John Green recently teamed up with Kurzgesagt for a video on one of the world’s deadliest diseases: tuberculosis. The white death has haunted humanity like no other disease following us for thousands, maybe millions of years. In the last 200 years it killed a billion people —
Loved Caity Weaver’s Letter of Recommendation for the only reality show I’ve ever really loved: PBS’s Frontier House . “Next to the unflappable Glenns, the Clunes are revealed to be feckless, flighty, highfalutin’ crybabies.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
llama.ttf is a font that includes an LLM and an inference engine for that model. “This also means that you can use your font to chat with your font.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
From Dynomight, some common sense and straight-forward advice about travel . Some favorites: 1. Mindset matters more than where you go. 12. Clothes dry much faster with body heat. 22. If you spend a ton of money and stay in very expensive hotels and whatever, you can
"For a crucial decade in print media’s transition to the internet, HBO’s fantasy series was a boon in traffic… for everyone. But what happened when every publication started chasing the same thing?"
Updated advice about lightning safety when you’re outdoors , including “hiding in a cave is a bad idea”, “lying down puts you in even more danger than standing up”, and “the lightning position is useless”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
First of all, I didn’t know Casio made some any different kinds of electronic instruments back in the day — he used more than 15 of them to record this. I laughed out loud when the guitar part came in. What you see me playing in the video are the actual instruments I used to
While dense cities carry an air of extraversion on the surface, it doesn’t take much digging beyond this superficial layer to see that sometimes even the most crowded places can also be the most solitary. Keita Morimoto ( previously ) uncovers this double-edged experience
Pros And Cons Of Displaying The 10 Commandments In Every Classroom . “PRO: Distracts from how weird the Pledge of Allegiance is. CON: Use of woke ‘Thou/Thy’ pronouns.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Contractions is a powerful short film by Lynne Sachs about a former abortion clinic in Tennessee, a state where abortion is almost completely banned. If I can’t make the same medical decisions about my body with autonomy, I’m a second-class citizen. And you basically, as a
Unhoused participants in the Denver Basic Income Project used their $1000/mo to find jobs & housing, spent less time in ERs, and reported improved mental health. “A year later, nearly half of participants had housing.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
For centuries in southeast Asia, lingchi was employed as a particularly brutal form of torture in which a knife was used to methodically remove parts of the body over long periods. Translated as “death by a thousand cuts,” the ancient practice provides the metaphorical
What if we could see spacetime? Embark on a visual journey through the invisible gravitational currents that shape our universe - by Aeon Video Watch at Aeon
If you haven’t heard of Hugo Gernsback, you’ve surely heard of the Hugo Award. Next to the Nebula, it’s the most prestigious of science fiction prizes, bringing together in its ranks of winners such venerable authors as Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Neil
If we’re to publish, teach, invent, imagine or promote, we need the confidence to believe that we have something to offer. That we are, in some way, right. But the enterprise of rational thought is based on theories, tests and improvements. We can never be certain, all we have
Cellists unwilling to settle for any but the finest instrument must, sooner or later, make a pilgrimage to Cremona — or rather, to the Cremonas. One is, of course, the city in Lombardy that was home to numerous pioneering master luthiers, up to and including Antonio Stradivari.
"We love our dogs for their individual characters—and yet cloning implies that we also believe their unique, unreproducible selves can, in fact, be reproduced."
"At some point in Cedric Lodge’s almost 30-year career in the Harvard Medical School morgue, working mostly alone and far from the eyes of his supervisors, he allegedly decided to get a piece of this trade."
Growing up, I had a pretty conventional childhood. In the northern Wisconsin of the 70s and 80s, that meant living in the country, dogs and cats, making ramps for our bikes in the driveway, Oscar Meyer bologna sandwiches for lunch, and a nuclear family of four that split into