YouTuber Paralogical downloaded data from over 5 billion chess games to find the rarest move in chess. Slight spoiler: there are many possible moves that weren’t played in any of the games analyzed. The data and analysis programs used are available on Github:
This is a lil’ code to analyze chess .pgn files, with the goal of finding the “rarest” move in chess.
That is, the rarest move notation (standard algebraic notation) given a large number of input games (e.g. every rated game from lichess) in pgn format.
However, since there are many moves that never happen, this is moreso counting and categorizing moves of various types rather than finding one specific rare move.
In order to leave comments on posts, you need to be a current kottke.org member. If you'd like to sign up for a membership to support the site and join the conversation, you can explore your options here.
Ask a Manager update about a guy who told his interviewer during a job interview that “maybe she made mistakes as a developer but since I actually went to school for it, I didn’t have that problem.”
Of course Kenji López-Alt had a friend come up with a computer model that determined the ideal way to chop an onion. How can you resist reading an article with the phrase “exactly .557 onion radiuses” in it?
NPR recently welcomed Chaka Khan into the office for a Tiny Desk Concert.
When the “Queen of Funk,” Chaka Khan, began to sing her hit “Sweet Thing” at the Tiny Desk, she seemed surprised at how the audience enthusiastically joined in. It’s just one example of how ingrained her work is in the fabric of music history. Since she emerged in the 1970s with the funk band Rufus, Khan has crafted a legacy that includes 22 albums, 10 Grammys, forays into jazz and theater and collaborations with Prince, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and Quincy Jones. Her 50 years in the music industry recently culminated in a long overdue 2023 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
This was great right from the jump…one of my favorite Tiny Desks for sure.
The myth about cars that’s hurting cities. “In study after study in city after city around the world, researchers have found that merchants exaggerate the share of patrons who arrive by car and undercount those who walk, bike, or ride transit.”
According to a new report from the FBI, murders, rapes, assaults, robberies, burglaries, and vehicle theft all dropped by double-digit percentages in the US during the first three months of 2024 (compared to Q1 2023).
In case you or someone you know needs a little levity or pick-me-up today, might I suggest what might be the cutest thing that’s ever aired on television: a little girl named Joey and Kermit the Frog saying the alphabet.
An in-depth look at the Etak Navigator, the first practical vehicle navigation system from 1985. GPS wasn’t available then, so the Etak used something called “augmented dead reckoning” to determine the vehicle’s location.
A scientific investigation into bears, the cuddly apex predator: If Not Friend, Why Friend-Shaped? “Some of bears’ features-especially their chubby, rounded face-might also remind us of our own babies.”
Cotino is a “Storyliving by Disney™ community” in the greater Palm Springs area. “Parks, pathways and a promenade will reflect the imagination of Disney Imagineering.”
YouTuber Nerrel takes James Cameron to task for releasing 4K remasters of Aliens and True Lies that have been, well, ruined by using AI to clean them up.
The best 4k releases tend to follow a pretty simple template: clean and scan the negative, repair any obvious signs of damage, and restore the colors to match the original grading, with as little meddling beyond that as possible. The process should not be about modernizing the style or forcing film to look like digital video. 35mm film was capable of incredible picture quality, and 4k is the first home format capable of delivering most of that detail — that should be enough. A well done 4k is like having a pristine copy of the original negative to watch in your own home, with the full data from that celluloid — grain and detail alike — digitally preserved forever. And that’s the problem with deep learning algorithms — they can’t preserve details. They make their best guess about what an object is supposed to be, then pull new details out of their digital assholes and smear them across the screen.
If Hollywood and one of its best directors don’t care enough about their movies to do them right, how are they supposed to convince us to care about their movies?
“There have been more gun suicides than gun homicides in the United States every year for the past 25 years. Yet the harm inflicted on communities by suicides rarely registers in the national debate over guns.”
Reproduced from a rare original copy, the book features over 165 highly-detailed scans of the legendary art by José Luis García-López, with an introduction by Paul Levitz, former president of DC Comics.
First issued in 1982, the Style Guide aimed to assist licensees in delivering a consistent look for DC’s Super Heroes. The reissue is based on the original copy held by Standards Manual, containing an amalgam of pages added by the owners of the original from ‘82 to ‘85.
French potter Jacques Monneraud makes ceramic pots that look like teapots, vases, and pitchers made from cardboard and scotch tape. He offers these pots for sale, but they’re unsurprisingly sold out right now. More about Monneraud & his work on his website and Instagram. (via @presentandcorrect)
From Practical Engineering, this is a video explaining every type of bridge in just 15 minutes…or at least attempts to.
Without listing every bridge, there’s no true way to list every type of bridge. There’s too much nuance, creativity, and mixing and matching designs. But that’s part of the joy of paying attention to bridges. Once you understand the basics, you can start to puzzle out the more interesting details.
Hosted by the New York Academy of Medicine, #ColorOurCollections is a yearly assemblage of coloring books sourced from the collections of museums and libraries. You can download this year’s coloring books (as well as those from past years) for free from the website. (via open culture)
Genderswap[dot]fm is a catalog of gender-swapped song covers — think Beyoncé covering The Beatles, Miley Cyrus covering The Talking Heads, or The Flaming Lips covering Kylie Minoque. There’s also a less comprehensive Spotify playlist.
A surfer as famous as he was could have made enough money for an easy retirement, I thought, but Sutherland hadn’t cashed in. Surfing was never, to his mind, a job. Even when he was at the apex of the surfing world, he was unimpressed, stubborn. There was no pro tour in those days. “You could work for a board manufacturer, maybe have your own signature-model board,” he told me. “But that meant sell, sell, sell. That was…crass. I mean, the banality. It was antithetical to being able to enjoy being out in the water.”
Sutherland’s mom, Audrey, sounds like an amazing person:
Audrey drew up a list of things that every child should be able to do by age sixteen and stuck it on the wall. It read, in part:
- Clean a fish and dress a chicken
- Write a business letter
- Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord
- Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes
- Handle a boat safely and competently
- Save someone drowning using available equipment
- Read at a tenth grade level
- Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy
- Dance with any age
This list changed with the times, adding computers and contraception, and nobody really kept score, but everybody got the idea.
Finnegan wrote Barbarian Days, a memoir of his life as a surfer — I loved it.
The first Black Barbie doll was created and sold in 1980. Black Barbie, a documentary streaming on Netflix later this month, tells the story of how the doll came to be and the impact it had on a generation of young people who were able to see themselves in a doll with the same color skin, perhaps for the first time.
The trailer opens with this line: “If you’ve gone your whole life and you’ve never seen anything made in your own image, there is damage done.” Which is then echoed later in the trailer when a little girl is describing her Barbie: “Really pretty, and has lochs, just like me”.
Oh, there’s a new Sally Rooney novel coming out just a few days before my birthday? Now you all know what to get meeeee. It’s called Intermezzo and here’s the synopsis:
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties — successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women — his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude — a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
According to her UK publisher, here are the novel’s opening lines:
Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.
Already hooked. You can preorder Intermezzo at Amazon or Bookshop.
*whispers quietly* I’m not enjoying Frankenstein that much. I am also behind on the reading for Hot Frank Summer. If you’re reading it right now, how are you finding it?
Great rec from Youngna Park: “Part of my life strategy for eating leftovers at home all the time is you have to have a sauces rotation” — e.g. hot sauce, chili crisp, a garlicky yogurt sauce, etc.
A group of photographers, editors, and curators recently convened to choose a list of “the 25 most significant photographs since 1955”. Choosing just 25 photos to represent 70 years of the richest visual era in human history is just an impossible task, so there’s bound to be some grousing about individual choices. (I love Beyoncé but really?) But the selection is fascinating, includes a few images I’d never seen before, and the accompanying discussion is worth reading.
I would love to see a process that asks for nominations across a
larger & broader range of folks and then whittle it down through ranked choice voting or pairwise ranking. Paging The Pudding…
Stay Connected