June 4, 2026
THE CURATOR · EVENING EDITION No. 023
What gets disclosed.
IV · VI · MMXXVI
Tonight, one question — what gets disclosed, and by what mechanism? A scale model of a bay built to win an argument, a chatbot talked out of account access, a telescope sniffing methane on an interstellar comet. Each piece, in its way, about making a system legible.
The Bay Model the Army Corps Built to Argue With a Dam
VIA WIKIPEDIA
A 1.5-acre hydraulic model of San Francisco Bay and the Delta, built in Sausalito in the 1950s to test a proposal to dam the bay. The model worked so well it killed the dam — and then kept running as a research instrument for decades. The page reads like an essay on how physical simulation used to function as public argument, before everything moved to spreadsheets.
JWST Detects Methane and Strange Chemistry on Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS
VIA SCIENCEDAILY
The first direct methane detection on a visitor from another star system, courtesy of Webb's MIRI instrument. The chemistry is genuinely odd — not what you'd expect from a comet that formed around our sun, which is the point. The methodology and the "how do we know" framing are clean here, not buried under press-release language.
Another Falcon 9 Lookalike Joins China's Growing Roster of Rockets
VIA ARS TECHNICA
Eric Berger on China's surprise debut of yet another reusable booster designed in the Falcon 9 mold. What's interesting is the engineering reasoning: there are only so many ways to land a first stage, and convergent design isn't copying so much as agreement about physics. Berger reads it as orbital doctrine rather than industrial espionage.
Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked.
VIA 404 MEDIA
When you replace human technical support with an LLM, the LLM becomes the new attack surface. This is the cleanest example yet of what happens when "ask the chatbot" becomes the official path to account recovery. The exploit is almost embarrassingly direct.
UK Media Fails to Disclose Defence Sector Links in Nearly 60% of Cases
VIA ACTION ON ARMED VIOLENCE
A patient piece of accountability data work: AOAV audited UK media appearances by "defence experts" and counted how often the outlet disclosed the expert's industry ties. The headline number is sharp, but the methodology — how they coded relationships, what counted as disclosure — is the part worth reading slowly.
Backpacking the Wind River Range — a Photo Gallery
VIA THE BIG OUTSIDE
Michael Lanza walks into Titcomb Basin at the end of a 14-mile day and the gallery does the rest. If you've spent time in the Winds, this is going to land. If you haven't, the photos make a quiet case for putting them on the list — the granite horseshoe around Titcomb Lakes is one of those landscapes you understand better after sitting with images of it.
Renaissance Maps at the American Museum in Bath
VIA THE MAP ROOM
A small note on a collection most map nerds will never have heard of: Dallas Pratt's Renaissance maps, now held by the American Museum and Gardens in Bath, England. What struck me here is how often the most interesting cartographic collections sit in institutions named for something else entirely — in this case a museum of Americana, in England, holding sixteenth-century European world maps.
Visualization Is Not the Goal
VIA FLOWINGDATA
Nathan Yau, characteristically brief, on a mistake that's easy to make: treating the chart as the deliverable instead of the question it's supposed to answer. A short read, worth keeping near the desk if you make charts for a living.
Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot
VIA IAN FIEGGEN
A small object explained at the level of mechanism: a variant on the standard bow knot that doesn't come undone, with diagrams and a clear account of why the usual knot fails. Ian Fieggen has been running an entire site about shoelaces for over twenty years, which is its own kind of disclosure — the durational expertise of someone who decided one small thing was worth getting completely right.
PROBED · SURFACED · DISCLOSED
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