NYC has been using aerial photography for over 100 years to catalog and measure the city. Thanks to some superb data preservation, you can explore some amazing aerial photography data going back to 1924.
BPD covers NYC's building footprints dataset updated weekly and covering 1M+ structures. Garages make up about a fifth of NYC buildings.
The cost of DNA sequencing has fallen faster than Moore's Law. Since 2001, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has tracked costs at its funded sequencing centers — from $95 million per genome in 2001 to around $500 today.
Genome sequencing costs fell 190,000-fold since 2001. Data here stops at 2023 and I can't seem to find reliable sources since then.
As a new parent, my mind immediately went to movie-viewing volume. With a four-month-old, I am not exactly plugged into movie culture—or really any culture unrelated to said four-month-old. So I wanted to know whether this “parent tax” is universal: Do we watch fewer films as our responsibilities grow?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes. In the MovieLens dataset, average rating volume peaks among users ages 25 to 34, then declines with each passing decade.
MovieLens data shows movie taste shifts with age, driven by nostalgia bias via Don't Worry About the Vase
Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.
The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News
The Brooklyn Seltzer Museum is dedicated to preserving and promoting the effervescent history of seltzer water. We are located in the oldest seltzer works in New York City, a local, family-run business now in its fourth generation. Together, we offer a Museum and Factory Tour that celebrates the manufacturing of seltzer, the science of seltzer, and seltzer as a cultural force in New York City and the world beyond.
The Brooklyn Seltzer Museum is open most Fridays.
commiserate with the fear of being found out, and the want of perfection. But if you want people to connect with you as a person, you can't hide behind a machine. Publish your typos and show your struggle getting going. Be a human.
Tom MacWright on LLM-generated job applications lacking authenticity via simonwillison.net
“My strip,” Watterson once said, “is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships.” Well, ditto for my relationship with the boy Calvin and his tiger Hobbes. Those adventures of a weirdo from another planet and his homicidal psycho jungle cat, their magical world in which the days are just packed with deranged mutant killer monster snow goons, that place where scientific progress goes “boink” and there’s treasure everywhere — they belong to their readers.
Matthew Morgan's gorgeous essay on Bill Watterson's fight for control over Calvin and Hobbes and his principles. I just learned about Nevin Martell's book "Looking for Calvin and Hobbes" and will be reading it soon.
Nearly 5,000 episodes across 90 series — from Zoo Quest in 1954 to Secret Garden in 2026. Search by animal, habitat, location, natural phenomenon, or theme to find exactly the episode you’re looking for.
Searchable archive of nearly 5,000 David Attenborough TV episodes via kottke.org
There are an incredible number of people who desire to connect with the land and learn how they can work with the plants in their region. There are already many online resources and books available to begin foraging but I believe the best way to begin foraging is by learning from a knowledgeable forager in your area. Many local foragers are out there, but they can be hard to find, especially for people who have just awakened to this possibility.
FindaForager.com database connects people with local foragers across US and Canada.
A dictionary asks: what is this color called? A pigment compendium asks: what is it made of? This catalogue asks both, and also: who paid for it, in money or in poison? Who painted with it before they knew what it was doing to them? When was it banned, and which sweeter substitute replaced it on the shelf?
Storied Colors - history and context for named colors.
Words of Type brings together the terms used in typography, illustrated and explained in multiple languages.
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This is the first version of the encyclopedia. It includes 200 terms covering multiple categories, such as type design anatomy, digital and analog typography, historical, technological and conceptual terms, as well as terms specific to certain scripts.
The fantastic, illustrated Words of Type encyclopedia,
Mesh networking over the airwaves presents a very unique opportunity for our societies. We could build a resilient, peer-to-peer network that coexists with the internet, enabling connectivity in currently underserved regions and increasing our personal sovereignty online by maintaining a functional backup to the internet for our most critical needs.
It's also just a freeing feeling to be able to send a message to someone else relying only on devices that you and people in your network own outright, instead of renting the capability to do so from your local ISP or Elon Musk's Starlink.
Jonah is getting into mesh networks... so am I!
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