March 17, 2019
Tulip Mania --> Poppy FOMO
Large desert blooms, labeled "superblooms" (previously) have been happening with greater than average frequency in the last few years, a consequence of wet-dry weather swings and fire activity. Social media has caught on, and capturing one's self sprawled in a field of wildflowers is now an essential selfie ritual. [more inside]
King of Surf Guitar
Dick Dale, godfather of surf guitar, dies aged 81. (Guardian) Richard Anthony Monsour, better known by his stage name Dick Dale, was an American rock guitarist, known as The King of the Surf Guitar. He pioneered and created what many call the surf music style, drawing on Middle-Eastern music scales and experimenting with reverberation. He worked closely with Fender to produce custom made amplifiers, including the first-ever 100-watt guitar amplifier. [more inside]
Deep Park
Photographers often talk about making pictures rather than taking them: constructing something from the scene in front of the camera that is related to it but not subordinate to it. A photo of a tree or a soldier has a life independent of its subject.
Bruce Polin began making these images in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park around the time of the last presidential campaign. He had been shooting mostly in his home studio, but when the divisive rhetoric of the election heated up, he felt the need to get out among strangers, from all cultures he could find. The park was ideal.
The camera was big. [more inside]
Well this is Bleeping Creepy...
The Government Is Using the Most Vulnerable People to Test Facial Recognition Software Research shows that any one of us might end up helping the facial recognition industry, perhaps during moments of extraordinary vulnerability. [more inside]
We got bored while you were gone.
Blair Braverman (previously) just finished the Iditarod. Her fans were doing their part, too. [SLtwitter, very short story, but man it got dusty in here]
Good Society: a tabletop roleplaying game of Jane Austen and others
Good Society, the RPG is a collaborative roleplaying game "that seeks to capture the heart, and the countenance, of Jane Austen’s work. It is a game of balls, estates, sly glances, and turns about the garden. At least on the surface. Underneath this, just as in Austen’s own novels, it is a game of social ambition, family obligation and breathtaking, heart-stopping longing."
Notable for blowing past their original Kickstarter goal of $4000 Australian in the first two days and winding up at $154,774 Australian, enabling better printing, more supplemental books, and donations to public libraries. [more inside]
Something to make you smile
Maybe a future grandmaster? "Tani is a reminder that refugees enrich this nation — and that talent is universal, even if opportunity is not." (SLNYT)
Wait, what grow on trees?
The marginalia of Jeanne de Montbaston in The Romance of the Rose. This is an illuminating piece of scholarship by historian Sara Öberg Strådal on the overlooked imagery in 14th century marginalia, in this case in the medieval French poem Le Roman de la Rose (written circa 1230 and 1275, BnF fr. 25526) by artist Jeanne de Montbaston (possibly nsfw, via.) [more inside]
The Orange Alternative: There Is No Freedom without Dwarfs
The cheeky gnomes taking over Wrocław -- Cute as they may be, each statue is a nod to the Orange Alternative, an anti-Soviet resistance movement that helped bring down Poland’s oppressive communist regime in the 1980s (BBC Travel). By opposing conformism and consumerism with intelligent humour, the Orange Alternative (Pomaranczowa Alternatywa) movement achieved a considerable artistic victory over the Communist regime. Their continuing influence upon Polish political protest is noticeable to this day. (Culture.pl) [more inside]
Look Up From Your Hash Browns
Micah Cash's Waffle House Vistas Project collects images that document Southern communities as seen through the windows of Waffle Houses. In each instance, the point of view is the customer’s. Each photograph looks out from booths and chairs, making the viewer a witness to intertwined narratives of poverty, transience, and politics. [more inside]
What Happens When Techno-Utopians Actually Run A Country? Fascism.
Spoiler, it's Italy; and Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon make an appearance. SLWired This is real-time reporting on using the internet to manufacture consent toward a goal that the participants initially would have rejected by using a beloved Italian comedian and his innocent blog. [more inside]
Bee-Lieve it Or Not
Most of the caterpillars were new to science
The Janzen–Connell hypothesis is an attractive but difficult-to-prove explanation for rainforest diversity: It's dangerous for rainforest trees to grow up near their parents, because that makes them vulnerable to the herbivores who are already crunching and munching on their parents. A team from the University of Utah has added some detail [paywalled] with a study in Panama. "“People may think of a jungle like it’s a giant salad bowl. It should be paradise for pests because they’re surrounded by leaves. But plants have an infinite number of defense combinations—half the weight of a young leaf is poison”.... Over five years, the researchers collected leaf samples in the field..... Using high performance liquid chromatography, they separated all of the distinct compounds inside the leaves.... [O]nly 4 percent of the Inga compounds were known to science."
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