archæoacoustics or sonic the hengehog

Knowing that acoustics and architecture go hand in hand, researchers are using gaming and virtual reality technologies to reconstruct and recreate the soundscape that Stonehenge must have presented to congregations three millennia prior.
The stone circle would have amplified bass sounds and focused them on the centre—like the signal boosting properties of a parabolic dish, and many have remarked in more recent times, like author Thomas Hardy, on the place’s strange musical hum. As fragmentary as the tonal structure is now—polluted with the din of a nearby traffic artery, scholars are only just now able to have an idea what being in the presence of this orchestrally arranged rock ensemble might have been like. Have a listen at the link up top; it was certainly easy to imagine an acoustic presence when we visited.  There is of course always a risk—though I suppose one diminishing on one level as measurements and models get more accurate—of not getting the whole picture and allowing, expecting technology to fill in those gaps in ways that may carry forward too much license and are not faithful to the original. Telescoped out, those minor fictions could cause real major problems not only for our conception of the past but also for contemporary predictions.

infonet

I had seen a few references in circulation but couldn’t quite manage to replay the film in head until reading this excellent but cringe-inducing analysis from Frank Swain.
The essay underscores how life imitates art, and rather than living in that under-privileged but blissful unawares computer simulation, we are in fact relegated to a rather bleak vision of 2017 from three decades hence—The Running Man. Complete with the billing of actors turn politicians in Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Venture and a game-show host more powerful than the president (now even more ironic considering that Schwarzenegger has been appointed Trump’s under-study as reality television-show master of ceremonies), the film is an uncanny reflection of our gladiatorial appetites. Even the technological state of affairs with the infonet and the infonet of things held up pretty well.  What do you think? Perhaps we’ve not crossed the threshold to blood-lust and public execution of society’s maladroits but virtual sticks and stones and teapot tempests are certainly not that far behind and are effective ways to placate and manipulate the home-audience.

hail to the chief, as we pledge cooperation

It may seem, in the grander scheme of things, like something very rarefied and trifling, but the emergent protest and backlash regarding a Saint Louis art museum’s decision to loan the a painting by George Caleb Bingham—called The Verdict of the People—to loan the piece to the presidential inaugural luncheon as a prop really strikes me as one of the better, more thoughtful arguments that I’ve heard imploring institutions and individuals not to normalise a regime that’s already demonstrated disdain for not only convention but also civility and social justice.
Too often, I think, wounded pride and fear is coming off as the same shrill mantra of partisan politics that was mumbled by the opposing chorus throughout the whole terms. We know it’s different and there’s much at stake but I think there’s a serious risk of having grave concerns fobbed off as something political and therefore not urgent thanks to safeguards—sometimes called grid-lock, and glacial rates of change (albeit it this environment, maybe that’s becoming an ever poorer metaphor). This contested artwork is not Bingham’s only political allegory but does seem particularly unfit in a self-styled era of populist uprisings that didn’t manage to also capture the popular vote and seemed ultimately far from the people’s verdict.

shōgatsu

In what’s become a sort of annual tradition, Spoon & Tamago are featuring a gallery of some of their favourite New Years’ postcards (年賀状, nengajō) for this upcoming year of the Fire Rooster. Although since 1873 Japan has officially adhered to the Gregorian calendar and celebrates the new year on 1 January, tradition still has a place for the lunisolar procession of the Chinese zodiac—which heralds in the year (and a second inflammatory one) of the rooster on 28 January with a week of festivities. Let’s hope that we’re getting an especially lucky sign this time around.

7x7

what sorcery is this: seemingly magical, Möbius-burrito method of putting the cover on a duvet (Plumeau, Bettdecke)

journeyman: large format, industrial three-dimensional printer installed in its own shipping container for ease of transportation

ретрофутуризм: 1960 Soviet vision of the year 2017

gluggaveður: a winter’s trek to Iceland’s Arctic Henge

furkids: funny and effective animal shelter promotional presentation produced on a shoe-string budget

f-bomb: despite older brother’s protests baby prodigy gets rather sweary

vinification statt gentrification: tiny urban vineyard in Berlin that was also home to the first programmable computer from the laboratory of Konrad Zuse

schwarzschild radius

Sometime early this year, lensing the entire Earth as the aperture for the telescopic array and enlisting the help of dozens of observatories, a project called Event Horizon will peer across twenty-five thousand light years into the centre of the Milky Way to catch a glimpse of the super massive black hole—Sagittarius A*, or at least it the gas and dust heated to millions of degrees falling into it.
Since famously and captivatingly not even light can escape the singularity, only indirect observation is possible and researchers are reaching across time and space to find something invisible and containing the mass of a billion stars but compacted into an area much less than an astronomical unit—that is, the Earth’s distance from the Sun. These run-away reactive structures are thought to anchor all sizable galaxies and the experiment has an extensive list of stated objectives, including verifying General Relativity but perhaps first demonstrating that black holes are not some scientific figment.

comet and cupid

NASA intends to make good on a 2014 proposal and launch a pair of missions within the six years to two very exotic locations.
One destination is the massive metallic asteroid 16 Psyche (named for the mythological tale of Cupid and Psyche, which astronomers believe to be the nickel-iron core of a proto-planet that was destroyed in the early stages of the formation of the Solar System. The other mission, Lucy—named after the hominid female discovered in Africa and recognised as the missing-link (herself named after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), will explore the so called Trojan asteroids, pulled away from the main belt by Jupiter’s gravity. While not much is not known about the nature of the Trojans, researchers believe that they represent the fossil remnants of planet formation. Aside from the pure exploratory value, the projects also will look at the feasibility of conducting mining operations, whose wealth make the notion of scarcity seem ridiculous.

anisotrophy or 45-rpm

I can vaguely recall how about five years ago it was the done thing to suggest that the Universe might be rotating—about what axis and relative to what being unanswerable questions—although I was never sure to what ends exactly, what individuals hoped to accomplish by sticking a reference point on the Cosmos.
Perhaps it was to preserve the symmetry of rotation from atoms to planets and galaxies or perhaps it was sort of to explain the Doppler effect—I could never quite tell though it always struck me as intriguing if not impossible to test, and reminded me of the story in the Middle Earth’s legendarium how it went in the Third Age from a flat planet to a globe so the Undying Lands would become inaccessible to mortals. Now revisiting the question, we find that astrophysicists can reasonably infer that the Universe is indeed directionless, uniform (from a sufficiently broad perspective) and stationary thanks to a recent battery of tests and observations that preserves our present understanding of cosmology, but it makes me wonder if we postulated a spinning Universe what might be different and supercilious. Would we need dark matter and dark energy (for which there’s little in the way of a satisfactory explanation) if the ability to hold it all together could be accounted for by angular momentum—that is, the Universe keeping itself balanced, like a ice-skater spinning and bringing her arms inward to twirl faster, or like a phonographic record on a turntable whose edge is sweeping out greater spaces at a faster rate than at its centre? Would the background of spacetime be something else entirely if not immobile?