Crash Course Pods: The Universe.

A podcast series I have thoroughly enjoyed is The Universe, hosted by John Green and Dr. Katie Mack. Over the course of 11 episodes they cover A LOT–exploring the very beginning of our universe, the formation of galaxies, stars, planets, dark matter, the origins of life, the possible existence of other forms of life in the universe, etc.

I enjoy all things astronomy and it was a really great, well-done series. There is a lot of personal meaning to glean from the episodes and the series as a whole and is definitely worth a listen.

The last 15 minutes of the last episode, aptly named How It All Ends, was especially great. As I’ve gotten older, I’m growing more appreciative of the moments and experiences in my life. I’m trying to experience more. Trying to be in the moment and appreciate all of my opportunities, more. Trying to bring joy and delight to others, more. Trying to help others, more. If you haven’t listened to the series and wondering what all of this has to do with a show about the universe, there’s a lot of meaning in our place in the universe.

Seattle’s ‘Almost Live!’ cast: Where are they now | The Seattle Times

I watched a lot of Almost Live when I was a teen. It was Seattle’s own SNL and something special, unique to the area and culture. So glad to read that many of the regular performers saw continued success after the show.

End of the Road: An AnandTech Farewell

The news of AnandTech coming to an end is the end of a website from my early internet. There are a lot of websites from the early internet that I followed and that have ended or disappeared, but there are few that I will remember as fondly as AnandTech.

In the late 1990’s and through the mid-2000’s, AnandTech was a site that I visited almost daily. It was one of the best tech news websites as it was updated daily and it had one of the best communities/forums for other tech-news obsessed people, like myself. It was in the AnandTech forums that I found that others were commenting and weighing-in on everything from the latest tech news, different and experimental operating systems, and a host of other topics not related to tech. For awhile there, it was really a great online community to belong. It was in those forums that I found that others were overclocking their CPU’s in attempts to get more performance out of their PC’s and I caught the bug of pushing my PC hardware to its limits.

It was always the quality of the articles on AnandTech–the writing, photography, in-depth research, comparisons, benchmarks, testing, etc.–that pulled me in as a daily reader. It was that level of quality that I feel set the bar for all tech news and review sites that followed–Engadget, The Verge, etc.

In those days, it seemed like every week the technology was advancing so fast that if you didn’t stay up to date you’d miss out on what was the latest technology. In hindsight, it may be because of how closely that I followed the news and forums on AnandTech that I upgraded my PC every year between 1998 and 2005 just to be on the bleeding edge.

At some point in the mid-2000’s, PC’s got to be fast enough and the need to stay ahead and informed of the latest and best technology waned for me. The PC that I built in 2005 was powerful enough to hold me over 2-3 years. It seemed like the advances in CPU speed and PC technologies were incremental year-over-year and at the same time, my PC needs were leveling out. In the last 10 years, I’ve only upgraded my PC twice and in both instances, I read the reviews of the CPU’s, motherboards, GPU’s, and other components on AnandTech (and other websites) that helped inform my purchase.

Finally, I’d like to end this piece with a comment on the Cable TV-ification of the web. A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o’clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content…

Besides today’s article on AnandTech, I couldn’t tell you the last article or forum post I read on AnandTech. If I had to guess, it would have been a GPU review in the last two years. To be fair, I couldn’t tell you about the latest tech article I’ve read on The Verge, Ars Technica, etc., either. However, I could tell you about MKBHD’s Google Pixel 9 review, his iPhone 15 review, or his car reviews. MKBHD is one of the few tech channels that I follow for his quality, attention to detail, professionalism, etc. I can also point to people I follow on Threads and Mastodon and sub-Reddit’s where I know I can read up on a topic or get honest takes and reviews. All independent and none of them affiliated with AnandTech.

AnandTech had a great run.

From kottke’s 52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023:

• 2. “If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport.”
• 3. Purple Heart medals that were made for the planned (and then cancelled) invasion of Japan in 1945 are still being given out to wounded US military personnel.
• 14. Hurricanes don’t cross the equator.
• 22. Multicellular life developed on Earth more than 25 separate times.
• 26. Colorado is not a rectangle — it actually has 697 sides.
• 27. Horseshoe crabs are older than Saturn’s rings.
• 29. Humans have pumped so much groundwater out of the ground that it’s changed the tilt of the Earth’s axis 31.5 inches to the east.
• 37. I cannot believe this is the first I’ve heard of this: in the original Super Mario Bros., you can continue where you left off in the last game by holding A down when you press Start.
  (a personal note: I found this infuriating that I’m only finding out about this in my 40’s)
• 44. The rarest single-game event in baseball is not the perfect game but hitting two grand slams in one inning, which has only been done once in more than 235,000 games.
• 45. Crab-like bodies have evolved at least five separate times in the past 250 million years.
  (a personal note: I think we were maybe intended to evolve to be intelligent crabs)

Also linked from kottke: Tom Whitehall’s 52 Things I Learned in 2023:

• 4. A ‘payola’ guitar is an electric guitar with four pickups and four output sockets, so that 1950s session players could get paid four times while playing one solo. [Allen St John]
• 5. Job satisfaction in the US is at a 35-year-high. In 2010, less than 45% of people said they were satisfied with their jobs. In 2022, over 62% said they were, and you need to go back to the 80s to find satisfaction as high as today. Big gains come from work/life balance and the performance review process. [Emily Peck]
  (a personal note: I’m still trying to wrap my head around this given the industry I work in (non-profit) and coming off the 2021-22 Great Recession.)
• 7. 1 in 5 people currently have a disability. 100% of people will have some form of disability in their lifetime. [Jim Nielsen]
  (a personal note: this is one of my biggest fears in life and getting older in age and discovering new pains, stiffness, tiredness, etc. isn’t helping my anxiety about this…)
• 16. In the 19th Century, champagne was sweetened depending on local tastes. Russians had 300 grams of sugar added, the British just 50 grams. In 1842 Perrier-Jouët introduced unsweetened champagne. It failed and people called it ‘Brut’, but that’s how all champagne tastes today. [Chris Mercer & Karen MacNeil]
• 31. Washboard sales went up 57% during the pandemic, inspired by “fears of societal collapse and limited laundry service”, although 40% are sold as percussion instruments. [Kris Maher]
• 32. Only 28 books sold more than 500,000 copies in the US in 2022. Eight of them were by romance novelist Colleen Hoover. [Jason Colvato]
  (a personal note: half a million seems like a low threshold to clear–are we not buying and reading books anymore?)
• 43. 2,529 individuals were offered a free online subscription to their local newspaper worth $45. Only 44 subscribed. [Daniel J. Hopkins]
  (a personal note: are we, as a society, not reading any more?)

Also linked from kottke: NY Times: 20 Things That Happened for the First Time in 2023:

• 2. Cells from two male mice produce live offspring.
• 5. Scientists successfully extract rocks from Earth’s mantle.
• 15. Microplastics are found in the clouds.

Also linked from kottke: Kent Hendricks: 52 things I learned in 2023:

• 1. Every iron object made before 1200 BC came from meteorites. (“Bronze Age iron: Meteorite or not? A chemical strategy”)
• 2. Santa’s reindeer are all female. Male reindeer don’t start growing antlers until February, so any reindeer with antlers hauling goods on Christmas Eve wouldn’t be male. (FDA)
• 5. One reason the United States didn’t adopt the metric system was because the ship crossing the Atlantic from France carrying a standard kilogram—yes, a real physical object—requested by Thomas Jefferson in 1793 was blown off course into the Caribbean and captured by pirates. (“How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America’s Metric System”)
• 17. There have been 80,000 recorded UFO sightings since 1906. Four-fifths of extraterrestrials have chosen to visit the United States and likely speak English. (source)
• 22. When a Walmart Supercenter opens in a town, average grocery prices drop 3%, but competitor revenue drops 16% and average income declines 10% in five years. (“Walmart Supercenters and Monopsony Power: How a Large, Low-Wage Employer Impacts Local Labor Markets”)
• 23. The maximum size of a PDF is 381km × 381km, roughly half the size of Germany. (Hacker News)
• 27. Food deserts are caused by lack of demand, not lack of supply. There’s a common assumption that food deserts don’t exist because grocery stores avoid certain neighborhoods. But that’s not actually true: food deserts exist because certain neighborhoods don’t want them. (“Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality”)
  (a personal note: I’m still trying to wrap my head around this. Probably because I’ve been told/have read the opposite for so long.)
• 29. Tic Tacs are labeled as sugar free even though they are 94% sugar. As long as there’s less than half a gram of sugar, the FDA permits products to be labeled sugar free. Each Tic Tac has 0.49 grams of sugar. (“The Sneaky Reason Why Tic Tacs Can Say ‘Sugar Free’ (When They Really Aren’t)”)
  (a personal note: I’ve read this before, but it still bothers me. Each Tic Tac has 5g of sugar.)
• 39. Birds are evolving smaller eyes to adapt to the brightness of cities at night. For two species, the Northern Cardinal and Carolina Wren, the eyes of birds in San Antonio are 5% smaller than their rural counterparts. (“Urban Light Pollution Linked to Smaller Eyes in Birds”)
• 45. In areas where people are more likely to divorce, birds are more likely to split up, too! There’s a strong geographic correlation between several human and animal behaviors, including distances traveled, population density, male parental involvement, age of first reproduction, food hoarding, and even divorce. (“Local convergence of behavior across species”)

Also from kottke, The Atlantic: 81 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2023:

• 1. Mars has seasons, and in the winter, it snows.
• 10. You have two noses, and you can control them separately via your armpits.
• 28. The same molecule that makes cat urine smell like cat urine is, in lower concentrations, commonly used in air fresheners and household cleaners.
• 35. A Dutch man and his family have a perplexing brain condition called “color agnosia”: They can see colors, but they cannot name them.
• 42. One of Saturn’s moons likely has a habitable ocean.
• 46. During the original run of Seinfeld, the show’s costumers had a hard time sourcing the clothing for Kramer’s wardrobe because his quirky style had become so popular with the general public that they were buying up all of the vintage clothing that made up his look.
• 56. Reports of pediatric melatonin overdoses have increased by 530 percent over the past decade.

How Rubber Bands Are Made.

This was a blast from the past…back in the early-mid 1990’s, when I lived in Yokosuka, at least once a month, I took the time to ride my bike to a stationary store that was off the Navy base to pick up a couple of boxes of O’Band rubber bands to use to wrap my newspapers. Each box was about $10 USD and they were worth it. They were the absolute best in terms of quality and durability–they could be used to wrap a daily paper and also the Sunday edition with all of the extra content and ads.

I remember one lady who kept all of the rubber bands and returned them to me when I came to collect monthly payments. The rubber bands were so good that they could be used multiple times.

Kottke.org Is 25 Years Old Today and I’m Going to Write About It

Back in 1997, 0sil8 was one of the first websites I stumbled upon in the early days of having an internet connection. During those early days, I became very interested in the world wide web and web design and I remember 0sil8 being one of my bookmarks and a site that I would frequently check for updates. About a year later, kottke.org launched and reading Jason’s blog has been a permanent part of my web browsing/consumption routine for the last 25 years.

It’s pretty incredible what I have learned and been exposed to about so much in the world because of what Jason has discovered or found interesting and shared on his website. More than any encyclopedia, more than any library–kottke.org

HBO Cancels ‘Westworld’ in Shock Decision – The Hollywood Reporter

I just recently completed season 4 of Westworld and enjoyed it (and I think I mostly understood what was happening). While it’s unfortunate they won’t get an additional season to wrap it all up with a bow, Season 4 managed to stick the landing for the season and the series.

William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With Sadness – Variety.

but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold…all I saw was death.

I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.

Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe.

I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna…things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind.

Best Jim Carrey Movies & Performances Ranked – Variety

What a career Jim Carrey has had. It’s fun seeing him in the movies my kids have grown-up with and love: Sonic, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Grinch, to name a few. It’s also been fun to show them some of the movies that made him famous: Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber.

My top 5 Jim Carrey movies:

#5. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
#4. The Mask
#2. Dumb and Dumber and The Truman Show (tie)
#1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Mozilla stops accepting cryptocurrency, Wikipedia may be next: Are dominos falling? – TechRepublic

As of this writing, a single transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain eats up the same amount of energy as the average US household in a 77.8-day, or roughly two and a half month, period. Ethereum, though nowhere near as large, still eats up the same amount of energy that a US household does in 8 days.