Welcome back to The Catalog of what’s worth learning, exploring, or watching this week, so you can start with a shortlist instead of sifting through noise.

CONTENTS

• New Arrivals (Visualized Seinfeld Laughs, Robots Doing Chores, Apophis the Asteroid, New Elon Documentary)

• The Feature (Lowered Barriers to Entry)

• Observations (A Season Without Hurricanes, OutKast at Waffle House in ATL)

NEW ARRIVALS

01 · Every Laugh in Seinfeld Visualized

If you’re a Seinfeld fan with an hour to scroll through visualized tv episode data, Andy Kirk’s The Seinfeld Chronicles is “an unnecessary data exploration” of the show about nothing. Use your desktop and turn on audio.

Kirk logged all 176 written episodes by hand from the DVD box set, and the level of detail is staggering. He breaks the episodes down like a musical score, with rhythm and scene structure, and you can filter by characters and locations. Kirk’s project started in 2020 as a printed book limited to 176 copies, one for each episode.

I really like how he measures a character’s peak performance: the episodes where they got a lot of laughs while on screen (laughter rate), a big share of all the episode’s laughs (laughter share), and plenty of screen time (e.g., George in “The Note”).

02 · A Robot Does the Chores

Figure deployed its humanoid robots into 30 Bay Area homes they had never seen, running their new Helix 2.5 model.

The humanoids autonomously made beds, folded towels, and picked up toys, completing 237 of 420 attempts (56%).

The same model without pretraining finished only 9% of household tasks.

The difference was Index, Figure’s library of human video, which more than 90,000 people add to every week by filming their everyday lives. In №003 I wrote about Waffle Video paying $25 an hour for footage of chores like washing dishes. Five weeks later, Figure is now using this sort of video to train their humanoid fleet.

As a parent of a 4-year-old, I completely understand why picking up toys was the hardest task to complete (40%).

03 · Apophis Is Coming

In April 2029, a 340-meter asteroid named Apophis will pass closer to Earth than the satellites carrying our TV and weather data, about 32,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface.

Apophis, named for the Egyptian god of chaos, arrives on a Friday the 13th.

The cosmic rock is as wide as the Eiffel Tower is tall, and astronomers have been tracking Apophis for a while. In 2004, its odds of hitting Earth in 2029 were estimated at 1 in 37, almost a 3% chance. Years of careful tracking brought those odds to zero.

The European Space Agency says objects this large come this close only once every 5,000 to 10,000 years.

The asteroid will be visible without a telescope in Europe and western Asia, so you might want to start planning a trip to go see it.

04 · New Elon Musk Documentary by Alex Gibney

Alex Gibney’s documentary about Elon Musk opens in US theaters next Friday, October 9. Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival last month to a minutes-long standing ovation.

Since Musk declined to take part, Gibney built a digital stand-in. An AI-generated Musk avatar reads the real Musk’s past quotes throughout a film made largely from his own words. Journalists like Kara Swisher and his ex-wife Justine Musk fill in the rest.

Gibney is a renowned director behind some of my favorite modern documentaries, like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), which I saw in theaters, and The Inventor, HBO’s 2019 documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

HBO has streaming rights, so most of us will eventually see it at home, and with a 4-hour runtime, probably in more than one sitting.

THE FEATURE

Lowered Barriers to Entry

Next week, Cumberland Coast Studio is livestreaming the Norcross City Council special election debate. It’s my first livestream since 2013, when I captured Ed Roland of Collective Soul playing holiday songs in the studio. It’s a lot easier now.

This time my whole rig is an iPhone 18 Pro, a MacBook Air, a pair of Rode wireless mics, and Streamlabs into YouTube Studio. I expect to go from unpacking to broadcasting in a few minutes. A setup like this used to take hours of wiring, and weeks of planning.

My iPhone is doing work that used to require a dedicated DSLR camera, and my laptop no longer needs external encoding hardware. The new iPhone 18 Pro has a variable aperture on its main lens, and its autofocus tracking compares with mirrorless cameras. Top-of-the-line phones still have gaps for serious film work, but for a live session in a small room, they’re more than enough.

Lately, with AI’s help, almost everything I build or produce has felt too easy. New software and hardware don’t require me to learn the language first. Here are two more examples from the past month.

• I connected one of my WordPress sites to Claude Cowork via MCP, a standard that allows AI to work directly inside other software. Now, I describe a new component or site-wide change in plain English, and it gets built and published. I don’t write a line of code.

• My wife, Kristen, and I co-founded and run Norcross Porchfest, and we just announced the 2027 festival date, Saturday, May 1. Last year’s inaugural festival drew about 1,500 people to our hometown with 36 acts on 12 stages. To kick off 2027 planning, I described what we needed in plain English, and AI built it all in Airtable: linked databases for volunteers and homeowners, sign-up forms, and automated follow-ups.

It’s easier than ever to pick up professional-grade creative equipment, build a website, or manage specialized software. None of these activities needed a specialist, external vendor, or budget.

Last week on The Ezra Klein Show, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a prediction about what’s coming next in this environment. College takes 4 years, he said, so the first students who had these tools from day one are about 2 years from graduating.

“In 2 years’ time, you’re going to have a new generation of engineers and students and artists, and they’re going to be empowered. They’re going to be native to this in a way that’s going to give them an advantage.”

-Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO

He compared AI to a calculator, which was banned when he was in school and is now so ordinary nobody thinks about it.

The sudden advanced capabilities of these new generative AI systems arrived mid-career for me, with 20 years of habits to unlearn. Recent Stanford research shows employment of 22- to 25-year-old software developers running 19% below expected levels. Roughly one in five of the jobs you’d expect for those new graduates aren’t there today.

New AI tools can make it easy to get started, but they aren’t making it very easy to get hired.

I think Huang is on to something about the upcoming wave of innovation by AI-native graduates, and I expect a lot of it will arrive as companies they start themselves.

OBSERVATIONS

No Hurricanes this Season

It’s October, and the Atlantic Ocean hasn’t produced a single hurricane this year. I live in the coastal state of Georgia, and that’s unusual.

So far this “hurricane season” there have been eight named storms and no hurricanes, the longest wait for a first hurricane since satellites started tracking in 1966.

This is likely caused by a strengthening El Niño, which raises winds high in the atmosphere and tears storms apart before they can organize. El Niño is a natural warming of the Pacific Ocean near the equator that shows up every few years and shifts weather patterns around the world. If none forms by next week, this hurricane season breaks a record that has stood since 1905.

OutKast + Waffle House Collab Launches in ATL Today

Speaking of severe storms, FEMA has a clever way to measure a storm’s impact in the South. Former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate’s Waffle House Index checks whether the local Waffle House is open.

This week I heard about one of the most southern collaborations I can imagine: OutKast and Waffle House are teaming up for a pop-up today in Atlanta.

At 11AM, limited-edition merch drops today on OutKast’s website. I’m going to try to pick up a jacket or coffee mug.

An official launch party runs from 11AM to 1PM ET at the Waffle House near Centennial Olympic Park at 135 Andrew Young International Boulevard NW in downtown Atlanta, with special menu items named for André 3000 and Big Boi, souvenir menus, and a live DJ.

ABOUT THE CATALOG

These days everything moves at hyperspeed. We’re creating and producing more content, with less certainty, than at any point we can remember. New emerging technologies are fundamentally reshaping how work gets done, how content is produced, and how we communicate with each other, faster than we can keep up with.

As an experience strategist I read a lot, and I continually run across things that are useful or worth thinking about. In fast moving environments, the hardest part can be deciding what deserves attention.

In the Catalog, I aim to capture what I’ve found each week that’s worth learning, exploring, or watching, so you can start with a shortlist instead of sifting through noise.

Learn more about why I started writing this newsletter in Issue 000.

See you next week,

J Corley