#Kottke

Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business, Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditions — ultra-dark skies (Class 1 on th

India’s Hottest District Shuts at 10 AM as Mercury Breaches 48 Degrees Celsius Mark. “After 10am, Banda becomes deserted. At first, you see one or two people outside. Then, as the day rises, there is

Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live. Among the buildings are a school in Mass., a hospital in Rwanda, a prison in Norway, and a lighthouse in Maine. Intrigu

A pep talk in the face of despair. “Things can always get better, but it doesn’t happen via inertia. It happens because a lot of people tried.”

Jamelle Bouie writes that each US president molds the presidency in his own image and Trump has constructed a “government as protection racket and the president as mob boss”.1 So what manner of pre

You Can Make an App for That. “The most important thing you’ll need is taste. Not objectively good taste, necessarily, so much as a keen sense of your own.”

From Universe Today, an ongoing series of articles on A Brief-ish History of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Part I is entitled “Where is Everybody?”

Contemporary pop artist fnnch’s essay on How to Make a Living as an Artist is pretty great. Lots in here that resonates with my experience of turning a creative hobby (KDO) into a business. Mos

This scan isn’t very good (best I could find), but these are all the lightsabers used by Jedi and Sith in the various Star Wars shows and movies. I think this is from a few years ago, so I’m not s

Interesting observation by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant and Ghostty) on how a company’s or product’s choice of programming language matters less in the age of agentic programming: On the

At Long Last, I Have Maxximized My Looks. “Apparently, eating a fistful of iguana tranquilizers for breakfast every morning has turned me cold-blooded, and I am no longer appropriately adapted for lif

Free admission to Canadian national parks this summer! “From June 19 to September 7, no fees apply for: admission for all visitors to all national historic sites, national parks, and national marine c

Trump Destroyed USAID. Now People Are Dying. “Everyone, especially in South Sudan, wanted to know if the US really had cut off aid. It was easier for them to believe that the aid organizations were ly

“US is ‘simply choosing not to stop’ Ebola outbreak after massive public health cuts.” Just so fucking stupid and maddening and wasteful and dangerous and callous and evil.

Wow, BBC Earth has posted this three-hour-long video to YouTube of David Attenborough narrating Unbelievable Moments From Nature. I’ve had it on in the background for the last little while as I’m

One of the questions on The Colbert Questionert that Stephen Colbert would administer to his celebrity guests was “What number am I thinking of?” As you can see from this compilation, his answer was o

The Secret to Winning on Jeopardy. “To win on Jeopardy, you don’t need to learn everything. You just need to learn one thing about everything.” As an proficient player of Yell Answers At The TV Jeopar

Water World, created by Seán Doran from imagery captured by a NASA/NOAA weather satellite, is a gorgeous, swirling, painterly portrait of the Earth’s dynamic atmosphere. Doran calls it “a meditati

“A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked

“A woozle effect…occurs when frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence misleads individuals, groups and the public into thinking or believing there is evidence, and non-facts becom