August Roundup
Below are things I’ve learned or found interesting in the past month:
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Snippet of 100 elementary schoolers vs the Japan national soccer team
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Hidden messages in 1 million checkboxes
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Solar panel train tracks
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Arthur from the most recent Tick adaptation reviewed a bunch of themed food at Disneyland Paris (skip to Griffin Newman’s French Cuisine Spotlight).
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I shared this piece about storageback in March, but I’ve been thinking about it again recently. I saw a post recently (that I of course cannot find now) where someone framed getting rid of things as “Free storage that has a cost to retrieve them (repurchasing)”. Get rid of your cables and screws, they said. Home Depot will keep all the screws you need for a low yearly fee. I like when a conventional framing is twisted on its head, and I’m always a fan of intentional moves away from consumerism and towards minimalism.
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This 2025 opinion piece about ending street parking in Toronto.
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Extremely related, ever since seeing this illustration by Karl Jilg, I’ve been acutely away of how much land is dedicatd for car. It’s a lot! (no pun intended)
9. Extremely, extremely related, this paper on urban sprawl
Our results show that there are approximately 2.2 parking spaces per registered vehicle, that parking lots make up more than 6.57% of the total urban footprint in this county, that the area of parking lots exceeded the area of parks in the city limits by a factor of three and that parking lot runoff and pollutants are significant compared to runoff and pollutants from these areas prior to their conversion to parking lots.
10. Astronomers Find an Atmosphere on a Nearby Earthlike Planet
11. You can find my reviews for every video game I’ve finished since 2018.
12. The word “escalate” comes from the word escalator. Granted, the escalator was named due to the existing noun escalade.
13. Miriam Webster will show what words are from a given year. Check your birth year and be surprised.
14. Different Trains by Steve Reich, a composition of music made by sampling, well. You know.
15. I love translators’ notes, and Emily Wilson’s On Complicated is compelling in writing and in the argument it makes.
16. Paul Krugman, Slate, on babysitting as a metaphor for the economy broadly.
17. I’m not sure how to describe Every Noise at Once, except to say that it’s sort of like an atlas of musical genres where you can be exposed to music you otherwise would never encounter organically.
18. Locals and Tourists, a visualization of which parts of big cities are photogrpahed by, well, you know.
19. I saw this lego cat recently
Which is relevant because of this article about the history of Lego instruction manuels.
20. Loomis Diaries
21. How do these wizards know each other?
22.\ Including this blog post about TTRPG taxonomy partially because it introduces some useful concepts, and partially because it heavily features wrok by friend of the blog Asa Donald.
23. Experimental History on “thick” art, including here for the usefulness of the phrase “book-shaped object.” I’m always talking about the difference between wanting to (e.g.) write a book and wanting to have written a book. I know at least one person who has used a chatbot to get the satisfaction of the latter. 🙄
(I wrote the above paragraph before finishing the article, only to find that Adam was masterfully leading me to the same conclusion.)
24. The Ars-Notoria, a magical book that might be full of demons?
Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning.