I learned two important pieces of news in this post: 1) Frozen OJ from concentrate as a product is being discontinued by major producers. 2) Beverage analysts refer to market share as “share of throat.” And I think that’s just lovely.
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This guy built an autonomous flying umbrella (powered by drones) that automagically follows you around in the rain. (A possible counter to a personal raincloud?)
Spurious Correlations
For his Spurious Correlations project, Tyler Vigen compares data sets that are the very definition of “correlation is not causation”. For instance, the number of Walmart stores worldwide correlates very strongly with the current distance between the Earth & Saturn. Or Google searches for “avocado toast” closely tracks biomass power generated in the Philippines.
kdo rolodex · a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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Brad Graham (RIP)https://web.archive.org/web/20020601183825/http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/index.shtml -
Cory Doctorowhttps://pluralistic.net -
Anil Dashhttps://anildash.com -
Chenjerai Kumanyikahttps://bsky.app/profile/chenjerai.bsky.social -
It's Nice Thathttps://itsnicethat.com
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Minnesota community leaders are calling for an “ICE Out” general strike and protests on Friday, January 30. “No work. No school. No shopping. Stop funding ICE.” KDO will be participating.
A huge collection of graphic design archives and resources, like The People’s Graphic Design Archive, Book Cover Archive, and Letterform Archive. This is great!
“There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.”
Prettifying Graffiti
For a project called Tag Clouds, street artist Mathieu Tremblin paints over graffiti tags and makes them more legible.
The result looks like when Word says that the Hardkaze and Aerosol fonts are used in the document you’re trying to open but are missing from your computer and you click OK to replace them with whatever’s available. I think the font above is Arial, which is perfect. I also like this faux-watermark piece he did:
“AI skeptics need to update their priors: Plenty of cause for concern, plenty of room to hit these companies for unethical behavior, resource demands, etc, but we are so, so far past the era of ‘stochastic parrots’”.
Vimeo was recently acquired by a private equity firm and you know what comes next: Vimeo Lays Off ‘Most’ of Its Staff, Allegedly Includes ‘the Entire Video Team’.
Your Friends Are Still Acting Like Everything is Normal in America. What Do You Do? “The first obligation we all have is an epistemic one: It’s to know what kind of reality we are actually inhabiting.” (gift link)
Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education. “We have a very focused and intense effort across the board to set America back a generation, at least, for education, health, research, climate policy.”
Thing I did not know I was looking for (but totally was): a deep dive into ASCII rendering. Super interesting!
Vintage Tourist Maps of Japan
The gang at Present & Correct found a cache of pre-war tourist maps of Japan while rummaging around in Tokyo’s Jinbōchō used book district. They photographed them for a new self-published book called Paper Trails.
The Copyrightability of Fonts Revisited by Matthew Butterick, a type designer & copyright litigator. “If a court were asked to directly consider the copyrightability of an ordinary digital font, it would likely rule in the negative.”
Clint Smith visits the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. “The goal of the sites is to force visitors to confront the violence of the past without the counterweight of a more uplifting narrative to assuage their distress.”
Bruce Springstein wrote & recorded a song about Minnesota’s battle against tyranny: Streets Of Minneapolis. “Our city’s heart and soul persists / Through broken glass and bloody tears / On the streets of Minneapolis.”
David Lynch Went to the First Beatles Concert in the US (1964)
In one of his final on-camera interviews, David Lynch recounts going to the very first Beatles concert in the US in 1964.
I ended up going to this concert. I didn’t really have any idea that it was the first concert. I didn’t have any idea how big this event was. And it was in a gigantic place where they had boxing matches. The Beatles were in the boxing ring. It was so loud, you can’t believe. Girls shuddering… crying… screaming their heart out. It was phenomenal.
Lynch continued:
Music is one of the most fantastic things. Almost like fire, water, and air. It’s like a thing. It does so much.
The interview was for the documentary Beatles ‘64, which is available on Disney+. Here’s how it came about:
“David had the idea to interview not just people who like the Beatles, because we’d be still making this movie forever. But it was people who’s who had some kind of pivotal, profound reaction or moment when the Beatles first came to the U.S., or when they first heard or saw the Beatles,” Bodde explained. “We had done extensive research on people who had that level of connection and we learned that David Lynch was living in Alexandria, Virginia, with his family. His father was in the Department of Forestry and they moved around a lot, [but at that time] they lived in Alexandria. He had met JFK. Had been at the inauguration of JFK as an Eagle Scout. And then had gotten a ticket to the to the Beatles concert, the first US concert at the Washington Coliseum. We were kind of amazed that he had multiple connections to the story that was being told.”
(thx, david)
Why do RSS readers look like email clients? “When we applied that same visual language to RSS (the unread counts, the bold text for new items, the sense of a backlog accumulating) we imported the anxiety without the cause.”
People Photographed With Their Vehicles
For his project called Homo Mobilis, Martin Roemers travelled the globe and photographed people with their cars, bikes, scooters, etc. You can see a selection of the photos on Roemers’ website, at The Guardian, or in his forthcoming book, Homo Mobilis (Amazon). (via @steveportigal.bsky.social)
Why Some People See Collapse Earlier Than Others: Perception, pattern-seeking, and the role of neurodivergence in a failing civilisation. “Collapse awareness is fundamentally a pattern-recognition event. Some people are wired for that.”
Kristen Radtke remembers Alex Pretti. “I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles…was my childhood best friend.”
An Archive of Italian Graphic Design
“Archivio Grafica Italiana is the first online archive dedicated to the entire Italian graphic design heritage.” (via sidebar)
An impressive isometric map of NYC, built with AI agents. “I’m particularly interested in scaling up the grindy repetitive tasks that make many ideas practically impossible.”
Watch Classic Episodes of Sesame Street for Free on YouTube
Sesame Street has uploaded a bunch of classic episodes to YouTube that are free to watch, including the very first episode from 1969, the one where Mister Rogers visits, and the episode where Mr. Snuffulupagus is finally revealed. The most recent one was uploaded just a couple of days ago, so it appears to be an ongoing effort. (via open culture)
P.S. From Four Things About Mr. Snuffleupagus:
Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high profile and sometimes graphic stories of pedophilia and sexual abuse of children that had been aired on shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. The writers felt that by having the adults refuse to believe Big Bird despite the fact that he was telling the truth, they were scaring children into thinking that their parents would not believe them if they had been sexually abused and that they would just be better off remaining silent.
You Need A Kitchen Slide Rule. “Kitchen work is all about proportions, and nothing beats the slide rule for proportions.”
Information You Could Hold in Your Hand
Whoa, this is a fantastic archive of tangible media objects — like gramophone records, punch cards, 8-tracks, floppy disks, etc. (via unsung)
Science magazine: US government has lost more than 10,000 STEM PhDs since Trump took office.
The Comics Journal’s obituary for Scott Adams. “Dilbert’s tone shifted during the 2010s, punching down at targets, mocking and belittling societal shifts and perceived “political correctness,” with more cynical, even bitter humor…”
This video from December is about a pair of teenaged ICE trackers. “Armed with phone and body cameras, Ben and Sam patrol the Chicago suburbs in hopes of tracking ICE agents and filming raids they see as unwarranted and unjustified.”
A 90-minute ICE Watch training session via Zoom “on effectively protecting your neighborhoods from federal enforcement incursions”. Jan 28, 7pm ET. Sign up here.
Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong. “Activists have made the decision to emphasize protection, aid, and observation. When matters escalate, it is usually the choice of the federal agents.”
A collection of dartboards used in different areas of the UK. “The closure of pubs and leagues not being fed with new players, unfortunately, leads to some of the boards just being consigned to history.”
Scientists have detected a swole neutrino, a potential signal from a primordial black hole, which may have formed “before there were even atoms, let alone stars”.
The Best Book Covers of the Past Decade
Every year since 2016, Literary Hub has asked a group of book cover designers for their picks for the best book covers of the year. Using 10 years of data, here are their picks for the best covers of the last decade. I’ve included a few of my personal favorites below.
“For a month, I tried: swapping my iPhone for a Nokia which I can only use to text, call and play Snake; also, a Walkman and a film camera. I picked up physical copies of books, newspapers…” What Emma Russell learned from her digital detox.
“The imperial boomerang is the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.”
M. Gessen: “It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.”
Thomas Zimmer on the stakes of Minnesota’s struggle against tyranny. “A society that has any aspiration to be free and democratic cannot — it must not! — tolerate the existence of an agency like ICE.”
ICE/DHS has killed nine people in 2026 (that we know of): Keith Porter, Parady La, Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos, Alex Pretti, and Renee Good.
Emily Witt reports on The Battle for Minneapolis for the New Yorker. “Federal agents attempting to stop U.S. citizens from monitoring them have broken observers’ car windows, doused them with pepper spray, and shoved protesters to the ground.”
Daft Punk Deep Cuts DJ Set
From Taner’s Funk Kitchen, a 30-minute set of smooth/chill deep cuts from Daft Punk. As noted in the description, this mix is less of a club vibe and more of a chill listening party.
The DJ is using a Digital Vinyl System (DVS) to play/mix the songs. I’d never heard of this before; from the description:
DVS is a DJ technology that allows you to control digital music files on your computer / smartphone using traditional turntables with special timecode vinyl. It combines the tactile feel of analog DJing with the flexibility of digital music libraries.
I knew many (most?) DJs were playing from digital these days but never knew how. From Wikipedia:
A Digital vinyl system (DVS) allows a DJ to physically manipulate the playback of digital audio files on a computer using turntables as an interface, thus preserving the hands-on control and feel of DJing with vinyl. This has the added advantage of using turntables to play back audio recordings not available in phonograph form. This method allows DJs to scratch, beatmatch, and perform other turntablism that would be impossible with a conventional keyboard-and-mouse computer interface or less tactile DJ controllers.
That’s pretty cool. I guess if I needed another expensive hobby…
A review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism. “‘No religion, no ideology, no philosophy, has ever been as all-encompassing as the economic logic of capitalism,’ Beckert claims, defining it as ‘the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital.’”
Nice piece about the forgotten queer artist Marlow Moss, whose work and influence on Piet Mondrian’s work is being reevaluated. “It is now widely recognised in the art world that it was as much Moss who influenced Mondrian as the other way round…”
A Chinese factory mistakenly stitched a frown on a Year of the Horse plush toy and it became a surprise hit. Meet the ‘Cry-Cry Horse’, the perfect mascot for 2026.
How To Help if You are Outside Minnesota, including donating money, hassling ICE-supporting businesses, and “Get Ready For This Bullshit to Come to You”.
Today, Minnesotans are striking (“no work, no school, no shopping”), protesting, and marching in response to the ICE invasion. “We are a northern state, and we are built for the cold, and we are going to show up…”
The Best Films of 2025
David Ehrlich is back with my favorite end-of-year celebration of film; here’s his look back at the best films of 2025 (YouTube). See the full list at Letterboxd. I’ve only seen five of these so it’s difficult to comment on the list as a whole, but I feel like Sinners should have been higher?
Dr. Gladys West, Mathematician Whose Work Made GPS Possible, Dies at 95. “Her painstaking calculations and programming helped transform raw satellite data into precise geodetic models, enabling reliable satellite-based navigation.”
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