Oba-Q Lamp — Shiro Kuramata

I've loved this lamp ever since I first saw it around the turn of the century.

A 1970 design in hand-cast acrylic.

22" x 22" x 22".

$5,000.

EPA Map of Radon Zones

Forty-five years ago when I was a buyer in search of my first house, radon was a major consideration — many potential buyers insisted on a certified radon level test done inside the house before agreeing to sign a contract (I didn't ask for a test).

At that time radon was considered by many doctors (not me, based on my reading of the contemporaneous medical literature) as a significant cancer risk and for some people high levels would cause them to walk away from an otherwise perfect property.

Time passes and like reefer madness, radon fear has dwindled away to a mere echo of what it once was. 

I haven't seen radon-related articles in decades.

I happened on the EPA Radon Zone map up top and thought it would be of interest.

FunFact: Albemarle County, Virginia, where I live, is in Zone 1: "Highest potential; average indoor radon levels may be greater than 4 pCi/L (picocuries per liter)."

After I bought my house I ordered a radon test kit and followed the instructions to the letter.

The results: well over 4 pCi/L, considered at the time — and still — hazardous by the EPA.

After I got the results I shrugged and went on with my business.

Both back then and now, the potential danger of living in a house with high radon levels seemed to me not worth worrying about.

Genius Hacksaw Hack

Way back in 2007 one of Mister Jalopy's "Blast From The Past" features in Make magazine was titled "Old-School Hand Tool Hacks: What I Learned From The 1963 Bureau of Naval Personnel Training Course."

Among the many interesting tips was the one featured here, which made me swoon with delight at 1) its simplicity and 2) its obviousness — after the fact.

Many have been the occasions in the past when my hacksaw proceedings have been truncated prematurely by throat-size limitation issues.

Never again.

Rebecca Hall x Maison Margiela

YouTube description:

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"ANONYMITY" starring Rebecca Hall. A trailer for a psychological thriller.

As she prepares for a role, an actress repeatedly comes face-to-face with her masked double, forcing her to confront her own identity.

But who is real? How can we truly know ourselves? The stakes have never been higher. That is "ANONYMITY."

'Boo! You've Been Buried Alive' — Roz Chast

 

"The first time I saw a mausoleum, I felt like I was home free."

Bizarro World USB-C Connector

If you're losing sleep because your charging cords aren't overcrowding your USB hub, your ship has come in.

It comes not from outer space but rather from the fertile mind of Burlington, Vermont-based designer and inventor Matty Benedetto. 

Wrote Andrew Liszewski in The Verge:

................

There's now an easy solution if your USB-C cables aren't taking up enough space.

Inventor Matty Benedetto's latest creation is a 60W USB-C charging cable disguised as a 10-foot extension cord, complete with chunky connectors on each end.

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Black, Orange, or Green: $25.

Sounds of a Jurassic Rainforest

Enter a time machine set for 165 million years ago.

From Science magazine: "By combining exquisitely preserved fossil insect wings with experiments on living insects, computer simulations, and machine learning, scientists have re-created what they say is a partial Middle Jurassic soundscape."

Read the original scientific paper, "High acoustic diversity and behavioral complexity of katydids in the Mesozoic soundscape," here.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

BeyondTheMedspeak: 'Simulating Death Can Reduce People's Fear Of Dying'

Death has always had a marketing problem. Most people fear their own deaths. The debilitating terror it induces has been linked to everything from money hoarding to workaholism. And worrying about death—thanatophobia for the pub quizzers—can even be self-fulfilling. Anxiety can double the risk of death in patients with heart disease and cause others to avoid screening tests most likely to catch cancer early.

So all credit to the brave folk in Australia who signed up for a quick practice kick of the bucket—experiencing a cardiac arrest and out-of-body journey in virtual reality (VR). The ten-minute VR experience, “Passing Electrical Storms” by Shaun Gladwell, was shown at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2023. Visitors lay on a bed that initially vibrated with their heartbeat, while wearing a VR headset showing them on a table in the gallery. The simulation then takes over: as their heart rate seemingly crashes, the volunteers watch doctors try and fail to resuscitate them. After brain death, they then see themselves leave their body and appear to float through the universe before shrinking inside cells and atoms. Six large fans provide the associated cooling effects.

Participants’ reactions to the experience were analysed by researchers before being published in a journal in June. Most participants found it a pleasant trip, and many emerged less anxious about death. “If death is as simple as that, I’d be very happy,” a volunteer told the research team, led by Stefan Greuter, a design technologist at Australia’s RMIT University. Another compared the experience to yoga. One participant, brought up to believe in hell, admitted to being relieved.

A separate study in Texas, published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, tested an 11-minute VR simulation of a near-death experience. In this case the student volunteers survived, but only after watching themselves undergo a car crash, coma, tunnels of light, serene landscapes and imagined encounters with friends and family. Reported death anxiety among participants dropped by an average 18%. “Very relaxing. I wish I could try it more than once. Maybe every night before going to bed,” one participant said. Running the test again with those who are frail, elderly or terminally ill could produce a stronger response, the researchers say. A glimpse of mortality did not, however, help everyone: a quarter of the student volunteers said the VR experience made them more anxious about death, and a third emerged more stressed.

[via The Economist]

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

201 Stories by Anton Chekhov

In the order of their publication in Russia between 1882 and 1904, the year he died from tuberculosis at age 44.

The stories — the entirety of Chekhov's oeuvre in this milieu — were translated into English by Constance Garnett and published in 13 volumes between 1916 and 1922.

Free, the way we like it.

"Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me." — Eudora Welty, 1977

How To Get In Touch With Anyone

Back in the before times, trying to contact someone, say an author you liked, was labor intensive and generally futile.

You had the choice of writing a letter to their publisher and hoping it would be forwarded and that the person would respond, or trying to winkle out their home address from written information and reference books and college catalogs (if they were associated with a school).

When the internet happened, gradually and then suddenly the walls came down: sometimes people had their own websites with a contact function or in rare cases their email address on the site.

This became ubiquitous when publishers started demanding that their authors put up a website as a condition of their contracts.

Then newspapers and magazines brought their reporters and writers out from the shadows: whereas in the old days you had to write the paper and ask them to physically forward your letter, now almost every byline is accompanied by an email address.

Recently I ran into a stone wall trying to reach an author: none of the above worked.

Then I stumbled on a new way to get in touch: 

1. Go a person's Instagram (everyone who makes money by interacting with the public has one)

2. Follow them

3. A Message box will appear (it's in the lower right corner in my Instagram screenshot up top) if there's not one there already and Bob's your uncle

Using this method  I've since succeeded in messaging several peeps I'd given up hope of ever making contact with, in one case after trying for over a decade.

If this trick doesn't work for you, let me know and a member of my Crack Research Team©®™ will get back to you.

They don't have Instagram as they're deep black as a condition of their employment.

Lobster is Lobster

A language guessing game.

1. A word appears

2. You guess which language it was translated into

Free, the way we like it.

Fair warning....

'Envy' — Maurizio Cattelan

Constant readers will recall that I've featured this sui generis artist on multiple occasions in the past, most recently for his sculpture "Comedian," a banana duct taped to a wall, which sold for $6.2 million at a Sotheby's auction in 2024.

"Envy" is a 2025 sculpture, a unique edition of one.

It is made of Carrara marble and a steel nail, and measures 23 5/8" x 16 15/16" x 5 1/2".

Cattelan said in an interview on ARTnews, "I wanted to show what happens to art under pressure. A nail usually hangs a canvas, here it almost crucifies it. It's minimal, but also violent — and from that, an image appears."

Helpful Hints from joeeze: How to store potatoes to prevent them from sprouting

I wish I'd known this a month ago: I bought some baking potatoes to nuke now that I've got a nifty microwave pouch that bakes them in 4 minutes.

I put them in a kitchen cabinet with a door, figuring keeping them in the dark would prevent them from sprouting and going bad: bad idea.

When I opened the cabinet a couple weeks later to grab a potato, I saw all of them had sprouted, and not just a little.

From The Coolest:

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Every fall it's the same story. You buy a big bag of potatoes, or bring in the last of the garden harvest, and three weeks later half of them have pale little shoots growing out of the eyes  and have gone soft to the touch.

A potato is a living thing. Stored in the wrong conditions, it does exactly what it's built to do: it wakes up and starts to grow.

Sprouting is triggered by warmth and light. In a warm kitchen, near the stove or a sunny counter, a potato reads the signal that spring has come and starts sending out shoots. Light also turns the skin green, a sign of solanine, a natural compound that tastes bitter and can cause stomach upsets in larger amounts. Green patches and sprouts should always be cut away generously before cooking; a potato that's very green or shriveled belongs in the compost.

Here's the best way to store potatoes:

• Keep them cool: ideally 45-50°F. A cool pantry, basement, garage that doesn't freeze, or unheated closet works well.

• Keep them dark: a paper bag, a cardboard box, or a basket with a cloth over it.

• Let them breathe: never store them sealed in plastic, which traps moisture and invites rot.

• Don't wash them before storing: dirt protects the skin; moisture speeds decay.

• Keep them away from onions: stored side by side, the two speed each other's spoiling.

One more thing: Grandmother's famous trick was to tuck an apple in with the potatoes. There was a logic behind it: apples give off ethylene, a natural plant gas, and continuous exposure to ethylene is used commercially in some countries to hold back sprouting in stored potatoes.

One apple in a bag won't match industrial-grade storage, and results at home vary, but it's cheap, harmless, and worth trying. Replace the apple when it starts to wrinkle.

What About The Fridge?

Here the advice has shifted. For years, the rule was never refrigerate raw potatoes, because cold turns some of their starch into sugar, which changes the taste and makes them brown faster when fried. In 2023, the U.K.'s Food Standards Agency updated its guidance to say the fridge is fine. Many U.S. guides still prefer a cool, dark pantry for best flavor. If your kitchen is warm and you have no cool spot, the fridge beats a sprouting potato.

Summarizing: Cool, dark, dry, away from onions, with an apple for company.

Destroy Any Website — 'Type an address, break everything'

All possible love to this wonderful website.

It's like a time machine, taking us back to an internet full of craziness and surprises, when one person could suddenly go big without trying to be an influencer.

Free, the way we like it.

Sign of the Apocalypse: Coke Plus — 'It's made with fiber..."

From the Guardian: "Coke Plus has 5 grams of indigestible dextrin fiber, which it says can 'suppress the absorption of fat from food.'"

You can too!

$3.49 here.

$5.95 here.

Just in Time Clock — Shiro Kuramata

Melamine board, twigs, woolen yarn, nylon string, clock mechanism; 20.5" x 14.5" x 1.4"; a 1986 design titled, dated, and signed by its creator.

To be auctioned today at Bonhams on Avenue Hoche in Paris.

Estimate: €4,000-€6,000.

A Map of Every Lighthouse on Earth — 'Every charted light on the planet, on its real cycle'

Fair warning: there goes the day.

Our Comment Policy

Long story short: We don't have one.

Never have, never will.

This is the only place on the internet where that's still the case: anyone anywhere can anonymously publish anything they want here without it having to first pass inspection or a requirement for ID etc.

Wasn't that the original intent of the internet, to be open and free?

Then how come I'm the only one here?

2595 Legal Graffiti Walls Around The World

Is yours still there?

Find out here.

Note: I believe the future belongs to Africa, which is why whenever I use a world map I put Africa in the center.

Good one.

Garbo Lives

Just. wow.

Back story here.

On Using My MacBook Pro Keyboard After A Couple Months With The DAS Mechanical Keyboard

In a fit of nostalgia a few months ago I took a flutter on a DAS Professional Mechanical Keyboard with Cherry MX Blue Switches because I wanted to see if they still felt and sounded like the clackety-clack version I had ages ago.

Long answer short: YES!

I love the DAS's tactile and audio feedback and I find I'm more accurate and faster as well on this retro keyboard.

Then, the other night, when I decluttered my workspace desktop, after disconnecting and removing the DAS keyboard along with my laptop stand, I kind of liked the streamlined look, so I've delayed putting everything back the way it was in favor of continuing with the minimalist approach for a while.

It's eerie how silent the MacBook keyboard is in comparison; another thing is how little effort is required to type compared to the force necessary to use the DAS.

Book Recommendations From... Hacker News?

Who'd a thunk?

Last week while making one of my periodic (around 4-5 times daily) perusals of the Hacker News homepage, I saw where someone asked "What are you reading?"

It generated nearly 900 responses, each one of which I glanced at, and I noted a couple books I'd never heard of that sounded fantastic.

Buried deep in the many comments was one which linked to this wonderful site picturing each of the hundreds of recommended books (screenshot up top).

Fantastic!

ChipTycoon — No! It's NOT about the guy who invented Ruffles*

ChipTycoon is a little chip factory where you watch a single wafer going through all twenty-two stages of chipmaking — sand to rough silicon to a flat mirrored disc, then coated, printed, etched, and wired layer by layer.

*Bernhardt Stahmer invented Ruffles in 1948

'The Neanderthal Force is strong with him'

Above, one of my favorite actors, Ron Perlman, recently fantastic in the series "Cape Fear."

But wait — there's another actor with the same oversized facial features: it's Luis Guzmán (below).

Am I right or am I right?

Popeyes Honey Chicken Biscuit Sandwich

As soon as I finished reading Tim Carman's rave Washington Post review of Popeyes' newest offering (above), I got my car keys and headed straight to the location 3 miles from my house.

Short review shorter: He's right!

Below, his paean to the king.

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Popeyes Has Another Hit With Its Honey Chicken Biscuit Sandwich

The Louisiana kitchen owes its customers a huge thanks for pointing the chain in the direction of this winning combo.

One of my favorite things about fast-food restaurants is their willingness to let customers innovate for them, a reminder that some of the best ideas don't come from tests kitchens or corporate boardrooms but rather from people who know how to hack an existing menu.

The latest example arrived last Monday at Popeyes, the Louisiana kitchen that made us lose our collective minds seven years ago over a chicken sandwich. The Miami-based chain just introduced the honey chicken biscuit, a sandwich that customers have been apparently engineering tableside for years. I stand in awe of the moxie of the American diner who reviews a fast-food menu and says, "I can do better."

For better or worse, I think most Popeye fans will want to compare the latest offering to the chicken sandwich that launched a thousand imitators. I think that's a mistake. The two sandwiches feel like two sides of the same bun — connected but distinct.

The original sandwich is the pinnacle of corporate-kitchen craft, a succulent chicken breast fried and entombed in a sweet brioche bun, offset with briny pickles to provide just enough pucker. While it has Southern touches, the sandwich still feels very much like a fast food creation, its bun a dead giveaway that it doesn't wander too far from the competition.

The honey chicken biscuit, by contrast, feels Southern Southern. Like sweet tea on a South Carolina veranda in mid-July. Popeyes designed a slighter larger version of its beloved biscuit to accomodate the thick, crackly breast meat, a protein so tender you'd swear it was 50 percent buttermilk. The biscuit and chicken come unadorned, the former doing its best to contain the gnarly length of fried bird. The combo includes two packets of "honey sauce," whose corn-syrup sweetness completes the picture.

I pounded this sandwich like I had not eaten in a week. Its components just locked into place: chicken, salt, butter, honey, crunch, flakiness, simplicity, elegance. This is a dish that somehow takes you outside the sterile walls of a chain and provides the kind of comfort we long for in our food.