Recently an archivist made a fascinating discovery in the form of the first programme, score of digital music from 1948. Cryptologist and polymath Alan Turing wrote the instructions to have his building-sized computer at a laboratory in Manchester perform God Save the King followed by a few other melodies.
While we do have some insight into the pragmatic drive for Turing to modify the mainframe to produce sound—wanting to untether himself from monitoring gauges and screens to check the status of a running programme, a B- of an F-note indicating whether the programme had concluded or ran into a logical glitch (the beep, bop, boop of vintage super-computers), so he could check for bugs elsewhere or attend to the engineering requirements of the hardware, we are sadly not privy to what Turing thought about electronic music or its potential, since for years Mister Turing was blacklisted and his contributions to computer science went unacknowledged.
Monday 10 October 2016
tron/troff or pitch-perfect
Sunday 9 October 2016
crossbenchers
Though we are still hoping for a Parliamentarian Roadshow, this alternative proposal of putting the House of Lords on an air-mattress barge on the Thames temporarily whilst the Palace of Westminster undergoes some major renovations from the architectural firm Gensler does seem like a pretty sound and non-disruptive solution. What do you think? Us commoners have often been displaced and had to work out of intermodals during major construction. After the devastating fire of 1834, King William IV offered parliament the nearly completed Buckingham Palace—though this gesture was to rid himself of a detested residence that he didn’t care for, and the gift was roundly rejected.
troglodyte
Somewhat reminiscent of the accursed crew of the Flying Dutchman who are beginning to fuse with their ship in the Pirates of the Caribbean, the excellent Futility Closet introduces us to Altamura Man, discovered in a karst cave in Apulia (the heel part, near Bari) in 1993. The Palรฆolithic fossil is the best preserved and most complete example known, but owning to the calcite concretions of some one hundred and fifty thousand years of water funnelling over limestone, Altamura Man is merged with the cave and can only be studied in situ.
7x7
art deco revival: Paris’ 1920s Hotel Bachaumont is reopening with all its former grandeur after four decades
sequoia: the puzzling phenomena of the albino redwoods provide a glimpse into how trees communicate and support one another
suburbia: New York City is getting an underground park complete with Victory Gardens
transhuman: the first Cyborg Olympic Games are being held in Zรผrich
nightliner: with competition from discount flights and long-haul busses killing romance, Austrian railways are trying to save the sleeper berth
luminophore: self-charging, glow-in-the-dark bicycle and pedestrian paths in Poland
Saturday 8 October 2016
mechanical turk or singing for one’s supper
JF Ptak delves into a very modern topic of discussion through the lens that the long shadow that innovation has cast over jobs-security and the notion that robots will create mass-redundancy with musicians, once the mainstay of entertainment with live, orchestral accompaniment, finding themselves shoved aside with the advent of talkies and canned- or robotic-soundtracks punctuating the experience.
Colluding with the advent of telephony that made written correspondence a less attractive means of communication, various leagues and lobbies back in the 1930s rallied on behalf live bands—though there’s no incipient doubt yet of the humanity of the composition, just perhaps the emotional quotient of the performance. A Mechanical Turk is a human employed, at a pittance, to perform repetitive tasks that could be automated—thus stealing jobs from robots—but given the circumstances, it’s more efficient to have a person perform it, like squirrels running in wheels to operate a complex juggernaut.
soda derby
A new front has opened in the Cola Wars, as Boing Boing reports, in the form of rewarding dieticians to endorse the benefits of drinking sugary concoctions—or at least disparage the notion of taxing soda as sort of a gateway sin-tax for controlling all sorts of behaviour and choice. While this practise is undoubtedly revolting and ought to be brought to light (for shame, disreputable nutritionists), I think being subversive on social media pales in comparison to the way that soft-drinks are marketed almost as sacramental wine in Central and South America. What do you think? Most peddlers of patent-medicines were run out of town long ago, yet the biggest ones remain.
