Shared posts

27 Mar 12:03

Musical Clock Museum in Utrecht

by Aaron Cohen
Merijn

Never need an excuse to share the Wintergatan marble machine

Jason’s only got one rule for guest editors and it’s, “If you’re going to post about Utrecht once, you have to post about Utrecht three times,” which is a bad rule imo and problematic for me because I don’t know anything about Utrecht except they got bones full of drugs there and a doorbell for fish.

Luckily, I am American and did the American thing of texting the only Dutch person I know when I saw the fish doorbell was opening up for the year, because obviously everyone from the Netherlands will already know about the fish doorbell. He didn’t know about the fish doorbell, but he did used to be an intern at the Musical Clock Museum in Utrecht, which is a museum focusing on self-playing instruments and musical clocks. The Museum Speelklok appears to contain the second largest such collection in the world behind the Musical Museum in Brentford, which has them beat on self-playing instruments, though it’s not clear how many musical clocks they’ve got at MM. Regardless, the Utrecht Musical Clock Museum appears delightful and you should visit after visiting the fish doorbell.

Update:
Thanks to Logan and Marc in the comments for pointing me to Wintergatan. The marble machine in the video below is exhibited at Museum Speelklok.

(Jason previously wrote about Martin Molin’s Wintergatan projects in 2020, which were inspired by Martin’s visit to Museum Speelklok in 2016.)

Tags: clocks · Martin Molin · museums · musical instruments · utrecht · Wintergatan

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

26 Mar 13:53

1600-Person Pub Choir Sings Radiohead’s Creep

by Jason Kottke
Merijn

this is amazing, I love that song so much

Pub Choir is an Australia-based organization that gets large crowds singing popular tunes, in three-part harmony no less.

Everybody can sing. Like, not well, but literally. Why should being average at something stop you from doing it!? It hasn’t yet… Singing is good for you, it’s EASY, and Pub Choir is here to show you how.

With a show that is equal parts music, comedy, and beer, Pub Choir is a euphoric sensation that transforms a crowd of tipsy strangers into a legendary choir.

By the end of the show the YOU will be belting out a popular song in three-part harmony.

In the video above, they get a crowd of 1600 people signing Creep by Radiohead. Beautiful.

You can find more of their performances on their YouTube channel, including Tina Turner’s The Best, Africa by Toto, and Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty.

See also Choir! Choir! Choir! and their performances of Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U and David Byrne singing David Bowie’s Heroes. (thx, matthew)

Tags: music · Pub Choir · Radiohead · remix · video

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

26 Mar 13:49

The sights and sounds of various video game systems being switched on,...

by Jason Kottke
Merijn

I did not expect the Xbox 'bloo-pee-dee' to trigger goosebumps as much as it did XD

The sights and sounds of various video game systems being switched on, from the Atari 2600 up to the newest systems. The nostalgia! I hadn’t heard the NES power button sound in 20 years but it was instantly recognizable.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

26 Mar 13:19

U.S. sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones

by Andy Baio
The Verge is pulling all the news and updates into a single stream #
26 Mar 12:46

Henry Heffernan’s homepage

by Andy Baio
can your portfolio run DOOM? #
22 Mar 13:54

Having A Ball With The Client

by Not Always Right

Read Having A Ball With The Client

Me: "Hello, [Client], this is [My Name]. I wanted to—"
Client: "Finally, he responds! I have an emergency here, and you've been AWOL! This is not the level of service I expect and—"

Read Having A Ball With The Client

20 Mar 12:14

Persistence of vision in black-and-white noise

by Andy Baio
an interesting effect used in the 2007 game Lost in the Static #
20 Mar 11:27

I Put 4 Million Suns in a Black Hole Over New York

by Jason Kottke

Using a scale model of the solar system the size of New York City and some dazzling visual effects, Epic Spaceman explains that black holes are generally smaller than you might think (because they’re so dense) — even the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. But when you consider some of the biggest black holes we’ve discovered…wow.

Tags: astronomy · black holes · physics · science · video

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

19 Mar 15:43

Bluesky begins limited data federation

by Andy Baio
you can now, with some effort and their approval, self-host your own Personal Data Server that contains your account, data, and signing keys #
19 Mar 15:36

Michael Tan plays a palindromic duet with himself

by Andy Baio
shot in one take and exactly the same when played backwards #
18 Mar 15:02

A “hypervaccinated” man voluntarily received 217 Covid vaccine shots in a 29-month...

by Jason Kottke
Merijn

The fictional strawman commonly used by antivaxxers actually exists! And thankfully he's healthy and does not have molasses-like blood, hahaha

A “hypervaccinated” man voluntarily received 217 Covid vaccine shots in a 29-month period. He’s shown no signs of ever having Covid and has suffered no side effects. “The researchers found that his immune system was fully functional.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

18 Mar 14:50

Beer Me, Obi-Wan!

by Jason Kottke

When the Star Wars films aired in Chile, instead of cutting away from the movie for commercial breaks, the TV station “seamlessly” inserted ads for Cerveza Cristal beer. We’re talking Obi-Wan opening a chest to find a lightsaber for Luke and instead it reveals a ice-chest full of beer. Or the Emperor Force-reaching for a lightsaber and a can of beer flies into his hand. And of course the whole thing has turned into a meme.

Tags: advertising · Chile · movies · Star Wars · video

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

18 Mar 14:48

Cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit Sung in Classical Latin

by Jason Kottke

This is so highbrow that it’s looped back around to being lowbrow: a cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit sung in classical Latin.

Sine lúce, angor minus
Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus
Mé sentió aeger, stultus
Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus
Barbarus, albínus, culex et, mea libídó
Hei! Hae, ha ha ha ha!

See also Bardcore: Medieval-Style Covers of Pop Songs. (via open culture)

Tags: language · Latin · music · Nirvana · remix · video

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

18 Mar 14:16

Very moving article about Trikafta, the “miracle” cystic fibrosis drug, and some...

by Edith Zimmerman

Very moving article about Trikafta, the “miracle” cystic fibrosis drug, and some of the lives it’s affecting.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

18 Mar 11:36

“Sometimes it’s desperate because I can’t touch someone, my hands don’t move,...

by Edith Zimmerman

“Sometimes it’s desperate because I can’t touch someone, my hands don’t move, and no one touches me except in rare occasions, which I cherish.” Extraordinary obituary for lawyer and author Paul Alexander.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

18 Mar 11:28

Short interview with a seismologist who has debunked a Harvard astrophysicist’s claim...

by Jason Kottke
Short interview with a seismologist who has debunked a Harvard astrophysicist’s claim that an alien artifact was found on Earth. “One, if you want to do seismic analysis, it’s ideal if you check with a seismologist first. The other is, it’s not aliens.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

11 Mar 09:33

Error'd: Time for more leap'd years

by Lyle Seaman
Merijn

Some lovely Leap Day errors

Inability to properly program dates continued to afflict various websites last week, even though the leap day itself had passed. Maybe we need a new programming language in which it's impossible to forget about timezones, leap years, or Thursday.

Timeless Thomas subtweeted "I'm sure there's a great date-related WTF story behind this tweet" Gosh, I can't imagine what error this could be referring to.

date

 

Data historian Jonathan babbled "Today, the 1st of March, is the start of a new tax year here and my brother wanted to pull the last years worth of transactions from a financial institution to declare his taxes. Of course the real WTF is that they only allow up to 12 months." I am not able rightly to apprehend the confusion of ideas that could provoke such an error'd.

leap

 

Ancient Matthew S. breathed a big sigh of relief on seeing this result: "Good to know that I'm up to date as of 422 years ago!"

05

 

Jaroslaw gibed "Looks like a translation mishap... What if I didn't knew English?" Indeed.

vlsc

 

Hardjay vexillologist Julien casts some shade without telling us where to direct our disdain "I don't think you can have dark mode country flags..." He's not wrong.

flag

 

[Advertisement] Continuously monitor your servers for configuration changes, and report when there's configuration drift. Get started with Otter today!
05 Mar 12:46

The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped. “I think of the Supreme Court...

by Jason Kottke
The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped. “I think of the Supreme Court the way Batman thinks of Superman: an extremely powerful being who is untethered from the laws of physics and therefore must always be considered a threat to free society.”
04 Mar 13:57

Studies have shown that people who ride e-bikes get more exercise than...

by Jason Kottke
Studies have shown that people who ride e-bikes get more exercise than those who ride pedal bikes. “Researchers have discovered that when riders find it less grueling, they tend to go on longer rides.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

04 Mar 08:36

Triple-D Levels Of YIKES

by Not Always Right
Merijn

LMAO

Read Triple-D Levels Of YIKES

Client: “I look great! Is there any way you can make my breasts a little larger, though?”

Read Triple-D Levels Of YIKES

01 Mar 13:09

NATO

28 Feb 11:54

A huge study of more than 99 million people confirms the safety...

by Jason Kottke
Merijn

I saw this study earlier this week in a clickbait headline to a paywalled article, and I immediately suspected that the risk of two 'very dangerous side-effects' were neglegible. Good to see a proper article about the study.

28 Feb 11:43

“How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold”

by Jason Kottke

Ross Andersen for the Atlantic on the effort to talk to sperm whales using AI tech:

Their codas could be orders of magnitude more ancient than Sanskrit. We don’t know how much meaning they convey, but we do know that they’ll be very difficult to decode. Project CETI’s scientists will need to observe the whales for years and achieve fundamental breakthroughs in AI. But if they’re successful, humans could be able to initiate a conversation with whales.

This would be a first-contact scenario involving two species that have lived side by side for ages. I wanted to imagine how it could unfold. I reached out to marine biologists, field scientists who specialize in whales, paleontologists, professors of animal-rights law, linguists, and philosophers. Assume that Project CETI works, I told them. Assume that we are able to communicate something of substance to the sperm whale civilization. What should we say?

One of the worries about whale/human communication is the potential harm a conversation might cause.

Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, a law professor at NYU who is advising Project CETI, told me that whatever we say, we must avoid harming the whales, and that we shouldn’t be too confident about our ability to predict the harms that a conversation could cause.

The sperm whales may not want to talk. They, like us, can be standoffish even toward members of their own species-and we are much more distant relations. Epochs have passed since our last common ancestor roamed the Earth. In the interim, we have pursued radically different, even alien, lifeways.

Really interesting article.

Tags: artificial intelligence · language · Ross Andersen · whales

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

28 Feb 09:37

tea.xyz causes a flood of spam pull requests to open source projects

A light green ASCII-art teacup formed from various characters, followed by "tea"

This crypto skeptic I've heard of once said "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."

A project called tea.xyz promised people they could "get rewards for [their] open-source contributions", complete with a flashy website describing how it would "enhance the sustainability of open-source software".

So far, it's achieved the exact opposite. Promising to reward open source contributors with crypto tokens, the project asked users to verify their access to open source projects by merging in a YAML file containing their crypto wallet address. This kicked off a flood of pull requests to prominent, often non-crypto-related open source projects by people who had never contributed to the project (or, often, any open source project), but who wished to merge in a file describing them as a "code owner".

Particularly impacted by this project was the open source blogging platform Ghost, which was used as an example in the demo video released by tea.xyz, and which received several PRs of this kind. A somewhat flummoxed maintainer of the repository replied to one PR: "[I]n practice the TEA project is not helping to support the Ghost project, but is instead causing a rush of self-serving PRs to be submitted to cash-in on other people's work. ... This why people hate on crypto." A maintainer of another unrelated open source project called "ghost" also reported receiving an influx of spam PRs.

This is not the first time crypto has generated massive Github spam, although another recent incident was (blessedly) mostly limited to open-source crypto projects and didn't waste the time of non-crypto-related projects as this one has.

26 Feb 11:48

DeezNutz_404 hacked for $170,000

I might otherwise skip over news of a $170,000 hack, given how commonly thefts of that scale happen in the crypto world, but with a name like this... come on.

One thing that keeps me from ever trying my hand as a crypto project hacker is that if I made $170,000 from exploiting a project called "DeezNutz_404", I would immediately be caught because I wouldn't be able to resist telling everyone I know that I'd just made enough money to not have to work for a couple years by exploiting deez nuts.

Anyway, there was a bug in their code that allowed an attacker to mint infinite tokens and steal around 58.65 ETH (~$170,000).

26 Feb 11:32

Xbox confirms Sea of Thieves, Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded, and Pentiment for rival platforms

Sea of Thieves, Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded, and Pentimen are heading to rival platforms
26 Feb 11:30

iO's unobtainable Xbox achievements finally fixed after seven years

Merijn

Amazing success story from Project Resero.

After seven years, two unobtainable achievements in iO have finally been fixed...
16 Feb 13:02

Kids playing football are doing the “Brexit tackle”, which means taking out...

by Jason Kottke
Kids playing football are doing the “Brexit tackle”, which means taking out the player without getting the ball while yelling “Brexit means Brexit”. “You have to admit, there’s something very funny about one child barking ‘Brexit means Brexit!’ to another in a muddy park.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

16 Feb 12:28

How The Cut’s financial advice columnist was scammed out of $50,000 cash

by Andy Baio
Merijn

Amazing story that screams 'THIS IS A SCAM' at almost every step, yet the author ignored all warnings.

the lesson I'm taking from all these recent scam stories is to never answer the phone #
16 Feb 12:26

Signs Your Client Might Be A Supervillain

by Not Always Right
Merijn

Great punchline to this one

Read Signs Your Client Might Be A Supervillain

Client: “I hate it. Looking at it hurts my eyes.”

Read Signs Your Client Might Be A Supervillain