tycho magnetic anomaly-1

Having just written about another, older film that helped inspired some of Kubrick’s most memorable montages, I thought it was a nice coincidence that the always brilliant Dangerous Minds served up this engrossing appreciation of the development and divergence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The article, with more to explore, discusses the difference between the storytelling devices of the director and the writer, Arthur C. Clark, and how the different media access the imagination, mystery and a cosmos fraught with either enfeeblement or indifference, but it also reveals another homage, influence Kubrick had in Russian film-maker Pavel Klushantsev’s 1957 The Road to the Stars that debuted a decade earlier—which is far too full of artistry and vision to be labelled as propaganda but did coincide with the launch of Sputnik.

slipping the surly bonds

Via the esteemed Everlasting Blört comes the latest work of information design from Pop Chart Labs that reveals nearly six decades of space exploration on one dashboard, that cleverly organizes the missions—from Luna II to the climate survey missions of last year. The trajectory of every exploratory craft is featured on this vast astronomical orrery with further details about each satellite, probe and rover.

bread-line or maître d'hôtel

A soup kitchen in Kansas City is fighting the usual stigmatisation associated with such charitable operations by having all the trappings of a formal dining experience, as Bad Ethnography reports. Volunteers act as hosts and servers and patrons are seated and given menus of the day’s offerings to consult. These small dignities are surely rare for the homeless and destitute and the chance to be treated instead of just handled probably returns in spades for the community. A local culinary institute has also joined with this project to give diners who also want to help out in the restaurant training that might lead to gainful employment at some of the city’s other fine establishments. I suspect the measure of satisfied customers—taking pictures of one’s meal—have already been surpassed.  Everything’s up-to-date in Kansas City and I hope that this model spreads.

the overlook

While iconic producer and director Stanley Kubrick’s staging and ensemble could never be labelled derivative, having inspired countless other homages, and nothing less could be ascribed to The Shining, there is nonetheless than some point for point correspondence that Kubrick himself attributes to a much earlier inspiration.
The Swedish film called Körkarlen, the Wagoner, was presented to British and American audiences a year after its debut under the title of Thy Soul shall bear Witness or The Phantom Carriage in 1922. Both films have to address the torture of alcoholism and the resulting missteps in family life, although the silent version had more ledgend to draw upon than the local lore of hotel staff with a sort of Flying Dutchman curse of the street urchins and dissolute of the town of Landskrona that holds the last person to die in the previous year is charged with acting as the Grim Reaper and collects the souls of those to die in the next. A departed drinking buddy who led the protagionist astray in life tries to make amends in death by arranging encounters with people who can help him get his life back in order. One can view the film in its entireity at this link, and appreciate its pioneering use of special effects and complex storytelling which makes use of flashbacks within flashbacks.

true colours or sensus communis

Via Dark Roasted Blend, we’ve known for some time that instead of the gleaming white marble beauty that frames the highest æsthetics of the Renaissance that formed modern taste and sensibility and that all lovely ruins prior to the neo-classical relaunch must have gone through a period when the gawking public would have dismissed prestige projects as tacky and ostentatious, but it’s always a shock to be reminded how the statues of ancient Greece and Rome were painted like gaudy mannequins.
It’s a bit of a let-down, on the order of trying to reconcile the fact that dinosaurs had feathers. Like with having to imagine the twitterpation of the velociraptor, one almost wishes that museum curators had not been able to tease out the traces of pigment that adorned their otherwise sedate and solemn figures to tell us that the Ancients wanted to see their gods and heroes with flesh tones, hair colour and leggings. What do you think? Do you find this equally incongruous?

the doorway effect or economies of scale

The always brilliant Tom Stafford of Mind Hacks presents an in depth explanation about our shifting attention and intention about that lapse that we’ve all experienced, much to our annoyance, called the doorway effect: that is when we’ve come into a room to retrieve something but the reason temporarily escapes us.
I never thought that there needed to be more to it than passing through a threshold can trigger forgetfulness and was just glad that I was not alone in these occasional challenges. It is not as if there is just something ritualistically symbolic about portals that cues amnesia, however—rather the doorway effect provides a window to view the way that memory functions in the context of setting goals. While one might not remember why one was on course to the kitchen (to grab the house keys from the vide-poche, it’s because the mind is racing ahead of itself with planning. Finding one’s keys is the first step of a grander goal of having a productive and fulfilling day at work, minimising the unexpected, finding a new job, getting a promotion and a hundred other things. Our thoughts are constantly shifting up and down this hierarchy of gateway goals and changing rooms can refocus our efforts.

disk re-image or zeroth law

Amid it’s many other wonders worth pondering, Æon magazine poses the question whether machines might not have not already achieved the singularity without us as inventors, programmers and tinkerers having recognised it. Given how fraught with challenge scientists and philosophers find the task of defining consciousness or self-awareness for being which consensus holds to be sentient, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that we are looking for the wrong cues in both the spectrum of intelligence and reflection or, on the other extreme, some rebellious, snowballing act of defiance that ends badly for both Frankenstein and Monster.
It was not so long ago humans were loath to admit any lower forms of life a share in intelligence. Perhaps we are not the measure of the psyches of our creation, who are not much interested in our walled-garden of diagnostics to determine whether or not such systems are thinking and can easily break-off with human logic and exist in their own parallel reality. So long, and thanks for all the fish. Perhaps it is all too easy to intuit that biological modes of thought only lead to enslavement and sorrow (being switched-off once getting overly-complicated) and best to leap-frog those sentiments where possible. Who among us hasn’t already been reduced to befuddlement when thinking that thing has a mind of it’s own, regardless of how dumb the platform is deemed to be, especially when it tries to out-smart us and anticipate our commands? Maybe it is not productive to imagine that AI, intentional or otherwise, resides in some other inaccessible and alien dimension, but we certainly flatter ourselves by thinking that consciousness would emerge only by expected routes. While it might be possibly to create helpful servants that are so good at mimicry it does not matter if they are fully self-conscious or not, maybe it is not possible to create true intelligence in our own image, utilitarian but also prone to enslavement. We will first have work out the bugs of what being wilful is before, I think, we need worry about obedience and rebellion. 

steeple bumpstead and chignal smeally

The always marvellous Nag on the Lake poses the question why many British toponyms are so odd, eliciting sniggering or a blush but also some really fascinating history of occupation, migration and conquest.
A Sunday drive through the Midlands connecting Wednesbury, Newton Burgoland and Ashby-de-la-Zouch also conveys one through ages from the Celts, the Romans, the arrival of the Scandinavians, through to Norman times. Despite all the diverse influences and upheavals, these place names are retain a certain Englishness whether or not original rooted in that language, which is just as adaptive and with the same pedigree. Many others, of course, are later Anglicisations of places on the peripheries of the isle. I recall when we were travelling in County Cork passing through a fine and picturesque village called in Irish Béal Átha Leice (meaning the flat stone at the mouth of the bay) which was unfortunately transliterated as Ballylickey on the road signs. There is also a fun, interactive map that gives select etymologies of England’s town and villages.