Author name: hubs

To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

Kim Addonizio

Chronophoto Is A Fun Game Where You Guess The Age Of Photographs

Chronophoto

I thoroughly enjoyed playing a few rounds of Chronophoto. It’s is a game in which you guess the dates of five historical photographs. The more accurate your guess, the higher your score. Each photograph has its own set of clues that give away the era — film quality, subject matter, products, uniforms, fashion, vehicles, and colorization,

My scores are all over the board, but after about 5 rounds I got a high score of 3,315. When I was wrong, I was really wrong. I did get a couple of guesses right on the spot – resulting in 1,000 points each – but being wrong is almost more interesting.

Champagne OK


This is a random clip taken from “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” (1976). Whether it’s the botched editing job between “oooo-owwww”, the palpable sense of self-satisfaction Robert Reed exhibits after he’s contained the chaos of bubbly eruption, or the final announcement that the disaster has been averted, this tiny element of film makes me feel ok…Champagne OK! After all, having had your child banished to the purgatory of a giant bubble, wouldn’t you-yourself feel that same sense of ‘victory’ having single-handedly contained an outright onslaught of smaller bubbles?

When I was a very young kid, I remember sitting on the couch next to my mom and loving this movie, yet probably not understanding it at all. I just added this to my netflix queue and can’t wait to see it again for the first time.

Maps of Dune

The First edition, first printing of the science fiction classic “Dune” by Frank Herbert has an unusual map of the stories setting printed on the dust jacket. The linked edition had an opening bid of $6,500 but didn’t sell. I haven’t yet read (or watched) Dune but I’m posting this here for when I do.

Dune map

ht: Nelson Minar

After posting this at reddit I was pointed toward these:

See also: The Most Accurate Maps Of Panem

The Moon Dressed In A Saturn Costume For Christmas Eve

Saturn Moon

Landscape, astro, and adventure photographer Francisco Sojuel took this incredible image of a waning crescent moon pierced by a thin cirrostratus cloud. The image appears as if it is the moon is dressed in a Saturn costume. The dimly lit silhouette of volcano Pacaya and the Guatemalan highlands drape the foreground.

The bottom-facing crescent is lit from below by the sun, just under the horizon, a few hours before sunrise. The image was taken on December 24th, 2019, two days before a solar eclipse, placing the sun almost directly under the moon and compounding the effect. The rest of the moon is lit by ashen glow via a fairly lengthy exposure time.

New Pasta Just Dropped

Cascatelli Pasta
The culmination of Dan Pashman’s three-year passion to invent a new type of pasta shape is now ready to get into your tummy. All of his hard work has paid off with the introduction of the Cascatelli pasta (Italian for “waterfalls”).

Pashman and Sfoglini engineered the new shape to maximize the three main characteristics:

  • Sauceability: How readily sauce adheres to the shape
  • Forkability: How easy it is to get the shape on your fork and keep it there
  • Toothsinkability: How satisfying it is to sink your teeth into it

Bringing the pasta into fruition seems to have been quite the ordeal. Pashman says he spent several thousand dollars and pushed the release of the shape back months, all to add half the thickness of a credit card to its shape, thus increasing the toothsinkability.

Dan has put together a five-part podcast detailing the concept, design, production, and subsequent birth of the new pasta – you can start with the first one here.

You can purchase a box of Cascatelli from Sfoglini. Though supplies appear low and you may need to pre-order.

Longevity Primer

Laura Deming runs the $26 million Longevity Fund – a VC firm dedicated to funding early-stage companies with a high-potential for increasing human lifespans.

Her blog has an interesting primer on longevity and the science behind increasing human lifespans. It’s filled with all kinds of well-referenced facts about things that affect our aging and ability to lead long lives.

10 years ago, one of the first projects I worked on was trying to understand a weird fact about reproduction in worms. If you take little worms and get rid of their gonads (I know, it’s weird), they live ~60% longer than normal. But this only works if you get rid of the stuff inside (sperm/eggs – these worms are hermaphrodites, which means they carry around both). If you get rid of the whole thing, lifespan goes back to normal.

Don’t miss the 95 things that make mice live longer and 70 drugs in the clinic that might make people live longer sections.

Via Oreilly

The David Bowie Book Club

Back in 2013, David Bowie released a list of his top 100 must-read books. It is no secret that the late music icon had an insatiable appetite for learning and enlightenment through reading. As a result, there are some real gems on his list. Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son, announced on Twitter that he’d like to start up an impromptu book club focused on the list. The first choice is Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd

For those of you playing along at home, a deadline of February 1st means you had better get crackin’. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an English copy of Hawksmoore on Amazon for less than $200. Reviews of the book are VERY mixed. It will be interesting to see what the David Bowie Book Club thinks of it. You can follow along on Duncan Jones’ twitter page.

#BowieBookClub

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