Posts with Recent Comments
And when it's time for leavin', I hope you'll understand
Singer, song writer, guitarist Dickey Betts has died. A driving force and original member of the Allman Brothers Band, Dickey Betts was an early pioneer of two part guitar harmonies in rock music.
The right side of history (and the cost curve)
"We learned when somebody's back is up against the wall, they come up with a lot of creative solutions. And if they don't have a lot of money, like Ukraine doesn't, they can figure it out." As crucial American aid remains tied up in Congress, Ukrainian defenses have been forced to improvise with cheaper, lower-tech, but surprisingly effective countermeasures, from bleeding-edge first-person piloted kamikaze drones and repurposed Soviet tech to pickup truck-mounted MIRV launchers and "FrankenSAM" hybrids to Project Safe Skies: a donation-driven network of 8,000 cellphones and mics on sticks whose crowdsourced acoustic monitoring detected 84 out of 84 Russian UAVs in one day and shot down 80 of them with anti-aircraft fire -- at a cost of only $500 a pop.
☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡 It was like fireworks. ☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡
It is the late 1800s. You are an innovative fireworks manufacturer in Yokohama, Japan, with an increasingly international audience (including, on at least one occasion, Ulysses S. Grant). But how to demonstrate to your worldwide customers what, exactly, you have on offer? Introducing the beautifully minimalist Hirayama Fireworks' Illustrated Catalog of Night Bomb Shells. [more inside]
"This is invisible walls explained, once and for all."
PannenKoek2012: "If you’ve wondered where I’ve been for the past 10 months, it was working day and night on this one video." (YouTube, 3hours, 45 minutes) [more inside]
Unlikely friendship between cockatoo and lorikeet
Unlikely friendship between cockatoo and lorikeet bamboozles wildlife sanctuary visitors.
A red-tailed black cockatoo and a musk lorikeet have become inseparable, with the smaller bird often found under the wing of the cockatoo at Tasmania's Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary.
You won't remember all my Erdős problems
A database of 589 math problems posed by Paul Erdős, mostly in combinatorial geometry and number theory, only 159 of which have been solved. Get to work!
Folks from round ere ain’t from round ere
"Animals speak their own language... it’s a lot simpler to figure out."
Mark Bankston Versus The Most Divorced Man In The World
As part of a defamation lawsuit against the owner of Twitter for his tweets, Mark Bankston - whom you may recall was the lawyer for the Sandy Hook families in the Texas lawsuit against Alex Jones, where he told the conspiracy theorist that he had recieved a full copy of his phone's contents from his lawyer while cross examining him - has deposed Elon Musk under oath, in a deposition that is a sight to behold. [more inside]
Sorry for ruining Wordle for you
What if your Wordle strategy was to always start with the same 4 words, all with unique letters? That would use 20 letters, with the exception, of J, K, Q, V, X, Z. Slate's "The Fastest Wordle Winning Strategy Ever" (archive). [more inside]
Fine-Feathered Friends
The two flat “blades” of a feather on either side of the main shaft are called vanes. In living birds that fly, the feathers that arise from the hand, known as the primaries, have asymmetrical vanes: the leading vane is narrower than the trailing one. It stood to reason that vane asymmetry was important for flight. And because fossils of Microraptor and its kin show asymmetrical feathers, some researchers argued, these animals must have been able to fly.Scientific American: Why Feathers Are One of Evolution’s Cleverest Inventions [includes helpful illustrations -- and some truly stunning 4K+ photography] [more inside]
Recent work by flight biomechanics experts, including me, has overturned this received wisdom about feather vane asymmetry. Our research shows that feather shape is largely optimized to allow the feather to twist and bend in sophisticated ways that greatly enhance flight performance. Merely being anatomically asymmetrical doesn’t mean much. What matters is that the feather is aerodynamically asymmetrical, and for this to be the case, the vane asymmetry must be at least three to one—that is, the trailing blade needs to be three times wider than the leading one. Below this ratio, the feather twists in a destabilizing rather than stabilizing way during flight.
The Incredible Machine
This is one of the best Blake's 7 fan fictions that I have ever read
This is one of the best Blake's 7 fan fictions that I have ever read. Avon and Blake both survive Gauda Prime - but can Blake ever trust Avon again? and can they win the war against the Federation? In the Bleak Midwinter by x_los.
emo ambient
Claire Rousay has gained prominence [NYT, archive link] as an experimental, ambient musician, but her most recent album, Sentiment, [Bandcamp, Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music] is closer to lo-fi indie pop. Her website has links to her whole discography.
You'd Think Every Year Would Be A Heliophysics Year
Heliophysics Big Year [24m] is a video from NASA Edge about, well, apparently a big year for heliophysics, or the study of the Sun. The Solar Observatory at Sunspot NM is a pretty interesting place to visit. If you're ever in the vicinity of White Sands National Park, you're only a couple of hours' drive from Sunspot, in a completely different environment from the desert floor below. [more inside]
Blue Andrew Man Huang Group
Blue Man Group & Andrew Huang 🥁🌵 DESERT PORTAL Music Video [5m, Blue Man Group YT channel] Getting weird with Blue Man Group [11m15s Andrew Huang YT channel]
Airchat: Boring as hell
On Monday, I described Facebook as a “data holding pen for advertisers to harvest,” but it’s not just Facebook and it’s not just advertisers. Every social network — Reddit, Tumblr, X/Twitter, TikTok — is now primarily an AI training pool. Though, I’ve reached the point where I don’t even really care about that anymore. The real issue with Airchat is that it’s boring as hell. Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day critiques Airchat, a new “audio-first social network.” [more inside]
Faith Ringgold, 1930-2024
Faith Ringgold passed over the weekend. A crafter, an artist, a thinker, a mentor. I am maybe not the best person to eulogize her, but her life and work have touched so many and deeply influenced generations of Black artists. Her passing is a loss, her memory will be a blessing. [more inside]
Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur
One Minute Park allows you to visit parks from around the world for one minute each. These are just one minute videos, not webcams. Eventually the project will fill in all the minutes (1440) in a day. You can create your own One Minute Park to help achieve this goal.