September 8, 2016
Monuments remember history we cannot and should not forget
In Montgomery, Alabama, where dozens of markers commemorate the history of confederacy... We plan to build a national memorial to the victims of lynching The Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based racial justice group, announced that it will build the first-ever national memorial to lynching victims in Montgomery, Alabama. [more inside]
Let's just push the button/We'd be better off dead
Catching up With Star Trek IV's True Hero: The Unkind Punk on the Bus. “It’s nice to be remembered,” says Thatcher. “I could win the Nobel Peace Prize, and my gravestone would still stay, ‘Star Trek IV: Punk on the Bus.'”
Bright Lights, Big Space
DEEP WEB - kinetic audiovisual installation The generative, luminous architectural structure weaves 175 motorized spheres and 12 high power laser systems into a 25 meter wide and 10 meter high super-structure, bringing to life a luminous analogy to the nodes and connections of digital networks. Moving up and down, and choreographed and synchronized to an original multi-channel musical score by Robert Henke, the spheres are illuminated by blasts of colourful laser beams resulting in three-dimensional sculptural light drawings and arrangements in cavernous darkness.
Storytelling explained visually
Jeff VanderMeer, best known for his SF Southern Reach triology (previously, previously), wrote a guide for writing fiction: Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (previously). An Illustrated Guide to Writing Scenes and Stories summarizes key points of the book and is a great resource for highly visual thinkers.
Unsound, THE sound.
Unsound magazine was published from 1983-1987. Unsound created a forum for musicians and artists to connect and network. The Sonic-Youth interview is in Vol1. #4, Swans interview is in Vol.1 #5, Karen Finley & Negativeland Vol.2 #2, Nick Cave (just post Birthday Party) interview is in Vol.1 #1. Etc. And don't miss the audio interview archive.
Gi Ra Ff Es
If you ever found yourself thinking That giraffe looks different from that other giraffe, congratulations: a genetic study has found that giraffes are four different species (plus a subspecies), which are roughly as different from each other as the brown bear and the polar bear. Previously, all giraffes were classified as the single species Giraffa camelopardalis.
Judge sentencing affected by football results
Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles is the title of an NBER research paper recently published, which showed that unexpected losses by the LSU football team resulted in harsher penalties for juvenile defendants. Reported in the Atlantic, and a .pdf of the draft paper.
Dear Mark.
“Very often I am writing about writing,” he says.
No, Alan Moore Isn't a Recluse [Publishers Weekly] “Speaking in intimidatingly long and thoughtful sentences, Moore is affable, relaxed, and eager to talk about his new novel, Jerusalem [Amazon], to be published in September by Norton’s Liveright imprint in the U.S. and Knockabout in the U.K. It’s a 600,000-word opus that has been lurking, Cthulhu-like, behind his last decade of work. Remixing the most-reader-challenging tricks of writers such as James Joyce, Roland Barthes, and Mark Z. Danielewski, Jerusalem is an astonishing collection of words and ideas that weaves a hypnotic spell.” [Previously] [Previously] [more inside]
These are the voyages of the warship Zumwalt
Massive, futuristic Zumwalt-class stealth destroyer sets sail to join U.S. Navy fleet under command of Captain James Kirk.
A pint of fear and home by teatime
Fundamentalist punk rock art collective The Mekons present their "hymn for Brexit," Fear & Beer. This track, like the rest of their new album Existentialism, was recorded on a single microphone in a single evening in front of a paying audience. The 75 attendees, dubbed the Mekoristers and credited by their names in the liner notes of the album, sang backing vocals in the style of Phil Minton's famous feral choirs. They become almost another instrument or sound effect — a distant, disconcerting drone or howl that permeates songs of political unrest and social chaos. Plus, you can dance to them (or simply shout along). [more inside]
Just don't play the samples backwards
WaveNet: text to speech using a generative deep learning model. Existing text-to-speech systems use parametric generation or a concatenative approach where tiny samples of a recorded voice are strung together to create synthesized speech. Using a deep learning technique WaveNet generates synthetic speech a single sample at a time. Especially interesting: "If we train the network without the text sequence, it still generates speech, but now it has to make up what to say. As you can hear from the samples below, this results in a kind of babbling, where real words are interspersed with made-up word-like sounds" The academic paper.
“My Moby-Dick has been Zhongwang”
Two years ago, a California aluminum executive commissioned a pilot to fly over the Mexican town of San José Iturbide, at the foot of the Sierra Gorda mountains, and snap aerial photos of a remote desert factory. He made a startling discovery. Nearly one million metric tons of aluminum sat neatly stacked behind a fortress of barbed-wire fences. The stockpile, worth some $2 billion and representing roughly 6% of the world’s total inventory—enough to churn out 2.2 million Ford F-150s or 77 billion beer cans—quickly became an obsession for the U.S. aluminum industry. Now it is a new source of tension in U.S.-Chinese trade relations. U.S. executives contend that the mysterious cache was part of a brazen scheme by one of China’s richest men to game the global trade system. The Wall Street Journal reports [more inside]
The Great Recession: American Movie Acting Today
Film acting is built from the very stuff of social life: norms of behavior, standards of interaction and communication, communally legible gestures, and personality tropes and dynamics. But if this poses a challenge for the critic, it’s also the reason acting styles, taken in the aggregate, are such unusually good barometers of cultural modes, themes, and ideas, whether they respond to prevalent motifs or are generated themselves.
Salem the glitter cat
THIS IS WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS WHEN YOU FORGET TO RINSE THE TUB OUT AFTER USING A LUSH INTERGALATIC BATHBOMB! [more inside]
"This isn’t some smug tirade against a widely beloved populist icon."
The 24-Year-Old Coca-Cola Virgin, Jamie Lauren Keiles
xEuclidx
Compass-and-straightedge construction (aka Euclidean construction) is a method of drawing precise geometric figures using only a compass and a straightedge (like a ruler without the markings). MathOpenRef maintains a catalog of many common constructions, each with an explanatory animation and a proof. This YouTube video demonstrates how to construct almost every polygon that can be constructed using these methods. [more inside]
A serious, well-behaved, young black cat
Airbnb’s Work to Fight Discrimination and Build Inclusion
In a new 32-page report, Airbnb says that it would institute a new nondiscrimination policy that goes beyond what is outlined in several anti-discrimination laws and that it would ask all users to agree to a “community commitment” starting on Nov. 1. [more inside]
How to extract the game data (the hard way)
"When we decided to remake The Dragon’s Trap, one of the primary goals we set for ourselves was to make a game that is faithful and respectful to the original in terms of gameplay [...] We want the timings, physics, and reactions to feel just right and not like a cheap remake [...] We don’t want to replicate all of it by guesswork and lose some the original magic due to translation. So I went and started digging into the original code…
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You 360 Degrees Turn and Try to Look Away
360 degree video in the middle of kittens playing. That is all.
TERRY 2016
Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads
Elephants Are Okay Too
Washington’s largest pair of Tevas are on an elephant at the National Zoo (Washington Post) [more inside]
The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean
"At twelve, my grandfather climbed into his Prayer Tower and said he’d die if he didn’t get $8 million; I was a gay kid living on a Pentecostal compound with an autographed photo of Ronald Reagan on my desk. At eighteen I left most of that behind, rarely looking back."
Randy Roberts Potts, the grandson of Oral Roberts, is publishing a memoir on instagram
"Everything Is A Target"
The bombing and blockade of the Middle East's poorest country, done with US weaponry, accelerates. Tens of thousands have died directly from Saudi bombings, and half of Yemen is malnourished, with the air war and blockade cutting access to 90% of the nation's food supplies and much of its clean water. [more inside]
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