- I loved reading this story about an 11-yo who pulled one of the most valuable baseball cards in history. The best quote from the article? “My brain pooped.”
- Hackers are hijacking WordPress sites to push malware on unsuspecting visitors. This is another good reason to make sure your plugins are core files are routinely updated.
- This short article about the psychology of scene transitions in film is really interesting. (Watch the video, too!)
One of the more concerning consequences of the current administration is that when the most powerful nation in history is ruled by feckless ignorant toads, those who lust for power elsewhere are emboldened:
- Paramilitary group attacks an open market in Sudan, killing 54 people and wounding scores
- Congo says 773 dead in week-long fighting as military tries to repel Rwanda-backed rebels
- Last night I realized I can watch Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough on BBC through AppleTV. I had to pay for it, but I think that’s pretty reasonable. I was pleasantly surprised to see Steve Brusatte make an appearance. I read his book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World a year or two ago and loved it. It’s really mind-blowing how much more we know about dinosaurs than we did when I was fascinated with them in elementary school. Scientists might even have finally discovered where dinosaurs first evolved! (The documentary is titled Dinosaur Apocalypse on AppleTV for some reason. I guess that sounds much more dramatic.)
- More Bird Flu Bad News: Infectious disease expert warns wind-blown avian feces may be route of transmission.
- Google searches for “adult tennis lessons” were up 245 percent shortly after the premiere of the Zendaya love-triangle sports-flick Challengers. – via The Athletic
- After reading a few of her Bluesky posts, I decided to subscribe to the tech newsletter rendezvous with cassidoo.
- Just in case you were under the misguided impression that the current administration cares about, y’know, people:
- The head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been fired.
- On Monday the Senate confirmed fossil fuel executive Chris Wright to serve as Secretary of Energy.
- A Coup in Plain Sight: An Explainer as the Crisis Solidifies
Posts in the category “WebLinks”
- Italy has embraced a novel approach to integrate olive oil into its tourism industry through oleotourism, an initiative that invites visitors to engage with the olive oil production process, offering experiences that range from guided tours of olive groves and mills to tasting sessions and educational workshops.
“In the final analysis, the progress of our civilization will be retarded if any large body of citizens falls behind. Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt- Scottie Scheffler, 2024 PGA Tour Player of the Year, missed the first two tournaments of the season because he needed surgery to repair his hand after slicing it while attempting to make homemade ravioli on Christmas Day.
- A growing number of US government websites have gone offline as of Saturday, including several related to USAID and others focused on youth programs, Africa, and more.
- A newly discovered asteroid has a tiny chance of smacking Earth in 2032. It’s very unlikely, thankfully, but what should be truly concerning is that nobody was even aware of it until two days after it made its last closest pass to us.
- A dire prediction: “[W]hen NIH and other health agencies emerge from the current freeze they will have been emasculated and politicized, prohibited from releasing information and research whose implications the Trump administration doesn’t like, banned from making policy recommendations that are inconvenient for Trump or at odds with the prejudices of the MAGA base.” – via Jodi Ettenberg
- When I was a kid, most of my possessions were very inexpensive, but tremendously meaningful. A baseball hat or an action figure or a comic book only cost a few dollars, but meant the world to me. My kids have tremendously expensive possessions that are very meaningless. An iPhone or iPad or AirPods cost hundreds or thousands of dollars but have essentially zero sentimental value. I’m sure this says something important about capitalism, but I don’t have time to think about it at the moment.
- Chris Coyier wrote a little about the pros and cons of maintaining your own website that’s worth a read. (And he mentions POSSE, which is something I love.)
- Here’s a cool statistical analysis done to determine whether NFL referees unfairly favor the Kansas City Chiefs. (Spoiler: Yup.)
- You can now play the classic 1982 Atari 2600 game Pitfall! in your browser.
- I’ve been using FontAwesome in web projects since late 2012 and they are still the best.
- Scaling Our Rate Limits to Prepare for a Billion Active Certificates – Let’s Encrypt protects a vast portion of the Web by providing TLS certificates to over 550 million websites. They currently issue over 340,000 certificates per hour.
- The parents of a 22-yo Wisconsin man who died after an asthma attack have filed a lawsuit against Walgreens and UnitedHealth Group after they said the price for his medication suddenly rose from $66 to $539.
- Just dropping this here for no particular reason: Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, Revised Edition
- Aides to [the man] charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.
- “The impotence [of the left] is as staggering as the abdication is sickening. But the current message from elected Democrats is loud and clear: You’re on your own. And the message from the … administration is even clearer: You’re next.” – via Marisa Kabas
Apparently federal employees are using Milton’s red stapler from Office Space as a symbol of resistance, which is awesome on so many levels.- An outbreak of tuberculosis in the Kansas City area has grown into one of the largest ever recorded in the United States, with dozens of active cases of the infectious disease reported, according to health officials. (Be alarmed.)
- Newly-appointed U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy signed a memorandum which directs the NHTSA to immediately initiate, “a rulemaking to rescind or replace all existing CAFE standards.” I just can’t get over the fact that this guy got his start on MTV’s Real World: Boston.
- The legacy New England Patriots logo of a minuteman center about to hike a football (that looks suspiciously like an eggplant) is officially known as Pat Patriot. 1 When I was at Super Bowl XLII in Arizona as a guest of the NFL, I was gifted an awesome distressed / vintage white Reebok retro t-shirt featuring Pat Patriot. It was my favorite t-shirt. It was accidentally incinerated in an industrial furnace several years ago — it’s a long story — and I’ve never been able to find another one exactly like it. I’ve looked far and wide, Googled and eBayed repeatedly, set alerts, but no luck. I’ve seen a red version a few times on eBay, but never the same white one I had and loved. I can’t even find an image of the same shirt anywhere online!
- Questlove created a trailer for the 50 Years of SNL Music documentary and it is completely mind-blowing. You have got to see it.
- When our TV enters screensaver mode, it shows images from Google, including the artist’s credit. One cute photo prompted me to search for Aravind Krishnaswamy and we were delighted to discover he has a plethora of pleasing penguin pictures.
- The latest issue of Culture of Sport (from David Skilling) examines why paying $7M for a 30-second Super Bowl ad is, incredibly, still a good deal.
- The entire global cosmetic Botox industry is supported by an annual production of just a few milligrams of botulism toxin. Pure toxin would cost ~$100 trillion per kilogram. – via Tom Whitwell
- TV & Movies
- We watched Mr. Popper’s Penguins recently and it was a big hit. It’s a great kid movie, especially if your kids are infatuated with penguins. (And it’s Jim Carrey acting like a [mostly] normal human being, which is my favorite version of him.)
- We have finally started watching Skeleton Crew, the latest Star Wars series. I read somewhere last year that the concept was supposed to be The Goonies, but Star Wars, and they nailed it. So far I think it’s phenomenal and I regret not having started it sooner.
- Fly Me to the Moon (Apple TV+) was a pretty fun family movie, but should have been at least a half hour shorter. It was campy and painfully predictable, but the kids liked it. Woody Harrelson was great.
1 I would guess that the “new” logo (that looks suspiciously like a windswept Elvis) is probably officially known as Pat Patriot, too, but that’s a different issue.
- Between 7AM and 7PM Eastern you can watch Bao Li and Qing Bao – the two new Giant Pandas at Smithsonian’s National Zoo – live on the Panda Cam as they explore their indoor and outdoor habitats at the David M. Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat.
- I know everyone is already drowning in what seems like an unrelenting torrent of insane news lately, but I feel like it’s important to highlight that last week Tennessee Republican Congressman Tim Burchett said he believes aliens have underwater bases on Earth.
- New research suggests that your coffee habit might help protect against type-2 diabetes. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
- The Unassuming Town of Bristol, Rhode Island, Is One of America’s Best Hidden Gems for a Weekend Getaway – via my dad
- I recently watched the 1991 Steven Spielberg film Hook for – I think – the first time. Great fun.
- The new MCU-themed Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl hype video is pretty intense.
- Anyone interested in iOS app development with SwiftUI should be reading Swift with Majid.
- Workout.lol is a handy one-page web app that gives you an exercise routine based on what equipment you have available and which muscles you want to target. (Pairs well with musclewiki.com.) – via kottke, from way back in July of 2023
- It’s a bummer that the Dead Bothans Society has been abandoned. It looks like most of the site was archived, thankfully, and many of their videos are still available on YouTube.
- The key difference between a calque and a loanword is that a loanword isn’t translated into English whereas a calque is. – surprisingly not via kottke, although he posted it, too!
- Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are television writer/producers with over forty years of combined experience — on shows including Lost, Firefly, Sleepy Hollow, and Helix — and they have a great podcast.
Should We Be Punching Nazis? You already know where I stand on this.- My sons and I love Cautionary Tales, the Tim Harford podcast about mistakes and what we should learn from them. (He’s also written a children’s book, The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up.)
- Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality
- Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
- What are Progressive Web Apps?
- You are the captain of a starship, about to embark on a long journey to a strange planet. You must hire a crew and buy supplies for the long journey ahead, then deal with all sorts of adventures and problems along the way. Space Awesome is a lovely little retro game similar to Oregon Trail* or Zork*. (You can play a complete game in a few minutes.)
- The Comprehensive Guide to Building a Realistic R2-D2 Replica
- A wall of ice the size of Rhode Island is heading toward a penguin-packed island off Antarctica.
- Once again, fans of the Buffalo Bills are the class of the NFL. They’ve raised over $100,000 with a GoFundMe for a diabetes charity supported by Mark Andrews, the Baltimore Ravens player who lost a fumble and dropped what would have been a game-tying catch in his team’s AFC divisional loss to the Bills.
- JK Brickworks is a site with instructions for lots of fun LEGO MOCs.
- “Wikenigma is an encyclopedia of known unknowns. That is, a listing of ‘scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer’.” – via kottke
- Oh, wow. This is awesome. The Public Domain Image Archive is a hand-picked collection of thousands of out-of-copyright works, free to browse, download, and reuse. – via @austinkleon
- “Productivity dysmorphia is the inability to see one’s own success, to acknowledge the volume of your own output.” – via Tom Whitwell
- How NASA has kept Apollo moon rocks safe from contamination for 50 years
- Everything you ever wanted to know about the history of tiki culture
- The Day the Music Burned is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.
- The current Banana Republic is nothing like it was when I was a kid. You can learn all about the company’s history at Abandoned Republic.
- The Launch is the story behind the 2019 debut of the Cosmic Crisp apple.
- The Ultimate Guide to Building a Hot Wheels Race Track
- For a little while now Apple has allowed you to tag someone as a legacy contact who can access and download the data in your account after your death. You can find the feature on the Sign-in & Security tab under your Apple Account at the top of the Settings app on your iOS device.
- If you ever find yourself hungry in Amsterdam, I urge you to try the pink mayonnaise french fries at ‘t Pareltje.
- Explaining how fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode – How to design your game for optimal play over a network
- Bad news for insomniacs. New research highlights how chronic, insufficient sleep can impair your body’s ability to manage blood sugar – even if your weight stays stable. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
- “The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.”
- Another good example of enshittification: Companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers… they just sell people more of it. – via kottke
- The Ten Commandments of iOS Development
- At some point I really must make these artichoke soufflés. They look delicious and have been on my to-make list for years.
- When My Father Talked About Larry Bird: The Boston Celtics legend was the north star of my youth, present in every debate and stretch of silence with my dad. This was true on the night when my world stopped, leaving me on a sidewalk seeing stars.
- On Bill Watterson’s Refusal To License Calvin and Hobbes is a great read. Let’s call this reverse enshittification. – via Links You’ll Love
- “If a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.”
- Do your shoelaces sit crooked? Do you retie your shoes several times a day? These are both signs of a Granny Knot. Learn the trick for keeping your shoes neatly and securely tied. – via Jodi Ettenberg
- Handy tool if you ever deal with email configurations: Quickly view your DomainKeys, DKIM, and SPF validity, and SpamAssassin score with DKIMValidator. – via @ofaolain.com
- Even the best parents of the best kids have had this thought: “Children are overbearing, supercilious, passionate, envious, inquisitive, egotistical, idle, fickle, timid, intemperate, liars, and dissemblers; they laugh and weep easily, are excessive in their joys and sorrows, and that about the most trifling objects; they bear no pain, but like to inflict it on others.” – Jean de La Bruyère, via Daily Dad
- The International Energy Agency has said the electricity usage of data centers worldwide might double in just four years. US electricity demand alone could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven mostly by AI. – via @longreads.com
- No. I don’t think I’ll ever get over Macho Grande.