Rebecca Solnit on the Tate brothers, The Odyssey, and the misogyny of classical literature & the contemporary world. “Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.”

Following a prompt from Joanna at Cup of Jo… The local deli or sandwich shop names a sandwich after you. What would be on it? Perhaps another way of asking the question: what’s your favorite sandwich that’s a little bit unusual?

I love a classic BLT, banh mi, or jambon beurre, but a sandwich that is fairly unique to me is tuna salad (made with pickles, pickle juice, and scallions), havarti, lettuce, and tomatoes on good white bread or a kaiser roll. I think that would be The Kottke at the local deli. Either that or something chopped?

Tags: food · sandwiches

Why are American ambulances so expensive? In part because Medicare pays only a fraction of the actual cost of an ambulance ride and the uninsured often don’t pay at all, so the privately insured get bills of $13,000 for a $2600 ride.

We’re Squandering LEDs’ Potential to Save Our Night Skies. “Our main failure isn’t a technical one. It’s that we have yet to revise our thinking about lighting at night. We use LED technology just as we did the old sources of light.”

In addition to leading the animation studio at the National Film Board of Canada, René Jodoin made several animated films that explored geometric forms and motion, including the one above, A Matter of Form from 1984.

Set to the rousing notes of Schubert’s Military March, this animation film is an ingenious example of how a single point can be the building-block for a multiplicity of shapes and configurations. Lines and forms grow out of the point, eventually covering the entire screen in splashes of colour. This is geometric wizardry at its colourful best. A film without words.

I’m not saying my affinity for such animations is because I watched so much Sesame Street as a kid, but I’m not not saying it either.

Here’s another of Jodoin’s films, Dance Squared:

You can watch more of Jodoin’s work in this YouTube playlist. (via the kid should see this)

Tags: geometry · René Jodoin · video

An online edition of all 85 of the Federalist Papers, presented as they were originally serialized in newspapers, with on eye on good typography and readability.

“This map shows the predicted density of underground networks created by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These networks form one of Earth’s circulatory systems, moving massive amounts of carbon, nutrients, and water across plant communities.”

Oh wow, The Verge made a 70-minute video on how The Clapper became a viral sensation. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a Clapper, no one I knew had one, and I couldn’t understand why every single household didn’t have one of these magical devices.

Well, this is just absolutely lovely: photographer and artist Jan Erik Waider shot these videos of cracked-but-unbroken Baltic Sea ice undulating with the gentle motion of the sea. Mesmerizing…I could watch these for hours.

Tags: Jan Erik Waider · mesmerizing · video

What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America? “A menu describes what a restaurant serves — but a menu also describes who is being served. They reflect the class, gender, political, technological, and environmental shifts of history.”

A list of Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail, including an Apple Powerbook 100, a SGI R4000 Indigo, the Motorola Envoy (PDA), and some Thinking Machines CM-5s. “This is a Unix system, I know this!”

There is nothing more I love in this world right now than these two lunch ladies performing Firestarter by The Prodigy.

Using William Blake (aka “the patron saint of unclassifiable artists”) as an example, Evan Puschak’s latest video explores how society often rejects artists whose work doesn’t fit neatly into established categories and frameworks of criticism and commerce.

What you’re seeing here, these are not paintings. They’re prints of engravings from Blake’s illuminated books, which he designed, wrote, etched, colored, and printed himself using a technique that he invented. These extraordinary books are works of art that mix and synthesize categories. And as a result, the art world of the late 17 and early 1800s didn’t really know what to make of them. And Blake never sold more than a handful.

Tags: art · Evan Puschak · poetry · video · William Blake

A digital museum of video game levels…you can move freely around each level using your keyboard. Heavy on Nintendo games (Mario Kart 64, Wii Sports, etc.) but also includes Portal, Halo, Katamari Damacy, GTA III, and World of Warcraft.

I have lived more than two score and twelve years on this Earth and somehow I didn’t know that there are two copies of the Gettysburg Address written in Lincoln’s own hand in the Library of Congress (and five overall).

The Cassette Tapes of the Great Migration, a collection of oral histories recorded in Michigan in the 1970s of Black people who had previously escaped the Jim Crow South. “If we don’t get it from those individuals, then we can’t get it from anyone else.”

“Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest — and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days.”

Near the end of 1995, the artist and producer Brian Eno wrote the following about new media in his diary, which entries were later collected in a book called A Year with Swollen Appendices.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.

Nailed it.

Tags: Brian Eno

Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed. “Google has often said it was ‘sending out more traffic & the web is bigger than ever. And then right next to that is a bunch of publishers whose businesses are getting destroyed.’”

Elephants May Hear Ground Vibrations Through Their Bones, Helping Them to Communicate Over 6 Miles. “Studying elephant hearing isn’t as simple as asking an elephant to wear headphones…”