Three weeks until Torino
Really I was looking for an excuse to post this photo from a transalpine flight of a few years back, but the Olympics are three weeks away. I can’t wait to see how many countrymen take home the Olympic donut.
Hi, I’m John Tolva!
Here's a little bit about me and how to get in touch.
The Ampcamper
Views From The Tank
Full coralscape
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly essay on places in horror filmmaking — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show podcast.
Marginalia
-
What if the decline of Cahokia and over great cities of indigenous North Americans was a deliberate response to The Little Ice Age?
-
The religious right would claim this as existence of humans living during the time of dinosaurs.
-
Generative AI for participatory planning (by humans!)
-
I agree with this: “We’re all for ketchup — up to the age of decision,” Tom McGlade, then a spokesman and vice president for Vienna Beef, said in 2017.
-
Ring the bell to let the fish pass through the boat lock in Utrecht. This is what the Internet was made for.
-
"It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does."
-
I'd watch a modern day Western flick based on this.
-
This fossil is 100 yards from my old house. A welcome friend on the walk to/from the L. (But it's a squirrel impression!)
-
How do you make sense of a world sloshing around in AI-generated content? The liberal arts.
-
Estimating the size of YouTube by "drunk dialing" URL strings.
-
Is it urban form itself that makes ghosts or the lack of community?
-
If they can pull this off in Phoenix, it can be done anywhere.
-
"Our universe's history, fossilized in light."
-
Thinking like Africa is a solution.
-
The hack that made my summer camper trip possible.
-
Live air traffic audio from the world's airports overlaid on ambient tunes.
-
See where any living thing exists in a beautiful interactive taxonomy visualization.
-
Flipping between channels of my childhood.
-
More impressive than tool-usage.
-
Type at work in the real world.
-
You're probably not prepared for how enthralling this is.
-
Anti-bird spikes as nest material, keeping other birds out!
-
B♭ C A♭ 8vb A♭ E♭.
-
Trains, automobiles, and rocket ships, basically.
-
"The act of simplifying reality for a machine results in a great deal of complexity for the human."
-
Sara Benincasa on the beauty of The Bear.
-
Two writers facing one Turing test: A dialog in honor of HAL between Richard Powers and Bruno LatourPrescience for our current world from 1998.
-
"History is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it. We will concede this trivia game (after a very long run as champions), and find another in which, aided by our compounding prosthetics, we can excel in more powerful and ever more terrifying ways."
-
AI neologisms. Could just link #termsfromtoday to this and never manually post again.
-
Science fiction becomes reality for fossil literature.
-
So much worse than the passive voice.
-
AI-generated imagery in the service of mythopoeic storytelling on a small town scale. (Follow via Instagram.)
-
"Dark magic box": The unique design opportunity of designing a marine ecosystem experience for visitors.
-
"A book with feedback"
-
Matt Kirschenbaum writes his own words about the "ongoing planetary spam event."
-
Meaning isn't 100% transitive.
-
A one-shot music video performed using only the reel-to-reel tape recorders.
-
Just because it was inevitable doesn't mean it isn't glorious.
-
Dan makes me nostalgic for Twitter 2007-2013.
-
Incredible instrument made from two Commodore 64s, floppy disks, tape and a giant dose of nerdery.
-
‘Oh, that’s tennis for non-athletes.'
-
Answer: barely, with a few modifications.
-
Some behind-the-scenes of my work life.
-
The All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club!
-
"Hell's Aquarium"
-
"Before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive."
-
"The problem wasn’t that Sisyphus had to roll his boulder up a hill forever; it’s that he had to roll it alone."
-
Same with me, clowns, same with me.
-
I'm here for the needless politicization of tennis versus pickeball.
-
Biomimicry meet reclaimed waste product.
-
"Cities are where we see each other. People who don’t want to see hate that."
-
How much do you know about lines?
-
Documentary on Minnesota's failed attempt at a city of the future in the late 1960's.
-
"Humanity, how are you doing on this beautiful Monday?"
-
Amazing visualization of European lighthouses showing light color, actual pattern, and radius of visibility.
-
An interesting data point, for sure, but this metric may be the best part: Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score.
-
The exact time of day, pulled from books.
-
Einstein confirms.
-
Mapping magnetic fields to the audio spectrum.
-
So pretty you often don't stop to listen.
-
The greatest tribute ever penned by a child for a parent.
-
Humans walking through a city don't take the shortest route but the one that physically points them at their destination most consistently.
-
Placing this here to remind future me.
-
LIght pollution of course ruins this.
-
Clever. Would be even better using LEGO's bioplastic bricks.
-
It doesn’t solve the problem to buy a hybrid and retrofit your house if all of that takes place 20 miles from your job.
-
Eno on urban design is masterful.
-
Railroad marketing ploy. But it's still quite nice here.
-
Particularly proud of this project from the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance.
-
"'There is an Italian phrase,' said Marco after we ordered our food. '"Li ti avvelenano", which translates to "there they will poison you." This is my prediction for the night.'"