For an ad campaign running in the United Arab Emirates, Ikea recreated the famous TV living rooms from three shows using only Ikea furniture and housewares. See if you can guess which shows these are from…
(via @mkobach)
Tags: advertising Friends Ikea remix Stranger Things The Simpsons TVStill Ill is a short documentary about the Beastie Boys’ career from approximately Paul’s Boutique to Ill Communication.
The 15-minute documentary tracks the Beastie Boys’ rejuvenation in the years after the release of 1989’s Paul’s Boutique — now considered a masterpiece but at the time a commercial flop — first with 1992’s Check Your Head and ultimately with Ill Communication, which produced the epic single and music video “Sabotage” and returned them to playing arenas.
Featuring interviews with Diamond and Horovitz from this March in Austin, Texas — as well as new interviews with keyboardist Mark “Money Mark” Nishita and producer Mario Caldato and rarely-seen 1990s footage of the band - Still Ill focuses heavily on late Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch and his contributions to Ill Communication. Through footage and the words of his friends, the documentary captures Yauch’s journey into activism, which would blossom with the Tibetan Freedom Concerts later in the decade, as well as his famous denunciation of misogyny in hip-hop on the single “Sure Shot”: “I want to say a little something that’s long overdue / The disrespect to women has got to be through / To all the mothers and sisters and the wives and friends / I want to offer my love and respect to the end.”
If you’re an Amazon Prime member or subscriber to Amazon Music, you can listen to a 40-minute mix of commentary from Mike D and Ad-Rock about Ill Communication and songs from the album.
Tags: Beastie Boys interviews music videoLast week, Greta Thunberg and dozens of other young climate activists called on adults to join them in a climate strike on September 20.
Once again our voices are being heard on the streets, but it is not just up to us.
We feel a lot of adults haven’t quite understood that we young people won’t hold off the climate crisis ourselves. Sorry, if this is inconvenient for you. But this is not a single-generation job. It’s humanity’s job. We young people can contribute to a larger fight and that can make a huge difference.
So this is our invitation to you. Starting on Friday 20 September we will kick start a week of climate action with worldwide strikes for the climate. We’re asking you to step up alongside us. There are many different plans underway in different parts of the world for adults to join together and step up and out of your comfort zone for our climate. Let’s all join together; with our neighbours, co-workers, friends, family and go out on to the streets to make our voices heard and make this a turning point in our history.
A response — signed by folks like Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Klein, and Margaret Atwood — appeared the next day:
Starting Friday September 20, at the request of the young people who’ve been staging school strikes around the world, we’re walking out of our workplaces and homes to spend the day demanding action on climate change, the great existential threat that all of us face. It’s a one-day climate strike, if you will — and it will not be the last. This is going to be the beginning of a week of climate action all over the world. And we hope to make it a turning point in history.
We hope others will join us: that people will leave their offices, their farms, their factories; that candidates will step off the campaign trail and football stars off the pitch; that movie actors will scrub off their makeup and teachers lay down their chalk; that cooks will close their restaurants and bring meals to protests; that pensioners too will break their daily routines and join in sending the one message our leaders must hear: Day by day, business as usual is creating an ecological crisis that is destroying the chance for a healthy, safe future on our planet.
I’m in — kottke.org will not publish on September 20th. You can join in here. Stay tuned to the Global Climate Strike site for more information on how to find events near you. (via laura olin)
Tags: global warming Greta ThunbergIn July, American Experience will air Chasing the Moon, a 6-hour documentary film about the effort to send a manned mission to the Moon before the end of the 1960s.
The series recasts the Space Age as a fascinating stew of scientific innovation, political calculation, media spectacle, visionary impulses and personal drama. Utilizing a visual feast of previously overlooked and lost archival material — much of which has never before been seen by the public — the film features a diverse cast of characters who played key roles in these historic events. Among those included are astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Frank Borman and Bill Anders; Sergei Khrushchev, son of the former Soviet premier and a leading Soviet rocket engineer; Poppy Northcutt, a 25-year old “mathematics whiz” who gained worldwide attention as the first woman to serve in the all-male bastion of NASA’s Mission Control; and Ed Dwight, the Air Force pilot selected by the Kennedy administration to train as America’s first black astronaut.
Among the stories not usually told about the Moon missions is that of Ed Dwight, NASA’s first black astronaut trainee:
Since 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, there’s a *lot* of stuff out there about the Space Race and Apollo program, but this film looks like it’s going to be one of the best. The film will start airing on PBS on July 8 and the Blu-ray & DVD comes out on July 9. There’s a companion book that will be available next week.
Tags: Apollo Chasing the Moon Moon movies NASA space TV videoThe BFI and the Royal Astronomical Society have recently rediscovered and restored a film taken in 1900 of a total solar eclipse. Here’s the minute-long film on YouTube:
The film was taken by British magician turned pioneering filmmaker Nevil Maskelyne on an expedition by the British Astronomical Association to North Carolina on 28 May, 1900. This was Maskelyne’s second attempt to capture a solar eclipse. In 1898 he travelled to India to photograph an eclipse where succeeded but the film can was stolen on his return journey home. It was not an easy feat to film. Maskelyne had to make a special telescopic adapter for his camera to capture the event. This is the only film by Maskelyne that we know to have survived.
The Royal Astronomy Society will be showing the film tomorrow May 31 at their HQ in London as part of their celebration of the centenary of the 1919 eclipse; free tickets available here.
See also my account of going to see the 2017 solar eclipse, one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. (via @UnlikelyWorlds)
Tags: astronomy Nevil Maskelyne Sun videoThe first trailer for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Netflix’s long-awaited prequel to Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, is finally here. From Vanity Fair:
The new series, which takes place years before the events of the original film, follows three creatures, called Gelfling, who discover the horrifying secret behind the power of a group of villainous critters called the Skeksis. The heroes — Taron Egerton’s Rian, Anya Taylor-Joy’s Brea, and Nathalie Emmanuel’s Deet — embark on an epic journey to ignite the fires of rebellion and save their world, which, at the time of the film, is dying, with sickness spreading across the land as the Skeksis control the powerful Crystal of Truth.
As you can see from the trailer, the series uses puppets and not CGI characters, just like the original. The 10-part series debuts on Netflix on August 30. In the meantime, the original 1982 movie is available on Netflix right now.
Tags: Jim Henson movies The Dark Crystal trailers TV video
The results of recently analyzed find from the Green River Formation in the western US were published yesterday show the fossilized remains of an entire school of 257 fish. Beyond the fact that a whole school of fish was somehow frozen in time together 50 million years ago, what’s so remarkable is this discovery provides evidence of the social behavior of a now-extinct animal.
We found traces of two rules for social interaction similar to those used by extant fishes: repulsion from close individuals and attraction towards neighbours at a distance. Moreover, the fossilized fish showed group-level structures in the form of oblong shape and high polarization, both of which we successfully reproduced in simulations incorporating the inferred behavioural rules. Although it remains unclear how the fish shoal’s structure was preserved in the fossil, these findings suggest that fishes have been forming shoals by combining sets of simple behavioural rules since at least the Eocene. Our study highlights the possibility of exploring the social communication of extinct animals, which has been thought to leave no fossil record.
Read more about the analysis in Science News.
Tags: fish paleontology scienceIn the 1890s and 1900s, the Biograph Company sent film crews around the world to capture moving images to bring them to audiences that, up until this point, had no access to seeing what life was like outside of their own locales. This footage was acquired by MoMA in 1939 but not analyzed until recently.
This footage is astoundingly crisp and clear — one of the highlights is a short clip of Queen Victoria shot on a visit to Ireland in 1900, just a year before her death. In a shot starting at 1:45, the queen is seen sitting in a carriage, exchanging greetings with well-wishers, and wearing a pair of now-trendy tiny sunglasses.
In the moving image, you get so much more — even in something as brief as this — of the personality, the presence of this woman. This is the embodiment of the British Empire, here she is, an immediate connection with a figure that everyone would have known. She’d certainly been photographed but only when you see her like this, when she’s moving, when she’s alive, when she’s in the middle of a scene, do you get the sense of being in the same world with her and really connecting to that living being that was Queen Victoria.
The film images are so incredibly clear because Biograph shot them in 68mm at 30fps, aka “the IMAX of the 1890s”.
To avoid violating Edison’s motion picture patents, Biograph cameras from 1895-1902 used a large-format film, measuring 2-23/32 inches (68 mm) wide, with an image area of 2x2½ inches, four times that of Edison’s 35mm format. The camera used friction feed instead of Edison’s sprocket feed to guide the film to the aperture. The camera itself punched a sprocket hole on each side of the frame as the film was exposed at 30 frames per second. A patent case victory in March 1902 allowed Biograph and other producers and distributors to use the less expensive 35 mm format without an Edison license, although Biograph did not completely phase out 68 mm production until autumn of 1903.
Compare the Victoria clip above with one shot by British Pathé around the same time:
More than a century after the invention of moving images, I think we still somehow underestimate the power and impact of the connection of film & video. Even now, we thrill when we open up Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat and “get the sense of being in the same world” (or even the same room) with people from around the world, living lives very different from our own. We may not experience the impact that early film audiences must have felt seeing their monarch in motion for the first time, but every video clip we see today is still a minor miracle, a time machine that brings far flung places, past & future, into our presence at the push of a button.
Tags: MoMA Queen Victoria video
First You Make the Maps is a survey of mapping technology by Elizabeth Della Zazzera showing how, starting at the end of the Middle Ages, better maps facilitated the European discovery of the Americas, the explosion of global trade, the enslavement of Africans, and the colonization by Europeans of much of the world.
While geographically accurate maps had existed before, the Age of Exploration saw the emergence of a sustained tradition of topographic surveying. Maps were being made specifically to guide travelers. Technology progressed quickly through the centuries, helping explorers and traders find their way to new imperial outposts — at least sometimes. On other occasions, hiccups in cartographic reasoning led their users even farther astray.
(via @ktguru)
Tags: design Elizabeth Della Zazzera maps
Scott Wade turns the dirty windows of cars into mobile art. Here’s a look at Wade in action:
Tags: art cars Scott Wade video
Artist Shawn Feeney worked as a forensic artist for a few years and was inspired by that experience to produce BFF, a project where he combined the faces of pairs of friends into composite portraits, and then pairs of those composites into composite drawings, and so on until a single composite remained from 128 initial faces. Here are two of the quarterfinalist brackets:
And in this video, you get a closer look at the complete bracket and how the lineage of each starting drawing develops through the generations:
This reminds me of the software-averaged faces of people from different countries around the world and also Jason Salavon’s work like the combination of all the couch gags from The Simpsons and Every Playboy Centerfold (SFW).
Tags: art Jason Salavon Shawn FeeneyThe story goes that modern chaos theory was birthed by Edward Lorenz’s paper about his experiments with weather simulation on a computer. The computing power helped Lorenz nail down hidden patterns that had been hinted at by computer-less researchers for decades. But the early tenets of chaos theory were not the only things that were hidden. The women who wrote the programs that enabled Lorenz’s breakthroughs haven’t received their proper due.
But in fact, Lorenz was not the one running the machine. There’s another story, one that has gone untold for half a century. A year and a half ago, an MIT scientist happened across a name he had never heard before and started to investigate. The trail he ended up following took him into the MIT archives, through the stacks of the Library of Congress, and across three states and five decades to find information about the women who, today, would have been listed as co-authors on that seminal paper. And that material, shared with Quanta, provides a fuller, fairer account of the birth of chaos.
The two women who programmed the computer for Lorenz were Ellen Gille (née Fetter) and Margaret Hamilton. Yes, that Margaret Hamilton, whose already impressive career starts to look downright bonkers when you add in her contributions to chaos theory.
Tags: chaos theory computing Edward Lorenz Ellen Gille Margaret Hamilton mathematics scienceAnnie Lowrey writing for The Atlantic last summer, How America Treats Its Own Children.
This is a country that professes to care about children at their youngest and most fragile. But here, for every 100,000 live births, 28 women die in childbirth or shortly thereafter, compared with 11 in Canada. This ratio has more than doubled since 1990, despite the medical advances made in those decades, where it has gone down in other high-income countries. Black women are three times as likely to die giving birth or shortly after birth as white women. Black women in the United States die having a child at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia.
It is a country that professes to care for babies. But in the United States, the infant death rate is twice as high as in similarly wealthy countries. Premature birth and low birth weight are common ailments, with lifelong and even intergenerational effects.
This is a country that attempts to support low-income mothers with tax benefits, food stamps, health insurance, and the Women, Infants, and Children program. Still, it spends less of its gross domestic product on family benefits than all other OECD countries, save for Mexico and Turkey, which are far, far less wealthy. It spends less than half as much as Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Sweden.
Higher rates of incarceration, lack of access to medical care, little or no parental leave for child birth, poor education, low government spending on children…the list goes on and on. Wealthy and middle-class parents can afford to provide many of these things for their children, but if you’re poor, forget about it. This is shameful…America’s “every person for themselves” ethos should not extend to our children.
Tags: Annie Lowrey politics USA
In Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, no coal has been used to produce power for the last 11 days. This is an arresting chart of how quickly the country’s reliance on coal has been reduced:
Britain is setting new records for going without coal-powered energy. In the latest milestone, it has gone for more than eight days without using coal to generate electricity — the longest such period since 1882.
The coal-free run comes just two years after the National Grid first ran without coal power for 24 hours.
Phasing out the heavily polluting fuel is a key step in the transition towards a net-zero carbon economy and essential to averting catastrophic climate change.
Britain still derives ~50% of its power from natural gas, but this is a very hopeful chart. “Gradually then suddenly” works against us in dealing with climate change but it also could work in our favor.
Tags: energy global warming infoviz UKThis video is so far up my alley that I’m now charging it rent. (For parking in the alley. Yeah, I don’t know how metaphors work.) Anyway, this 20-minute film is a collection of photography of street scenes, from the very first photo ever taken of a person in 1838 (by Louis Daguerre) to a crowded market in Glasgow in 1869 to a ghostly Norwegian street scene in 1882 to NYC’s Mulberry St in 1900 to a newsie selling newspapers about the Titanic disaster in 1912 to more modern scenes, presented chronologically one photo per year. Along the way, you see the development of history, fashion, and technology — the people in the photos get crisper and clearer as shutters quicken and film improves.
My only complaint is that many of the photos after 1900 and into the 40s & 50s have been artificially colored…and distractingly so. Why not just feature the original B&W versions? Believe me, I understand the appeal & impact of seeing the past in color, but these colorized versions greatly detract from the historical value of this video. (via aeon)
Tags: photography video
Hear ye, hear ye! The third book in Hilary Mantel’s excellent Thomas Cromwell trilogy has been announced. The Mirror & the Light picks up where the previous book left off, with (spoilers!) the execution of Anne Boleyn, and covers the final years of Cromwell’s life.
England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves.
Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to the breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?
I loved both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and am really looking forward this one coming out next March. Preorder now!
Tags: Hilary Mantel The Mirror & the Light Thomas Cromwell booksIn the latest issue of his newsletter, Rex Sorgatz proposes a name for the growing collection of media about the recent past: the Historical Cinematic Universe (HCU for short, name after the MCU, naturally).
By my estimation, the uptick started in movies, with a surge in reality-based Oscar-bait like Spotlight, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Post, The Social Network, and the films of Adam McKay, especially Vice and The Big Short. More recently, and more significantly, the trend has spilled into scripted television, with such ambitious projects as HBO’s Brexit movie, Paramount’s Waco miniseries, Netflix’s Unabomber series, USA’s Tupac / Biggie miniseries, Hulu’s 9/11 series, Buzzfeed’s 1968 series, and, of course, HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries, which is the best show on TV right now. (A+ rec!)
With the influx of scripted historical reinterpretation, traditional documentaries have broadened their scope, expanding into binge experiences. The boomlet is most obvious in those esteemed investigations from HBO, such as Leaving Neverland and The Jinx. But this vim for verisimilitude has spread to unexpected locales, like Lifetime, with Surviving R. Kelly, and A&E, with The Clinton Affair, my personal favorite of this genre. Each of these historical investigations have yielded massive cultural influence.
I am a huge fan of the HCU, particularly of podcasts like Slow Burn and an excellent documentary he doesn’t mention, OJ: Made in America. As Sorgatz notes, Slow Burn creator Leon Neyfakh just launched a new podcast called Fiasco, the first season of which is about the 2000 Bush/Gore election.1 The podcast is only available via subscription, but you can listen to the first episode on the website.
Which I have been thinking about a lot recently — it is recent history’s biggest counterfactual. Imagine a world where Al Gore became President in 2001. The US taking climate change seriously back then would have made a huge difference. No using 9/11 to sharply escalate our meddling & deadly presence in the Middle East. Perhaps no financial crisis in 2008. Perhaps no Roberts or Alito on the Supreme Court. Sigh.↩
I keep track of every media thing I “consume”, so here are quick reviews of some things I’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in the past two months. I never wrote a proper report on my trip to Mexico City, so I put some of the highlights in here. I’m in the middle of several things right now. On TV, I’m watching Our Planet, In Search of Greatness, Street Food, Chernobyl, The Clinton Affair, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, and This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy. I don’t normally watch 19 different things at one time, but life’s felt a little scattered lately. For books, I’m listening to Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond on audiobook and I’m making good progress on Robert Caro’s Working (highly recommended).
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. Hard to summarize but there’s certainly something interesting on almost every page. (A-)
Fleabag. Bitingly funny and poignant, a real gem. (A+)
Skyscraper. Die Hard + the Sherlock Holmes story A Scandal in Bohemia + #sponcon for Big Duct Tape. I love a good disaster movie. (B+)
Mexico City. Great food, vegetation everywhere, beautiful architecture, culturally fascinating, super walkable/bikeable/scooterable. I am definitely visiting here again as soon as I can. (A)
Puyol Taco Omakase. Delicious & fun & a great experience, but I’m not sure the food was obviously so much better than some of the best street food I had in Mexico City. I had this same experience in Bangkok years ago…street food is tough to beat when there’s a thriving culture of markets, carts, and stalls. (B+)
The National Museum of Anthropology. One of my new favorite museums in the world. The only thing possibly more impressive than the collection is the architecture of the building. (A+)
Teotihuacán. I had high hopes for this archeological site and I was still blown away by it. (A+)
AirPods. This is my favorite gadget in years, the first real VR/AR device that feels seamless (and not like a Segway for your face). The freedom of wireless headphones feels similar to when I first used a laptop, wifi, and dockless bike share. (A+)
Homecoming. So many things to love about this, but one of my favorites is the shots of the audience watching Beyoncé and the rare moments when she watches them back: “I see you.” And also the way they put a cohesive show together while showcasing individual talents and styles. (A-)
Homecoming: The Live Album. Come on, a marching band playing Beyoncé hits? That this works so well is a small miracle. (A-)
Avengers: Endgame. I liked but didn’t love it. It was like the ST:TNG finale and the Six Feet Under finale mashed together and not done as well. It also seemed too predictable. (B)
Avengers: Age of Ultron. Now that the Thanos narrative arc is complete, this is an underrated installment. (B+)
Casa Luis Barragán. This was like being in someone’s creative mind. The layering of the garden reminded me of Disney’s use of the multiplane camera in the forest scene in Bambi. (B+)
Gelatin Sincronizada Gelitin (NSFW). I was skeptical of this art performance at first — a bunch of half-naked people painting on a moving canvas using paintbrushes coming out of their butts — but it ended up being a really cool thing to experience. (B+)
Game of Thrones. I’m not quite as critical of the final season as everyone else seems to be. Still, it seems like since the show left the cozy confines of George RR Martin’s books, it has struggled at times. (B+)
Wandering Earth. Based on the short story by Liu Cixin (author of the Three Body Problem trilogy), this disaster movie is a little uneven at the start but finishes strong. (B)
Halt and Catch Fire Vol 2. The music was one of the many great things about this show. (A-)
Running from COPS. A podcast about how media and law enforcement in America intersect to great and terrible effect. (B+)
Eating bugs. I tasted crickets, grasshoppers, and grubs at the market: mostly just salty. I had beef tartare and guacamole with grasshoppers on it. They added a nice crunch to the guac. Wouldn’t exactly go out of the way for them, but they weren’t bad. (B)
Panaderia Rosetta. Did I have one of the best pain au chocolat I’ve ever had here? Yes. Yes, I did. Also extremely delicious: everything else I tried. (A-)
Against the Rules. A podcast from Michael Lewis about what’s happening to the concept of fairness in America. The episode about Salvator Mundi, the supposed Leonardo masterpiece, is particularly interesting. (A-)
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth. I have a new appreciation of how much Tolkien did in creating his books: writing, map making, world building, art, constructing languages. (B+)
Frida Kahlo’s Blue House. A striking house with a lush courtyard, but the highlight was seeing Kahlo’s work area much the way she left it when she died. (B+)
Street Food Essentials by Club Tengo Hambre. Mexico City is a huge place with so much to do that I wanted to hit the ground running right away, so I booked this street food tour. Definitely a good idea. We sampled so many different kinds of tacos & gorditas & quesadillas that I lost count. Highlights: huitlacoche quesadillas, al pastor tacos, fresh Oaxaca cheese at the Mercado de San Juan, and the blue corn masa used to make tlacoyos at one of our last stops — probably the best tortilla I’ve ever eaten. (A-)
The Matrix. This came out 20 years ago. I watched it with my 11-yo son the other day and he thought the special effects “held up pretty well”. (A)
Electric scooters. I used the Lime dockless electric scooters for the first time when I was in Mexico City and I loved experience. Easier than a bike and a fun & fast way to get around the city. Cons: the combo of the speed & small wheels can be dangerous and cities generally don’t have the infrastructure to accommodate them yet. (B+)
Paprika. Inventive and visually dazzling. Purportedly an influence on Christopher Nolan’s Inception. (B+)
Oh and just because, here’s a photo I took recently in my backyard that makes it seem like I live in Narnia or The Shire:
Past installments of my media diet are available here.
Tags: books food media diet Mexico City movies museums music podcasts restaurants TV videoToni Morrison: The Pieces I Am is a documentary film on the legendary Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved.
Navigating a white, male world wasn’t threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were, and I wasn’t afraid to show it.
The film opens in theaters June 21.
Tags: movies Toni Morrison Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am trailers video
Tales From Weirdland has a collection of posts that feature concept drawings from several Studio Ghibli movies like Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Castle in the Sky. I poked around a little and found artwork & concept drawings from Princess Mononoke, The Wind Rises, and Porco Rosso. Hand dawn and it all just pops off the screen. Wonderful.
Looks like a lot of this is available in book form as well: The Art of Spirited Away, The Art of Princess Mononoke, The Art of Howl’s Moving Castle, etc.
Tags: art Hayao Miyazaki Howl’s Moving Castle movies Porco Rosso Princess Mononoke Spirited Away Studio Ghibli The Wind Rises
A few McDonald’s restaurants in Sweden started putting beehives on their rooftops to help save dwindling bee populations and it turned into a national sustainability effort.
More franchisees around the country are joining the cause and have also started replacing the grass around their restaurants with flowers and plants that are important for the wellbeing of wild bees.
To promote the idea, McDonald’s constructed what might be their smallest restaurant, actually a fully functioning beehive just for the bees:
Totes adorbzzzz.
Tags: bees food McDonald’s videoLJ Rich has synesthesia and perfect pitch and wrote about what that feels like for her personally.
Now, I’d like you to imagine you’re chatting with your conversation partner. But instead of speaking and hearing the words alone, each syllable they utter has a note, sometimes more than one. They speak in tunes and I can sing back their melody. Once I know them a little bit, I can play along to their words as they speak them, accompanying them on the piano as if they’re singing an operatic recitative. They drop a glass on the floor, it plays a particular melody as it hits the tiles. I’ll play that melody back — on a piano, on anything. I can accompany that melody with harmony, chords — or perhaps compose a variation on that melody - develop it into a stupendous symphony filled with strings, or play it back in the style of Chopin, Debussy or Bob Marley. That car horn beeps an F major chord, this kettle’s in A flat, some bedside lights get thrown out because they are out of tune with other appliances. I can play along to every song on the radio whether or not I’ve heard it before, the chord progressions as open to me as if I had the sheet music in front of me. I can play other songs with the same chords and fit them with the song being played. Those bath taps squeak in E, this person sneezes in E flat. That printer’s in D mostly. The microwave is in the same key as the washing machine.
I have a friend with perfect pitch and one of the first times we hung out together, the horn on a tugboat sounded and she said, “C sharp”. I looked puzzled so she explained, and then I peppered her with questions about all the other sounds around us. It was like watching a superhero do their thing.
But with great power sometimes comes great irritation. From a NY Times article about Rich:
Tags: audio LJ Rich synesthesiaLJ said she had been a “weird prodigy kid.” For her, perfect pitch had been a nightmare. The whole world seemed out of tune. But then teachers introduced her to Indian ragas, Gamelan music and compositions with quarter tones, unfamiliar modes and atonal structures. As her musical horizons expanded, her anxiety dissipated. (She remains exceedingly sensitive to pitch, though. Her refrigerator, for example, hums in A flat. Working from home, I hear my fridge running 12 hours a day. Blindfolded, I’m not sure I could pick the thing out of a lineup of three other refrigerators.)
Pavel Dobryakov has built a nifty little fluid dynamics simulator in WebGl that runs in any modern browser, including on mobile devices. You can drag around on the screen with your mouse or finger and produce colorful swirling patterns like these:
iOS and Android apps are also available. (via @EdwardDixon3)
Tags: Pavel DobryakovFor Wired’s series Technique Critique, former CIA Chief of Disguise Jonna Mendez looks at several TV shows and movies to rate how good their spy scenes are.
Mendez gives high marks to characters from Alias and The Americans for effective use of disguises and low marks to The Bourne Identity and Homeland. In relation to Philip’s disguises on The Americans, she discusses the concept of the little gray man, the CIA’s goal for its agents to look like harmless middle-aged men, something she also mentioned in this Washington Post piece:
Rhys makes the case, however, for disappearing under nothing more than a knit cap and a pair of glasses, a scruffy mustache and a messy wig. He becomes the consummate little gray man, invisible, the one nobody can remember was even on the elevator.
Mendez also talks about the three cover identities that CIA agents were not allowed to use: clergy, media figures, and Peace Corps volunteer. She previously did this video with Wired about how the CIA used disguises.
Tags: CIA espionage Jonna Mendez movies The Americans TV video
Artist and former advertising art director Alvaro Naddeo does these wonderful paintings of old iconic junk from our branded past repurposed into absurdist structures and vehicles, like Junkyard Wars through the lens of Warhol. It’s tough to explain, so just feast thine eyes on a couple of examples:
Ok, that was more than a couple. But there are so many more on his website and Instagram (including work-in-progress stuff)…check them out!
Naddeo recently shared his process for making these paintings with Colossal:
Naddeo tells Colossal that he starts with a loose sketch by hand. He then uses 3D software to help define a plausible shape for his imagined constructions, and creates a reference composition in Photoshop. After years of practice, Naddeo shares that he is able to recreate the texture, color, and shadows of various building materials like brick and concrete from memory. He uses reference photos to help flesh out small detail items, which are similarly rendered in watercolor.
A prime example of Robin Sloan’s concept of the flip-flop.
Tags: advertising Alvaro Naddeo art remix Robin Sloan
Playdate is a new handheld gaming system from Panic, the makers of FTP software. Hold on, what?! From the press release:
Playdate is both very familiar, and totally new. It’s yellow, and fits perfectly in a pocket. It has a black-and-white screen with high reflectivity, a crystal-clear image, and no backlight. And of course, it has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB-C, and a headphone jack. But it also has a crank. Yes, a crank: a cute, rotating analog controller that flips out from the side. It’s literally revolutionary.
The crank made me laugh out loud — in delight, mind you. Who puts a hand-crank on the side of a handheld video game console?! A very playful Nintendo-esque touch, designed in collaboration with Teenage Engineering. There’s more info, including photos of their first prototype, in this Twitter thread.
The old school tech blogging community1 is fired up about this thing in a way I’ve not seen for years. John Gruber writes on Daring Fireball:
The idea of a new upstart, a company the size of Panic — with only software experience at that — jumping into the hardware game with a brand new platform harkens back to the ’80s and ’90s. But even back then, a company like, say, General Magic or Palm, was VC-backed and aspired to be a titan. To be the next Atari or Commodore or Apple.
In today’s world all the new computing devices and platforms come from huge companies. Apple of course. All the well-known Android handset makers building off an OS provided by Google. Sony. Nintendo.
Panic is almost cheating in a way because they’re tiny. The Playdate platform isn’t competing with the state of the art. It’s not a retro platform, per se, but while it has an obviously nostalgic charm it is competing only on its own terms. Its only goal is to be fun.
And from Anil Dash, Putting the Soul in Console:
I’d been given a hint a while ago that something like this was coming, but the final execution is even more delightful than I’d imagined it might be. (That crank!) More importantly, it’s captured the imagination of so many, and seems like the kind of thing that could inspire a new generation of creative people to think, “Hey, maybe good tech is something we can make ourselves.” I’ve seen it happen on Glitch, and now I see it happening around Playdate after just a few hours.
That idea, that maybe things like our gaming devices or the websites we visit should be created by people we know and like, instead of giant faceless companies, seems more essential than ever. We would never settle for replacing all of our made-with-love, locally-grown, mom’s recipe home cooking with factory-farmed fast food, even if sometimes convenience demands we consume the latter. And we shouldn’t compromise any less on making sure that some of the time we spend playing games with each other, and delighting in the promise of technology, comes from people who’ve been diligently working for years to make well-sourced, organically grown, made-with-love technology.
Playdate starts shipping in early 2020. Supplies are probably going to be limited, so if you’re interested in getting one, you should hop on their mailing list.
I.e. the folks who write about technology (software, gadgets) because they love it, not the folks who write about technology (IPOs, funding rounds) because it makes them money and gives them power.↩
Design firm Pentagram has brought in a new partner to their New York office, information designer Giorgia Lupi, who joins heavy hitters like Michael Bierut, Paula Scher, and Eddie Opera. I remain fascinated with how Pentagram operates:
Established in 1972, the firm has a collectivist attitude and adheres to a longstanding constitution, which exists in its original form with only small modifications. It spreads profits and decision-making power equally among its self-governed partners — all designers — irrespective of seniority or how much business they brought in during a given year. There’s no CEO. The partners do collaborate with one another, often across disciplines, but essentially operate their own studios, though the local offices meet on a weekly basis and the entire group convenes twice a year. These all-partner meetings, chaired by one of the partners on a rotating basis, are about sharing work with the group and discussing business dynamics, Pentagram’s publishing program, its website, and trends in the industry.
The process for bringing in a new partner can take years from start to finish and requires the unanimous consent of the rest of the partners:
“One vote against and it’s over, truly,” says Miller. “We’ve seen it happen.”
I’ve often thought about if a collective structure could work for independent content sites. I wouldn’t want to sell kottke.org to anyone, but the idea of sharing resources and infrastructure with a couple dozen similar sites is appealing. You could collect the sites into a membership bundle; hire dedicated staff for customer support, ad sales, & devops; do cross-promotion, syndicate the content via a meta-site, and generally help small indie sites punch above their weight. This is what The Deck could have evolved into, I suppose. Aw well.
Tags: business design Giorgia Lupi PentagramThis wonderful site presents animations of 507 mechanical movements first published in a book by Henry T. Brown in 1868, the full title of which is:
Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements: Embracing All Those Which Are Most Important in Dynamics, Hydraulics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics, Steam Engines, Mill and Other Gearing, Presses, Horology, and Miscellaneous Machinery; and Including Many Movements Never Before Published and Several of Which Have Only Recently Come Into Use
The site is a work-in-progress…not all of the movements have been animated yet. This short video shows movement #123:
You can buy a paperback version of the original book or browse/download the entire thing at the Internet Archive.
See also this great explanation of differential gears and especially Ralph Steiner’s 1930 short film Mechanical Principles, in which we see many of the mechanisms from Brown’s book actually working:
Warning: if you start Steiner’s film, you’ll probably end up watching the whole thing…it’s mesmerizing, particularly when the gears come in around ~2:30.
Tags: books Henry T. Brown Ralph Steiner videoThe Bit Player is a documentary film about Claude Shannon, the underrated “Father of Information Theory”, whose work, more than anyone else’s, laid the foundation for the information age in which we find ourselves currently immersed.
In a blockbuster paper in 1948, Claude Shannon introduced the notion of a “bit” and laid the foundation for the information age. His ideas ripple through nearly every aspect of modern life, influencing such diverse fields as communication, computing, cryptography, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cosmology, linguistics, and genetics.
The film is directed by Mark Levinson, a former particle physicist, who also directed the excellent Particle Fever (about the search for the Higgs boson). The Bit Player premieres later this month at the World Science Festival in NYC and presumably will be out in theaters sometime after that.
Tags: Claude Shannon Mark Levinson movies The Bit PlayerI am here for any metaphor linking the internet and Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem trilogy. Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler writes that netizens are retreating from the public square of the internet, resulting in many private & isolated worlds that don’t communicate with each other, a la the dark forest condition in Liu’s books.
Tags: books Liu Cixin The Three-Body Problem Yancey StricklerDark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. This is where Facebook is pivoting with Groups (and trying to redefine what the word “privacy” means in the process).
These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.
It turns out that the fourth track off of Philip Glass’ soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi matches up pretty well to the dancers in this clip from Soul Train.
I don’t know whether to like this or hate it. Actually, I think I love it. See also Soul Train dancers backed by Daft Punk. (via @tedgioia)
Tags: Koyaanisqatsi movies music Philip Glass remix Soul Train video
An 1119-page collection of papers known as the Codex Atlanticus has been completely digitized and put online to explore. The codex showcases Leonardo’s impressive range of interests and abilities, from flying machines to anatomy to weaponry to astronomy to engineering.
Several more of Leonardo’s notebooks have been put online as well…I’ve listed all of them in this post about the Codex Forster. (via open culture)
Tags: Leonardo da Vinci booksAn intriguing insight from Khoi Vinh in his short review of the third John Wick movie:
This is what usually happens: a film creates a compelling fantasy world and fans clamor for more. So sequels build that world out, they show more of its mechanics, its people, its history. But “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum” demonstrates one little acknowledged principle of escalated world building: the inevitable outcome is bureaucracy.
[…]
Things that were at first only suggested become explicit, mysteries are explained, and idiosyncrasies metastasize into red tape. Suddenly filmmakers find themselves in a position where building the world becomes its own motivation.
See also Why the Writing in Game of Thrones’ Season 8 Feels Off. (via @capndesign)
Tags: John Wick Khoi Vinh movies
In 1960, David Latimer put some compost, water, and plant seeds into a large glass jar and sealed it up. And it’s been growing like that ever since, save for when Latimer opened the bottle to water it in 1972.
It’s easy to take nature and evolution for granted but think about how marvelous this is. Over billions of years, an ecosystem evolved on Earth that can sustain itself basically forever using light from the Sun.
Tags: David Latimer scienceThe plant creates energy from the sunlight via photosynthesis, using up carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen into the bottle. When parts of the plant die, bacteria in the soil use the oxygen to break down these dead parts, releasing carbon dioxide and completing the circle. The water cycle is similarly self-refueling: whatever water the plant takes in through its roots ultimately transpires out of its leaves, condenses on the inside of the bottle, and drips back into the soil.
The Downton Abbey movie is nearly upon us (it’s out in Sept) and the first full-length trailer is here. The action picks up a couple of years after the TV show ended and concerns the visit of King George V and Queen Mary to the estate. I’ve embedded the UK trailer above — it’s better than the American trailer even though it gives away a bit more of the plot. Plus, in the UK version you get to see the deployment of Carson in the Battle of the Head Butlers. Carson’s glance of disdained indifference toward the other butler might be the most spine-tingling battle moment since Aragon uttered “for Frodo” and charged headlong into the hordes of Mordor.
Tags: Downton Abbey TV movies trailers video
Reagan Ray has collected a bunch of classic logos from American airlines, from the big ones (Delta, United) to small regional airlines (Pennsylvania Central, Cardiff and Peacock) to those no longer with us (Pan Am, TWA, Northwest). I sent him the logo for my dad’s old airline, Blue Line Air Express…I hope it makes it in!
See also Reagan’s collections of record label logos, 80s action figure logos, American car logos, VHS distributor logos, and railway logos. Careful, you might spend all day on these… (via @mrgan)
Tags: design flying logos Reagan RayRemember trials rider Danny MacAskill, who I’ve been covering on kottke.org for over ten years somehow?! In his newest video, he turns babysitting a friend’s young daughter into a death-defying cycling adventure…an oddly tender death-defying cycling adventure somehow.
Stay tuned after the main action for a short making-of feature (no children were harmed, etc. etc.) in which we see Daisy riding a bike of her own!
Tags: cycling Danny MacAskill sports video
Liberty Crumbling is sand sculptor Damon Langlois’ version of the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, which won first prize at 2019 Texas SandFest. (via colossal)
Tags: Abraham Lincoln art Damon LangloisMeet Vincent LeVine. He’s the subject of “My Dad, the Facebook Addict”, a short documentary by his son Dylan. He started off using Facebook normally, keeping up with the news and chatting with friends, but evolved into a fierce meme warrior stocked with a “nuclear arsenal” of memes at the ready to destroy anyone who wants to come at him.
I can have a meme war with anybody and destroy them. And I’ve done it! People actually bail at the end and go, “Who is this guy? He’s got like every meme ever produced on the internet! He can knock us out with his memes!” And I do, I have tons of memes, I just keep memeing them to death until they just surrender because they just can’t do it anymore. They don’t have the memes that I have.
Vincent is very entertaining and it was difficult to not just quote all of his lines in the video. You can check out his Facebook account for yourself or watch his technique for hygienically blowing out birthday cake candles.
Tags: Dylan LeVine Facebook Vincent LeVine video
An exhibition called Hollywood Dream Machines: Vehicles of Science Fiction and Fantasy just opened at the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA. It features more than 50 vehicles from sci-fi and fantasy films like Blade Runner, Iron Man, Mad Max: Fury Road, Black Panther, Minority Report, Star Wars, Speed Racer, Back to the Future, and Tron: Legacy. The exhibition runs through March 2020.
Tags: cars movies museums
The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden is restoring a painting by Johannes Vermeer after it was “conclusively determined” that part of it was painted over after Vermeer died.
For more than 250 years now, the famous painting by Johannes Vermeer featuring a profile depiction of a girl intently reading a letter in front of a light-coloured empty wall has held a firm place among the masterpieces in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. This picture, which dates to around 1657/59, is regarded as one of the earliest interior paintings by Vermeer with a solitary figure. Previous x-ray examinations indicated that a picture of a naked Cupid in the painting had been overpainted. Today, new laboratory tests have conclusively determined that the overpainting was not by Vermeer’s hand. On this basis, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister decided in the course of the current restoration of the work to remove the overpaint.
The restoration of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window is not totally complete, here’s what it looks like now:
And what it looked like before the restoration started:
The partially restored painting will be on display at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden until June 16, after which they will take another year to complete the painstaking restoration.
Tags: art Johannes VermeerIf you could somehow fold a piece of paper in half 103 times, the paper would be as thick as the observable universe.
Such is the power (*cough*) of exponential growth, but of course you’d never get anywhere close to that many folds. The theoretical limit for folding paper was long thought to be seven or eight folds. You can see why watching this hydraulic press attempt the 7th fold…the paper basically turns to dust.
But in 2002, high school student Britney Gallivan proved that you could fold a piece of paper 12 times. Here’s Gallivan explaining the math involved and where the limits come in when folding:
(thx, porter)
Tags: Britney Gallivan mathematics videoMany species of migratory birds, like the Canada goose in North America, fly in a v-formation. Scientists have long suspected that there was some energy-saving advantage to flying in formation and a 2014 study provides evidence to that effect.
By comparing the birds’ flight data to computer simulations, Portugal found that the ibises are apparently drafting — catching an uprush of air from the wingtip of the bird ahead. “Furthermore, when they’re in that position, they time wing beats perfectly,” he says. “So they don’t just sit there passively hoping to get some of the good air from the bird in front.”
They actually flap along the perfect sweet spot. Portugal thinks there’s a very good reason why the ibises do this. Previous studies have shown that flying is hard work.
“When we get exercising, our heart rate gets up to around 180 beats per minute on a good day,” Portugal says. “When birds are flying, it goes up to 400 beats per minute.”
You can read the paper published by the researchers in Nature. (via the kid should see this)
Tags: birds science video
Frans Blok has created an incredibly detailed inverse map of the world, where all the current landmasses have been turned into water and oceans, lakes, and rivers converted into land.
Not only the coast lines are reversed in this world. Also, the relief is consistently the opposite of reality. So the deepest parts of the oceans are in the Tibetan and Himalayan troughs in the southern part of the Asian Ocean. And the highest peaks, around eleven kilometer, are found in the Mariana Mountains in the west of the continent Pacifica.
Prints of Blok’s map are available here.
See also Vladislav Gerasimov’s inverted world map.
John Driscoll is the CEO of a healthcare company called CareCentrix. In an opinion piece in The Guardian, he wrote about the success of a plan his company implemented where they froze the salaries of the top 20 executives and gave significant raises to entry-level workers, from the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr to $15/hr. Driscoll explains why the company decided to do this:
Assuming nothing went wrong, and assuming that our employees were living with another wage earner or working another part-time job, $7.25 hourly wage might be sufficient.
The reality is that for many of us, things do go wrong, and I had emails from my new teammates to prove it.
One was from a customer service representative — a young mother with a family, who had lost her apartment in a fire and did not have enough money for diapers. Another email soon followed — this employee had missed a few bills and was living out of her car with her child.
This drove me crazy: how did we get to the point where one of our employees had to apologetically ask for financial support so she and her family could put a roof over their heads?
While some of our elected officials congratulated us for creating jobs, I felt that we were failing some of our employees, and the communities we were based in. The more our executive team parsed through the requests for assistance, the more we all became uncomfortable with the mismatch between what we asked of our employees and what we provided to them in turn.
And the real kick in the groin about the plan? It wasn’t even that tough to implement!
I challenged the chief financial officer to see how deeply we would have to freeze wages in order to reach our goal of a base rate of $15 per hour.
The answer was that we did not have to go very deep. Over the last few decades executive salaries have skyrocketed. That translates into accelerated wage growth in the highest tiers of executives throughout American business, and it affects every company.
What that meant for our company was that if we just froze the wages of our most senior team — less than 20 executives - we could radically increase the wages and improve the lives of nearly 500 of our teammates.
The conversation with our executives was straightforward. We were in the midst of a turnaround. We were demanding much from every corner of the company. Small financial sacrifices from those at the top could be life changing for those at the bottom of our wage scale. We needed to do it to build a real sense of Team CareCentrix. They agreed.
And it worked really well. Duh. It drives me bananas that more companies don’t see the benefit of doing this versus implementing compensation policies that serve only to line the pockets of the people in char— oh waaaaait, it actually makes perfect sense why this is happening. The shareholders of these companies should start calling bullshit on that sort of behavior with more regularity though.
See also the founder of Richer Sounds retiring and transferring 60% of his company to its employees, with workers also receiving £1,000 for every year they’ve worked for the company.
Tags: business economics John DriscollA robot built by a pair of engineering students at MIT can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 0.38 seconds (which happens to be 19 minutes and 59.22 seconds shorter than my fastest time):
0.38 seconds is over in an almost literal flash, so the video helpfully shows this feat at 0.25x speed and 0.03x speed. I bet when they were testing this, they witness some spectacular cube explosions. (via @tedgioia)
Tags: robots Rubik’s Cube video