Posts from 2024

• If you have any Apple devices – a MacBook, an iPhone, etc. – I strongly urge you to subscribe to the Simple Apple Tutorials newsletter published by Gannon Nordberg. Every two weeks, you’ll get one actionable lesson on how to use your Apple tech to be more organized, productive, and stress-free from a former Apple Certified Consultant and Mac Technician of seven years. His latest one, explaining the fastest way to protect all your Mac’s photos and documents, is superb and nearly identical to what I have been telling friends and family forever.
• Short-sightedness is on the rise – including among kids. Here’s what can be done. – via Links You‘ll Love
• Proboscis was one of my mom’s favorite words. Funny the little details you remember sometimes. Mostly because of her, a profound childhood infatuation with Mr. Snuffleupagus, and my maternal grandparents’ shared love of small carved figurines of them, I have always been interested in elephants. If you are also fascinated by regal creatures with prehensile noses, you might enjoy this incredible Royal Society Open Science deep dive into how elephants develop trunk wrinkles through both form and function. – via Curious About Everything
• If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow: “Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools, and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when [one of them] dies or is killed. They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.” – via kottke
• Stop killing yourself over that project for five minutes and read the divine discontent, an essay by Celine Nguyen on the pursuit of unhappiness: “The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious—about new ideas, experiences, information and people. And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness.” – via personal canon
• A recent study suggests mindfulness isn’t just for mental health. It can support healthier body composition, less body fat, and better weight management. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
• Since the start of 2022, in the regular season Penn State is 0-5 versus Michigan and Ohio State, 27-0 versus all other schools. – via TMQ

• When Indiana Jones tells you he needs your help fighting Nazis, you help Indiana Jones fight Nazis. – via @laurenthomanwrites (Vote!)
• If you’re looking for some good news: The population decline of honeybees has actually reversed! – via @dirtyrealism42
• In 2034 people are going to rediscover these unhinged John Mulaney musical sketches and realize they were incredibly brilliant and hysterical. #SNL – via @gatordavid
• The Boss opening his show in Montreal with a cover of Ghostbusters makes me really happy. – via @coachbennett
• I wonder how many of the rabid anti-immigration folks in the US could pass a citizenship test?
• Learn programming by playing games! – via @denicmarko_
• I’m no rocket scientist, but this headline seems bad. The International Space Station Has Been Leaking for Five Years – via @laura.helmuth
• The Athletic just published a great article about sports video game soundtracks that’s worth a read.
• “Can you imagine the beautiful chaos if LinkedIn allowed commenting on open job positions?” – via @regina.thequeen.bee (I love this idea! Couldn’t someone make a browser extension for this?)

How can it already be November? It is incredibly unfair how the last three months of each year are only two weeks long. Big election in just a few days. Please vote.

• “In the end, it’s the hard things we love to remember.” – via @heybaskle
• “It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it’s not obvious.” As an early GenXer, this essay was quite the gut punch. I urge you to read it. – via Austin Kleon
• The story of Ghost is awe-inspiring and has me reminiscing about the early days of blogging. – via @simondowens
• Beginning in mid-December, the Whitney Museum of American Art will be free for everyone 25 and under.
• Before her death in April of this year, Christine Farrell somehow managed to track down every single DC comic book, tens of thousands of them, going back to 1935. About 500 of the rarest ones were just auctioned. – via @NPR

• Chocolate is America’s favorite Halloween candy, with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups once again the top choice in an overwhelming majority of states. But don’t sleep on Nerds Gummy Clusters, which boosted sales at Ferrara Candy Company from $40 million in 2018 to $800 million last year.
• Wow. Texas leads the nation in wind energy generation with over 15,000 turbines producing between a bit more than 10% of the total electricity in the United States.
• An Expert’s Guide to Protein for Athletes – via @sweatscience
• New research found that if you want to feel younger later in life, don’t go easy on your training. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
• I’ve always been a sucker for black holes, so these thought experiments that fray the fabric of space-time were fun. – via kottke, of course
• Take thirty seconds out of your day to read this brilliant poem, If Adam Picked the Apple, by Danielle Coffyn. – also via kottke

• Biden Administration Proposes a Rule to Make Over-the-Counter Birth Control Free
• I guess this counts as good news: EPA imposes stricter standards to protect children from exposure to lead paint. (We’ve known that lead is dangerous for close to 2,000 years!)
• The moon hasn’t changed since the 1960s, while every technology we used to get there has seen staggering advances. But twenty years and $93 billion after the space agency announced our return to the moon, the goal seems as far out of reach as ever. – via hiro.report
• If your website aggressively pushes me to use your AI support and/or search features, I will not assume you have a bunch of radical, hip, cutting-edge tech bros on your web development team. I will assume your CEO surrounds himself with a bunch of greedy, soulless sycophants who refuse (for the worst possible reasons) to pay humans a living wage to do valuable work. – @gatordavid
• I feel like every single time I receive an email from LinkedIn, I click the unsubscribe button. Yet every day I seem to receive at least one completely new type of email from LinkedIn. – @gatordavid
• Penguin Random House is adding a clause to all their copyright pages explicitly stating the contents of their books are not to be used to feed generative AI models. It’s a lovely sentiment, of course, but about as effective as the FBI warnings they used to play at the beginning of VHS tapes. (The tech bros building these resource hogs certainly aren’t going to respect copyright law.) – via @clairecameron123

• Some excellent climate news: United States greenhouse gas emissions peaked in 2005 and have been declining ever since. — via All Predictions Wrong
• Some excellent environmental news: The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife announced Chinook salmon have returned to the Klamath Basin for the first time since the construction of hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in 1912. – via @saramontourlewis
• “Sorry I missed your call. I was sitting on the couch holding my phone and watching it ring.” — @scottevandavis
• Allbirds are great everyday shoes. They’re stylish, comfortable, and you can toss them in the washing machine. I have three pairs and love them. They’re having a 30%-off Fall sale ending October 27, 2024.
• A few days ago I realized that my sons have never heard of Snidely Whiplash. They don’t know Dudley Do-Right or Grape Ape or Hong Kong Phooey, either. I feel like I’m a terrible parent.
• I currently have a fourteen-year old. And I absolutely remember being a fourteen-year old. This video about growing pains from Amsterdam’s NEMO Science Museum is <chef’s kiss> good. – via @dsnyderuk
• In order to pass your CCNA exam, you need to be proficient at converting decimal numbers to binary numbers and binary numbers to decimal numbers — and do so quickly. Cisco made the challenge into a video game, and it’s pretty fun! – via Jason

• Want 33,000 classic sound effects for free? Check out the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
• I am very much concerned about the many, many, many possible negative consequences of nefarious, incompetent, and/or misguided generative AI. Ruining wikipedia should have been on my bingo card.
• A University College London demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans won an Ig Nobel prize. I always thought blue zones sounded fishy.
• Ugh. Scientists are worried that persisting cognitive issues sparked by COVID-19 may signal a coming surge of dementia and other mental conditions.
• Philip Moscovitch‘s Halifax Examiner article Beyond the Link Tax: Journalism and the Changing Nature of the Internet contains some interesting ideas about potentially taxing megacorporations to subsidize good reporting. But what grabbed me was the line, “Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink […]” Sites like Threads, Instagram, Twitter / X, et.al. have a vested interest in keeping you from leaving. They are, in fact, designed to make it more difficult for you to get to the “rest” of the Internet. I have been occasionally combing through old posts here and it is alarming — for someone who’s been blogging regularly for more than a quarter of a century — how many links simply no longer work. And I’m not talking about links from twenty years ago which should work but don’t (because the site’s gone offline or developers didn’t bother to redirect URLs). I’m talking about links from just a year or two ago. The wayback machine has been a fantastic resource to help me find archived content, but it’s not perfect and it’s grossly underfunded for how important it is to anyone who cares. See also: link rot
• Speaking of being extremely online, you should read Reclaiming Social Media in a Fragmented World. I love the concept of POSSE and it’s been something I’ve really tried to remember the last few years, especially after what’s happened with Twitter.
• On Ghost Networks: Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after twenty-one phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.

• The annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are always fun.
• I’m sure everyone has seen it already, but this story about a woman in Washington who called the police after nearly 100 raccoons surrounded her property really is something else.
• The Nord-Trøndelag Health Study, a 15-year study of sense of humor and causes of mortality found that laughter is associated with a 48 percent reduction in death from all causes, a 73 percent lower risk of death from heart disease, and an 83 percent lower risk of infection
• Evidence of ‘Negative Time’ Found in Quantum Physics Experiment: This will surely delight my youngest, who is obsessed with The Flash and his time traveling adventures. It also jibes with something I posted on Threads recently!
• Speaking of Threads, one of Meta’s frustrating problems is that they haven’t managed to brand the term “threading” in a way as organic as Twitter did “tweeting”. It doesn’t feel right to say, “I threaded,” or, “I’m threading,” which makes it not-insignificantly more difficult to casually mention their platform, which I think is a primary reason Threads hasn’t already crushed the decaying bird site.
• We’re biologically wired to prevent our children’s suffering, and it can be excruciating to watch them struggle. That’s certainly an understatement. I’ve been desperately trying to not be a helicopter parent but “excruciating” doesn’t come close to describing what it’s like seeing your child suffer. And I promise I’m well aware that a little elementary school teasing or even dealing with high school cliques are light years away from the difficulties other parents – close friends, even – are facing. (Gift link, like most good things online, via Jason’s infrequent newsletter)
• In a very odd cosmic coincidence, Hurricane Milton destroyed the roof of Tropicana Field – home of the Tampa Bay Rays MLB franchise – just a few hours after the implosion of the vintage Tropicana casino in Las Vegas (to make way for a new stadium for the Oakland Athletics).