Manet's famous painting Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère never appealed to me. But now I realize its genius, and my spine tingles every time I see it.

The perspective looks all wrong. You're staring straight at this barmaid, but her reflection in the mirror is way off to right. Even worse, her reflection is facing a guy who doesn't appear in the main view!

But in 2000, a researcher showed this perspective is actually possible!!! To prove it, he did a photographic reconstruction of this scene. Check it out in my next post.

This blows my mind.

(1/3)

We use 32 million ha of land globally (ca. 1 Germany) to grow plants for biofuels. This equals 1.400 TWh per year, or 4% of our global energy consumption for transport.

If we'd use the same area for PV, we could produce 32.000 TWh per year, already considering the potential yield for the areas where we grow bio fuel plants.

For comparison: the entire world consumed 31.000 TWh of electricity in 2024.

I love such comparisons.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQBgNpooCEo

Today I learned about naked streets:

“…a naked street involves the removal of all hard safety measures, including safety barriers, traffic lights, warning signs, speed humps, pedestrian crossings and road markings. These are all replaced with road surfaces that do not clearly distinguish between vehicle and pedestrian space, ambiguity in defining traffic rules, and a street environment that fosters eye contact and human interaction.”

“A favourite demonstration of Monderman’s was to walk backwards and with eyes closed into the intersection. Instead of honking or worse, striking him down, the car and bicycle traffic diverted its way around him.”

#streets #infrastructure #design

https://streetswithoutcars.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/naked-streets/

The James Bond Theme was written in 1962 by Monty Norman

The Mission: Impossible Theme was written in 1966 by Lalo Schifrin

The Star Trek Theme was written in 1966 by Alexander Courage

wild that six decades later these themes are still strong in popular culture

HTML might be getting a new type of tag, which… hasn't happened this millennium. Here's the new syntax, and how it works.

And here's the explainer on HTML patching https://github.com/WICG/declarative-partial-updates/blob/main/patching-explainer.md

⭐️ New blog post: A Month With OpenAI's Codex

https://highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20260301-A-Month-With-OpenAIs-Codex

It's been literal *years* since I last posted anything, so you know this is a big deal for me 😜