This is a wild story: The Scientist Who Lived with Dozens of Children from the Pacific Islands. “I realized I’m in the middle of a pedophile operation that has been run out of the N.I.H. by a Nobel laureate for thirty years.”

“Scientists have found that people are being exposed to more toxins than previously known, and beyond damaging lungs, wildfire smoke may affect hearts, brains and other organs.” (Research is preliminary & ongoing but sheesh…)

Portuguese photographer Rui Santos captured this shot of the recent solar eclipse.

Stunning. Here’s what makes this shot look a little different from other eclipse photos; from APOD:

Usually the solar corona appears white, and to some observers the corona of last week’s total solar eclipse did appear this pearly color. But this time, totality observers in Spain saw a corona that appeared unusually golden. For one reason, from Spain, the totality occurred when the setting Sun was near the horizon. That low, sunlight travels through a large amount of air which scatters out blue light. An unusual amount of smoke in the air from nearby forest fires acted as a second filter, further scattering the remaining blue tones and deepening the already gold-dominated light.

Tags: 2026 solar eclipse · astronomy · eclipses · photography · Rui Santos · Sun

How to make a good Star Wars movie for once. “Stop making stuff that’s so self referential and start focusing on projects that once again are bringing things from the outside and putting them in a Star Wars container.” Fan service is bad storytelling.

And also a trailer for season 2 of Star Wars: Ahsoka. Huh. Lots of Anakin, but where are the space whales?

Trailer for VisionQuest, the third leg of the Wanda/Vision/Agatha trilogy. Huh. “Ultron! Human avatars only!”

In Bourgogne, they’ve been recording grape date harvests since 1354. This year’s harvest set a record for earliest start: Aug 8. “From 1354 to 1987 the average start was 28 September. Since 1988 it runs 13 days earlier.”

Post-pandemic vaccination rates of US kindergarteners continue to fall and “nonmedical exemptions” based on “personal or religious beliefs” jumped 0.8% in just 1 year.

Whoa, Columbia House (12 cassettes for 1¢) is finally going out of business after 71 years and several pivots (records to reel-to-reel to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to VHS to DVDs to Blu-ray).

The area known as Tornado Alley continues to shift eastward (from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) due to “a warming climate that helps transport warmer and more-humid air farther north and east than in the past”.

“Sand temperatures above 29°C now produce 95–99% female sea turtles instead of the historical 50–50 ratio, creating a reproductive bottleneck that could collapse populations within two generations.”

A.J. Jacobs recently interviewed “the Papa Bear of Puzzling”, Will Shortz and came away with seven lessons he learned from him. “Creativity is usually more about evolution than revolution.”

Unwinding the Great Tech Power Grab. “If tech seeks to replace democratic governance itself, then the response has to be more democracy, not less.” Lots of related links in this piece too.

We live in a world of ordinary abundance & luxuries only dreamed of in centuries past: music on demand, photographs, books, eyeglasses, refrigeration, vaccination, bicycles, and the washing machine.

For TCM, Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou tell us how legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu made the transition to color filmmaking. His first color film was Equinox Flower in 1958 and it took a couple of films for Ozu to work out how to best employ color.

When you watch later Ozu films, you’re struck by how similar two people can be. How often one place resembles another, how life itself is cyclical and Ozu used color as another way to build these patterns.

In the recent post about the supersonic trebuchet, I wrote that if I’d had access to engineering process videos like that when I was a kid, I would have grown up to be an engineer. Well, same thing for Every Frame a Painting: 12-year-old Jason had zero idea how filmmaking worked and videos like theirs would have fired me up to try my hand at it (no idea where I would have gotten a camera though…) Maybe it’s best that I grew up to do what I’m doing, where I can learn a little bit about all of these different fascinating things. 🤷‍♂️

Tags: color · film school · movies · Taylor Ramos · Tony Zhou · video · Yasujiro Ozu

Two new episodes of Ric Burns’ 1999 documentary series New York will soon air on PBS. “Produced by the same team that created the original NEW YORK series, The Future of Cities presents a sweeping and dramatic portrait of New York since Sept 11th.”

Yale study: “A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom on AOC’s presumed presidential run. “But these are different times. Ocasio-Cortez is a different woman, and Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down.”

We haven’t done an open thread for awhile, so… What have you been working on? How are you feeling? What’s on your mind these days? What’s the best thing you’ve seen this week? Have you called a plumber to your home lately?

Are you new here? Introduce yourself if you feel like it. Heck, if you’re a regular commenter, reintroduce yourself if you’d like.

Tags: kottke.org · open threads

NOAA: Contiguous US Breaks Its Record for Hottest Month Ever. “It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl…” (This record will be broken several more times in the decades to come.)