Travelling this week. Even still, I’m not sure what happened; I don’t think I’ve ever sent out an issue with only 2-star links. I suppose you could argue for three stars for the first two…
2 stars
Seeing Beyond the Beauty of a Vermeer | New York Times
I am still moved by the quiet miracle of that boyhood afternoon. But my relationship with art has changed. I look for trouble now. No longer is a Vermeer painting simply “foreign and alluring.” It is an artifact inescapably involved in the world’s messiness — the world when the painting was made and the world now. Looking at paintings this way doesn’t spoil them. On the contrary, it opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal, divulging all kinds of other things I need to know.
This spring, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I stood again in front of “The Milkmaid,” returning 33 years after that day in Lagos to her humility, her solidity and the ongoingness of her domestic work. I love it — I love her — no less than I ever did.
This Ball is Impossible to Hit | Mark Rober (YouTube)
Another very enjoyable Mark Rober video, exploring wiffleball.
50 Amazing Rarely Seen Photos From World War II | Art of Manliness
To bring an event that can seem far away and yet remains in the living memory of thousands of people back into focus, we dove deep, deep, deep into the photo archives from WWII. When the war is covered and remembered today, there are a few classic pictures that repeatedly reemerge. But, of course, tens of thousands of photographs were taken during the war, and we wanted to find and resurface some lesser-known snapshots from the Big One.
Apple Vision | Stratechery
First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS | Daring Fireball
With the amount of hype Apple’s new product is getting from seasoned and cynical commentators, I’ll be surprised if it’s not a hit. I’m sharing Ben Thompson and John Gruber’s intelligent takes:
The high expectations came from the fact that not only was this product being built by Apple, the undisputed best hardware maker in the world, but also because I am, unlike many, relatively optimistic about VR. What surprised me is that Apple exceeded my expectations on both counts: the hardware and experience were better than I thought possible, and the potential for Vision is larger than I anticipated. The societal impacts, though, are much more complicated.
I walked away from my demo more than a bit discombobulated. Not because it was disorienting or even the least bit nauseating, but because it was so unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It strikes me that in some ways Bob Iger’s cameo during the keynote had the relationship between Apple and Disney backwards. Iger spent his keynote cameo talking about Disney creating original new content for VisionOS’s new medium. But after experiencing it, it felt more like what Disney should want is Apple providing this technology for Disney to use in their theme parks. The sports and dinosaur demos I experienced using Vision Pro were in many ways more immersive and thrilling than tentpole major attractions I’ve experienced at Disney World.
Are you going to want to buy a Vision Pro for $3,500? That price is high enough that the answer is probably not, for most of you, no matter how compelling it is. But are you going to want to try one out for an hour or two, and find yourself craving another hour or two? I guarantee it. You need to see it.
Where does libertarianism go from here? | Noahpinion
Add all this together, and it’s little wonder that I don’t hear a lot of people eager to label themselves “libertarian” these days. And yet I feel like something important has been lost. Small and confused as it always was, the libertarian movement constituted something of a counterweight to our society’s seeming tendency to impose ever-more onerous regulation on our lives and livelihoods. And now that counterweight is mostly gone.
The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth | Kottke
Oh this is so nerdy and great: Veritasium introduces us to Micromouse, a maze-solving competition in which robotic mice compete to see which one is the fastest through a maze. The competitions have been held since the late 70s and today's mice are marvels of engineering and software, the result of decades of small improvements alongside bigger jumps in performance.
I love stuff like this because the narrow scope (single vehicle, standard maze), easily understood constraints, and timed runs, combined with Veritasium's excellent presentation, makes it really easy to understand how innovation works. The cars got faster, smaller, and learned to corner better, but those improvements created new challenges which needed other solutions to overcome to bring the times down even more. So cool.
In Memory of Tim Keller | The Weekend Reader
This newsletter is based on the idea that if you read widely and read wisely, you'll be a deeper thinker. Instead of just parroting one article you read, you can synthesize multiple viewpoints, and come to your own conclusions.
When you do, you’ll be clearer about what you believe. At the same time you will gain more respect for the other side, because you will have studied it.
Tim Keller exemplified this kind of approach. He used to say that the best kind of debate was when you so respected the other person that you could articulate their perspective fully, maybe even better than they could, and yet still argue why your position made more sense.
In an age when we are quick to draw bright lines around our camps and yell at each other without listening to each other, Tim Keller's intellectual curiosity and humility appealed to both the right and the left, to people with faith and people with no faith at all.
Optimising computer systems with more generalised AI tools | Google DeepMind
Most recently, AlphaDev, a version of AlphaZero, has made a novel breakthrough in computer science, discovering faster sorting and hashing algorithms – two fundamental processes used trillions of times a day to sort, store, and retrieve data.
The reverse OPEC maneuver | Noahpinion
There are a number of reasons for the price drop — a fall in demand from China due to its economic slowdown, a recovery in oil production to near-pre-pandemic levels, Biden’s use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and so on. But one factor is just what economists call “market structure” — a change in the nature of competition in the oil industry.
Mysterious species buried their dead and carved symbols 100,000 years before humans | CNN
Researchers have uncovered evidence that members of a mysterious archaic human species buried their dead and carved symbols on cave walls long before the earliest evidence of burials by modern humans.
The brains belonging to the extinct species, known as Homo naledi, were around one-third the size of a modern human brain.
The revelations could change the understanding of human evolution, because until now such behaviors only have been associated with larger-brained Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
The history of the term "planet" is not what you probably think it is | Chronicles of Harry
The generally-out-there idea of the history of the word "planet" is something like this: Originally, any astronomical bodies that moved relative to the fixed stars were planets -- so, the sun and the moon were planets, but the Earth was not. Then, with the advent of heliocentrism, it came to be understood that the Earth is a planet; but the sun and the moon are not (since the moon orbits the Earth). Eventually more planets were discovered beyond the classical ones. Curiously, 4 of these planets shared approximately the same orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Eventually so many more new planets were found inbetween Mars and Jupiter that it became clear that these bodies didn't belong with the planets, and so they were reclassified as asteroids. More recently, it became clear that Pluto, which had been considered a planet, is actually just one member of the Kuiper Belt, much as Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta had turned out to just be four members of the asteroid belt; and so it became clear that Pluto shouldn't be considered a planet either, as was famously ratified in 2006 by a vote of the International Astronomical Union.
In fact, these papers contend, substantial parts of the above story are wrong, and the 2006 IAU vote was a mistake. Now to be clear, the astronomical facts are not in question -- Pluto really is part of the Kuiper Belt; it has not cleared its neighborhood. Moreover, nobody here is arguing that we should consider there to be nine planets, those being Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto; that state of affairs is clearly not tenable, and some solution to the problem was needed. But the solution to that problem that was chosen was the wrong one, and the reason it was chosen has a lot to do with the above incorrect story.
Building a Scale Model of Time | Kottke
The length of a human life is around 80 years. You might get 100 if you're lucky. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. The vast difference between a human lifespan and the age of the universe can be difficult to grasp — even the words we use in attempting to describe it (like "vast") are comically insufficient.
To help us visualize what a difference of eight orders of magnitude might look like, Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh have created a scale model of time in the Mojave Desert, from the Big Bang to the present day.