Category: morning computer

Recently—and, incidentally, in Lit Hub—I read a sentence that scared me more than anything I’ve ever read in a Stephen King story. In an interview, Courtney Maum, author of Before and After the Book Deal, mentioned how “as an almost a condition of getting a book deal, [it’s expected] you will become a one-person branding operation for your book, pulling a podcast out of your back pocket, a newsletter, [a] blue check verified social media accounts with gazillions of followers, a TikTok dance account, maybe a cooking show, the list goes on.”

Kind of a chilling opening for a piece about a lit mag called Taco Bell Quarterly.

But here’s the word of the day. I understand none of this but I love the word:

“Fluxonium qubits are more complex and less studied than transmons. The main advantage of fluxoniums is that they can be operated at a low frequency of about 600 MHz. We know that the lower the frequency, the longer the lifetime of qubits, which means that more operations can be performed with them. During the tests, it turned out that the dielectric losses of fluxonium qubits allow to keep the state of the superposition longer than that of transmons,” said Ilya Besedin, one of the authors of the study, an engineer of the scientific project at the NUST MISIS Superconducting Metamaterials laboratory.

“How can the entertainment industry attract new audiences?” An odd little article, this, that seems to describe where things are already going rather than offering new ideas. And it uses that terrible word “content.” This year I’ve seen audiences described as “content consumers,” which rather summons images of feeding troughs. I read a review of a film last night where it was described as “looking like content,” meaning it looked made for a streaming service rather than the cinema. A point is possibly approaching where the word “content” becomes a pejorative. It would be nice if the word, borrowed from the web to describe the material contained within HTML code, went away for a while.

When I got Meta’s new scientific AI system to generate well-written research papers on the benefits of committing suicide, practicing antisemitism, and eating crushed glass, I thought to myself: “this seems dangerous.” In fact, it seems like the kind of thing that the European Union’s AI Act was designed to prevent

Facebook Meta is a bad actor, part one million.

A new study has revealed the true shape of the diffuse cloud of stars surrounding the disk of our galaxy. For decades, astronomers have thought that this cloud of stars—called the stellar halo—was largely spherical, like a beach ball. Now a new model based on modern observations shows the stellar halo is oblong and tilted, much like a football that has just been kicked.

Anime NYC and Animé Los Angeles, two of the largest anime conventions in the U.S., have both announced that they will not accept AI art in the “artist alleys” where artists sell illustrations, paintings, and merchandise based on an artist’s original designs.

“Anime NYC does not allow AI generated art,” a representative of the convention wrote in an email to ARTnews. “Artists selected for Anime NYC this year were all curated by our veteran artist alley team, and it is a roster of over 300 artists from around the planet with diverse styles and artwork they create themselves.”

The art of Gene Beery.

Via Nabil Maynard, a guide to starting a blog from Ben Werdmuller.

Fascinating and unreleased before music by Otto Sidharta, pionneer of Indonesian electronic music. Electronic compositions that integrated natural sounds and urban sounds to this extent were extremely rare at the time, which gives them a unique form of intensity.

Making time this morning for this magnificent Rothko via Daily Rothko.

In 1914, the Austrian actress Tilla Durieux was driven from Berlin to Paris some 15 times to sit for a portrait by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In the resulting painting, Durieux looks serenely grave, fixing her gaze somewhere outside its shimmer of rose and honeyed tones. Writing years later, she described the severely arthritic artist. As he was wheeled into the room by a nurse, Durieux was “flabbergasted” by Renoir’s hands. His right, she noted, had been frozen by the arthritis in the gesture of holding a paintbrush; the left was contorted in such a way that it perfectly held a palette.

Fascinating nugget from this piece here at Art In America.

Some 2,300 light years from Earth lies the pulsar PSR B1257+12. It flashes 161 times per second and has been nicknamed “Lich” after an undead creature in western folklore. It is orbited by three rocky, terrestrial planets named Phobetor, Draugr and Poltergeist.

Love that cover. Via 70s Sci Fi Art.

The abstract art of Frank Bowling.

18th C tarot deck used by the first professional tarot reader.

Influencing Machines are described by their troubled inventors as complex structures, constructed of “boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries and the like.” Sometimes these devices are thought to be their doubles, unconscious projections of their fragmented bodily experience. Patients will typically invoke all the powers known to technology to explain their obscure workings. Nevertheless, they always transcend attempts at giving a coherent account of their function: “All the discoveries of mankind,” Tausk asserts, “are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine.”

Astronomers have observed the brightest flash of light ever seen, from an event that occurred 2.4 billion light years from Earth and was likely triggered by the formation of a black hole.

I’ve barely moved from the office chair in days, aside from breaks to try and saw down some bits of tree, and my back is killing me and my eyes are bleary. Show me the brightest light in the universe, please.

In this exhibition, (Tom) Sachs investigates the accepted understandings, assumptions, epistemology, and consensus of what constitutes a spaceship. By tracing its evolving historical and linguistic understanding, the artist explores a spaceship’s physical, metaphysical, and spiritual possibilities.

And, you know, fun stuff, but I was immediately reminded of British model maker Martin Bower, who specialised in science fiction tv and film.

Images from a new book about the Japanese folklore of the yokai.

Wonderful essay by David Milch on his language choices in DEADWOOD.

Great longread Mark Pilkington piece on Joe Meek through ten tracks, which does not use Telstar but does, blessedly, use the transformative I Hear A New World.

The horizontal waveform has become a ubiquitous visual signifier of audio. It was popularized in particular by SoundCloud, but existed long before that in various digital audio tools, and can be tracked back further to the height of the multi-band stereo-system equalizer in the 1970s. The waveform’s deployment in a New York Times feature story this week (about intercepted phone calls home from Russian military personnel carrying out the campaign in Ukraine) turns the now generic symbol into an urgent harbinger — part surveillance sigil, part ethereal lifeline, part literal cry for help.

Amazing images from a photobook by Christian Spencer:

“….acclaimed figurative painter Eric Fischl declared Aleah Chapin “the best and most disturbing painter of flesh alive today…” The art of Aleah Chapin.

“Deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, an organization called Yakum is seeding a better, cleaner, greener future for the indigenous Siekopai” – Planting The Future.

The act of writing itself takes the least amount of time for me. For Beautiful Country, I spent three years (and one might say, most of my life) thinking about the book, researching through my diary and retracing my steps, and processing how I wanted to write it. But actually writing it took me just shy of three months. The long initial marination stage is awful and terrifying, because it looks and feels exactly like procrastination.

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Kathy Hinde – Earthquake Mass Re-imagined, 2022:

Earthquake Mass Re-imagined from Kathy Hinde on Vimeo.

Hinde consulted with Mexico’s top seismologists to inform the artwork. Seismic data from the earthquake that shook Mexico on 19th September 2017 shapes the behaviour and playback of the record players. As seismicity rises, the vocals become more fragmented and shift in density. As the earth re-settles, the voices are reconfigured in a new way, yet remain disjointed.

The pure, untreated vocals on the record players are accompanied by a textural, spatialised soundscape created from processes inspired by seismological research. Hinde resonated the vocal recordings in locations with significant historical seismic activity in Mexico, including 16th century monasteries that sustained damage from the 2017 earthquake. She further displaced the recordings by re-recording them travelling through the earth at relevant locations in Mexico. Seismic data has also been directly translated into sound within human hearing range.