One of the many things I learned from Evelyn Eastmond in my time working with her is this technique for deeply exploring, releasing yourself from preconceptions, thinking in new ways.

This technique is called “Make 50 of Something”, and to do it, you make 50 of something. In one big marathon. Maybe over a few days, but it’s important to do them one after another, exhausting your possibilities to break and illuminate habits. This is in contrast with thing-a-day or thing-a-week marathons, where you’re making habits and have time to think between things.

50 is a LOT, and it takes you on this weird journey of ups and downs and complexifying and simplifying and combining and taking apart. It can be oddly emotional and intense. It gets at something and teaches us something that is hard to find if we space things out or wait for inspiration.

This technique was meant for artists, but my research group has used it for VR stuff and programming language design too. So now to learn python, over the weekend I made 50 implementations of fizzbuzz.

Fizzbuzz is a classic kids game where you take turns counting, but if the number is divisible by 3 you say “fizz”, and if it’s divisible for 5 you say “buzz”, and if it’s divisible by both you say “fizzbuzz”. Now it has become a common programming exercise and interview question.

Fifty is a lot of programs, even if many are just 1 to 5 lines. It was an intense exercise. The first 20 or so are fairly normal programming exercises. But 50 is a lot, and things start to get weird.

Some of my fizzbuzzes output the solution. Some of them are flagrantly wrong. Some write you poetry, some play you songs.

Some favourites you might check out:

#22, which uses a linear regression and proves AI is smarter than humans.

#32, which plays a quite musical auralization of the algorithm.

#40, a chatbot that will listen to you and write you a poem.

#48, a complete text adventure with sound effects and monsters to fight.

Twitter user @quasiben was kind enough to figure out how to host an interactive version with all the dependencies.

To play with it, go here and click Fifty Fizzbuzzes.ipynb (it might take a minute to load).

It’s also on my github here, where it’s read-only, unless you download the file and run it, for which you’ll need jupyter python stuff. I use Anaconda.

Vi

This project made possible by my supporters on Patreon. Thank you, good humans!

running an NES emulator on a Raspberry Pi encased in an NES cartridge, plugged into an unmodified NES

Photographer Kenji Toma makes these hyperrealistic images of flowers that are so detailed that they almost look fake because every part of each flower is in sharp focus. Johnny of Spoon & Tamago explains:

To create photographs, which both hyper-realistic to the point of looking artificial, Toma utilized a process called focus-bracket shooting. It’s a method of photography often employed to shoot close-up, macro photos in which the final photograph is a composite of several images of the subject with each element in full focus. “Hyper-realism allows him to capture the specimen’s idealized beauty, creating a work that is deeply modern, yet in harmony with a rich Japanese history and tradition.”

Toma’s images are available in a book called The Most Beautiful Flowers.

Tags: books   Kenji Toma   photography   The Most Beautiful Flowers

Justin O’Beirne has written a series of extraordinary essays over the past few years on maps, focusing particularly on Google Maps and Apple Maps. His latest is my favorite yet, attempting to answer the question “How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps?”

It’s a fascinating, insightful read, and the work O’Beirne has put into collecting and assembling his comparative illustrations — most of them animated — is simply staggering. As icing on the cake, even the typography is gorgeous.

During the opening of today’s Apple Special Event, there was a clip from Steve Jobs that I hadn’t heard before, about showing appreciation for life:

THERE’S LOTS OF WAYS TO BE, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.

You never meet the people, you never shake their hands, you never hear their story or tell them yours, but somehow in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation.

We need to be true to who we are, and remember what’s really important to us. That’s what’s going to keep Apple, Apple–is if we keep us, us.

STEVE JOBS

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At the highest levels, you can tell a lot about the designers of something by simply using the thing they designed. When people truly care–when they obsess–about what they are working on, their thoughts, ideas, and feelings get injected into their work and then transmitted to the people who use it.

One of the first things I do when I get a new Apple product is to look for the compromises made by the designers, to understand them, to feel their hard work, and ultimately to feel their appreciation for my time and my life. If you look hard enough, you can understand the philosophy, love, and care of the people who took an idea, made it wonderful, and then made it real.

Something’s transmitted.

I asked Kottke.org readers to tell me what were the best web sites that they knew about that most people have never heard of. Normally, each of these sites would be worth a blog post on its own, either a longer or shorter one. But this week, we’re…

A few of the sites readers suggested are actually (in my experience) quite well-known. However, if you’ve never been to Daring Fireball, Longform.org, The Millions, Hacker News, Every Frame A Painting, DuckDuckGo, LMGTFY, xkcd, Nautilus, The Internet Archive, Google Reverse Image Search, or, yes, Kottke.org, you should remedy that as soon as you can.

The rest of the suggestions are really quite something. I’d never heard of most of them. A few others I’ve loved and shared as a secret handshake between friends. In lieu of lengthy explanations, I’m just going to link them all and let you explore.

(This is what most web pages used to be: just long lists of links. We were such dorks back then. But maybe we were on to something.)

Note: The order is not a ranking, but simply an easy way I can count how many links there are.

Also Note: No money changed hands to feature any of these sites on Kottke.org, although in retrospect, that would have been a good idea..

Final Note: If the site required a login, or I couldn’t figure out what it was doing or why it would be interesting to anyone, I didn’t include it. Sorry.

1. Weird Fiction Review: “an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird, from the classics to the next generation of weird writers and international weird.”
2. Pink Trombone: You kinda have to play with this one to get it.
3. Internet Hockey Database: Statistics, Logos, and Trading Cards.
4. diamond geezer: A lovely blog about trains and architecture in Great Britain.
5. MLB Uniforms worn on April 19, 2017: You can do this for any date you want.
6. Nepali: A Beginner’s Primer Conversation and Grammar
7. Swear Trek
8. Fuck You, Broccoli: “An in-depth exploration of vegetables and other so-called healthy foods.”
9. Spacetrawler: A science-fiction webcomic and comics blog.
10. Extra Ordinary: Another webcomic, about a little girl who has sweetly surreal adventures.
11. WPC Probabilistic Winter Precipitation Guidance: Tracks snowfall.
12. The Drawfee Channel: A video blog about drawing with digital tools.
13. Is it Christmas?: Current answer: NO
14. BoardGameGeek | Gaming Unplugged Since 2000
15. Free online Dictionary of English Pronunciation - How to Pronounce English words
16. Instant No Button! Unhappy Darth Vader on demand.
17. Seismic Monitor: Recent earthquakes on a world map and much more.
18. Autostraddle: News, Entertainment, Opinion, Community and Girl-on-Girl Culture. This site is great.
19. Superbad.com: I… I don’t understand this thing I’m seeing.
20. WWWF Grudge Match - Where useless knowledge breeds champions: If you’ve ever wondered, “What if Boris Yeltsin and Ted Kennedy had a drinking contest?” this site is for you.
21. The Griddle: A puzzle blog with free puzzles.
22. Badger Badger Badger.com! The Original Dancing Badgers!
23. Futility Closet - An idler’s miscellany of compendious amusements
24. Skyline - YouTube: “Esports analyst and coach focusing on the game Overwatch.” Two people suggested this.
25. The Vintagent: A vintage motorcycles blog.
26. CDC WONDER: The CDC’s online databases. Get as much government data as you can, while you can.
27. InfiniteLooper: Endless loops of YouTube videos.
28. The Morning News: A real blog. I love it.
29. Deadspin’s The Stacks: Old sports stories from out-of-print magazines republished with the author’s permission. I can’t believe I hadn’t been reading this already.
30. street dog millionaires: Two dogs, one from India, one from Africa.
31. FL@33 presents http://bzzzpeek.com: What do animals sound like in different countries? (Every language is different!)
32. JazzOasis.com - Pat Metheny on Kenny G: Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny takes Kenny G to the woodshed.
33. McMansion Hell
34. Scroll Down to Riker: Does what it says on the tin.
35. Flickr: The Commons
36. NYPL Digital Collections: This is amazing, and it’s all free to play with.
37. The Library of Babel
38. Bowiebranchia: “Nudibranchia or other opisthobranchia compared to the various looks of David Bowie.” Surprisingly compelling!
39. Play Later: Browse newly released albums and save them for later. Mostly a handy discovery frontend for Spotify.
40. www.Visual6502.org: Simulation of vintage computers and game systems in the browser.
41. Political status of Western Sahara: So are we going to have a new country in North Africa or what?
42. Antipope - Charlie’s Diary: Science fiction writer Charlie Stross’s blog.
43. Pi.co: Interviews with interesting people by journalist/investor Om Malik.
44. Deuce of Clubs: A Demonstrated Aptitude for Reasonable Mayhem: A site by Godfrey (“Doc”) Daniels, of Mojave Phone Booth fame.
45. The Well’s annual conversation with author Bruce Sterling.
46. Beyond the Frame: visual essays about TV and movies by Luis Azevedo.
47. Artsy Engineering: An information network and open-source software for people in the art world.
48. Hart Island Project Stories of unclaimed and unidentified people buried in mass graves in an island near New York city beginning in the 19th century.
49. Damn Interesting: a science, history, and psychology blog.
50. What’s Noka Worth? (Part 1) — DallasFood. A takedown of a hot, expensive artisanal chocolate maker… over a decade ago.
51. Mexican Table Salsas: The eGullet culinary institute’s discussion of traditional salsas, and how to make them.
52. Histography - Timeline of History: A mighty timeline view of every event in Wikipedia. That’s a lot of dots.
53. People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction, a movement: a short story/manifesto by George Saunders.
54. Langscape: an interactive map of all world languages, put together by researchers at the University of Maryland.
55. in Bb 2.0 - a collaborative music/spoken word project: twenty musicians, all playing in the same key — you get to mix and match.
56. Paper Planes: Use your phone to catch and throw paper planes to and from people all over the world.

There! That ought to be enough magic and wonder to last you through the weekend. Thank you, as always, to the readers who submitted links.

Tags: best of the web