Posts tagged “Kottke”

• Researchers in Japan have developed a durable and recyclable plastic that fully dissolves in the sea and doesn’t leave microplastic pollution in the oceans because it breaks down in the water over time. – via @oceanbluestar.bsky.social
• Early entry for the best news of the year? Ted Lasso is returning for a fourth season.
• I recently finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It is easily the best work of fiction I’ve read in the last twenty years. After five pages I was enjoying it so much that I decided to pace myself so I could inhabit its story as long as possible, but ended up devouring it in just a couple of days. My only regret is that I will never get to read it for the first time again. ¹
• Happy belated 27^th birthday to kottke.org, the website that inspired me to start blogging a quarter-century ago.
• Notes from the firehose:
  • Conservative former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig issued a stark warning about what he described as [the President’s] escalating attacks on the legal system.
  • Former Spiritual Adviser to POTUS Indicted for Sexually Abusing a Child
  • Top Democrats Warn “DOGE” Employees of Potential Criminal Exposure from Ethical Misconduct – via @beyer.house.gov
  • “Mr. Schumer’s stated approach of waiting for Trump to ‘screw up’ and continue this inexplicable embrace of the slippery slope is wholly inadequate and an astonishing failure of leadership.”
  • [The President’s] deportation of Venezuelan migrants may have violated a direct court order, leading to what the former general counsel of the FBI, Andrew Weissmann, has called a potential “doomsday scenario.”
  • [The President] has already implemented at least half of Project 2025’s objectives in eight areas.

• Holy hell do I love this My Life in Weeks project from Gina Trapani. And, like almost everything gold on the web that I’ve found for the last 26-ish years, it’s via kottke.
• Worcestershire gets endlessly dragged but the American pronunciation of sarsaparilla is even less intuitive. – via me
• The Freedom of the Press Foundation has a FREE digital security curriculum for journalism students. – via @dansinker.com
• Spineless milquetoast Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul will not remove New York City Mayor Eric Adams, at least for now, instead proposing “guardrails” to increase oversight of the city.
• The Curious Case of Leland Dudek
• The Incompetence of “DOGE” Is a Feature, Not a Bug: A series of mistakes by “DOGE” shows just how arbitrary and destructive this slash-and-burn strategy can get.
• A new bat coronavirus that has the capacity to spread to humans, similar to the one that caused the COVID-19 pandemic has been discovered. – via @girlsreallyrule.bsky.social
• Oh, and just for good measure: Prominent “DOGE” Staffer Is Grandson Of Turncoat KGB Spy – via @jasonkirk.fyi

• An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why Cats Are Perfect. (This is from a couple of years ago but it’s a great re-read.)
• Dammit. I literally just had a conversation about how I have so many favorite t-shirts that I should seriously never buy another t-shirt in my life and then Jason finds a t-shirt I absolutely must purchase. – via kottke
• An underweight baby seal is getting all the fish it could want at an aquarium after being rescued off the streets of Connecticut near Yale University.
• Trust and believe that if I worked for the Federal Aviation Administration and I got an email telling me I was being fired and that email came from an @mail.outlook.com address I would hit print and then delete and continue to go to work every day.
• So, uh, whatever happened to Q? Did we ever learn who he (or she) was? Or was that years-long mania just lost in the firehose of stupidity the last decade has been?
• The world’s darkest and clearest skies are at risk from an industrial megaproject. – via @therickman.bsky.social
• One of the passengers on the Delta flight to Toronto that flipped on the runway did an incredible Reddit AMA. – via @cosmicrami.com
• Mark Cuban posted some bullish remarks about the future of AI that really rubbed me the wrong way and, after a flurry of pushback from his followers, posted a link to an essay that (I think) undermined his original remarks. He didn’t say whether it was enough to change his mind, but I do appreciate that he at least acknowledged the alternative viewpoint. (And all of this is, of course, ignoring the inherent immorality of being a billionaire.)

• Take a minute today to read this tribute to Dan Jezek and the story of his website, bricklink, the world’s largest online LEGO marketplace.
• A Guide to Using Signal for Government Workers – via kottke, who is doing a great job reporting on the ongoing coup
• In less than eight years the NCAA went from banning North Carolina from hosting championships due to its bathroom bill to [kowtowing to a cartoonishly evil conman]. – via @bubbaprog.lol
• The universe could undergo a ‘catastrophic change’ that could alter absolutely everything, quantum machine shows.
• Hopefully reading this will help convince you to dump Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter. The Technological Poison Pill: How the ATProtocol Baked into Bluesky Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification – via Jodi Ettenberg
• The President’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education could prove more costly for red states than blue.
• Incompetence and desperation are a bad combination. The important thing to remember is that [the “DOGE” attempt to get employees to resign] isn’t about economic efficiency, despite what the billionaire at the helm may say. It’s about efficiently breaking morale within the federal government to make it easier to dismantle from the inside.
• Related: “DOGE” staffer steps down after racist posts emerge
• “NOAA workers ordered to stop all communications with foreign nationals. Workers covering things like air transportation safety, drought, monitor coral reef destruction, and guarding railway shipping carriers against dangerous weather affected.” – via @timmarchman.bsky.social
• “Twenty years ago, when Jeremiah Trotter, Sr won an NFC championship with the Eagles, baby Trotter Jr. was on the field, in his father’s arms. Now he’s playing for the Eagles in this year’s Super Bowl.” – via @npr.org

• How to Make the World’s Rarest Pasta – via kottke
• The requirement that homes be built at least 21 meters apart in parts of the UK dates back to a 1902 regulation drafted by two men who determined this was closest they could be to each other before they could see the other’s nipples through their shirts. – via Kent Hendricks
• The Lions–Vikings regular season finale had three times as many viewers as the Golden Globes. – via TMQ
• Bartosz Ciechanowski occasionally publishes incredibly detailed articles on fascinating topics. Last month he tackled the moon and – hoo boy! – this is a deep dive on our nearest celestial neighbor. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter
• I would probably finally switch completely from Firefox to Chrome if it wasn’t for Chrome’s egregious, unforgivable, inexcusable insistence on stealing focus from other apps on launch. – via bluesky
• “I can’t believe the billionaires are unanimously siding with the fascists! This has only happened every possible time throughout history so I am truly stunned!” – via @fousheezy
• “I don’t think people understand how devastating the end of net neutrality, and consumer protections around internet connectivity, are going to be.” – via @anildash
• Animals as Chemical Factories: Horses are bled for antivenom, crabs are drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms are boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives, but we need to find ways to scale them.

• Shrinking (Apple TV+) is probably the best show on TV right now. Jason Segal and Jessica Williams are phenomenal in it and — as impossible as it is to believe — it might be the best work Harrison Ford has ever done on screen. The show was co-created by Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) and the theme song is Frightening Fishes by Tom Howe & Benjamin Gibbard.
• Engineers found a bottle with a 132-year-old message deep inside the walls of a lighthouse in the south of Scotland. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• Is there anything better than college football bowl season?
• ProPublica has an online tool that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial, which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases. – via @broingerm (threads / bluesky)
• Rare baseball stats are my jam. When I was an early teen I watched Roger Clemens mow down sixteen Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park and was bored out of my mind. I wish I’d appreciated the feat as much as I did the mini batting helmet ice cream. (I still have the helmet.) It’s wild that there have been fewer 20-K games than perfect games.
• On Sunday, December 8, 2024 — in a loss to the Los Angeles Rams — Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills had the best fantasy football performance ever by a QB. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• Over 21 months, Taylor Swift‘s culture-dominating Eras Tour brought in $2B, more than double the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
• Staffers at roughly 600 booksellers are receiving $500 holiday bonuses from James Patterson, the bestselling novelist who has been awarding independent store employees since 2015. – via @abcnews
• You can find something for everyone in The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide.

• 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

• 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

In web design circles the little stacked three line graphic that you often see on websites to denote a clickable menu is usually called a hamburger (or just burger) icon. We call it that because it sort of looks like how a computer would display a minimalist hamburger. I adore that in the bottom navigation area of kottke.org, he has one that — instead of opening a menu, as you’d expect — takes you to an archive listing of all the posts he’s ever made referencing… hamburgers.