Links (72)
Tensile Birds Legs, Challenge Trials, The Internet, and Whale Oil
Why Birds Do Not Fall While Sleeping
The bird subsequently does not have to think or concentrate to remain standing. Everything is based on the system’s elasticity. This is a kind of embodied intelligence where the body alone solves the problem, with no intervention by the brain, thereby doing so without consuming energy.
I Got Dysentery So You Don’t Have To
Some 24 hours in, the first people started going down. Via word of mouth I heard the phrase “Exorcist-style projectile vomiting” used to describe someone in the next room over, a description whose accuracy I fortunately cannot verify.
Society for Indency to Naked Animals
There was no membership fee to join SINA, as the official society policy for membership stated that "you must only demonstrate a desire to be decent by clothing your animals, and in some instances those of your neighbors."
The Disappearance of an Internet Domain
Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist.
All Possible Plots By Major Authors
Ginevra Beauregard and Redmond Ingram (known as Red at Princeton) are honeymooning in the South of France. They are beautiful, clever and rich. For reasons never fully explored, they have resolved to make themselves unhappy. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Blue Whale Skeleton at New Bedford Museum Still Oozing Oil
“I like to joke with visitors that are standing underneath the skeleton that this is a good reminder to not look up with your mouth open,” he said.
That’s because Rocha said the rare blue whale skeleton is actually leaking oil.
Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
I was digging around in my Claude activity export (I built a claude-to-sqlite tool to convert it to SQLite I could explore it in Datasette) and decided to see how much I’d used artifacts in the past week. It was more than I expected!
Being able to spin up a full interactive application—sometimes as an illustrative prototype, but often as something that directly solves a problem—is a remarkably useful tool.
