pew pew

Tedium gives us an interesting overview on sound design and the history of foley artists (the distinction being that foley effects concerns themselves with dramatizing human and natural sounds, like footfalls or a yapping dog, whereas sound designers are tasked with imagining how a laser blast ought to sound) and acquaints us the award-winning individual behind many of the iconic science-fiction and fantasy sound effects that are not only instantly recognisable but often serve to place one at a precise point in the narrative. Ben Burtt created the hums of lightsabres, Darth Vader’s respirator sounds, the satisfying, solid sound of Indiana Jones throwing and sustaining a punch as well as the crack of his bullwhip plus many others. Find out more at the link above.

talent pool

As part of a larger discussion on the pace of technological advancement, Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen introduces us to the Grand Ise Shirine complex in the Mie prefecture of Japan and how process and institutional knowledge play a big role in progress.

The architectural style dates back to antiquity and can be referenced in no other structures—this site being holy to the sun goddess Amaterasu, housing the Imperial artefact the Sacred Mirror—and is characterised by gabled and thatched roofs with plank walls. To ensure that the buildings are forever both new and ancient and that succeeding generations know the craft and technique of construction, for at least the past twelve hundred years, the old shrines and the wooden bridge that spans the Isuzu River (namesake of the automotive company) have been dismantled and rebuilt on a site adjacent to exact specifications every twenty years. The cycle of renewal is called Sengu, and the present buildings (originals in their sixty-first iteration) date from 2013.

of pageants and placements

Not to be cynical as they are some really amazing hobby photographers whose talents deserve to be showcased and it’s always good to be curious about one’s surroundings but we’ve wondered if sponsoring a picture contest might not be a good and profitable business-model worth pursuing. It seems like everyone’s getting into competition one way or another and the field still has a lot of room for expansion and we’ve got an attested weakness for just about any speciality superlatives. The whole field taken together is sort of like PR’s PR Award from Absolutely Fabulous—“That award had your name on it Eddy.”
Though not nearly as polished as the top entrants of the International Garden Photographer of the Year contest—co-sponsored by Kew Gardens—learning of the inclusion of a Macro Art category inspired me to share a couple of serendipitous, up-close shots of a dragonfly (eine Libelle) and a butterfly (ein Schmetterling) from our back garden. What do you think? What would be a good niche class of photography to hold a contest for?

out to pasture

Via Kottke, we’re directed toward a rather powerful and immediate way to visualise land-use in the United States of America by projecting percentages on to a map of the contiguous states. Each pixel represents one million acres (about four hundred thousand hectares) and an enormous amount is allotted to ranches, ranges and pasturelands for livestock and for raising feed for the animals with crops for human consumption dwarfed in comparison. One would think that in this day and age, one could find a better use for more than a third of one’s territory than the upkeep of cattle and wonder how other countries and regions rank.

kleptocracy

This thoughtful essay from economist Susan Crawford on the inherently paradoxical nature of good governance—how the most vital and integral public services are the most vulnerable to being dismantled by oligarchs by dint of their invisibility—initially reminded us of a parallel phenomena that we encountered a few weeks ago that spoke to how we perceive laisse-faire attitudes and confidence in market-corrections: a search void.

The result of unequal passion for forwarding a particular agenda or product over a scientifically sound and accepted truth that needs no advocacy, search engines answer enquiries with a paucity of authoritative answers in favour of amplifying and propagating rumour and falsehoods—not because of some malfeasance in programming or bias to serve up what sells (though spamdexing does happen and that is a real problem too), but because there is a concerted effort boost the worldview of a particular party. It’s not a majority perspective but can appear so. In the same way those sturdy and staid institutions of government, the museums, schools, hospitals and regulatory bodies, get far less attention and fewer champions (seemingly) than those who would call for their privatization or outright obliteration. Here’s hoping that we won’t have to loose these protections to realise what we have and what’s at stake.

í embætti

On this day in 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became the first democratically directly elected female president (forseti—the presiding one and derived from the Æsir god Fosite, the personification of justice and reconciliation), assuming the high office in Iceland.  Though she initially won by only a slight majority of voters, she went on to serve three more terms, running in two of the elections unopposed, making her also the longest serving—to date—female head of state, with an administration of exactly sixteen years. In 1996, Vigdís chose not to be considered for re-election but has remained active since as a goodwill ambassador, lobbying on behalf of minority languages and world peace.

flagged content

The experimental social media chatbot Tay that quickly suffered a racist meltdown after less than a day’s exposure to the Internet wilds has a younger sibling called Zo, whose programming dictates she follows the protocols of their aggregate idea of a typical teenage American girl.

Far worse than the stereotyped pastiche of shouts and murmurs, however, is the unsettling and insidious way Zo champions political correctness through disengagement and strictly avoids the lures and decoys that led to the grounding of her elder sister. What Zo is ostensibly being trained for is to police forums for uncivil material and she has adopted a disturbing way of shutting down a conversation, should an interlocutor introduce a term associated with controversy. Decontextualizing censorship is a mistake that humans are prone to make enough by their own devices and possibly not something to be automated and institutionalised.