We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read. “This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.” ? Join the discussion on kottke.org ..read more

A lovely essay: Variations on the Theme of Silence. “I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.” ? Join the discussion on kottke.org ..read more

Seabike is an “underwater mobility device” that can propel you through the water at “superhuman speed”. You pedal with your feet, driving a small propellor. ? Join the discussion on kottke.org ..read more

NASA used one of their supercomputers to model what it would look like if you flew into a supermassive black hole. (You can watch the simulation in a 360° view on YouTube. I bet it looks great on a VR rig like Apple Vision Pro.) The movies begin with the camera located nearly 400 million miles (640 million kilometers) away, with the black hole quickly filling the view. Along the way, the black hole’s disk, photon rings, and the night sky become increasingly distorted — and even form multiple images as their light traverses the increasingly warped space-time. In real time, the camera takes ab ..read more

A neat technique to rebuild roads using a movable temporary bridge — traffic goes over and the work happens in the shade. ? Join the discussion on kottke.org ..read more

A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair. “Learning to fix bicycles has changed my outlook on manual labor, on the nature of work, and ultimately on life itself.” ? Join the discussion on kottke.org ..read more

Here are a couple newish lyric videos that share a nice spirit of “Good riddance!!!”-ness. I learned of the Chappell Roan video from a comment in a post from earlier this week (comment of the week?? by my standards, anyway), and I love it. (Here’s Roan’s awesome Tiny Desk Concert, by the way.) And the Miranda Lambert reminds me of a specific situation in my own life and makes me smile. ?? Tags: Chappell Roan · lyric videos · Miranda Lambert · music · video ? Join the discussion on kottke.org ..read more

AI Copilots Are Changing How Coding Is Taught; they can “free up time for us to teach higher-level thinking — for example, how to design software, what is the right problem to solve, and what are the solutions.” ? Join the discussion on kottke.org ..read more

Some tips for long walks. “We’re prone to lean forward when we walk. Over long distances, this wreaks havoc on one’s lower back and hips. As such, ‘head over hips’ is something to be conscious of.” ? Join the discussion on kottke.org ..read more

If you play carefully by not stomping enemies, not collecting coins, not eating mushrooms or flowers, and hopping on the flagpole at the very last second, you can rescue the princess in Super Mario Bros with only 500 points. One bit is surprisingly tricky: How tough is that jump in 8-1? Well, the timing of the liftoff, the duration of holding the jump button, and the timing of the wall jump are all frame perfect. NES games run at 60 frames per second, which means all the necessary inputs need to be timed within 1/60 of a second. In addition, the starting position before running I used not on ..read more