The Sun’s about to get bitten

Keith Preston

9 months ago

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1 week to go until the Moon takes a ‘bite’ out of the Sun during partial solar eclipse on September 21

“Get ready, sun lovers! We’re just one week away from the September 21 partial solar eclipse. The Moon will appear to take a ‘bite’ from the Sun for observers across the South Pacific, including New Zealand, a sliver of eastern Australia, several Pacific islands, and portions of Antarctica. A partial solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly in front of the Sun during a new moon phase, occulting a swathe of its disk while stopping short of blocking it entirely. Roughly 16.6 million people — or 0.2% of the world population — will see at least some portion of the partial solar eclipse.”

Space.com »

School’s back, but the chaos is optional

You don’t need to helicopter. You need to strategize. IXL is the subtle move that makes you look like a genius. It helps kids build mastery in five key subjects with adaptive questions, built-in explanations, and actual retention. It works behind the scenes while your kid feels like they’re just playing with numbers and words. Studies show students who use it score higher on tests — and you’ll be the one casually saying “oh, we just use IXL.” Best of all? It’s 25% off for your first year now. [Ad]

Get smart about school »

The superyacht, the billionaire, and a wildly improbable disaster at sea

“In the predawn hours of August 19, 2024, bolts of lightning began to fork through the purple-black clouds above the Mediterranean. From the rail of a 184-foot vessel, a 22-year-old named Matthew Griffiths took out his phone to record a video. The British deckhand was just a week and a half into his first official yacht job, and he wasn’t on just any boat. The yacht, the $40 million Bayesian, was a star of the superyacht world, considered to be a feat of minimal design and precision engineering. As thunder rolled toward the anchored vessel, Griffiths set the video to AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ and posted it to Instagram. It was 3:55 am. … Many of them would not make it. Griffiths’ video was to be the final earthly record of the Bayesian.”

Wired »

Growing up in a library is exactly as magical as you’d imagine

“For a certain type of bookish kid (or, let’s be honest, adult), living in the library sounds like a dream. But when the Clark family moved into the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library in the late 1940s, their teenage son Ronald Clark was skeptical. ‘Kids are strange,’ he says. ‘We always want to be normal. So at first I was a little ashamed that I lived in a library.’ His family had moved from a small town in Maryland, where everyone knew each other, for his father, Raymond, to take a job as the library’s custodian. When New York City’s branch libraries were first built, each one had an apartment on the third floor for a live-in caretaker, who would keep the library clean and its coal furnaces burning…”

Atlas Obscura »

Costco is more than hot dogs and cookies (but those are pretty good, too)

Imagine a magical shopping experience where you go to a single store and find everything you need in one go: all your groceries for the week (er, month), cozy seasonal buys, home goods, electronics, you name it. As a Costco Gold Star Member, you can get it all under one roof — and you can get it at a great value, too. And when you’re done shopping, there’s that beloved food court waiting for you with their legendary $1.50 hot dogs and those new chocolate chunk cookies that you just can’t say no to. Join today and get a $20 Digital Costco Shop Card* that you can use online or in-store. [Ad]

Become a Gold Star Member »

Why I became a birdwatcher

“The first time I met a bird close-up, it was dead. A raven. … The bird felt like a miracle of construction: the splitting-axe of its bill, more paleo than any piece of bird-body I had ever seen, capable of crushing the skull of a rabbit in one slow, final closure; the nape that it ruffles and raises in both anger and desire; the spread of the primary feathers in the wing, no matter wasted, each rib as structural as a medieval vault, as fine as necessary, graded in width and strength from outer to inner and from tip to root. … The dead bird was not the bird. The body seemed only to have been the means by which the bird could have become itself. But that moment of closeness to such an animal was the beginning of something for me.”

Nautilus »

// This AI rescues your janky clips from pixel purgatory. Trim, smooth, compress — suddenly you’re Kubrick with a laptop instead of crying over file sizes »

// IntelliCode that actually makes sense, containers that don’t implode, and Git that won’t gaslight you: This is coding without the chaos dimension »

// Buy low. Sell high. Or at least try to. Sterling gives you lifetime access to market analysis and stock recs that make you look like you actually understand the words “diversified portfolio” »