Grokkist Press
Reading Room
Snackables
Things we found elsewhere and pass on: a film, a tool, an essay, a corner of the old internet. A few lines on why, then off you go. New ones join the shelf as we find them, newest first.
24 Mar 2024
A deep dive into the red circle-slash — a ubiquitous sign of prohibition that's easy to spot but hard to explain. When road systems were built out, the US assumed you could read English and covered its signs in words; Europe, with 24+ official languages, relied on symbols. The story winds
Read the note ↗24 Mar 2024
An open-source app that shows you colours as they're perceived with various types of colour blindness. Point your camera at something and watch it re-render — use it to make visual designs more accessible, to understand a child's strange colour choices, or simply to see the world from anot
Read the note ↗24 Mar 2024
'When we throw something into a recycling bin without being confident we should — wishcycling, the industry calls it — we're perhaps imagining that the dirty work will be taken care of down the line by some technological wizardry.' A visit to a South London recycling facility becomes a tho
Read the note ↗10 Mar 2024
In 2010 researchers found that a slime mould could reproduce a map of Tokyo's transit system of its own accord — and it turns out slime moulds can solve tasks in computational geometry, image processing, logic and arithmetic. Bristol's Unconventional Computing Laboratory explores mycelial
Read the note ↗10 Mar 2024
An elegant and pointed tool for data-driven advocacy: whenever a company posts a celebratory International Women's Day message, the bot automatically replies with that company's median gender pay gap, drawn from public data — causing no small amount of online chaos. A neat cure for corpora
Read the note ↗10 Mar 2024
Jon Ronson — a journalist in the Louis Theroux mould, hunting universal truths in the fringes of society — explores the surprising origin stories of the culture wars that have divided us for decades, from abortion to critical race theory. The standout is the episode about televangelist Tam
Read the note ↗10 Mar 2024
A beautiful 90-second animation by Hideki Inaba on the passing of time. 'The waves of the sea gently ebb and flow, while the mountains silently observe. The short life of a bee and the long transformation of continents — both are merely illusions. The flow of time shines eternally in each
Read the note ↗10 Mar 2024
A labour of love: 'Could you imagine if every year there was a new Muppet movie that adapted the latest Best Picture winner? That's what Hollywood is taking away from you.' Each of the 95 films, the author argues, would be improved by being Muppets — but not equally, and there's a hierarch
Read the note ↗25 Feb 2024
Auckland photographer Charles Brooks explores the hidden interiors of fine instruments in his 'Architecture in Music' series — the inside of a cello or a 19th-century violin rendered as a soaring cathedral of wood and light. His images have exploded in popularity, displayed everywhere from
Read the note ↗25 Feb 2024
Something to break your heart a little. This short CalArts film tells the story of the beautiful birdsong of the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, based on field biologist John Sincock's experiences in Kauai. After avian malaria arrived on 19th-century ships, the birds had no defence; the last of its kind
Read the note ↗25 Feb 2024
'We live in a culture dominated by text and images — not listening… we value most what is easiest to encode.' Ted Gioia imagines a world where we invented recording before the printing press: songs would be the cornerstone of the humanities, bards would be authority figures, and we'd still
Read the note ↗25 Feb 2024
Music is math, and everything is also everything else. What can you draw with a waveform? A game of continuous pitch-bending: take an image, trace its upper and lower halves as audio envelopes, and now you have shapes that sound like things. This one starts with a fish, contains real squir
Read the note ↗