Month: August 2025

From Kottke: “Giles Clement, also known as Polymatt, decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. In a YouTube video where he breaks down the process, he says: “I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things open and taken a look inside, but it’s actually a little bit more complex than I expected. Recreating a shell isn’t going to be the tough part. It’s actually this: recreating the media itself with some PET film and a bunch of chemicals. These disks are incredibly thin, and the magnetic film itself is measured in microns. It’s going to be quite the feat in order to figure out how to apply something that thin.” The same creator also made a fully functioning wristwatch from scratch, including making two milling machines and designing the typeface used for the numerals and printing on the watch.”

Some IMAX 70mm movies such as Oppenheimer are powered by a PalmPilot emulator

From Ars Technica: “As shown in IMAX’s TikTok video, the 70 mm print for Oppenheimer is so large that they had to extend their film platter. That’s fascinating and all, but so is the emulated 2002 PDA apparently running things. The m130 wasn’t even top of the line when it came out in 2002. It debuted at $279 with a 2-inch, 160×160 screen and a 33 Motorola Dragonball VZ processor. But that was just the magic needed for IMAX’s purposes, and so it hasn’t changed a thing. The only difference is that it’s using emulations in at least some cases. The video shows the PDA emulated on a 10.1-inch Windows tablet for businesses. The PDA emulation controls the theater’s Quick Turn Reel Units (where workers load the physical film reels). A company spokesperson said the original units operated on PalmPilots, so IMAX designed an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a PalmPilot to keep it familiar for IMAX film projectionists.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “He made a floppy disk from scratch in his basement”

From Kottke: “Giles Clement, also known as Polymatt, decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. In a YouTube video where he breaks down the process, he says: “I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things open and taken a look inside, but it’s actually a little bit more complex than I expected. Recreating a shell isn’t going to be the tough part. It’s actually this: recreating the media itself with some PET film and a bunch of chemicals. These disks are incredibly thin, and the magnetic film itself is measured in microns. It’s going to be quite the feat in order to figure out how to apply something that thin.” The same creator also made a fully functioning wristwatch from scratch, including making two milling machines and designing the typeface used for the numerals and printing on the watch.”

Some IMAX 70mm movies such as Oppenheimer are powered by a PalmPilot emulator

From Ars Technica: “As shown in IMAX’s TikTok video, the 70 mm print for Oppenheimer is so large that they had to extend their film platter. That’s fascinating and all, but so is the emulated 2002 PDA apparently running things. The m130 wasn’t even top of the line when it came out in 2002. It debuted at $279 with a 2-inch, 160×160 screen and a 33 Motorola Dragonball VZ processor. But that was just the magic needed for IMAX’s purposes, and so it hasn’t changed a thing. The only difference is that it’s using emulations in at least some cases. The video shows the PDA emulated on a 10.1-inch Windows tablet for businesses. The PDA emulation controls the theater’s Quick Turn Reel Units (where workers load the physical film reels). A company spokesperson said the original units operated on PalmPilots, so IMAX designed an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a PalmPilot to keep it familiar for IMAX film projectionists.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “He made a floppy disk from scratch in his basement”

Ever since artificial intelligence became a topic of popular conversation, the environmental cost of all these large-language models and the massive server farms that make them possible has been the subject of much concern. Every week or two, it seems, there is another article about the vast appetite these systems have for both power and water, the greenhouse-gas emissions, etc. and the impact on the environment. So I found it interesting to read Google’s assessment of these factors in a recently published study entitled “Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale.” The company also wrote a blog post summarizing some of the numbers, in which it said that the average Gemini prompt “uses 0.24 watt-hours of energy, emits 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent, and consumes 0.26 milliliters – or about five drops – of water.” The overall per-prompt energy impact, according to Google’s scientists, is “equivalent to watching television for less than nine seconds.”

Since Google runs Gemini and obviously wants to understate how much power and water it uses, you might be skeptical of these results, as I (and others) were when the paper was released. The Verge, for example, wrote a piece quoting a number of experts who said that the Google study was misleading because it “omits some key data.” What key data? If you read the article, it says that Google only looked at the direct water and power use of its server farms and related AI equipment – that is, the amount of water and electricity that these systems consumed while running Gemini queries – as wellrather than looking at the indirect use. That would include water consumed by power companies that generate the electricity to power these data centers, whether it’s water to drive electrical turbines or to cool gas or nuclear power systems. From the Verge article:

“They’re just hiding the critical information,” says Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. “This really spreads the wrong message to the world.” Ren has studied the water consumption and air pollution associated with AI, and is one of the authors of a paper Google mentions in its study. A big issue experts flagged is that Google omits indirect water use in its estimates. Its study included water that data centers use in cooling systems to keep servers from overheating. As a result, with Google’s estimate, “You only see the tip of the iceberg,” says Alex de Vries-Gao, founder of the website Digiconomist and a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who has studied the energy demand of data centers.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Does AI use a lot of energy and water? Yes and no”

From MIT Tech: “On a Friday evening last December, every tier of US law enforcement—federal, state, and local—was dispatched to the US Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, a military research installation outside Boston. A squadron of about 15 to 20 drones had been spotted violating the base’s restricted airspace. The culprits could not be found.One retired major with the Massachusetts State Police, who had been dispatched to help investigate that night, called these unidentified aircraft the strangest thing he’s ever seen, says Brian Lauzon, deputy chief of Natick’s municipal police department. When Lauzon arrived on base later that weekend, he says, he saw drones that were larger than consumer models (most of which are pre-programmed to respect US military airspace these days anyway). By the end of this weekend-long breach, base police not only had called in local law enforcement for backup but were coordinating with the FBI and US Army commanders as well.”

Stone Age settlement lost to rising seas 8,500 years ago found off Denmark coast

From CBS News: “Below the dark blue waters of the Bay of Aarhus in northern Denmark, archaeologists search for coastal settlements swallowed by rising sea levels more than 8,500 years ago. This summer, divers descended about 26 feet below the waves close to Aarhus, Denmark’s second-biggest city, and collected evidence of a Stone Age settlement from the seabed. It’s part of a $15.5 million six-year international project to map parts of the seabed in the Baltic and North Seas, funded by the European Union, that includes researchers in Aarhus as well as from the U.K.’s University of Bradford and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research in Germany. The goal is to explore sunken Northern European landscapes and uncover lost Mesolithic settlements. Moe Astrup and colleagues have excavated an area of about 430 square feet at the small settlement they discovered just off today’s coast.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Twin brothers who were UFO hunters are now tracking drones”

From MIT Tech: “On a Friday evening last December, every tier of US law enforcement—federal, state, and local—was dispatched to the US Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, a military research installation outside Boston. A squadron of about 15 to 20 drones had been spotted violating the base’s restricted airspace. The culprits could not be found.One retired major with the Massachusetts State Police, who had been dispatched to help investigate that night, called these unidentified aircraft the strangest thing he’s ever seen, says Brian Lauzon, deputy chief of Natick’s municipal police department. When Lauzon arrived on base later that weekend, he says, he saw drones that were larger than consumer models (most of which are pre-programmed to respect US military airspace these days anyway). By the end of this weekend-long breach, base police not only had called in local law enforcement for backup but were coordinating with the FBI and US Army commanders as well.”

Stone Age settlement lost to rising seas 8,500 years ago found off Denmark coast

From CBS News: “Below the dark blue waters of the Bay of Aarhus in northern Denmark, archaeologists search for coastal settlements swallowed by rising sea levels more than 8,500 years ago. This summer, divers descended about 26 feet below the waves close to Aarhus, Denmark’s second-biggest city, and collected evidence of a Stone Age settlement from the seabed. It’s part of a $15.5 million six-year international project to map parts of the seabed in the Baltic and North Seas, funded by the European Union, that includes researchers in Aarhus as well as from the U.K.’s University of Bradford and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research in Germany. The goal is to explore sunken Northern European landscapes and uncover lost Mesolithic settlements. Moe Astrup and colleagues have excavated an area of about 430 square feet at the small settlement they discovered just off today’s coast.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Twin brothers who were UFO hunters are now tracking drones”

Ever since artificial intelligence became a topic of popular conversation, the environmental cost of all these large-language models and the massive server farms that make them possible has been the subject of much concern. Every week or two, it seems, there is another article about the vast appetite these systems have for both power and water, the greenhouse-gas emissions, etc. and the impact on the environment. So I found it interesting to read Google’s assessment of these factors in a recently published study entitled “Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale.” The company also wrote a blog post summarizing some of the numbers, in which it said that the average Gemini prompt “uses 0.24 watt-hours of energy, emits 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent, and consumes 0.26 milliliters – or about five drops – of water.” The overall per-prompt energy impact, according to Google’s scientists, is “equivalent to watching television for less than nine seconds.”

Since Google runs Gemini and obviously wants to understate how much power and water it uses, you might be skeptical of these results, as I (and others) were when the paper was released. The Verge, for example, wrote a piece quoting a number of experts who said that the Google study was misleading because it “omits some key data.” What key data? If you read the article, it says that Google only looked at the direct water and power use of its server farms and related AI equipment – that is, the amount of water and electricity that these systems consumed while running Gemini queries – as wellrather than looking at the indirect use. That would include water consumed by power companies that generate the electricity to power these data centers, whether it’s water to drive electrical turbines or to cool gas or nuclear power systems. From the Verge article:

“They’re just hiding the critical information,” says Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. “This really spreads the wrong message to the world.” Ren has studied the water consumption and air pollution associated with AI, and is one of the authors of a paper Google mentions in its study. A big issue experts flagged is that Google omits indirect water use in its estimates. Its study included water that data centers use in cooling systems to keep servers from overheating. As a result, with Google’s estimate, “You only see the tip of the iceberg,” says Alex de Vries-Gao, founder of the website Digiconomist and a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who has studied the energy demand of data centers.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Does AI use a lot of energy and water? Yes and no”

From The Guardian: “More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina. A photo shows the painting, Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) by the late-baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi, also known as Fra’ Galgario, hanging above a sofa in the living room of the property, in a seaside town near Buenos Aires. The Dutch newspaper AD said it had traced the work, which features in a database of lost art and is listed by the Dutch culture ministry as “unreturned” after the second world war, after a long investigation – and with the unwitting help of the estate agent. Portrait of a Lady belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a leading Dutch art dealer who fled the Netherlands in mid-May 1940 to escape the invading Nazis but died after falling and breaking his neck.”

The name of this Mexican peninsula translates as “I don’t understand”

From Now I Know: “The Yucatán Peninsula, circled above, is a peninsula in Mexico, dividing the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean Sea. In 1517, conquistador Francisco Hernández de Córdoba launched the first notable expedition to the Yucatán, and asked the Mayans where they were. It’s unknown what they actually said, but transliterated, it’s likely one of the following words or phrases: “mathan cauyi athán“, “tectecán“, “ma’anaatik ka t’ann” or “ci u t’ann.” Say those aloud and you’ll kind of, sort of hear the word “Yucatán” in there. And that’s what de Córdoba probably heard, so he gave that name to the region.” That’s all fine and good — if the Mayans were answering de Córdoba’s question the way he thought they were, with the name of their country. But they almost certainly weren’t. Those phrases mean, roughly, “I don’t understand.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “A painting stolen by Nazis was spotted in a real estate listing”

From The Guardian: “More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina. A photo shows the painting, Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) by the late-baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi, also known as Fra’ Galgario, hanging above a sofa in the living room of the property, in a seaside town near Buenos Aires. The Dutch newspaper AD said it had traced the work, which features in a database of lost art and is listed by the Dutch culture ministry as “unreturned” after the second world war, after a long investigation – and with the unwitting help of the estate agent. Portrait of a Lady belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a leading Dutch art dealer who fled the Netherlands in mid-May 1940 to escape the invading Nazis but died after falling and breaking his neck.”

The name of this Mexican peninsula translates as “I don’t understand”

From Now I Know: “The Yucatán Peninsula, circled above, is a peninsula in Mexico, dividing the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean Sea. In 1517, conquistador Francisco Hernández de Córdoba launched the first notable expedition to the Yucatán, and asked the Mayans where they were. It’s unknown what they actually said, but transliterated, it’s likely one of the following words or phrases: “mathan cauyi athán“, “tectecán“, “ma’anaatik ka t’ann” or “ci u t’ann.” Say those aloud and you’ll kind of, sort of hear the word “Yucatán” in there. And that’s what de Córdoba probably heard, so he gave that name to the region.” That’s all fine and good — if the Mayans were answering de Córdoba’s question the way he thought they were, with the name of their country. But they almost certainly weren’t. Those phrases mean, roughly, “I don’t understand.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “A painting stolen by Nazis was spotted in a real estate listing”

From the Smithsonian: “During the late 19th century, in the years following the Civil War, Americans—mostly ailing veterans—were hooked on morphine. Syringes, which were sold at drugstores, allowed people to administer the opiate themselves. So with a morphine epidemic sweeping the country, Bayer offered a hot new solution: heroin. The drug, Bayer claimed, was not only stronger than morphine but also far less addictive—so much so that it was billed as the antidote to morphine dependency. Plus, it purportedly had the added benefit of healing the lungs, allowing patients suffering from breathing disorders—asthma or bronchitis or a chest infection—to finally find relief. According to the Atlantic, Sears sold two vials of heroin for $1.50 (some $50 today). The company even threw in a syringe, two needles and a heroin-kit carrying case.”

Why are knights in illustrated manuscripts shown fighting giant snails?

From Open Culture: “Why do illustrated manuscripts show knights doing battle with giant snails? Boars, lions, and bears we can understand, but … snails?Theories abound. In medievalist Lilian M. C. Randall’s 1962 essay “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare,” she describes some 70 instances of man-on-snail combat in 29 manuscripts dating from the late 1200s to early 1300s. She believes that the tiny mollusks were stand ins for the Germanic Lombards who invaded Italy in the 8th century. After Charlemagne trounced the Lombards in 772, declaring himself King of Lombardy, the vanquished turned to usury and pawnbroking, earning the enmity of the rest of the populace, even those who required their services. Their profession conferred power of a sort, the kind that tends to get one labelled cowardly, greedy and malicious.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “You used to be able to buy heroin from the Sears catalog”

From the Smithsonian: “During the late 19th century, in the years following the Civil War, Americans—mostly ailing veterans—were hooked on morphine. Syringes, which were sold at drugstores, allowed people to administer the opiate themselves. So with a morphine epidemic sweeping the country, Bayer offered a hot new solution: heroin. The drug, Bayer claimed, was not only stronger than morphine but also far less addictive—so much so that it was billed as the antidote to morphine dependency. Plus, it purportedly had the added benefit of healing the lungs, allowing patients suffering from breathing disorders—asthma or bronchitis or a chest infection—to finally find relief. According to the Atlantic, Sears sold two vials of heroin for $1.50 (some $50 today). The company even threw in a syringe, two needles and a heroin-kit carrying case.”

Why are knights in illustrated manuscripts shown fighting giant snails?

From Open Culture: “Why do illustrated manuscripts show knights doing battle with giant snails? Boars, lions, and bears we can understand, but … snails?Theories abound. In medievalist Lilian M. C. Randall’s 1962 essay “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare,” she describes some 70 instances of man-on-snail combat in 29 manuscripts dating from the late 1200s to early 1300s. She believes that the tiny mollusks were stand ins for the Germanic Lombards who invaded Italy in the 8th century. After Charlemagne trounced the Lombards in 772, declaring himself King of Lombardy, the vanquished turned to usury and pawnbroking, earning the enmity of the rest of the populace, even those who required their services. Their profession conferred power of a sort, the kind that tends to get one labelled cowardly, greedy and malicious.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “You used to be able to buy heroin from the Sears catalog”