. Learning to play the game is an exercise in peacebuilding on a small scale. The noncontact nature makes conflict resolution even more straightforward than in other sports. Players can't run with the disc; they can only move it by passing it to another teammate.
(SL Reason)
Pass the Palissy Plate
Bernard Palissy (1510 – c. 1589) was a Renaissance man in more ways than one; over the course of his life, he did work as a potter and ceramicist, garden designer, glassblower, hydraulics engineer, painter, surveyor, and naturalist. He is probably best known for his ceramics - dishes and platters decorated with hyper-realistic shells, snails, ferns, fish, frogs, seaweed, and other aquatic life, all cast from specimens Palissy collected and meticulous observations he'd made from specimens he'd collected. [more inside]
Study underway into cute but feisty freshwater creature
Study underway into cute but feisty freshwater creature. Scientists are investigating the health of spiny freshwater crayfish in habitats surrounded by large dams, growing towns, and coal mines. (Australia)
John Oliver Wants Your Rat Erotica (SFW)
www.johnoliverwantsyourraterotica.com Make yourself less valuable to Meta
I would like to be less of a stranger to myself
I considered Lucian Freud’s paintings of me, where I was the model, not the artist. They were all made when I was a young woman—the first when I was twenty, the last when I was twenty-seven. I have never sat for another artist since, yet the label of “muse” has stuck. It is a frustrating and corrosive feeling to be compartmentalized in this way. I wondered whether I could undermine the lazy public labeling so that I could be seen as the artist I am. from Painting Myself by Celia Paul [NYRB; ungated]
February 25
The clarity of crossword clues meets the parsability of LISP
Want to iteratively unpack a series of cryptic clues to collapse a horrifying nest of brackets to resolve down to a heavily obscured headline? Want to do it once a day? Good news: Bracket City is here to make you feel alternately like an entire idiot and then kind of a genius.
Tinned Fish Recipes
Native species resurgence in WA's north after rangers' war on cane toads
Native species resurgence in WA's north after rangers' war on cane toads. The Balanggarra Rangers have fought the cane toad for over a decade and are finally seeing native flora and fauna make a comeback (Australia).
The players today have some unusual names
Abbott & Costello perform their greatest routine one last time for a mass audience on The Steve Allen Show, October 7, 1956, to commemorate the induction of "Who's On First" into The Baseball Hall of Fame. [more inside]
“Your books and deeds slow line by line erase”
The Cuddled Little Vice is a book-length essay by Elizabeth Sandifer which offers a magisterial overview of Neil Gaiman’s life and career, from rise to fall, focusing especially on the Sandman comics. [Content warning: Child abuse, sexual abuse]
Modeling lava flows
A fedi thread on how (impossible it is) to model lava. It’s impossible! We know SO MUCH relevant stuff, entire fields of knowledge, kitchen-table imbricated with the hardest mathematics. And we still can’t. Often because it’s, you know, lava.
30-50 barrels and logs
Sty Scraper is a simple game. Stack the random farmyard junk as high as possible on the platform. If anything falls, you lose. It looks fantastic, the physics are great, and it's fun to play. Enjoy! [more inside]
A serious paper about a silly task, written accordingly
Lyrics parody swaps one set of words that accompany a melody with a new set of words, preserving the number of syllables per line and the rhyme scheme. Lyrics parody generation is a challenge for controllable text generation. We show how a specialized sampling procedure, combined with backward text generation with XLNet can produce parody lyrics that reliably meet the syllable and rhyme scheme constraints. We introduce the Weird AI Yankovic system and provide a case study evaluation. We conclude with societal implications of neural lyric parody generation. from Weird AI Yankovic: Generating Parody Lyrics [Arxiv; pdf]
Rare native mouse like dumpling on legs found in Blue Mountains
Rare native mouse like dumpling on legs found in Blue Mountains. Ecologists set up tea strainers filled with peanut butter and oats in the Wollemi National Park to attract the New Holland mouse which has not been seen in the area for 20 years. (Australia)
What we need is a “monster-centered ethics”
Humans offers a rich historical and literary survey of the pathological and contradictory means by which we define the monstrous, a process often slapdash and mutable. Tracing our history of monster-making through conversations around race-making and nation-building, gender and sexuality, our relationship to the divine, machines and extraterrestrials, the book reveals the myriad ways we express and compensate for a fundamental fear that we ourselves might not be “normal.” from Our Monsters, Ourselves [The Chronicle of Higher Education; ungated]
February 24
Mapping a lost map
The lost map of Al-idrisi The 12th-century Islamic cartographer al-Idrisi for created this world map in 1154 for Roger II of Sicily. It was a masterpiece of mapping which remained the most technically sophisticated world-map for three centuries after its production. Drawing on several centuries of Islamic cartographic research, al-Idrisi produced both a single, round map engraved onto a silver disk and set into a wooden table, with Mecca at its centre and a detailed book titled the Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi'khtirāq al-āfāq, or the Entertainment for those wanting to discover the world. Factum Foundation has re-created al-Idrisi’s fabled map. Neither facsimile nor copy, this re-creation combines detailed historical research and advanced digital techniques with the highest levels of craftsmanship.
…a little more than half the size of Pokémon Go at its peak.
Sam Rivers
"Few, if any, free jazz saxophonists approached music with the same degree of intellectual rigor as Sam Rivers; just as few have managed to maintain a high level of creativity over a long life. Rivers played with remarkable technical precision and a manifest knowledge of his materials. His sound was hard and extraordinarily well-centered, his articulation sharp, and his command of the tenor saxophone complete. Rivers' playing sometimes had an unremitting seriousness that could be extremely demanding, even off-putting. Nevertheless, the depth of his artistry was considerable. Rivers was as substantial a player as avant-garde jazz ever produced." - Chris Kelsey [more inside]
Scientists left questioning how a corella turned pink
Scientists left questioning how a corella turned pink. You've probably heard of the Pink Panther, but have you heard of the pink corella? This bird has caused academics to ponder how it became the bright colour. (Australia)
You won't be surprised to learn that this was NOT clotted cream.
Queen of Afternoon Tea reviews the Railcar 91 Tea Room at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida.
Built for sound
When it was effortful to make noise and people wanted to hear, what did they do? This reminds me that Vitruvius talked about building for sound, too -- I think I remember reflecting sound for speeches and in the marketplace, and maybe deadening it near temples.
App-exit
"Three questions about Apple [disabling Advanced Data Protection for UK customers]" in responce to a secret “Technical Capability Notice” under the UK's “Snooper’s Charter.”
Do you name your stuff? It's your weekly free thread!
About 1 in 4 people name their cars. And of course people name their instruments (Atlantic, ungated). Does your car or guitar (or crouton) have a name? Share it - or anything at all you want to talk about! (except politics) - it's your weekly Free Thread!
"If I'd known there was a record to be beaten, I'd have gone faster"
Man accidentally sets marathon record on crutches Chris Terrill, 73, from Wilmington in East Sussex needed a hip replacement after injuring himself playing cricket last year. Regardless of being on crutches, he decided to run the Brighton Marathon as usual because he was already registered. It was only after he finished in six hours, 11 minutes and 11 seconds that he learned he had beaten the previous record by more than 13 minutes. [more inside]
Blue Bic
7 Years of Doug Ford
What the hell is cheesecake?
"I always say that 'love is a song.'"
"I'm really sad about the state of this family."
Ten Things I Don't Want To Hate About You Zach Mack and his dad try to mend a rift between them in a very unusual way. Zach makes a yearlong bet with his right wing religious dad over whether or not his predictions come true. (Spoilers for the podcast below the cut.) [more inside]
The hunger for quiet leaves us hungry.
Noise-cancelling tech leaves us less able to listen. "...I find that sad. Sometimes I think of it as a tragedy of the commons in reverse. The tragedy of the commons is we have like a field of grass and we all want to feed our cows on it. But if we all try to feed our cows on it at the same time, then the grass gets eaten up, and it's all gone.
I think in this case, it's more [about] contribution. If no one is contributing to the social space around us, the social space gets more boring, less interesting, more sterile, and so there's even less reason to not be plugged into our technologies."
Waffle’s Revenge
If you didn't want clouds or houndstooth, Windows 95 offered the option to tile 8x8 pixel 1-bit patterns on your desktop. Stored as eight decimal numbers describing the bit pattern of each row. [more inside]
Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti" Turns 50
“Physical Graffiti remains the band’s definitive statement, and rock’s ultimate double album. Unlike some of their earlier work, it does not suffer from overfamiliarity, and is the culmination of what they had achieved up to that point. As far as many fans are concerned, the record marked the end of the band’s reign of supremacy through the first half of the decade, and while these songs have been ranked, there is not a bad note on this LP. Led Zeppelin would not reach this artistic pinnacle again.” [more inside]
📚 Small Press Books in Trump’s Honeymoon Period 📚
One of the ways people are resisting is through their wallets: under the fold, over 100 small press books by people in groups targeted by the Trump administration, or which provide insight and guidance on what to do next. Small press books previously. [more inside]
Gull-et
We want to know what gulls are eating and where! ... Our goal is to get people noticing gulls whilst also contributing to our understanding of gull diet and behaviour. We want to capture the huge diversity of gull diets and understand spatial and temporal trends in what they are eating. from Gulls Eating Stuff
February 23
Rick Steves is one of our great writers.
An Unexpected Writer Shows Us One Way Out of Our Current Hellscape - "Before the travel guides or the long-running PBS show or his ascendance as an American folk hero, Rick Steves was once a broke 23-year-old piano teacher lighting up a hunk of hashish somewhere in the Afghan highlands. It was the first time Steves had gotten high in his life, and he unwinds the story early on in his new memoir, On the Hippie Trail. Steves, and his enduring travel partner Gene Openshaw, loaded the hash in an old wooden pipe and lit it up on their modest hotel bed. At first he didn't sense much of a change, but then Steves felt everything at once." [more inside]
Bee hunter saving native species, one hotel at a time
Bee hunter saving native species, one hotel at a time. A 23-year-old ecologist known as The Bee Man is on a mission to conserve solitary pollinators by building them structures where they can nest — and he's urging others to do the same.
Davie504's Bass Around Sthe Sworld
Davie504 has successfully stopped bassists from India, Brazil, and Korea. But can even he play a 24-string bass? [more inside]
Oak Origins: From Acorns to Species and the Tree of Life
Oak trees are some of the most important trees in the world. Watch as Dr. Andrew Hipp discusses his Oak research. Besides being the backbone of many of our forests, they also support as stunning array of insect life, animal and fungal life, and have also been key to humans since time began. There are a lot of oak species in North America. Some of them are among the oldest living things on the planet. [more inside]