full frequency range recordings

As a fund-raising event for English Heritage—the caretaker foundation for hundreds of historic sites across England, disc-jockey and record-producer Paul Oakenfold will be allowed to hold an intimate concert next month for an invited audience of fifty at Stonehenge. Known for hosting events in exotic venues, Oakenfold will be the first musician to perform at the location—at least in modern times, researchers having studied the acoustic properties and recreated the soundscapes of Stonehenge as it would have been in ancient times recently.

brand new roman

Hyperallegic directs our attention to a font face from the studios of Hello Velocity whose characters are all corporate logos—which by all aesthetic rights should result in something garish and obnoxious, but somehow they’ve managed not to create a typeface that’s perhaps not perfectly legible, still draws one in. Challenging us to parse pervasive sponsorship, I guess the appeal lies in our ability to recognise the logos out of context and underscores the power of careful graphic design and marketing.

type 57

Last week, we were taken for a test drive in a porcelain Bugatti called L’Or Blanc (White Gold) and now we are given a demonstration of another fully-functional Bugatti model—a Chiron supercar—that was almost entirely built from LEGO Technics pieces, over a million assembled by hand.
The car is a legacy brand first founded by Ettore Bugatti in the city of Molsheim in 1909 that produced a line of high performance luxury and racing automobiles through the 1950s when the company went bankrupt and the factory acquisitioned for the aviation industry. Bugatti saw a comeback in the 1990s when the name and distinctive chassis style saw a revival, with Volkswagen engineering the Chiron, two-seated sports car, which was revealed for the first time at the Geneva Motor Show in 2016. See footage of both cars in action at the links above.

annuario pontificio

If you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favour and do give a listen to the Pontifacts podcast. A slightly irreverent romp through all the popes from Paul to Francis with indulgences on offer, each episode gives a biographical, hagiographical overview of each of the Vicars of Christ and some studied explanations of Church hierarchy (from the Greek for president of sacred rites) and other developments in catechism and rates them in the style of another one in our play-list, the Rex Factor.

c+c music factory

Found at The Awesomer, a group of researchers at the University of California’s Berkeley campus have created software for the motion retargeting of video subjects which can—most importantly—transpose dance moves from the source to target. Though the output is not has a few glitches and is not perfectly rotoscoped, it’s really remarkable that the process is nearly instantaneous with no special sensors or studio required.

7x7

secret garden: Google Earth leads a team of researchers to an untouched mountaintop rainforest in Mozambique

ultima thule: on its encore mission, Pluto probe beams back its first image of its next target

comnenian period: an exploration of Byzantine architecture from draughtsman Antoine Helbert, via Kottke

amos rex: a subterranean museum opens in Helsinki  

seven points of articulation: a visual history of the past four decades of LEGO Minifigs (previously)

drainspotting: a tour of the manhole covers (elsewhere) of Massachusetts  

hyperpolyglot: what the people who’ve mastered dozens of languages can teach us, via Digg

🔣 or extended character set

Thanks to Duck Soup for directing our attention to the first instalment (update: here is part two and part three of the series) of Keith Houston’s investigation into the fascinating history of emoji and its linguistic cachet.
First originating as an unexpected outcome of Japanese teenagers using pervasive pagers (pocket bells, poké beru) in a novel way with messages encoded in numerals, the company that oversaw the country’s largest cellular network conceded to popular pressure and enabled what we would recognise as texting with the number keypad. Eventually the ❤ was added to the vocabulary of possibilities—which is a bit ambiguous in terms of meaning in different contexts. Temporarily abandoned as a frivolity, customers demanded it back and inspired the company to offer more. Be sure to check back with Shady Characters to get the next parts of the story.

a marketplace of ideas

Via Boing Boing, we learn that after satisfying the compulsion to google himself—egosurfing if you will—that insufferable occupant of the White House decided that he did not like the results that were presented him and has directed his goons to look into whether and how internet search engine results should be regulated by the government.
Although this is just another in a long line of pathetic tantrums that even has the Republicans clutching their pearls, such bluster erodes societal norms and our collective expectation of integrity and reliability in our institutions, whose reputations are already bruised by reflecting our implicit biases, being manipulative, judgmental, prejudiced and for jumping to conclusions. Though parts of the internet are both echo-chamber and excoriating Star Chamber, the raw and unmediated (and admittedly finding the latter can take some extra effort) facts are out in the ether as well.  This latest grandstanding (using platforms to attack platforms) combined with the unrelenting howls of fake news may well be dread to hear for most but have had real and dire consequence and sets the United States on a course to dictatorship, which is depressingly seeming a more likely outcome.