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Category: marks

Looking Back On September 2024

Published October 12, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.

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Published September 30, 2024 by Warren Ellis

The good American beard oil is back in the house. Sunstone is marine, all salt air and shorelines.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/FiresOfFreyja

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Looking Back On August 2024

Published September 24, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.

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The Carousel Lens and Einstein’s Cross

Published September 23, 2024 by Warren Ellis

The Carousel Lens is a unique magnifying portal into deep spacetime. A gravitational lens is a massive structure in space that bends light around it in such a way that more distant objects become more clearly visible to us. The Carousel Lens is a cluster of galaxies with seven other galaxies lined up behind it.

“Finding one such alignment is a needle in the haystack. Finding all of these is like eight needles precisely lined up inside that haystack.”

Through that lens is a line of sight taking us close to the edge of the observable universe. Both the skill and luck involved in finding an alignment of a stack of galaxies pointing to the edge of known space are staggering.

In the middle of that intergalactic telescope is an Einstein Cross. This is what one looks like:

An Einstein Cross is a gravitationally-lensed quasar, and apparently in this instance it becomes key for modelling the Carousel Lens. Looking at it, I like to think of it as a rangefinder halfway down the telescope, helping to target the Lens for the end of spacetime.

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Published September 17, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Dozens of members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement have reportedly been injured after handheld pagers they use to communicate exploded.
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Society of the Psyop Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media, Trevor Paglen

Published September 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

This is really, really good.

I first met Richard Doty in 2022. I was anxious. I could feel my unease rising as his silver SUV pulled into the parking lot across from the makeshift film studio where I was working at the University of New Mexico.2 A paunchy man wearing a red polo shirt emerged. I wasn’t afraid of physical violence. Rick Doty wasn’t known for that. I was worried about my own sanity. Doty was known for that.3

Doty conducted elaborate psyop programs for the US Air Force in the 1970s and ’80s. One of his targets, a defense contractor, was so consumed by paranoia after being subjected to Doty’s craft that he was committed to a mental institution. There was also a well-respected journalist who, after enduring one of Doty’s psychological operations, spent the remainder of her career babbling about reptoids, cover-ups, and ancient alien conspiracies. A third target, a former UFO investigator who collaborated with Doty, publicly confessed to participating in a military disinformation campaign and retreated into self-imposed obscurity. We would be spending the next two days together. It turned out that I liked the guy.

I had sought out Doty because I wanted to learn about the particular form of media-making he practiced to such dramatic effect. My intuition was that Doty’s career as a cultural producer could shed some light on what media might be like in an age of recommendation algorithms, personalized news feeds, information bubbles, and generative AI.

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Do we live in a shell universe?

Published September 12, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Do we live in a shell universe?

“In 2011, Jun Ni discovered a new class of solutions for the Einstein field equations of neutron stars. These solutions were completed and generalized by Lubos Neslušan, Jorge deLyra and others.

“The Ni-Neslušan-deLyra solutions atypically feature a shell-like configuration and a central matter void. A repulsive gravitational field centered on the origin causes matter inside the shell cavity to be attracted towards the shell. This also induces a gravitational redshift in light moving from the shell towards the center and a blueshift in light moving back towards the shell.

“This runs counter to the standard picture in general relativity, which features a flat, Minkowski spacetime inside a spherical shell of matter.

“All the tensions of the LCDM model could be resolved if the matter of the observable universe—in both early and late times—were concentrated in a thick Ni shell, with the Milky Way lying close to the center within the KBC Void.

“While this positioning is at odds with the cosmological principle, anomalies in quasar counts and other observational “dipoles” are not inconsistent with it. In a Ni shell universe, the Hubble redshift seen in light from distant stars would arise at least partly from the gravitational redshift induced by the outer shell.

“The Hubble tension would then be explained with the changing derivative of ν(r), which causes the Hubble constant to steadily decrease as one moves from the center of the universe towards the shell. The dark energy of the LCDM model would no longer be needed.

“Supernova dimming would instead result from the Ni redshift causing objects to appear further away from us than they really are. In like-fashion to Rajendra Gupta’s “CCC + TL” model, the Ni solutions could be blended with the LCDM model in a hybrid approach.

“And yet the Ni approach can go much deeper than this. With recent findings of unexpectedly high mass density at high redshifts, the universe may have so much mass that it becomes a black hole…

September 12, 2024 at 03:44PM

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Mostly Riskless

Published August 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

You can also sense the apparent vacuum of animated discourse about aesthetics – what you could call a lack of an avant-garde, although metaphors of conquest feel inappropriate here. Nuanced conversations are happening, of course – but “underground,” offline, or in private forums like Discords and group chats. (To paraphrase critic Caroline Busta, you won’t find counterculture on Instagram.) These nonpublic networks are what tech blogger Venkatesh Rao calls the “cozyweb.” It’s a refuge from the “dark forest” of the open internet, a corporate superfund site stalked by bots, trolls, censors, hackers, scammers, aggregators, and advertisers. Why is the forest silent at night? Not because it’s empty – but because there are predators. The platform still known as Twitter used to fuel a kind of discourse, but lately, it’s gotten risky to really spill your guts where your hot-headed or empty-headed bons mots get stamped into the public record for eternity (much like Holzer’s laughable series of Trump tweets stamped into chunks of lead) and can lead to physical threats

Is art going in circles? Is it looking backwards? Definitely. These maneuvers are tactical. This is contemporary art as refuge. Tapped to entertain in art’s castles, artists and curators find it more strategic to retell old stories, reprise old work, rehash old battles, and pine for old peace. Contemporary art is cozy art in a dark forest. The fire is in the hearth.

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