Posts in the category “WebLinks”

• A limited-edition, Fabergé egg pendant, inspired by the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy, was (grossly) recovered after six days of closely watching the man accused of swallowing the jewelry in a New Zealand store.
• Scientists found that taking 2,000 IU of vitamin D3 daily slowed telomere shortening by the equivalent of about 3 years of biological aging over 4 years. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
• Fifteen Years
• If you need a good gift for anyone over 80 years old, these hard candies are great. My grandmother loved them and I used to send her a tin every year on her birthday and Christmas.
• We didn’t see it in the theater, but the 1986 comedy Ruthless People was on high rotation at our house for a while (from Blockbuster, once it was released on VHS). Danny DeVito, Bette Midler, Judge Reinhold, Helen Slater, and Bill Pullman had us in stitches and I still occasionally quote it. (Now you can rent it on Amazon.)
• An Indian boy, just 3 years old, became the youngest rated chess player in history.
• These Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights are awesome. They’re super easy to install and you can control them with an app on your phone and/or via Alexa, HomeKit, etc. (The cost has been fluctuating wildly for months now, by hundreds of dollars, and I wish you the best of luck in finding them listed at the absurdly low price we paid.)
• I can relate to this guy’s 2025 Parenting Wrapped. – via hiro.report
• My Kid’s Insane Christmas Wish List, Annotated – via my friend Lauren
• University of Florida Honors Program class teaches Gainesville‘s punk history – via my little sis
• This holiday season, consider giving the gift of independent journalism. – via @marisakabas
• ‘Tis the Season:
  • The president’s Florida mortgages match his description of mortgage fraud. – via @charlesornstein
  • Pete Hegseth Should Be Charged with Murder – via @elienyc
  • I Left the CDC 100 Days Ago. My Worst Fears About the Agency Are Coming True – via @brandyzadrozny
  • Spotify is garbage on every count: Its treatment of artists, its ICE advertising, the CEO’s investment in military AI, its leading role in the commodification and AI slop-ification of music, its terrible audio quality—you name it. A Guide to Finding the Best Spotify Alternative – via @bcmerchant
  • “If you’re a complete idiot life sure does have a lot of surprises for you.” – via @samthielman.com
  • “All I want for Christmas is for the worst people in the world to experience some consequences.” – via @gracelp
  • The National Park Service will offer free admission to U.S. residents on the president’s birthday next year, but is eliminating the benefit for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth.

• When ancient Romans felt wronged, they didn’t ask for revenge from the gods. Instead they scratched their anger into thin lead sheets called defixiones, folded them carefully, and buried them in wells, graves, or temples, trusting that some power beneath the earth would take care of the rest.
• Buckle up, buttercup. This essay is going to be tough to swallow. Collagen Sits on a Throne of Lies: How the supplement industry took meat garbage and turned it into a $9B business
• A single HPV vaccination appears just as effective as two doses at preventing the viral infection that causes cervical cancer.
• Finding it impossible to stop thinking about The Chair Company? You can get a Tecca t-shirt or hat, but they’re sold out of chairs.
• One of the hardest parts of being a parent is attempting to balance, “Please study! School and your grades are very important,” with, “Don’t be stressed! This one history test isn’t going to matter at all in twenty years.” – via me
• Have you ever wondered how a touch screen knows you are touching it?
• Chindōgu: The Japanese Art of Unuseless Inventions
• How a UF engineer found purpose Below Deck
• Man unexpectedly cured of HIV after stem cell transplant
• “Anyone who was born an American and therefore feels superior to someone who had to work to become an American doesn’t know the first thing about being an American.” – via @harrymccracken.com
• Good News for People Who Like Bad News:
  • A 6-year-old boy is missing after ICE arrested him and his dad in NYC last week and shipped them to separate facilities. – via @clauirizarry
  • Zillow has removed climate risk scores from over a million real estate listings after realtors complained that information such as how at risk a home is from wildfires was causing them to lose sales. – via @carnage4life
  • Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead. – via @papapishu
  • “You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” – Penelope Hegseth to her son, Pete
  • The Supreme Court is siding with the current administration 84 percent of the time; it sided with the Biden administration only 53 percent of the time. And of course only one of those administrations is habitually laying waste to the rule of law.
  • Lawsuits allege USA Gymnastics, SafeSport failed to prevent sexual abuse by coach

• Three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s attic discovered a remarkably well-preserved copy of Superman No. 1, which sold at auction for a record-breaking $9.12 million.
• Everyone in Florida should be thankful for alligators. – via my dad
• What makes the world’s first bar joke funny? No one knows. – via @heidiyounggrasshopper
• I love this research into whether the mere presence of someone in a Batman costume makes people act nicer. (Spoiler: It does.)
• Why do NFL refs keep botching the overtime coin toss?!
• Clues by Sam is a daily brain teaser that manages to be both cute and maddening – via The Athletic
• On the evening of October 9, 1992, a meteor weighing more than two tons punctured the atmosphere. Sonic explosions accompanied its descent as it broke apart while screaming across the sky before a small chunk of it went through the trunk of a parked car in Peekskill, New York.
• Does Harrison Ford Know His Lines?
• The ultimate dad gift? A World War II Aircraft Advent Calendar
• War Is Over If You Want It:
  • The people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least.
  • Higher Ed’s Rush to Adopt AI Is about So Much More Than AI
  • The current maliciously-ignorant dotard running the most powerful nation-state in the history of mankind decided to demolish the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden (established by first lady Edith Roosevelt as the Colonial Garden in 1903) in addition to leveling the Rose Garden and felling two historic magnolia trees (commemorating Presidents Warren G. Harding and Franklin D. Roosevelt) adjacent to the East Wing in his craven lust to install a self-aggrandizing and pointless ballroom.
  • A 17-year-old U.S. citizen and high school senior was detained by immigration officers in Oregon on Nov. 21, 2025.
  • Driver Denny Hamlin breaks down in tears as the first witness testifying at NASCAR antitrust trial
  • Indigenous actress Elaine Miles of Northern Exposure was detained by ICE at a bus stop. When she showed them her Tribal ID, they told her it was fake. – via @phillewis

• Martijn Doolaard is a photographer, filmmaker and travel writer from the Netherlands who is renovating and living in a remote stone cabin in the Italian Alps. – via @thepharmdfoodie
• MacKenzie Scott (ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) has now given away more than $19 billion, including more than a quarter of a billion to historically black colleges and universities.
• The recently-published list of the Top 100 Comedies of all Time (from Variety) is an abomination. Bull Durham deserves to be in the top ten and it’s not even on the list! (And where is Trading Places?!)
• Man Keeps Strange Rock for Years, Hoping It’s Gold. It Turned out to Be Way More Valuable. (See also: Scientists Cracked Open a Lunar Rock and Found a Huge Surprise)
• Requiem for Early Blogging doesn’t resonate with me as much as I know it does for many. (I think it’s because I started far, far earlier than the blog boom and, y’know, still haven’t stopped.)
• “User behavior suggests people are finding LLMs more convenient for finding answers than Googling, where they must leap over hurdles of ads, dive several pages into the search results, and then pogo in and out of websites to find answers to some of their most banal questions.”
• We Asked Golfers for the Best Place to Buy Used Clubs. – via my dad
• All’s Fair, the new series from Ryan Murphy, is an atrocity.
• Why Is Dad So Mad?
• Vocalist and a-ha front-man Morten Harket recently shared that he has Parkinson’s disease.
• Black Friday:
  • “Imagine the quality of an architect that Trump would pick – and who would want to work for him. Even *that guy* thinks this project is too grandiose.” – via @helenkennedy
  • “It should go without saying, but the president has no authority to do this, and anyone reporting the story needs to say as such.” – via @tomtomorrow
  • This is, quite literally, what the Germans did. We all agreed it was a big deal and nobody should ever be allowed to do it again. So for anyone in any uniform to allow it to happen by the United States of America is inexcusable.
  • Charities that help people pay for medical care say demand is way up, and that’s before scheduled cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare enacted in the new GOP spending bill take effect.
  • “The guy shot two random people with a gun, I don’t think you can say he wasn’t assimilating into our culture.” – via @internethippo
  • A Story About Illegal Orders is terrifying.

• The Philadelphia Eagles have produced yet another awesome and fun Christmas video. – via The Kids Kickoff
• Missing Flamingo Thought to Be Living in France
• Beginning in the 1970s, Alan Rosen – the Indiana Jones of vintage sports cards – professed that there would always be a market for older cards and memorabilia, and history has proven him right.
• The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day – via kottke
• It’s tough to argue with anything on this list of 100 small steps you can take to live to 100. And some of them are even pretty fun. – via hurly
• The Food and Drug Administration unveiled a new blueprint for the regulation of bespoke drug therapies, a way for these treatments to quickly get to market if they meet certain standards.
• A cannon, three coins, and a porcelain cup were among the first objects Colombian scientists recovered from the depths of the Caribbean Sea where the mythical galleon San José sank in 1708.
• This Is Fine dot gif:
  • Over 30,000 Charlotte, North Carolina students skipped school in protest of ICE operations in the area.
  • The U.S. is becoming an Nvidia-state: How the AI Crash Happens
  • Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear suspended after it gave advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives
  • I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. Students chose to actively avoid learning because it’s boring and hard.
  • Paul Bojerski, a 79-year-old who was born to Polish parents in a WWII German refugee camp and who legally emigrated to the U.S. when he was 5, has been abducted by ICE in Florida. – via @oliviamesser
  • Prominently displaying the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom is a clear and obvious violation of the First Amendment. How is this even an issue?
  • Sex Workers & A Secret Charity: The Story Of Cory Mills’ ‘F*cking Bananas’ Afghanistan Mission – via @ronfilipkowski
  • This story is simply heartbreaking. A Teen in Love With a Chatbot Killed Himself. Can the Chatbot Be Held Responsible? – via New York Times Magazine

It’s easier to put your hand in the next guy’s pocket if he’s illiterate.

American society is dominated by wealthy mountebanks and literally demented politicians who are happy to take on all the risks of AI because it promises to create workers who cannot even conceptualize quitting, much less striking.
from We Used to Read Things in This Country, by Noah McCormack

• The paradox of horror: How scary films can soothe your anxiety
• Matt Berninger, lead singer of The National, traded his notebook for a baseball. And the words kept coming.
• I didn’t realize until reading a recap at The Athletic that on Saturday night Will Smith hit the first extra-inning Game 7 homer in the history of the World Series. Oh, and the nail-biter peaked at 33.1M viewers and beat the last Game 7 (in 2019) by 10%, making it the most-watched MLB game since 2017.
• The New England Aquarium built a geriatric island for aging penguins to live in safety and dignity.
• Take a walk! A modest increase in physical activity can delay cognitive decline by three years or more, and Alzheimer’s symptoms decrease with just a few thousand steps a day. And new research shows exercise could help reduce anxiety as effectively as traditional talk therapy in as little as 8 to 12 weeks.
• This is pretty wild: [M]ost Americans in 1790 consumed an average [of] 5.8 gallons of pure alcohol a year. (Today the average is closer to “just” 2 gallons per year.)
• Adults ruined “6-7” for Halloween – via my wife
• The University of Florida Gators 7-foot-9 Olivier Rioux became the tallest college basketball player ever.
• I’ve long loved The Point, but never knew the full story of the brilliant, baffling rise and fall of Harry Nilsson. – via my dad
• Things Can Only Get Better:
  • Federal agents drive off with 1-year-old girl after arresting her father in Los Angeles
  • Louisiana officials waited months to warn public of whooping cough outbreak – via @elizabethjacobs
  • One analytical model shows that the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. – via @newyorker.com
  • The United States of America continues to extrajudicially murder people.
  • A Food and Drug Administration official who resigned on Sunday was sued by a Canadian pharmaceutical company, which accused him of soliciting a bribe and tanking its stock with false statements as part of a revenge campaign against a former colleague.
  • Employees at The Washington Post uploaded a fake video to 8 social apps. Only one told users it wasn’t real.
  • East Wing ballroom donations by corporate owners create awkward moments for news outlets

• Japan’s sushi legend Jiro Ono turns 100 and is not ready for retirement
• Wait. What? College golfer aces same hole twice in one day!
• Feisty Otters Are Once Again Hijacking Surfboards in Santa Cruz
• “When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same.” – via Joe Hanson
• Like the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, researchers say some AI models may be developing their own survival drive, seeming to resist being turned off and even sabotaging their own shutdown.
• New to me: Italian time
• The average energy bar is anywhere from 6 to 15 times more expensive per calorie than a good ol’ PB&J.
• Hoo boy. Care to read about how chatfishing has made finding love on dating apps even weirder? – via kottke
• “[On] Sunday, [October 26, 2025,] the [New York] Times had more column-inches dedicated to urging readers to gamble on football than to China’s control of rare-earths minerals.” – via TMQ
• Some good reasons to vote:
  • Before [POTUS], and Before the Young Republicans, There Was the Dartmouth Review – via my dad
  • [I] really resent the continued assertion that there’s so much anger on both sides, as if the causes of the anger are equally legitimate. [W]e’re angry because masked maniacs are violently snatching our family and neighbors off the street, and they’re angry because we’re calling them out for it. – via Marisa Kabas
  • As improbable as it had seemed just minutes ago, it now appeared that I really was texting with interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan. [See also: New York AG Letitia James pleads not guilty to mortgage fraud charges]
  • “the speaker of the House is refusing to seat a duly elected member of Congress to protect the president from a vote to investigate his extensive connections [to] the world’s most notorious human trafficking pedophile” is one of those things you simply cannot put into New York Timesese – via ryan cooper

• T-shirt Worn by Taylor Swift Sparks a $2M Windfall for Sea Otters
• “It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive,” is the catchy lede of this article on editing genes with CRISPR, Editing Nature To Fix Our Failures, that everyone I follow has already posted.
• Got a few hours to kill? Check out the Space Exploration Logo Archive. – via kottke
• Imagine getting burned by the Pope.
• Kohler Wants to Put a Tiny Camera in Your Toilet and Analyze the Contents
• Score one for the good guys: Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules
• Research on 6,000 older adults reveals that optimistic people are up to 50% less likely to develop weak grip strength and lose mobility.
• Any golfer should be able to relate to this essay by Gabby Herzig: I made a 12 during the biggest golf tournament of my life. Here’s what I learned.
• Who doesn’t love a good story about a cursed Egyptian mummy? (Related: The Met is having its first Egyptian exhibit in over a decade.)
• It’s just tech, everything doesn’t have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on. – from The Majority AI View, a fantastic essay by Anil Dash.
• The beatings will continue until morale improves:
  • Top US Army general says he’s using ChatGPT to help make key command decisions
  • There is a special place in hell for those who use children as pawns in their quest for power.
  • I don’t understand why the headline on this article about a convicted felon isn’t simply Maliciously Incompetent, Aggressively Ignorant, Lying Buffoon Lies Again.
  • North Carolina Elections Chief Demands Voters’ Full Social Security Numbers from DMV

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning. – Winston Churchill

• An oral history of Industrial Light and Magic
• Always Invite Anna
• Don’t cry for millennials or Gen Z. Save your pity for those in their 50s. Why Gen X is the real loser generation.
• Fat Bear Week is here.
• This is now incredibly the 16th consecutive year I’m linking to this: It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers
• The truth is not always beautiful nor beautiful words the truth. – via @swiftonsecurity.com
• I’ve always loved the Jabberwocky.
• For more than a century in the 18th & 19th centuries, an edited version of Romeo & Juliet, with “a 67-line final conversation between Romeo and Juliet“, was more popular than Shakespeare‘s original. – via kottke
• And now for the bad news:
  • A little chat about genAI is well worth your time. Don’t be the kind of person who says, “I hear you. I understand. But also, I don’t care.”
  • He’s Been On Louisiana’s Death Row for Decades. A Judge Just Vacated His Conviction.
  • “A former director of the North Carolina Republican Party – who resigned amid election fraud and corruption scandals – has been appointed to a new role overseeing North Carolina’s state and local election officials…” – via @maddow.msnbc.com
  • Bear shot, killed after wandering into Central Florida home
  • POTUS Fired a U.S. Attorney Who Insisted on Following a Court Order
  • Hollywood Union Files Complaint Against Use of James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader Voice—Which He Sold Before His Death