2026-08-18 03:33:00
“Sand temperatures above 29°C now produce 95–99% female sea turtles instead of the historical 50–50 ratio, creating a reproductive bottleneck that could collapse populations within two generations.”
2026-08-18 02:43:00
A.J. Jacobs recently interviewed “the Papa Bear of Puzzling”, Will Shortz and came away with seven lessons he learned from him. “Creativity is usually more about evolution than revolution.”
2026-08-18 01:33:00
Unwinding the Great Tech Power Grab. “If tech seeks to replace democratic governance itself, then the response has to be more democracy, not less.” Lots of related links in this piece too.
2026-08-18 00:18:00
We live in a world of ordinary abundance & luxuries only dreamed of in centuries past: music on demand, photographs, books, eyeglasses, refrigeration, vaccination, bicycles, and the washing machine.
2026-08-17 22:58:00
For TCM, Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou tell us how legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu made the transition to color filmmaking. His first color film was Equinox Flower in 1958 and it took a couple of films for Ozu to work out how to best employ color.
When you watch later Ozu films, you’re struck by how similar two people can be. How often one place resembles another, how life itself is cyclical and Ozu used color as another way to build these patterns.
In the recent post about the supersonic trebuchet, I wrote that if I’d had access to engineering process videos like that when I was a kid, I would have grown up to be an engineer. Well, same thing for Every Frame a Painting: 12-year-old Jason had zero idea how filmmaking worked and videos like theirs would have fired me up to try my hand at it (no idea where I would have gotten a camera though…) Maybe it’s best that I grew up to do what I’m doing, where I can learn a little bit about all of these different fascinating things. 🤷♂️
Tags: color · film school · movies · Taylor Ramos · Tony Zhou · video · Yasujiro Ozu
2026-08-17 21:57:00
Two new episodes of Ric Burns’ 1999 documentary series New York will soon air on PBS. “Produced by the same team that created the original NEW YORK series, The Future of Cities presents a sweeping and dramatic portrait of New York since Sept 11th.”