a writer's notebook
Metal scar found on cannibal star
“When a star like our sun reaches the end of its life, it can ingest the surrounding planets and asteroids that were born with it. Now, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile, researchers have found a unique signature of this process for the first time—a scar imprinted on the surface of a white dwarf star. The results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.”
February 26, 2024 at 04:09PM
Comments closedVia Jay:
Paul’s made no commitment to posting new issues with any regular frequency, the offer simply is this: I have a broadsheet newsletter, pay me a one time fee and get ‘on the list’. I presume he’ll raise the price once there’s a bit of back catalogue.
It all feels very simple compared to running a Substack or other contemporary subscription model which results in the need to grind out regular posts down in the content minds.
I have no interest in gaming, but Jay feels correct in saying:
Paul’s newsletter feels like a little weak signal, a light in the dark, a step along the road to the sort of culture that I want to be a part of and participate in.
We live for the small lights out there in the dark of the personal web. The little radio stations and so forth.
Comments closedAs Engadget recently asked in their excellent teardown of Arc’s AI search pivot, “Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us?” But let’s take a step even further here. Why even bother making new websites if no one’s going to see them? At least with the Web3 hype cycle, there were vague platitudes about ownership and financial freedom for content creators. To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist. It is an undeniably apocalyptic projectComments closed
Susan Sontag: Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson
“Some art aims directly at arousing the feelings; some art appeals to the feelings through the route of the intelligence. There is art that involves, that creates empathy. There is art that detaches, that provokes reflection.
“Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. But its emotional power is mediated. The pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed.
“The contrast can be accounted for in terms of techniques or means—even of ideas. No doubt, though, the sensibility of the artist is, in the end, decisive. It is a reflective art, a detached art that Brecht is advocating when he talks about the “Alienation Effect.” The didactic aims which Brecht claimed for his theater are really a vehicle for the cool temperament that conceived those plays.
“In the film, the master of the reflective mode is Robert Bresson.”
Comments closedThe G-SHOCK RANGEMAN GPRH1000: A Watch for the Ultimate Adventurer | Everyday Carry
Weirdly covet this ugly thing.
Comments closeden.wikipedia.org – Epic Theatre
Comments closed‘Beyond what’s possible’: New JWST observations unearth mysterious ancient galaxy
“Our understanding of how galaxies form and the nature of dark matter could be completely upended after new observations of a stellar population bigger than the Milky Way from more than 11 billion years ago that should not exist.”
GALAXY THAT SHOULD NOT EXIST
Comments closedTraces of Stone Age hunter-gatherers discovered in the Baltic Sea
“In autumn 2021, geologists discovered an unusual row of stones, almost 1 km long, at the bottom of Mecklenburg Bight. The site is located around 10 kilometers off Rerik at a 21-meter water depth. The approximately 1,500 stones are aligned so regularly that a natural origin seems unlikely.
“A team of researchers from different disciplines has now concluded that Stone Age hunter-gatherers likely built this structure around 11,000 years ago to hunt reindeer. The finding represents the first discovery of a Stone Age hunting structure in the Baltic Sea region.”
Comments closedTelescopes show the Milky Way’s black hole is ready for a kick
“The supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way is spinning so quickly it is warping the spacetime surrounding it into a shape that can look like a football, according to a new study using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).”
Comments closed“Staff here are used to finding all kinds of creatures in baggage, from a 1.5-metre basking shark folded inside a box to a whole smoked monkey. But most meat comes dried, smoked, charred and chopped, so it is hard to identify it. In some cases, that’s probably the point. A hunk of meat being confiscated could be from a cane rat, catfish, monkey or pangolin – or it could just be a bit of beef.”
Smoked monkey!
Comments closed