- Egyptologist in Paris Discovers Secret Messages on the Luxor Obelisk: The 3,300-year-old monument has sat in the French capital’s center for almost 200 years, but no one else noticed these strange encryptions.
- I took the boys to see Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith in the theater on the 20th anniversary of its release. I saw it in Century City (several days before the official release) two decades ago (and then again a few days later!) and am happy to report that also viewing it hundreds of times on a TV did not detract at all from the thrill of seeing it on the big screen. We loved it. It’s wild that the re-release of a twenty-year old movie made north of $42M over the weekend. Related: I love reading about Star Wars movie mistakes.
- “The choice of wood was completely incomprehensible,” isn’t the best line in this story about a concentration camp violin, but it’s up there.
- In sport, turning 30 was once the point where pundits started sharpening retirement speeches. But Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, and Lewis Hamilton didn’t just stretch the narrative, they shattered it.
Boulevard of Broken Dreams:
- “DOGE” has tapped into some of the most sensitive and valuable data in the world. Now it’s starting to put it to work.
- Related: “DOGE” says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion. – via @heidiyounggrasshopper
- Public health, modern medicine, and disease mitigation will suffer under RFK Jr. because he sees sick people – not sickness – as the problem.
- Vince Vaughn poses with POTUS in the Oval Office. Pathetic.
- Senate Democrats who took heat for government shutdown vote now feel vindicated. Pathetic.
- Oh Great, Millionaires Are Racing Sperm Now
- The Supreme Court’s Late-Night Alien Enemy Act Intervention
Posts tagged “aging”
- The key difference between a calque and a loanword is that a loanword isn’t translated into English whereas a calque is. – surprisingly not via kottke, although he posted it, too!
- Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are television writer/producers with over forty years of combined experience — on shows including Lost, Firefly, Sleepy Hollow, and Helix — and they have a great podcast.
Should We Be Punching Nazis? You already know where I stand on this.- My sons and I love Cautionary Tales, the Tim Harford podcast about mistakes and what we should learn from them. (He’s also written a children’s book, The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up.)
- Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality
- Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
- What are Progressive Web Apps?
- Were Back to the Future and The Goonies set on the same day? – via kottke
- Here’s a faithful recreation of me in the 1980s explaining my IT job to my grandparents at Christmas. It also perfectly mimics how I imagine I sound any time I talk to my teenager about pretty much anything. (But the danger presented by a poorly-maintained turbo encabulator is no joke!)
- Reverse Engineering Call Of Duty Anti-Cheat
- There are some hidden gems on this MacStories Best Apps of 2024 list.
- I have a generic digital photo frame at home that’s on its last legs. I got it well over a decade ago and was never thrilled with its buttons or input options, but at the time it was pretty awesome. Since then I’ve purchased multiple Pix-Star frames (website, Amazon) for far-off family members; I’m not a huge fan of those, either, and I don’t feel they’re worth the price tag. I just saw the Aura frame recommended in the hiro.report newsletter and it looks pretty nice, but it’s also pretty expensive. I’ve got at least two ancient iPads Mini collecting dust and am going to try repurposing those instead. (I’ll keep you posted.)
- To age on the internet is to exist in an accidental version of [a] time tunnel.
- I’m wondering for how long what you don’t know can’t hurt you. It’s definitely not forever, but it is still for today.
- I just received a text message that read, “Please be advised that we are currently conducting a lockdown drill at [your son’s high school]. This is a routine practice to ensure student and staff safety. Thank you for your understanding. STOP to end”
What a utopia it would be if simply texting STOP to end was actually the solution.
- Plenty of excellent stories from Longreads: The Most Popular Editors’ Picks of the Year and Our Most Popular Stories of the Year
- My friend Steve the Bartender recently did a Christmas Cocktail Special livestream!
- Brilliant: ElevationLab has created an AirTag battery booster that lets you replace the default CR2032 battery with a pair of AA batteries instead, theoretically extending the charge of an AirTag for a decade.
- You’ve got less than a week until the big day, so don’t forget to check out my quick list of easy Christmas gifts for parents.
- This short video on the effects of a smartphone on your child is painfully accurate.
I know you’re getting tired of me talking about Shrinking, but I think it’s important to note that in a series featuring freaking Harrison Ford giving the performance of his career, it’s Ted McGinley – who plays Derek, the neighbor of Jason Segal – who rules the show. (McGinley was also in Happy Days, The Love Boat, and Revenge of the Nerds!)- A Tiny Christian College in Michigan Is Infiltrating Florida’s Schools
- My son and I just happened to be watching TNF and were able to see the NFL’s first successful fair-catch free kick since 1976.
- I adored Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife. Just astounding writing. Beautiful in the best way, including the gut-punch, “In Memory Care, one sees and hears many things one wishes to forget.”
Everything Is Relative
Where does the time go?
- Want 33,000 classic sound effects for free? Check out the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
- I am very much concerned about the many, many, many possible negative consequences of nefarious, incompetent, and/or misguided generative AI. Ruining wikipedia should have been on my bingo card.
- A University College London demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans won an Ig Nobel prize. I always thought blue zones sounded fishy.
- Ugh. Scientists are worried that persisting cognitive issues sparked by COVID-19 may signal a coming surge of dementia and other mental conditions.
- Philip Moscovitch‘s Halifax Examiner article Beyond the Link Tax: Journalism and the Changing Nature of the Internet contains some interesting ideas about potentially taxing megacorporations to subsidize good reporting. But what grabbed me was the line, “Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink […]” Sites like Threads, Instagram, Twitter / X, et.al. have a vested interest in keeping you from leaving. They are, in fact, designed to make it more difficult for you to get to the “rest” of the Internet. I have been occasionally combing through old posts here and it is alarming — for someone who’s been blogging regularly for more than a quarter of a century — how many links simply no longer work. And I’m not talking about links from twenty years ago which should work but don’t (because the site’s gone offline or developers didn’t bother to redirect URLs). I’m talking about links from just a year or two ago. The wayback machine has been a fantastic resource to help me find archived content, but it’s not perfect and it’s grossly underfunded for how important it is to anyone who cares. See also: link rot
- Speaking of being extremely online, you should read Reclaiming Social Media in a Fragmented World. I love the concept of POSSE and it’s been something I’ve really tried to remember the last few years, especially after what’s happened with Twitter.
- On Ghost Networks: Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after twenty-one phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.
- General Stuff
- Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates is fascinating.
- If you go through life free of bad habits, you won’t live forever, but it will feel like it.
- Top Ten Favorite Numbers
- I guess if hanging out with beautiful women, on the beach, in Spain, drinking, on a Tuesday afternoon, while being ridiculously rich is your definition of “cool”, then… yeah, being Leonardo diCaprio is probably fun.
- When you’re old, you have to have something to give you pleasure.
- So what does all this mean if you’re ambidextrous?
- I read Men’s Health and Sports Illustrated all the time. I never read Time or Newsweek. This is why.
- I can’t see any special effects, but I find it hard to believe that this amazing waterslide jump real.
- Coke vs. Pepsi: The truth about the logos.
- About a decade ago I worked for a company that did “every-other-Friday-off” and I thought it was extraordinary.
- Techie Stuff
- The Smoking Gun catches a loser.
- Apple releases Mac OSX 10.5.8 update. If you have a Mac, click the little Apple logo in the top left and choose “Software Update…” to update your system. (This means you, mom.)
- To keep the Google Analytics code from interfering with page rendering you can use jQuery to load and execute the ga.js file.
- PHP comes with a bunch of functions designed to help you manage URLs.
- And speaking of URLs… Comcast will now send you to a crap spam page if you type an URL incorrectly.
- Gator Stuff
- Urban Meyer: This is it.
- The University of Tennessee has some serious issues.
- Welcome back, Riley!
- College Football Preseason Top 25 Power Rankings: Cheerleader Edition
Signs of Aging
I guess I’m safe for now. I could identify with less than 30% of dink’s aging signs. (Although … the fact that I actually grabbed a pen and paper and did the math to figure out that statistic frightens me.)
My Birthday
<blab>Have I mentioned that I will soon be 27? Because that is freaking me way-the-hell-out the more I think about it. I was running past a high school today and there were all these high school kids running track. I was running. They were running. I am seriously not in high school any more. I