nikhil.io

by the inimitable Mr. Lovenstein…

And it might never be. But it’s certainly up to us. Love a good Ian Hislop interview. I wish LBC’d publish the entire thing but the few snippets they have are well-worth a listen.…

I finally switched over from Chrome to Firefox, after switching away from the latter over 12 years ago. I’d basically given up on any shred of privacy I might have left on the internet, but the final straw for me was Chrome totally bypassing the DNS blocklists on my PiHole1 (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ Unsurprising…

When I was about 13 or so, I was blown away when I learned that ancient Greek and Roman statues used to be painted and were not commissioned to be ghostly-white. An all-time favorite is this Greek sculpture of a Persian archer. Source: “We know Greek statues weren’t white. Now you can see them in…

Well not really. I was immediately reminded of (a) where I grew up and (b) Dune when I saw this photo of a Bedouin mother and her child. “Bedouin Mother”, Ilo Battigelli, 1948 (Source Unknown) Intense and so beautiful. It was composed by this chap called Ilo Battigelli (1922-2009, RIP) who work…

From the United Automobile Worker magazine, 1937: “What did you tell that man just now?” “I told him to hurry.” “What right do you have to tell him to hurry?” “I pay him to hurry.” “How much do you pay him?” “Four dollars a day.” “Where do you get the money?” “I sell products.” “Who makes the produ…

This is insanely adorable. For more cuteness, you can see a high-res photo of a transparent baby octopus or a baby octopus’ chromatophores 🥰…

I love me my cowsay. It’s a lovely amusement that greets me every time I open a terminal session. People typically use it with the fortune command but my cow moos a random developer excuse. I generate that using this bash function and this invocation: command -v cowsay >/dev/null 2>&1 &am…

Sears, the department store, sold DIY homes via catalog for 32 years between 1908 and 1940 through a program called Sears Modern Homes. They offered 447 different housing styles which you can see here. The designs were not ‘remarkable’ in any way: Sears themselves admit that they were “not an innova…

Via Wikipedia. I am “not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke” the genesis of other styles. “Haskell Style” has to be a joke (like this masterpiece) and I just pray I don’t encounter it in the wild1 🙏 // Allman while (x === y) { func1(); func2(); } // Hor…

They look like priceless brooches and are tremendously important to our planet. Emphases mine: Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth’s biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year, take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon…

When he was young he had prided himself on being clever. Walking down the street, not even thinking anything, just walking along like every other moron, he’d had a distinct sense of how clever he was. He’d never done anything with that cleverness except write stupid articles and make occasionally…

Be a Kermit the Frog. Have a creative vision and no ego. Recognize the unique talents of those around you. Attract weirdos. Manage chaos. Show kindness. Be sincere. @timescanner…

People ask me why in 2023 I’m still rocking a mullet. Easy answer. Without the lettuce I’m just a guy that says dumb shit all the time. When I say dumb shit with the mullet, it’s like my face is saying one thing out front, and my mullet is apologizing out back. My mullet is “Dumb shit out front, I…

Spent a decent portion of my professional life with init.d. Had to deploy a set of Ubuntu servers last week (use FreeBSD at home), which marked my first actual brush with systemd after a long while of sysadmin-ing Linux systems. It’s weird, takes some getting used to, and has a lovely Enterprise™ sm…

Definitely the future of television I had in mind was me having to google every movie I want to watch to see if it’s currently in one of its one-month windows on any of the seven streaming services I pay for. This is way easier than buying a DVD. I love it. @chasemit…

These are fossilized crinoids found in Western Australia by Tom Kapitany. Crinoids are animals and belong to the phylum Eichinodermata which includes starfish and sea urchins (and they all have “pentameral symmetry”). This is all well and good but these things, in their fossilized state, look like s…

This is the Patek Philippe 5131. It’s a world-timer with an intricate and lovely, hand-painted cloisonné enamel dial, and is a marvel of engineering and ingenuity from one of the Holy Trinity of watchmaking that will set you back at least $150,000 if you’re lucky1. It also features one of the shitti…

This was rather vertigo inducing.…

A theater-owner on Telugu moviegoers at RRR: This fucking shit destroyed my theater opening night. The Telugu crowd specifically wrecked out shit. No issues with the Hindi dub or the Tamil dub. Confetti cannons, spraying soda everywhere, littering in the parking lot, sneaking in more people than th…

I feel very personally attacked by Mr. Lovenstein. And somehow glad I’m not the only person who, for instance, purchases a glorious WaterRower1 and proceeds to give it a thousand cumulative and approximate ‘pulls’ over three years. 🤦‍♀️ Because he saw it in House of Cards and thought it looked sic…

What is the difference between ethics and morality? A morality functions according to principle, while an ethics functions according to experimentation. A morality presupposes a discontinuity between principle and action, while an ethics presupposes a continuity of action and character. A morality…

Not really. Reminded me of that Transformer when I saw this macrophotograph of a Longhorn Beetle. Just amazing. Via and TD.…

What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immerse…

please bro just one more election please just one more I swear we just gotta win one more please bro please after the election we’ll fix everything please come on bro this is the most important election in history bro please bro I gotta win this one please bro please @mycheesemonster…

You predict (or have insider information) that the price of lawnmowers will fall. The current market price of a lawnmower is $1,000. You go to Eddie’s Lawnmower Rental Company and rent a lawnmower from Eddie for $10 a day. He doesn’t care about you returning the same lawnmower; he just wants you to…

Macula is an absolutely lovely typeface by Jacques Le Bailly. It reminded me of Impossible Type by Fleta Selmani. I also found out that Eric Demaine has an “Impossible Folding Font”.…

This beauty is by Owen Gent an artist and illustrator from Bristol (Insta). He appears to do a lot of book covers and I just love his work. Here are a few favorites.…

I can stare at photographs of the Nefertiti Bust all day. It’s just so alive. It was carved out of limestone and covered in stucco/plaster. The eyes were made out of quartz and affixed with beeswax. Just so beautiful. Wikipedia has a 3D model you can look at.…

Indecision has been a pretty huge problem in my life and this comment by /u/tomwaste hit home. I’m not sure if people have experienced the same but when I entered my 30s I became convinced I was rapidly running out of time. Rather than using that as motivation I let it paralyze me with indecision b…

This is Zephyr, a “captive-born gray wolf” at the Wolf Conservation Center in NY. Below, you can hear him and his friends orchestrate some of the most beautiful sounds you will hear today. I’ve watched this five times and it was somehow even better with my eyes closed. Here’…

My dudes. Cached here via YouTube because it is too precious to be yanked off the internet. Via Rob G. It also occurred to me that the OS in the video would be more usable, more respectful, and less full of spyware than the giant crock of shit that is Windows 11.…

Summary of Wikipedia article: Japanese kimono didn’t have pockets. They needed something to store their stuff in. So they made containers that they hung from their kimonos’ sashes1. The part that secured the container to the sash at the top was called a netsuke (“root attached”.) Here’s a really cut…

This is from a while ago but I didn’t get the memo. It’s a little crazy: It’s named after Reddit user /u/vaieriepieris, an ESL teacher from Texas, who made it for a map subreddit in 2013. There are more Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Communists inside the circle than outside it. It “pulls all of…

As far as Indian Gurus go, I find this guy more illumined and full of practical, actionable advice than, say, this guy, less full of shit than this one, and definitely less batshit crazy than this one. Via LT 🙏 Update The creator of the video is Masood Boomgaard.…

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get us…

A couple from snowy Minnesota decided to take a winter vacation back in the simple Florida resort where they had stayed for a honeymoon twenty-five years before. Because of his wife’s delayed work schedule, the husband went first, and then when he got there he received a message that she would me…

Lessons learned from “Frog and Toad Together”: Don’t be like Toad and yell at your seeds. Do what you must with love and care and leave them be. They’ll be fine. “But when?!”…

I like nothing more in the world than sitting on my ass doing nothing. And it’s not my fault I have this attitude, because I happen to have an amazingly comfortable ass. It may not look like much, but if you could sit on this baby for two minutes, you’d realize that getting off this ass would be a…

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do. Henry Moore Via this collection of lovely talks by m…

Unknown artist, circa 1800 The terrifying goddess Kali, wearing a necklace of skulls and holding a severed head in one of her hands, is worshiped here by other gods. From the left, we see Indra, Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer). Kali is associated with viole…

What a strange, strange creature. Those bumps remind me of rivets on a submarine. But because they are anglerfish, the bumps are even more bizarre than you’d expect: Since anglerfish are deep sea creatures, it took scientists years and years to figure this stuff out. They could never find a male…

These articles are from a while ago. I love them a lot. By Michael Deacon. That’s true, mused the accomplished composer of thrillers that combined religion, high culture and conspiracy theories. His books were read by everyone from renowned politician President Obama to renowned musician Britney S…

The Steller’s sea eagle is one of the world’s rarest eagles. There are only around 4,000 left. It’s native to Russia and Japan. One was spotted in Maine and got bird watchers very excited. “It would be like an elephant walking up out of Africa into Scandinavia,” Mr. Lund said. “Like getting a call…

We all know one. They used to wear fedoras or berets or other identifiable hats. Many of them don’t anymore.…

I just love this. Couldn’t find out who drew it. Via MVB whose grandma is a huge fan and with whom I will watch an episode or two one day 🤗💗🕵️‍♂️…

Should be a lovely 2022 and 2024. By Jen Sorenson whose work I love.…

This is a clip from the very funny Kathleen Madigan’s 2016 standup special Bothering Jesus. I’ve been saying it a lot these days. It’s just tremendously satisfying to say.…

Software is and has been engaged in an endless race to the bottom. Wrong. The Achievements of the software industry over the last thirty years are astonishing. They’ve managed to entirely negate several orders of magnitude of performance improvements provided by the hardware industry. Anonymous.…

The question is, what does it mean to be living a fear-based agenda? Then your life is always constricted. Then it’s sabotaging the expression of your possibilities in life. Jung said once, in a book published in 1912, “The spirit of evil is negation of the life force by fear.” That’s strong langu…

Here’s Bryan Cantrill’s classic assessment of Oracle Corporation (taken from this talk.) On Twitter, a year after that video: If you were an enterprise database customer who hadn’t heard of the Nazis, might it be easiest to explain them with Oracle allegory? @b…

I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus. Why not? Because it’s covered with a dense layer of clouds. Well, what are clouds made of? Water, of course. Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it. Therefore, the surface must be wet. Well, if the surface is wet, it’s probably a swamp.…

Robocop’s wet dream. Here are the artist’s website and Instagram.…

Henry Lin has a degree in Architectural Design is a “a lover of all things transportative”. He draws really lovely Car Silhouettes 😍 Here are a few. Chevy Corvette C3 (1968-1972) Jaguar E-Type (1961-1968) Lagonda Rapide (1961 - 1964) Mercedes-Benz S-Class (W221) Mercedes-Benz CLS400 (C218) Bu…

This is a short film done entirely with the Early Access version of Unreal Engine 5. It’s only around eight minutes long and took six weeks to make but its plot is more exciting and coherent than whatever the heck was happening in Prometheus1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kXWNfW9ia8 Some example…

You’ve said that, despite being married three times, you’ve been in love only once. Do you think you might have a particularly higher bar than other people? No, I think I’m not that interested. I’m much happier on my own. I can spend as much time with somebody as I want to spend, but I’m not looki…

In 1967, the Films Division of India1 asked all kinds of 20-year olds about their dreams and how they felt about the future of a nation that was, itself, 20 years old. Here’s the original video. A lot of the kids who speak English in the video (starting at 5:00) attend the august Indian Institute of…

Artist Unknown…

Dil Se, written and directed by Mani Ratnam, is one of my all-time favorite movies. I still consider its soundtrack to be A R Rahman’s greatest work. It’s just magnificent stuff. When I was 15, I remember seeing the movie’s trailer1 and being awestruck by this haunting background song2 that didn’t m…

Journalist David Walsh recounting a story about his late son John in the context of his work uncovering Lance Armstrong and the USPS Pro Cycling Team’s “most sophisticated, professionalised and successful”1 doping program. One story stood out. One of John’s teachers at [inaudible] National School…

COVID Theater has become a sad thing to behold these days. Do we still wear masks? If transmission is mostly airborne, why do we get to take them off at restaurants to eat our food when droplets from a sneeze can travel in excess of 25 feet? What’s all this talk about a second booster? Is Omicron so…

In the succession of religions, there are only so many ways the old gods can end up. They can fade away, in which case they are lost to us for good; they can be held up to scorn as pagan demons who persisted in their old, evil ways; or they can be recruited into the new faith as its servants and d…

He leads the existence of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk. Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fi…

Absolutely beautiful work by Nada Maktari 🔥 Here are a few others for the Dune that didn’t get made.…

I just ordered a set of “blackout” plates from the DMV here. They’re rather cool and look like this: I didn’t know that they were actually a solution to a problem. People would take existing, specialized plates for Dordt University and cover them up to look like the blackout plates. Clever! But le…

At the Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur. About as mesmerizing as percussion can get. Speaking of mesmerizing, see this performance by the great Zakir Hussain at the Berklee College of Music.…

Renay Mandel Corren passed away at 84 a week ago (RIP 🙏). Her son wrote what is one of the best obituaries I’ve read in a while. A small excerpt: Here’s what Renay was great at: dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines. She said s…

This (beautifully formatted and well-paced-and-delivered and surprisingly sparsely attended) talk by Gabriel Lebec on the fundamentals of Lambda Calculus is one of my favorite talks ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VQ382QG-y4 As Lebec explains, the lovely bird names come from this book called…

For “the greatest movie never made”, although there appear to be a few contenders1 for that title, like Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon. My absolute favorite is the last one by Hugo Emmanuel Figueroa 🙌 Pe-release flyer (Source) by Matt Chinn. Variation 1 by Stan and Vince. Variation 2 by Stan and V…

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. Law And Gover…

Yeah, Nic Cage brings the same intensity to almost every role he does. If it’s not a very good role, it’s gonna stand out as being bad. To put it another way, imagine a boxer that is very good at knocking people out. That’s impressive. Now imagine he accepts fights against children as well, and he…

The National Rifle Association says that, “Guns don’t kill people, uh, people do.” But I think, I think the gun helps. You know? I think it helps. I just think just standing there going, “Bang!” That’s not going to kill too many people, is it? You’d have to be really dodgy on the heart to have tha…

The Best Albums: Pitchfork, Rolling Stone The Best Graphic Novels: New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian The Best Movies: New York Times, Empire, The New Yorker I’ll cache and smush these soon.…

Reddit user u/Inzitarie made this lovely Cultural Map of the United States. It’s not perfect but it’s something. He based his version on this one by u/Aijol10 right below it…

Stephen Crowley is a product designer who maintains @ShitUserStory, my favorite new Twitter account1 (via Deepu). He also maintains a Medium blog with gems like these: “Can Squid Game make you a better UX designer?” (cached) “What I’ve learnt about design from parenting a toddler.” (cached) “How I…

From the highly entertaining “Just One More Thing”…

If you took “Buttons” by The Pussycat Dolls and deep-fried it in stale peanut oil, you would get the result below. It’s by Youtuber Dii and it’s all I’ve been humming for the past 48 hours.…

A most beautiful, graceful, and sublime rendition of one of my all-time favorite songs. Lovely, lovely stuff 🙏❤️ (via Deepu) See also: Worlds Beyond the Stars…

I love this ring as much as I love Mr. Stanley Tucci. It’s from The Devil Wears Prada and is an aqeeq ring (which “means quartz in Arabic, and agate in Turkish”) which was a pretty common sight on older hands when I was growing up. I looked far and wide for a replica and found this on Etsy1. That p…

The Dune screenplay was written on MS-DOS on a program app called “Movie Master”. It has a 40 page limit which helps the writer, Eric Roth. Writing is fundamentally about putting your ass in the chair and typing the words. Eliminating distractions (I’ve checked Twitter at least five times while wr…

Old stuff, but always immensely satisfying to read ♥️…

by the wonderful Amii James (Insta)…

I cannot help rewatch this powerful scene from “Margin Call”. A masterclass in acting by the great Jeremy Irons. Every sentence, glance, and gesture projects complete and menacing presence, power, and finality, and is done to absolute perfection 👌…

Telugu is a phonetic language, written from left to right, with each character representing generally a syllable. There are 52 letters in the Telugu alphabet: 16 Achchulu which denote basic vowel sounds, 36 Hallulu which represent consonants. In addition to these 52 letters, there are several semi…

This is the city of Madras The home of the curry and the dal Where Iyers speak only to Iyengars And Iyengars speak only to God. I’d read this years ago some place and forgot where. Thought it would be in some Religious Studies textbook back from when I was (briefly) a Religious Studies major. Nope…

The Chess Sets used at the World Chess Championships cost $350 (plus $700 if you want the electronic piece tracking), are likely out of stock if you’d like one, take a lot of training and practice to make, are woodworked in Amritsar, India, and were designed by Daniel Weil, a former partner at Penta…

Battling cancer for 9 years without telling anyone is the most Norm Macdonald shit ever. Anthony Jeselnik I had no idea that he performed at the Hancher Auditorium at The University of Iowa in 1997 and mortified most of a crowd of 1,200 excited kids and their parents who’d come to see him, Darre…

Danny Pudi keeping it real. “Uh… a luxury you can’t live without.” “A luxury I can’t live without… Coffee. I really like it.” “Luxury… you can get it anywhere.” “Ah I guess, yeah. Like good coffee…” “I love coffee too.” “I like nice socks.” “Socks. Your socks…

Carved by someone in Ancient Egypt between 3700–3500 BCE. […] most of them represent nude females with their feminine attributes emphasised by carving and careful drilling. With their slim figures, narrow waists and full hips they present an ideal of the female body that will change little over t…

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Frank Herbert, Dune…

I can’t get enough of Gustav Nordgren’s art. Here’s a Mughal outpost. Not a high-enough resolution but tap/click for a larger image. Zooming in! Here’s another. It’s Aztec! Just beautiful stuff 😍…

I will always let my puppy inspect everything for approval (and, usually, immediate loss of interest.)…

Low resolution but enough to make the point. See also: Every Website in 2019 and 2018. The mobile web is a garbage nightmare shitshow (especially if you want to read any fucking news.)…

Allysson Lucca is a Brazilian designer who took this original list (cached) of what the world would look like with a 1,000 people and shrank it to a hundred. The idea of reducing the world’s population to a community of only 100 people is very useful and important. It makes us easily understand the…

I’m put off by the word “gubernatorial” whenever I see it. Seems very silly, saccharine, like something a 5-year old mispronounced in 1953 that just stuck because it was so cute 🙄 Nope. “Because, if you go back to where this word came from, in the original Latin, it’s from the verb, gubernare and…

This is indescribably badass.…

When I was a kid, I’d close my eyes and allow the strange shapes caused by the night lamp and blood flow in my eyelids to put on a small dance and lull me to sleep. Many a time, as I’d relax and drift away, I would suddenly feel this ‘inflation’ and loss of personal boundary and sense of geometry. I…

Lovely Python-esque stuff.…

by @sportsracer48 (Patreon)…

Just some quick notes about a piece of shit from the hit machine that is Conservative Tech. The Freedom Phone is another grift for those inside the Sphere of Shit who are upset that their Orange Daddy got censored by Facebook (that mighty ethical paragon of Silicon Valley) and Twitter (they aight.)…

I love these etudes by Professor Yun Shin. I saw them at the Des Moines Art Center a few years ago. All images © the artist…

There isn’t much variety in the music I listen to. I stick to soundtracks, minimalist composers, some weird surprises1, and mostly to what my good friend calls “electronic windchime shit” (by which he means “ambient music.”) This means I’ve heard fewer than, say, twenty country songs in my life so f…

I used to have a printout of this at my desk at work because it’s just pure joy 🌸 ♥️ It was pretty popular on the internet a while ago. The little girl’s name is Butedmaa and she was just five when this picture was taken in 2003 by photographer Han Chengli, who titled it “Inner Mongolian Child”. H…

Glass Octopus (Vitreledonella richardi) Longarm Octopus larva (Macrotritopus defilippi) Marine Snail (Atlanta inclinata) Sea Butterfly (Clio chaptali) Eye-flash Squid (Abralia veranyi) Deep sea eel Male copepods Larval Prawn (Plesiopenaeus armatus) Glass Squid (Bathothauma lyromma) More her…

The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer,” Milton said. “That’s the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let’s [sic] us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language…

“Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago and garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please treat you…

(Source unknown) TIL that (a) tentacles and arms are two different things and (b) there is a lot more diversity to this family1 than I’d imagined! I don’t mean “family” in a taxonomic sense.↩︎…

This beautiful piece was sculpted in Japan around the 13th century and is about three feet tall. The subject is a Zen Buddhist monk Shinchi Kakushin, who lived till the ripe old age of 95. After his death, he was given the title “perfectly awakened national teacher of the Dharma lamp” which is what…

If you’ve ever installed a program using “curl XYZ | sh” don’t worry about what’s in the vaccine Daniel Feldman ♥️♥️♥️…

I bought this print at a thrift store a decade ago because it looked ‘nice’ and warm and I loved the colors. It’s an innocent celebration at a glance and from a distance, and a total bacchanal when you examine its scenes up close. I never knew who painted it until now. It’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder…

Simply delightful. Here’s an article about him.…

I have a dying peace lily. I’m a bit attached to it and don’t know that I’ll be able to save it. Searching the internet for any hope led me to this post (cached) which made me feel slightly better about my inexperience. The first mistake is relying upon the plant’s visual cue that needs water: the l…

Not sure why this actually got to me.…

From an interview with Vincent Connare, creator of Comic Sans: Q. What do you think of comic sans’ detractors? A. I think most of them secretly like Comic Sans — or at least wish they had made it. Interesting fact: the main designer at Twitter tweeted that the most server space is used by complaint…

A lecture at UCSB by Douglas Adams (RIP) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc…

>>> n = 0 >>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[n==1:]) 0 items >>> n = 1 >>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[n==1:]) 1 item >>> n = 2 >>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[n==1:]) 2 items # If you might want to print negative items, add abs to the test: >&g…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0 See also: “Where profits come from”…

By Barry Deutsch, September 2009. Things are much better now.…

Koji Kondo is a “sound designer” who composed music for Super Mario Bros. He was inspired by these songs. Music Artist Song The Main “Overworld” Theme T-Square Sister Marian (3:08) When you go down the Warp Pipes Friendship Let’s not talk about it When you get a Star Piper Summe…

Estimate Actual Time Very Easy 1 Hour Easy 2 Hours Quite Easy 4 Hours Looks Quite Easy 6 Hours Average 8 Hours Looks Average 12 Hours No Clue 16 Hours Seems Complex 24 Hours Complex 30 Hours Very Complex 40 Hours Can Take Some Time 48 Hours Fuck 60 Hours Yeah Looks Pre…

Catherine Scorsese used to drop by her son’s sets with food and good cheer 🤶❤️ She appeared in quite a few of his movies and wrote a cookbook.…

This is the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, an eponymous and subjective measurement of the pain caused by bees, wasps, and ants (and other things in the order hymenoptera.) It ranges from 0-4. In Level Zero, you don’t feel any pain whatsoever; the stinger doesn’t even penetrate your skin. The humble and f…

In college, I remember being blown away by a huge, physical map of metabolic pathways our Biochemistry professor once brought into class. It looked like this: Here it is online. Kinda like a Google Maps of cellular reactions. It was impressed upon us that the interior of a cell (especially a eukary…

I’m not crying, you’re crying.…

This is just indescribably beautiful.…

Happy Father’s Day to the fathers, stepfathers, grandfathers, and father figures who enrich our character, love us unconditionally, and give so much of themselves every day so we can live lives worthy of their dreams and sacrifices. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And, this is real (as much as you…

Note that you can certainly burn them. That’s not ‘cooking’, however. The key here is that mushroom cell walls are composed of chitin which is far more heat-stable by virtue of the structures it forms, compared to pectin which is what you’d find in veggies1. In this video, Dan Souza explains all thi…

Two absolutely mesmerizing videos by Universal Everything. I could watch them for hours and might just loop them on the old iPad. This one’s called “Walking City” https://vimeo.com/85596568 Here’s another called “Transfiguration” 🙌 https://vimeo.com/429924982 Here’s a third video (not by Universal…

This is the best ever episode of “Monkey News”. No further discussion.…

I finish just by saying this: war is an easy thing to talk about; there are not many people - a - of the generation that remember it. The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup served with distinction in the last war. I never killed anyone but I wore uniform. But…

My favorite visualization of “Clapping Music” by Steve Reich. Here’s a video of him performing it with one other musician.…

me, a software engineer: large scale production systems are complex and require teams of experts to keep running. It’s near impossible to get right 100% of the time me, when an app I use goes down once: these fucking clowns, what the fuck @aweary…

Uber in 2016: “We have thousands of microservices.” Everyone: “That sounds insane." Uber in 2020: “It turns out that was insane.” @sandofsky…

I love this work by @VisualDon. It sold for ~$45,000 at an NFT auction. Here’s how he made it.…

Vox on something I’ve always wondered: Why tennis pros reject balls before a serve (and what happens to the ones they do.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChzL17zV9hA More fluff ⇒ more drag ⇒ more time for your opponent to react. So they’re looking for a ball with less fluff for their first serve, a…

A young Elizabeth I found herself on the throne of England immediately “besieged by suitors” to whom she made “no firm promises” but sent very nice-sounding letters. One such suitor was a young Eric XIV of Sweden. He was so thirsty, he offered to come to England to visit her. That’s when she fired o…

“You know I wrote this in… when I was looking at the mirror, right?” “I’m serious.”…

All 14 years of the show in a comic by Danby Draws:…

I was rather dismayed to find out that there were no more episodes of “Grill Talk” with the leader of one of the worst companies on the planet1. I wonder if the PR team that thought it was a good idea to show the ‘casual and human’ side of their ethically bankrupt CEO are still with the company. Her…

“For all that we’ve been able to achieve while many of us have been separated, the truth is that there has been something essential missing from this past year: each other,” [Tim Cook] said. “Video conference calling has narrowed the distance between us, to be sure, but there are things it simply…

Neil Panchal on substituting shitty, ineffective, and expensive consumer-grade items with their industrial and military grade equivalents. Emphases mine: The average consumer is an idiot, so the bean counters keep milking them. Let’s stick RGB lights in what used to be the BMW, you know the ultima…

I love Oliver beyond words. Here’s another happy doggy. Update: Here’s another Big Happy Guy…

Hikaru Dorodango means “Shining Mudcake”. Start with a lump of mud and end with a highly polished sphere. Absolutely amazing. Here’s a short NatGeo video about Bruce Gardner, an artist who makes a lot of these. He says it took him 30 tries to make his first perfect one. https://www.youtube.com/watch…

One of the most disheartening charts I’ve seen about the current hyperpartisan political climate. We fear each other so much more. – Source I suppose all’s fine and dandy if you’re in news or social media and are spiritually obligated to deliver Value™ to stakeholders via those almighty engagement…

This is one of the most seriously badass representations of Shakti I’ve seen in a while. The goddess is shown seated on obsessed boy (Corpse or Preta). The corpse is placed on a pedestal. The deity has a skeletal body, veins can be seen clearly. Its face is ferocious and wrathful; eyes are poppin…

[…] I think late 50’s he was asked once “Why are you wasting your time with CND demonstrations when you could be working on logic and philosophy and doing something of lasting significance?” And his answer wasn’t bad. He said “If I’m not out there demonstrating, there won’t be anyone around to rea…

“Happiness” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDk “MAN” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU…

I love these paintings by Arturo Garcia. I saw them in Denver. They’re from a series called Tatanka - The Spirit of the Land.…

Reddit user and evident Mark Wood fan @kanyay-west put together this list of England’s All-Time Cricketing Best when asked “What’s your country’s all time ODI XI?” I’ve reproduced it here and formatted it for clarity. I laughed a lot to this and am a rather silly person 🙏♥️ Mark Wood Mark Wood Ma…

From 2016 but still very relevant apropos conservatism and isolationism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA…

A group of stringrays is called a fever (my head: “So that’s where that album name came from!”) This is what they look like:…

By Charles Barsotti a sage of a cartoonist, who drew a lot of dog cartoons ♥️ 🐶 over his long life.…

Whenever I get discouraged and want to quit something, I remember the words of my then 3 year-old after she puked carrots all over the living room floor: “I’m gonna need more carrots.” Jessica Valenti Now write down “You’re gonna need more carrots” on a sticky and look at it from time to time ♥️…

With the trailing comma and sorted properties/imports/arguments/whatever. Makes symbols easy to scan from top-to-bottom and looks like this in Python: from constants import ( EXIT_CODE_ARTICLE_ROOT_NOT_FOUND, EXIT_CODE_NOT_A_GIT_REPOSITORY, EXIT_CODE_NOT_AN_ABSOLUTE_PATH, MARKDOWN_EX…

[…] it’s not okay to block old browsers, but it’s a waste of time to support them 100%. Chris Heilmann…

Octopus kaurna lacks chromatophores like other octopuses. So it just burrows instead 😍🐙. It’s the only known octopus to bury itself completely like this. The process begins with the octopus using its siphon to inject water into the sand, creating quicksand-like condition…

Are Galangal, Kaffir Lime Leaves, and Lemongrass. According to Pailin Chongchitnant, whose YouTube channel I enjoy greatly.…

There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake an…

I absolutely love this otherworldly work by Maria Svarbova (Wiki, Web, Insta.) GN thought they looked like stills from a Wes Anderson short film.…

Though capitalism has had a longer lease of life than some of us would’ve predicted or that many of our ancestors of the socialist movement did predict or allow, it still produces the fax machine and the microchip and still able to lower its costs and still able to flatten its distribution curve v…

Somoza called himself “president”. The Sandinistas called him a “dictator”. They called themselves “freedom fighters”. He called them “Commie terrorists”. So they kicked him out then they were in charge. Ronald Reagan called them “Commie oppressors” and he sent in the Contras, whom he called “free…

A handy-dandy visual guide to the <script> tag, its various attributes, and how they relate to HTML parsing. Source unknown.…

Terra, Gossip’s Web, and Marijn’s Linkroll remind my (oldass) self of a more innocent time when one would ‘surf the internet’, come by a list of links another human being liked, and discover all sorts of strange and wacky handmade things. I think I’m saying I really miss how fun something like Geoci…

“I love you, Ted Danson.”…

Between takes of 2001: A Space Odyssey…

Matt Rowan is a family man, a Christian, and a former youth pastor (so we’re off to a fantastic start already). At a high school basketball game, this pillar of the community called children “f****** n******s” for that grave sin of actually kneeling during the national anthem. On the video, Rowan…

SOCIALIST: late capitalism has created a moral rot that pervades our entire society NEOLIBERAL: but imagine if we monetized the rot @Trillburne…

Don’t. Just let this kid assure you that everyfing’s gonna be alright.…

Just stop it. Via Professor Goldsman.…

I just met you, And this is crazy, But here’s my number (delegate), So if something happens (event), Call me, maybe (callback)? LightStriker on StackOverflow…

I love this so much. Just look at this happy fuzzderp 🥰 By /u/noah9389…

This is around Rovaniemi, Finland. By Jani Ylinampa, whose Instagram account is just magical. Here’s another picture. Looks like a highly detailed miniature.…

“Positive Affirmations don’t work when I question them, Jeremy.”…

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolki…

Here’s a fairly recent (Dec 2018) interview with the creators of chrome://dino. It was called Project Bolan (which I had to look up), had 270M games played every month1, with most users coming “from markets with unreliable or expensive mobile data, like India, Brazil, Mexico, or Indonesia” and took…

Kiawak Ashoona, Musk Ox, 1963…

Don’t know if these are shopped but this is amazing.…

Some surrealism: Jan Švankmajer - Lunch (Food 1992). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yM3uxZjdfo The shortest film ever nominated for an Academy Award: Fresh Guacamole by PES. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNJdJIwCF_Y Cooking utensil salad by Omozoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da7iGPigiz4 And…

Was discussing water quality in Des Moines with DL. Told her that our city couldn’t hold a candle to Ames, that their water was the “cleanest around.” Wanted to prove this but couldn’t find the 2014 viral hit “Hooray for Ames” video anywhere on the internet. GN, blessed datahoarder that he is, lucki…

I remember the very first burrito I had in the Mission District in San Francisco. My friend warned me that it would be “around the size of your forearm” and that, if I tried to finish it in a single sitting, I would be an idiot. It was, I did, I am 🙏 i do not fuck with any burrito without heft. i…

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites…

Also known as Pesquet’s parrot or the vulturine parrot. The Dracula parrot is a large, heavy bird, stretching to almost half a metre from beak to tail and weighing in at almost a kilogram. It maintains all that bulk by feeding almost exclusively on figs, which researchers suspect is why it ended…

Nexe and pkg are two compilers that create self-contained executables out of your Node scripts. Deno introduced this in a recent release, which got me looking for Node-based alternatives.…

It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single at…

A devoted dog has spent days waiting outside a hospital in Turkey where her sick owner was being treated. The pet, Boncuk, which means bead, followed the ambulance that transported her owner, Cemal Senturk, to hospital in the Black Sea city of Trabzon on 14 January. She then made daily visits to…

[…] the simulation takes place on a replica of a starship bridge, with the test-taker as captain and other Starfleet members, officers or other cadets, in other key positions. […] the cadet receives a distress signal stating that the civilian freighter Kobayashi Maru has struck a gravitic mine in…

and By Jace Avery…

♥️♥️♥️ Via @uiowa…

Here’s to a Malarkey-Free America 🇺🇸🍦😎 Things won’t magically start getting better. He isn’t perfect. But he certainly is a decent human being, if only because he isn’t malevolent narcissism incarnate. And unless your career depends on democratic dysfunction and systemic ineptitude, cruelty, and…

Wait, is Bernie is wearing the same jacket from his meme at the inauguration? @thealanjohnson The pose. The mittens. The social distance. @vulture Bernie dressed like the inauguration is on his to do list today but ain’t his whole day. @MsReeezy And about those mittens: Bernie’s…

By Cameron Spires.…

New Years resolutions for 2021 are gonna be like: travel to the other side of the room wear a different shirt cut screen time from 12 hours a day to 11 eat a vegetable bathe @alyssalimp…