2026-04-10 06:45:00
I’m charmed by this fragment of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of Mary Magdalene that’s up for auction later this month.
For many years it was in a private collection in Germany where it lay rolled up in a cellar. The head of the saint had been cut out of the canvas, under circumstances that remain unclear, in an incident most probably linked to the chaos and looting of postwar Berlin.
Like the empty picture frames at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the rectangular hole in the painting invites the viewer to imagine what became of its former contents. Where is Magdalene’s head & shoulders now? Did it get framed as its own painting? Is it still hanging in someone’s house or tucked away in someone’s attic? Will it be reunited with the rest of the painting someday?
Btw, this painting is a copy of another of Gentileschi’s previous works, which hangs in the Pitti Palace in Florence. There are some differences between the two paintings, but at least we know what the area inside that hole looks like, mostly.
Tags: art · Artemisia Gentileschi
2026-04-10 06:01:57
Between the Impossible and the Inevitable: The Case for Defiance (aka Never F**king Surrender). “We make the future in the present, when we show up. Don’t surrender it to those who would destroy it.”
2026-04-10 05:12:18
Hostile Volume is a simple and maddening game where you need to hold the audio volume at 25%, which gets increasingly difficult with each level.
2026-04-10 04:38:58
International Chess Federation Adds Race Car Piece. “The race car piece gets to go twice in one turn because it’s so fast.” Smart to capitalize on F1’s popularity; they should do my fave Monopoly piece next (the iron).
2026-04-10 01:30:00
Bill Hammack, aka The Engineer Guy, is an amazing engineering educator and in this video he explains how duct tape is designed to simultaneously do three things well: “a) adhere with light pressure, b) stay in place, yet c) be removable”.
Controlling the stickiness of tape is of utmost importance. In fact, a key element of engineering tape is controlling its stickiness — and only by doing that can tape be wound into a useful roll. If the tape sticks too tightly to itself, we could not use it.
Gotta be honest: I was not expecting Silly Putty to make a relevant guest appearance during his explanation. And I love the ramp & ball test for tape stickiness near the end…a very elegant and simple bit of engineering:
Pressure sensitive tape predates much of the most elementary molecular understanding of adhesion; tape has been mass produced since the early twentieth century. That engineers developed and refined tape without this knowledge is no surprise — recall that the purpose of the engineering method is to solve problems before we have full scientific knowledge.
Tags: Bill Hammack · design · engineering · science · video
2026-04-10 00:45:13
Someone ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii. “Since its launch in 2007, the Wii has seen several operating systems ported to it: Linux, NetBSD, and most-recently, Windows NT. Today, Mac OS X joins that list.”