2026-10-31 04:19:00
Great Art Explained: Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio. “Even Matisse wasn’t entirely sure what he had created and nobody wanted to buy it.”
2026-10-31 03:11:00
The top 10 paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes. “I feel like Artemisia has actually thought through the logistics of overpowering a grown man and hacking his head off.”
2026-10-31 01:58:00
There are no generalized solutions to the three-body problem. Say you have three planets orbiting each other: it’s impossible to calculate how they will move using Newton’s laws of motion and gravity.
Unlike the two-body problem, the three-body problem has no general closed-form analytic solution. The differential equations that govern the motions of three gravitating bodies are not integrable and cannot be solved to give explicit formulas for the positions of the bodies as a function of time. For most initial conditions, the dynamical system for three orbiting bodies is chaotic, and the only way to predict their motions is to estimate them using numerical methods.
But thousands of stable three-body orbits have been found — their paths repeat after a given interval. The Three Body Orbits website is an atlas of some of those orbits: you can watch each three-body system play itself out in a wide variety of different shapes and complexities. There’s this simple figure 8, this slightly less simple one, and this one that looks like a spirograph.
The site even enables you to search for new stable solutions to the problem in your browser. This is what one of my unsuccessful tests looked like — two of the planets locked in a gravity death spiral while the other one peaces out in the other direction:
2026-10-31 00:45:00
James Bridle on making chairs with LLMs. “What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one.”
2026-10-30 23:25:00
In a late-stage trial, personalized mRNA vaccines for melanoma “reduced the risk of death or recurrence by 42 percent compared to standard treatment”.
2026-10-30 21:42:00
After years in the making (or more accurately, years in the wanting), I finally figured out how I wanted to do search for KDO posts. I’ve been tinkering with this specific implementation since the beginning of the summer and it finally all came together. If you’re a member, please help me to kick the tires on this for a few days. (That link, as well as the search links below, will 404 for non-members for now.)
Hopefully it’s pretty close and then I can open it up to everyone. I’ve been using it for the past week or two and it’s been really helpful so far, especially in surfacing older posts about topics I’m currently writing about or generally interested in. The tag pages are good for that too, but search can help hone in on specifics — like posts I’ve made about fascism or posts that link to McSweeney’s. Search also pulls in results from Quick Links, which aren’t included on tag pages. The rankings still need some work here and there (it’s not magic), but your searches will help calibrate things.
For now, the search only looks at posts from 2014 to the present. You can search by keyword, describe what you remember (“the guy who walks in Japan”), or paste a link to find posts that link to it. Search is fuzzy-ish but it’s not an AI bot or anything like that so if you ramble on with a 25-word query, it’s probably not going to work that well. You can sort by best match or newest, search all posts or just Quick Links or main posts, and filter by time (past month, past 3 months, etc.)
I’ll share more about how search works in a subsequent post. For now, kick the tires and let me know what you think in the comments or via email. As always, bug reports, comments, and suggestions are welcome.
Tags: kottke.org · search