Gang Drones swarm FBI hostage raid

Criminals are often at the forefront of new technologies, early adopters at the very least. This piece at Defense One, A Criminal | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Connecticut silk

Did you know Connecticut nearly had a silk production industry? Atlas Obscura has a short history of that silk adventure, from mul | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Divine Discontent

The always pertinent Ben Thompson considers Apple and Amazon (plus Facebook and Google) and how they each focus on customers. He s | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Unknown twisted blood-red squid

Sometimes we must realize that what we know is that we don't know that much. Earlier in April, the Okeanos Explorer crew, a rese | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

New Science from Jupiter

Since Juno's 2016 arrival in orbit of Jupiter, we've been marvelling at the pictures of the astonishing cloud formations and col | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Humble, it means humble!

This won't turn into another GIF (hard G) vs GIF (soft G) battle but it comes as a big surprise to me, just like the soft G did wh | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The Bering Sea’s ice is falling off a cliff

After a much warmer than usual winter, the ice in the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Russia, is at less than 10% of what is cons | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Jeff Bezos sees space as the “only” option to spend his money on

Jeff Bezos is super rich, $131 billion kind of rich. Business wise, an admirable drive, some incredible ideas, and a very forwar | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Facebook announced some things, including Clear history

People at The Verge have taken the time to attend Facebook's F8 and selected the five biggest announcements. Like more Instagram | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Animated sketches to teach drawing

I'm not specifically learning to draw right now but I do love how Ralph Ammer builds his lessons. Split into short exercises, th | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Charging speed is no longer an obstacle for electric cars

There's a lot to learn about and ponder in this thread by Bloomberg Senior Reporter Tom Randall. He talks about how fast upcomin | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Pure CSS Francine

This is kind of nuts. Diana Smith creates CSS-only hand coded "paintings." Here are the rules she sets for herself. | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Awaken Akira

Awaken Akira was created by two friends, Ash Thorp and Zaoeyo (XiaoLin Zeng), who wanted to collaborate on a tribute to the icon | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Eternal text-cities

Sometimes, cities are not only the places where stories happen but characters in and of themselves. Here Tyler Malone explores t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

On Margins 005 with Jason

Jason is a humble guy so I'm not sure he'd post this. Good timing then that he's on vacation and I'm writing here because I will | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Luxurious irony

Apple has been making a number of moves towards becoming more of a luxury and lifestyle brand (including hires from fashion mainst | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

City Everywhere by Liam Young

I had the chance to see this "lecture performance" live a couple of weeks ago and it's a great way to catch up on some | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

15 Patents That Changed the World

Popular Mechanics has a quick look at 15 Patents That Changed the World, including the maglev train from back in 1967, the 3d pr | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A Mobile Tabletop Shape Display for Tangible and Haptic Interaction

We've seen this before with the MIT Media Lab's Tangible Media Group inFORM but that was a (super impressive) table, this one is | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

AIs, predictions and judgment

This Mckinsey piece summarizes some of Ajay Agrawal thinking (and book) on the economics of artificial intelligence. It starts wit | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Cities flowing like liquids or organized like crystals

File this story at Citylab adjacent to concepts like complexity, scale, and fractals. It turns out--according to this research pap | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Twitter history walk threads

One of my favourite Twitter thread style or topic in recent months has been the "history walk." People picking somethi | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Studio Ghibli-style art prints

Dutch art gallery Cook & Becker is releasing a series of high quality art prints taken from the very Studio Ghibli-like game | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Guest editing this week: Patrick Tanguay

[Hello there, everyone. I am off this week (taking two kids to The Wizarding World in Orlando, pray for me, the butterbeer is alco | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Fan of the opera

Your periodic reminder that Christoph Niemann is an unimaginatively imaginative visual storyteller. This image is one of a serie | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

DNA sites show why we need a Hippocratic Oath for data science

A suspect in the Golden State Killer murders has been arrested, based largely on DNA evidence that was apparently obtained in part | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Burn the monster, steal his jokes

Wesley Morris unsurprisingly has written a very good essay about Bill Cosby -- specifically, the ways in which Cosby created and b | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The culinary wonders of MSG

Helen Rosner writes in praise of monosodium glutamate, an umami-rich flavor additive that's been vilified for all the wrong reason | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The Finkbeiner test for gender bias in science writing

In a 2013 piece, Christie Aschwanden suggested a test in the spirit of the Bechdel test for avoiding gender bias in profiles writt | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A side-by-side comparison of the new “unrestored” 2001 with a restored Blu-ray version

This summer for the 50th anniversary of the film, Warner Bros. is releasing a 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey made from the or | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A list of must-read books you don’t have to read

The editors of GQ have compiled a list of 20 notable books that you don't actually have to read, despite their inclusion on variou | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The Face of Distracted Driving

Filmmaker Errol Morris has made a pair of videos for AT&T's It Can Wait campaign against distracted driving, which "kills | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

David Foster Wallace on John McCain’s 2000 Presidential campaign

As I said recently in the newsletter and in my media diet post for March, I've been listening to the audiobook of Consider the Lob | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

An AI can realistically “paint in” missing areas of photographs

This video, and the paper it's based on, is called "Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions" b | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Tuileries, a short film about Paris by the Coen brothers

As part of a larger anthology film called Paris Je T'aime, the Coen brothers directed a short film about a character played by S | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The best title sequences of 2017

I know it's almost May of 2018, but I missed Art of the Title's Top 10 Title Sequences of 2017 when it came out back in January, s | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Self-portraits drawn by David Bowie

From a collection of drawings and paintings done by David Bowie, here are a couple of self-portraits...there are more if you c | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

True facts about frogfish

Proto-YouTuber Ze Frank momentarily steps down from his executive perch at Buzzfeed to get back on the mic for the humorous natu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Four seasons in the life of a Finnish island

Nestled amongst hundreds of stunning shots of the aurora borealis taken by Finnish photographer Jani Ylinampa is a series of fou | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The Design of Childhood

Design? Parenting? Playgrounds? iPads? Architecture? Toys? Probably Lego? Alexandra Lange's upcoming book about "how childr | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

From CGP Grey, an animated version of philosopher Nick Bostrom's The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.Seeing that defeating the tyra | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Philip Glass: “I expected to have a day job for the rest of my life”

I enjoyed reading Lolade Fadulu's interview with Philip Glass about the composer's early life and how he made a living in NYC befo | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

TFW when your outfit perfectly matches land, sea, and sky

I know many photographers have taken similar photos, but August Östberg's Lover in Disguise is a particularly good inst | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls in audio format

Audiobooks for both of the bestselling Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls books will be out in June: book one, book two. The bedti | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Three Identical Strangers

Two men attending the same college in the early 80s kept getting mistaken for each other and when they met, they realized that t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

How to harvest nearly infinite energy from a spinning black hole

Well, this is a thing I didn't know about black holes before watching this video. Because some black holes spin, it's possible t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The last living human link to the 19th century is gone

For the past few years, because of my interest in The Great Span of human history, I've been tracking the last remaining people wh | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The Pigeon Photographer: Aerial photographs from the turn of the century

The New Yorker has some genuinely exciting early aerial photographs, taken by birds. They're excerpts from a new book, The Pigeo | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago