the new tymbal orchestra (12. 534)

Although seemingly a bit cruel, the conscripted performers were unharmed by this musical interlude—we learn via Strange Company—that a group of students at Cornell university have demonstrated that cicadas connected to tiny electrodes can be stimulated to chirp on demand as a sort of insect-computer hybrid sound-system. The orchestra is coordinated and they keep time with the piece, Pachelbel’s Canon in D (plus ‘Danger Zone’ from Top Gun), but the individuals’ biological variation and agency, as with all musicians, comes through to show they’re not cyborgs. The researchers don’t plan to make some new bizarre symphonium out of their test subjects but rather hope to further research into such collaborations to harness nature to forego wiring and components and ultimately decrease the impact of deploying infrastructure, especially for ad hoc and emergency situations.

*    *    *    *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: an MS Paint photo filter (with synchronoptica), commemorating mass-deportations from the Baltic states under Soviet rule plus comedians get a papal audience

seven years ago: a Bayeux tapestry of a government worker’s office calendar, mapping out Dante’s Inferno plus sobriety tests for passengers

eight years ago: deifying the Singularity, simulating the universe, early ink-blots plus an antique railway hotel

nine years ago: massacre motivations, motion-capture technology, the foot from Monty Python, more on the mass-shooting in Orlando, EU proposes using Türkei as a buffer zone for migration plus a Photo-Shop battle for the Queen

ten years ago: Doomsday bunkers plus finding Dr Livingstone

avant la lettre (12. 525)

We thoroughly enjoyed this appreciation of one of the most successful products of all time in the BiC Cristal, introduced in 1950, the ballpoint pen ubiquitous and archetypal surpassing one hundred billion sold in 2006. In development since 1930 when inventor Lázló Bíró (the genericised namesake of the writing instrument “biro” in many European countries) when inspired for the mechanism, a rolling metal nib, by witnessing a group of children playing with marbles in a muddy puddle and observing how the objects left a trail of water in their wake, Bíró experimented with various models and eventually recreated a prototype with a narrow reservoir of viscous ink encased in the body and kept from drying out by the nib and cap. Incremental improvements continued over the every years until the launch of Cristal. The pen was enshrined in the permanent collection in the Museum of Modern Art (see previously), the design virtually unchanged for decades. Much more from Open Culture at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the EU votes (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: recycled illustrations and early modern memes plus the Alexander method for improving poise and posture

eight years ago: hung parliament in the UK  

nine years ago: an advertising homage to the cats of the internet, world food resources, removing Confederate symbols from Washington’s National Cathedral, Star Trek coins from the Canadian Mint, a sci-fi screenplay written by AI plus the gig economy and moonlighting

ten years ago: more links to enjoy 

 

hohenwartetalsperre iv (12. 500)

We took a short drive to look at the Hohenwarte dam wall (Staumauer, see previously) and took a nice long walk with the dogs down a trail through an enchanted forest (there were a lot activities set up for kids hidden amongst the trees, like our own Zwergweg) and across the basis by a former cardboard factory. We could see the Pumpspecicherwerk (pumped hydroelectric energy storage plant in the far distance, a gravitational sink that is a source of potential energy, channelling water uphill to a higher holding basis during off-peak hours and releasing it during higher periods of demand to generate electricity in the turbines.

Such a plant also allows excess energy from intermittent sources—like solar and wind—to be saved. The lake and surrounding area were full of recreational opportunities, more wandering and cruises over the length and breath of reservoir.

voice writers (12. 494)

Having known just a little about the development and integration of closed-captioning technology, we really appreciated this fascinating deep dive from Radio Lab into its history and struggle for equal access that followed, with accommodation, advances in hardware and software, representation and mandates all intertwined and informing one another, concluding with a reflection on how the process is being automated with artificial intelligence and how in training the machine, we ourselves are transformed through the collaboration. Of course the story didn’t end with triumph of accessibility through the above first demonstration, as the advances for the hearing impaired community were not widely accessible: most programming was not captioned and for those that were an expensive decoder was required as a television peripheral. The situation gradually improved and after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, TV sets were required to include closed captioning technology and all broadcasts were mandated to include subtitles. A workforce of thirty thousand transcriptionists were at work to capture all stations’ content and in order to reach all of the growing market with the rise of cable programming, institutions providing the service turn to emerging voice recognition systems. These early versions were too bug-prone to be useful, especially for realtime applications and failed to keep pace with live dialogue, seizing up at the slightest accent. Researchers, however, discovered that they were more responsive and accurate with the voices of the trial participants, and soon one devised helping the computer by reading back the words in a steady, well-enunciated manner that it could manage. A team of voice writers across the States repeated scripted shows and news reports as they were aired and achieved a pretty good level of fidelity by 2003. Even with only their master’s voice, the programme still had its shortcomings and the voice writers developed a code of substitute words to clear up homophones and short prepositions, for example: echoing, “She has tootoo daughters inly college comma tootaloo period” would yield the yield the desired text, “She has two daughters in college, too.” Two decades on, the software has advanced to the point where it can transcribe instantly without the help of an interpreter and is improving with AI refinements.

cosmic ray coincidence counter (12. 468)

Our gratitude to Weird Universe for the introduction to the singular esoteric by the name of Harvey Spencer Lewis, revivalist Rosicrucian, through his numerous inventions, including the enigmatic title detector, the sympathetic vibration harp and the Luxatone—a chromatic organ that converted audio inputs into colours on a triangular display as a heuristic tool for demonstrating mystical connections amongst the perceptions. More interestingly was Lewis’ trajectory that led up to the re-establishment of the ancient and obscure order: an advertising agent by profession, Lewis founded the New York chapter of the Institute for Psychical Research in 1904 and after a trip to Toulouse, claiming to have been initiated in the old rite, organised the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross (AMORC) in 1915, a schismatic branch of the the Ordo Templi Orientis recognising Lewis own break from Aleister Crowley’s society—see previously—AMORC having no truck with sex magik. Mainly adhering the ritual and philosophy of the seventeenth century movement, Lewis also incorporated elements of European neo-Templar and Teutonic orders, secret ranks claiming to be a continuation of the knighthood dissolved by Pope Clement IV in the fourteenth century. Non-canonical and not major tenets of the Rosicrucians, Lewis went on to author (with significant plagiarism from earlier works—see also) several volumes that would popularise the mythos of Mount Shasta (known in the Shasta language as Waka-nunee-Tuki-Wuko and in Karuk Úyaahkoo) as hiding the settlement of advanced refugees from the lost continent of Lemuria, ascendent masters in communion with alien intelligences, as well as a derivative on the swoon theory that Jesus did not die on the Cross and merely fell unconscious and later revived by his followers, surviving the Crucifixion and travelling to Gaul, India or Japan. Dismissed as pseudohistorical and a fringe hypothesis by most scholars and theologians, the conjecture was originally proffered as Jesus being drugged by the apostle Luke, a physician, when asking to quench His thirst and made to appear to give up the ghost, to convince the community to accept a spiritual messiah rather than a political one—supported by biblical accounts of his relatively short period of torture, six hours compared to the three-to-nine days of agony endured by most healthy adults (Pontius Pilate was surprised by this news) and the hasty removal of His body, with no eye-witnesses into the custody of the Roman executioners and the empty tomb.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a visit to Neustadt an der Aisch (with synchronoptica) 

seven years ago: beaming music samples into space plus Anthropda Iconis

eight years ago: assorted links to revisit

nine years ago: a visit to Penzance, Saint Michael’s Mount plus the photography of Ole Marius Joergensen

ten years ago: abandoned social networks plus the Lost City of Z

7x7 (12. 438)

kanzlermehrheit: Bundestag selects Friedrich Merz chancellor after secure a majority in the second round of voting, averting a constitutional crisis  

rococo and its discontents: McMansion Hell on Trump’s gaudy transformation of the White House—via Kottke 

fuzzy maths: an unsure calculator that produces a range of histograms to assess one’s unknown factors—via Pasa Bon!—from home economics decisions to the Drake equation

reaction time: a car brake engaged by one’s eyebrows  

top billing: the movie poster and album cover art of Dick Ellescas that fuses Art Deco and Mod  

architektonisches gesamtkunstwerk: the Junkerhaus of Lemgo articulated over the decades whilst the jilted artist awaited his betrothed who would never return—via Messy Nessy Chic—more here 

habemus papam: first round of voting fails to produce consensus—plus live chimney cam

olo (12.402)

A rare genetic mutation allows some individuals to distinguish ten-fold more colours than most humans’ range of ten million but even those possessing the extra retinal cone receptors are not true tetrachromats as the brain, with limited exposure to colours in the wild and the limitations of display screens far less granular than the hundred million upper limits, a seemingly sad, self-handicapping comment on our perception—see also. An experiment conducted on five test subjects hot-wired biological and mental-mapping constraints, however, to stimulate a specific cone, a study named “Oz” for the emerald glasses of the film adaptation, to cause it to encode for a brilliant green hue—appearing like a super-saturated teal for the rest of us—never before experienced, the colour named the above from the binary 010 (for the one targeted photoreceptor, isolated from neighbouring cones) and visible only to those participants for a fleeting moment. Aside from the wonder of surpassing vision, the test also hints at medical and therapeutic applications for degenerative diseases of the eye or for colour blind individuals, rerouting inputs to interpret missing shades.

synchronoptica

one year ago: more theatrical adaptations of toys and games (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: more kakistocracy, the first Earth Day plus a visit to Willmars

eight years ago: antique German African travelogues, more Liartown, USA, populism in France plus revisionist history on Wikipedia

nine years ago: lucid dreaming 

twelve years ago: sovereign debt in the Eurozone

iec 60906-1 (12. 397)

Via Pasa Bon! we are directed to the Digital Museum of Plugs and Sockets which gives in extensive detail information regarding domestic and heavy-duty electricity standards and outlet types for countries all over the world, including exhibits on rare and superannuated for different kinds of current and low-voltage applications. There’s considerably less variation nowadays, but camping we’ve encountered a lot of these alternative groundings and have a kit of adapters and converters for contingencies, and it’s interesting to see how hybrid models incorporate USB standards for one’s personal electronics. The International Electrotechnical Commission published the above specification for plugs that look similar but are not identical in terms of pin number and spacing, wattage tolerance, etc with an eye towards a universal standard for the European Union (see Schuko design has a friendly face) and though harmonisation has continued apace since the 1990s, enforcement of the project has been put on hold.

where is everybody? (12. 342)

Being obsessed with the philosophical and cosmological question of Fermi’s Paradox and having considered the Great Filter beforehand, we enjoyed revisiting the proposal that no one makes it—that is succeeds as a spacefaring civilisation with a constellation of lesser filters setting up intractable hurdles to the accomplishment, progress sabotaged by biological limitations, superstition, self-destructive tendencies of a society, pollution or a misguided Singularity. In that unlikely loneliness, however, there also lies an equally improbable (though less so than intelligent life evolving no where else in the Universe) of a grand conspiracy of those that have made it exercising and enforcing a sort of Prime Directive to cloak their evidence and activities. While that might seem patriarchal (but who knows what challenges and dangers could await) and demotivating in terms of reaching for the stars, humans—on any others on the cusp—might have never had the ambition to invent and explore with gods in the sky.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a Euro Pop playlist (with synchronoptica) 

seven years ago: a yōkai primer, assorted links to revisit, transhumance plus an AI suggests April Fools’ pranks

eight years ago: more links to enjoy plus Mr Roger’s Conflict Series

nine years ago: Easter origins, a venerable guesthouse plus a sinister lullaby

ten years ago: night-vision eye-drops plus even more links

8x8 (12. 318)

first comes the performance, then comes the repetition, then comes the integration: thirty lonely yet beautiful acts of defiance—even including social media—via Kottke 

fubar: Muckrock presents its FOIA Foilies awards for 2025—probably too early—see previously  

not shuttered, per se, just considered complete: venerable UbuWeb started back up after closure last year  

audible enclaves: researchers have discovered how to beam sounds to a targeted listener—via the New Shelton wet/dry 

it’s peanut butter jelly time: froghorn.exe is an homage to what used to be the internet’s biggest draw  

programmable mutterer: the allure of magical thinking and how the displaced grace of AI could prove more analogous to markets and institutions steering better than individuals  

smoking gun: Trump declassifies a tranche of documents on the JFK assassination, unredacted and “ushering in a new era of maximum transparency  

greeks bearing gifts: Senator Schumer votes to let the wooden horse into Troy

take me to the river (12. 309)

Watching the Netflix production The Electric State about a retro-future dystopia where the thinking machines have been locked away in a no man’s land, under the leadership of Mister Peanut, and noticing stacks in a warehouse of presumably contraband Big Mouth Billy Bass, we couldn’t resist reposting this clever modification to this novelty animatronic trophy catch from Austrian hacker Charlie Diaz that greatly expands its vocabulary with the the help of ChatGPT, responding in a voice inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This benevolent vision of things to come with AI shoehorned into everything is not yet commercially available but Diaz helpfully includes builds for all of his projects.

*     *     *     *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: Stile Bertone (with synchronoptica),  a pronunciation guide to British surnames plus a walk in the countryside

seven years ago: more on Fluxus, US school shootings, Balinese New Year traditions plus propaganda and reality television

eight years ago: feline hybrids plus a constellation calligram 

nine years ago: the Mah Nà Mah Nà song, culinary mushrooms, outdoor classrooms plus the original vision for Star Trek: The Motion Picture

ten years ago: intermediate geologies, the sugar trade plus assorted links worth the revisit

musique d’ameublement (12. 288)

Having previously learned about the introduction of music on demand, an early streaming service for subscribers and the accidental advent of hold music (muzak being a proprietary eponym), the former emerging at a time when exposure to song was a rarer treat and required some effort and received as a performance, whereas the latter shows how we are over-saturated at times, we quite enjoyed this segment on the “furniture music” of composer Erik Satie to complete the timeline with the immersive experience of incidental or mood music—or a pleasant background to ignore. Commiserating with an artist friend over the cacophonic playlist that typically filled restaurants, far from enhancing the dining ambiance rather magnified the general din and clang of cutlery, prompting Satie to design music to blend into the environment. Though under appreciated at the time, his tailored compositions eventually gave rise to the unintrusive and unengaging musak above and ambient, meditative songs from Brian Eno and John Cage. Much more from Open Culture at the link above.

homebrew computer club (12. 278)

Meeting for the first time in the garage of founder and organiser Gordon French in Menlo Park California on this day in 1975, this informal association of electronic and programming enthusiasts was chartered as a forum for hobbyists to exchange ideas and create DIY personal computing devices to make the emerging technologies more accessible to everyone. Present for this inaugural gathering, Steve Wozniak (previously here and here) credited the demonstration and reverse-engineering of an Altair 8800 microcomputer as inspiration for designing the Apple I. Running regular meetings through 1986, Steve Jobs, John Draper (former phone phreak), Paul Terrell (proprietor of Byte Shop, the first hardware retail outlet), Jerry Lawson (creator of the first cartridge-based video game system, the Fairchild Channel F) and Liza Loop (who saw the potential to supplement classroom and distance learning and opened the first public-access computer labs) were also members.

blue ghost i (12. 272)

Launched in mid-January and touching down now in the Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crises, adjacent to the Sea of Tranquility, the basin of a huge impact crater visible from Earth to the naked eye flooded with ancient lava, originally named after the Caspian Sea for its apparent geological correspondence), Firefly Aerospace, sponsored in part by NASA and SpaceX, has achieved only the second successful landing by a commercial enterprise on lunar surface. Carrying a payload of experiments and demonstration projects. The payload of instruments include devices to gauge how the satellite’s regolith (dust) could affect future missions and measure how the Earth’s magnetosphere interacts with the Moon as ways to migrate exposure to solar radiation.

speldosa (12. 271)

Via Marco McClean’s Memo of the Air, we quite enjoyed seeing this impressive performance from Swedish folktronica band Wintergatan (the Milky Way, from the term for the galaxy, “winter street”) and the resident multi-instrumentalist and tinkerer Martin Molin’s documented construction of a music box that used cascading steel marbles to play, modulated by a hand-crank, the score programmed on LEGO Technic beams. Nearly a decade later, the group has returned to the idea, with a challenge to build a bigger version (powered by eighty-thousand marbles) robust enough for touring, turning to the Renaissance and contraptions of Da Vinci and Huygens for inspiration. More from New Atlas at the link above.

*    *    *    *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: a 1974 international crisis in West Berlin (with synchronoptica) plus the language of Dune

seven years ago: the science of toast, assorted links to revisit, an adventuresome archaeologist plus an Oscar preview

eight years ago: the women of NASA in LEGO form, a lunar mission, US cracks down on immigration plus more on space-elevators

nine years ago: perfect for Roquefort cheese, prohibition in Canada plus a luxurious time-capsule in Palm Springs

ten years ago: recruiting for the Second Crusade, more links to enjoy, misinformation plus that dress

 

natronlokomotive (12. 194)

From the archives of Amusing Planet, we learn about a variant of “fireless” trains, running off a reservoir compressed air cycling through a reciprocating engine as opposed to steam-power derived from burning coal—cheaper, more energy efficient and safer without the risk of boiler explosion but with a limited range, called soda locomotives. Invented in the early 1880s by engineer and chemist Mortiz Honigmann, the engine was loaded with five tons of caustic soda (sodium hydroxide), generating heat when the substance came in contact with water, enough to propel the car forward with exhaust from the pistons in the closed-system passing again through the soda to perpetuate the cycle. After about four to five hours of use, the chemical reaction ceased being self-sustaining, at which point the boiler jacket would be swapped out for a refresh one at a station, the spent soda “recharged,” re-concentrated by dehydrating it, evaporating the excess water with an injection of ultra hot steam, that sourced from municipal heating surplus. Trialled as street cars for the public transit systems of Berlin and Aachen, they proved reliable and were well-received by passengers due to their silence and lack of smoke and soot. The demonstration project, however, was abandoned due to logistical problems, owning to the weight of the tank and liability for explosion (which fortunately never occurred) and whilst a forgotten juncture in rail and metro development, such an thermo-chemical exchange system has found new applications in recent years as a storage cell for renewable energy.

synchronoptica

one year ago:  a sixty year old chatbot (with synchronoptica), Sierra On-line games plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: an exceptional flaneur, LEGO Day plus an online museum of ephemera

eight years ago: Trump’s national security council, feeding livestock subpar candy plus American Carnage 1.0

nine years ago: underwhelming fossils, Barbie origins, seasonal trappings and stereotypes, UFO cults plus road sign typefaces

ten years ago: the history of US-Mexico relations, the Duma to rule on German reunification plus more links to enjoy

10x10 (12. 191)

i saw, i cut, i applied: a retrospective of the textile art of Ayako Miyawaki (宮脇綾子) at the Tokyo Station Gallery 

hadron therapy: researchers at CERN are collaborating with oncologists to develop precision treatment that last a fraction of a second—via the new Shelton wet/dry 

drag and drop: the development of tools that easily move data around with confidence it would not be lost

shǒusuì: an exhibition on community resilience through helps gird one for the trying year ahead 

two-minute warning: the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences (see previously) advance the second hand once again as a warning to world leaders  

oreoboros: a round-up of recently introduced snacks and treats—via MetaFilter 

comparative entomology: an 1879 study in the colour patterns in moths and butterflies 

object impermanence: a glitchy and broken AI knock-off of Minecraft makes for a strangely compelling experience  

experimental advanced superconducting tokamak: an artificial sun burned for nearly eighteen minutes at the EAST plasma physics lab in Hefei—a significant milestone for sustainable fusion reactions—via Boing Boing 

the little loomhouse: the history and evolution of an ensemble of Kentucky cabins to a thriving arts community

deepseek (12. 189)

A scrappy, lean and open-source AI developed on a budget of just six million dollars has punched a hole of over a trillion dollars in global technology markets, raising doubts about the sustainability and infiltration in the boom led by the same cadre of grifters who upsold crypto and NTFs (and still trying to make fetch happen) cum beneficiaries of the tech-feudalism panopticon, bowdlerising and exploiting one’s sentiments and information as much as any accusations lobbed outside, that demonstrates that benchmarks in artificial intelligence utility can be set and surpassed without premium micro-processors (Nvidia chips, considered state-of-the-art, were subject to an export embargo in China since 2022) and without extensive infrastructure for computing power, spurring American companies to invest in server farms and nuclear plants to fuel their resource-hungry models—prompting a sober reevaluation of enthusiasm and underwriting and tuition for training. Liang Wenfeng, entrepreneur and hedge-fund manager, developed the model as a hobby to identify patterns in stock prices, and while remaining focused on research rather than commercial products has released a personal assistant as a free download to showcase its potential and make AI transparent and universally accessible (the algorithms can be adapted by anyone)—and the app is the most popular in its category, really handicapping the present US broligarchy (a real fail-whale) the declared American national emergency over energy.

13x13 (12. 185)

embossed: turn of the century tactile teaching aids for the visually impaired for lessons on nature and geography  

lab-leak theory: US Central Intelligence Agency embraces controversial vector for COVID-19 pandemic, discounting zoonosis factors 

ghostwatch: the supernatural horror BBC mockumentary broadcast on Halloween (see also) 1992 and never shown again due to the panic it elicited  

sb593: Oklahoma legislature introduces bill to “restore moral sanity” and criminalise production, distribution and possession of adult material—see previously 

minimoog: a fully-functional analogue synthesiser in LEGO  

haptics and macros: an idea to add gait gestures to one’s smart phone—we can hardly do the right kind of fake kick to open the rear hatch on our car 

mox nix: language borrowings from German propagated by US and UK soldiers stationed there post WWII  

electric garden: a run-down lodge transformed into a living museum mapchat: interact with AI shopkeepers for local businesses—results may vary 

wassergöttin: prehistoric figurine from the Hallstadt culture found in 2022 in Lower Franconia goes on display at the Bavarian State Archaeological Museum in München  

walk without rhythm and you won’t attract the worm: graboids—see also—the other in-jokes that Tremors leans into  

underrepresentation: as part of order to eliminate DEI programmes, US Food and Drug Administration curbs clinical trials aimed at diverse populations for cancer research 

 switchmen: the sign language of railroad workers

earthstreak (12. 178)

Though the crew of the Apollo missions who captured Pale Blue Marble and Earthrise might take exception to the accolade of best photo ever, we do think that this image of cities whizzing by taken by veteran astronaut Donald Pettit, on his third tour aboard the International Space Station having spent over five hundred days in orbit, is pretty spectacular. The dazzling nature of the foreground in motion belies other details, like the galactic core on the horizon and the streaks of other satellites and the transition from night to day on the world’s edge. A gifted science communicator making the most of his stints onboard the ISS, Pettit is well equipped with cameras and lenses and has conducted numerous experiments and demonstrations for the curious and enquiring as well as his regiment of assigned tasks and holds the first patent for an object invented in space, the Zero G Cup, a coffee mug that uses the wetting angle, the incline where a liquid and solid meet, to avoid the need of using a straw.