2026-01-13 05:44:59
“I feel stuck and sad and I don’t know what else to do.” Yeah, same.
2026-01-13 04:39:46
Bees use polarized sunlight scattered by the atmosphere in order to navigate; they always know where the sun is, even if it’s cloudy or behind a mountain. Then they waggle dance to inform their hive-mates about food source locations.
So if a bee wants to fly straight towards the sun, it waggles straight up the hive. If the food is 30° away from that polarization line, it waggles 30° away from vertical. If the food is directly away from the sun, it waggles downward.
And the distance they should fly is encoded on how long the waggle lasts. It depends on the species of bee, but a waggle of about 1 second means about a kilometer away. So a 45° waggle for about 0.6 seconds means fly at 45° angles from the sun polarization line for about 600 meters.
The bee repeats this waggle dance over and over. And the more excited the dance, the better the food source. And if other bees verify it and perform the same dance, the signal gets amplified until the whole hive knows where to go.
As shown in this video, it’s possible to construct an optical compass using polarized filters in order to wayfind like the bees. Pretty cool! (via damn interesting)
2026-01-13 03:46:32
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. “This page contains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games.”
2026-01-13 02:35:11
Out of the 1000 most-discussed books on Hacker News, it looks like around 50 of them were written by women.
2026-01-13 01:25:18
Just wanted to drop a quick note to say that kottke.org moved servers over the weekend. You shouldn’t have noticed anything, except perhaps that the site is faster now. There was a small issue with the RSS feed after the migration, but that’s been resolved. If you notice anything amiss, drop me a line?
As always, big thanks to the crew at Arcustech for their rock-solid hosting and prompt tech support expertise.
Tags: kottke.org
2026-01-13 00:55:24
A wreck on the Lehigh Valley trackage in South Somerville, NJ circa 1918. (via shorpy)