Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

Getting warmer, getting warmer, already warm:

Following up on this post’s top link, NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting months of gibberish. (via)

Graph of date of peak cherry blossoms in Kyoto from 812 CE to today. The warmer average temperatures means earlier blooming. (via)

Zoomable map of all hotsprings in the United States, with temperatures. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Naming of Parts, Henry Reed.

A few beautiful links:

Take Five, solo guitar transcription by Lucas Brar. (via)

Mars in 4K. CW: voiceover. Still worth watching on your best and largest screen. (via)

Superb Owl Sunday VIII. (via janni)

(I actually watched the Super Bowl for the first time in several decades—Eaglet plays flag-football as well as soccer-football, and wanted to see it. Spoiler: they skipped the game’s middle third because football is more boring to watch than play plus “who the heck is Usher?” Confession: I spent a lot of the game scrolling through r/SuperbOwl. As far as plague is concerned, we’re all negative now: Eaglet is back in school this week, though they skipped soccer-football practice yesterday because still tired, and I’m back at work, though not working full days, and janni still hasn’t caught it.)

---L.

Subject quote from Elizabeth, George Brandon Saul.

Playing around with links, or maybe links about playing around. Something like that:

An amateur Belgian luthier builds a bass guitar for and with his 6-year-old daughter, who is very sass. Other builds (with occasional daughter commentary) on his channel. (via)

Paku Paku, a one-dimensional, one-button implementation of Pac-Man that is surprisingly addictive. (via)

Flipping a coin is not a 50/50 thing: coins have a 50.8% chance of landing on the same side they started. (via)

Needless to say, this last result is huge.

---L.

Subject quote from Caset at the Bat, Ernest Thayer.

Links of varying importance:

Naomi Klein: “Side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.” (via janni)

(I’ll let that sit there for a moment. If you follow only one of these links, let it be that one.)

Wiktionary has started the important task of building out entries for emoji. Did they get to 🍑 and 🍆 quickly? Of course they did 😂

“The human brain uses one mechanism to assess [the number of items when there are] four or fewer items and a different one for when there are five or more.” (via)

---L.

Subject quote from All Quiet Along the Potomac (aka The Picket Guard), Ethel Lynn Beers.

A few stunning links:

Formulations of quantum mechanics that do not use complex numbers, only real numbers, cannot correctly match all predictions of “standard” quantum mechanics. IOW, imaginary numbers are real. (via lost)

A column about dip hop, in which deaf rappers lay down rhymes in sign, with or without oral rapping as well. (via)

Woodblock printmaker David Bull is creating prints from a series of previously unpublished drawings by Katsushika Hokusai, originally created for a project called “The Great Picture Book of Everything” that was canceled for reasons unknown. The first print (at the top) is of Kannon/Guan-yin riding a dragon’s head. Relevant British Museum website, and search results for all 103 drawings.

Subject quote from Since U Been Gone, Kelly Clarkson.

A few very important links:

It’s come to my attention that I haven’t been posting enough surf guitar, so to rectify this here’s “The Ripper” by The Volcanics. (via, which has more surfy goodness in comments)

Out of Sight: After her guide dog runs off after a thief who takes her bag, a girl navigates alone, with the animation adapting to show what she learns through her senses of touch, hearing, and smell.

An outdated periodic table of note.

---L.

Subject quote from The Long Trail, Rudyard Kipling.

Art, and math that’s art, and engineering that's art:

One painting from every year of the 19th century, in chronological order. Includes many pix not from western Europe. (via)

Meet the Kochawave curve, a variant of the fractal Koch snowflake that looks vaguely familiar. (via)

The guy who created the procedurally generated infinite Chinese landscape painting I linked to a while ago has created wenyun-lang, a programming language in Classical Chinese. Among programs already created is divination.wy, to cast an I Ching fortune. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Black, Pearl Jam.

A few useful links:

Building a programmable drum sequencer with Legos, including debugging as they go. (via)

Contemporary innovations in juggling. (via)

The Audubon Society attempts to set the record straight: When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? An Extremely Important Guide. (via, which asks an extremely important point of clarification)

---L.

Subject quote from Experimental Film, They Might Be Giants.

Some links. Well, a few. Just a couple. But they’re links:

The Unsuccessful Treatment of Writer’s Block. Yes, this was really published in a peer-reviewed journal.

That broken tech/content culture cycle. (via)

Burds. On your screen. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Boyfriend, Tegan & Sara.

It’s been a while since I shared some links, hasn’t it. In my defence, I’ve been camping in mountainous places and getting up close and personal with wild turkeys, though that’s only some of the time. Not really an excuse. Still, here’s some good ones I’ve collected:

Alternate Realities: 2400 CG artists were challenged to render a base animation of a walking person, and here’s the top 100 entries, one after the other. One of them is Ghibli inspired. All 2400 entries. (via)

John Oliver Loves Octopuses, especially the wonderfully named Wunderpus photogenicus. CW: octopus crawling out of a man’s mouth. (via)

r/MaliciousCompliance, stories about people conforming to the letter, but not the spirit, of a request. (via, which has more links to r/AmITheAsshole-adjacent places)

---L.

Subject quote from Schism, Tool.