notebook/daybook
For serious physical design nerds: a deep dive on the design work for STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS. From the bridge right down to the flatware and the lamps.
The days are getting longer and nobody knows why. I personally thought it just felt that way.
Image below by Ben Zank. We’ve all felt this way, too.
Good morning computer. I spent yesterday trying to fix my newsletter – you can once again subscribe at http://orbitaloperations.com – and the other sick chicken passed in her sleep overnight, so today is about digging a very big hole under very high heat. But:
Or: it’s not social media, it’s just media. This explainer from Cal Newport on Facebook/Instagram feeling the need to pivot towards TikTok’s methods makes one thing very clear:
TikTok, by contrast, doesn’t depend on …painstakingly accumulated social data. It instead deploys a simple but brutally effective machine learning loop onto the pool of all available videos on its platform. By observing the viewing behavior of individual users, this loop can quickly determine exactly which videos will most engage them; no friends, retweets, shares, or favorites required.
What he describes there is, to my eyes, actually an upgraded TiVo box. If you’ve ever used a TiVo box, you know this experience – you watch a crime show one time, and two days later it’s recorded five other crime shows for you because it thinks you like crime shows now. That isn’t social media. That’s just media. Clever television.
A fantastic gallery of work by Alexa Hawksworth.
Jose Naranja’s sumo notebook art. (I have a whole tournament saved on Tivo right now.)
Chris Korda, via Artforum.
Today’s word is necrobotics.
Mechanical engineers from Rice University have actually turned spider cadavers into what they call “necrobots,” able to function as mechanical grippers.
There is, of course, video of a dead spider being puppeted to act as the sort of claw crane that fails to pluck a teddy bear out of the box at the seaside arcade.
Necrobotics. Good morning.
A survey of recent collections of micro-fictions: also referred to as flash fictions, short-shorts and other terrible terms.
Produced by the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1964, It Started with Muybridge begins with a voiceover proclaiming the center’s mission: “research and development for tomorrow’s weapons”. The future’s bombs, this training film claims, will be detonated atop the shoulders of yesterday’s “photographer extraordinary”, Eadweard Muybridge. His famous sequential studies of animal movement innovated photography as a tool for motion analysis — the field that excites these ordnance laboratorians most
During what he thought would be a routine storm-chasing expedition in Virginia last week, photographer Jason Rinehart visited an overlook within the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was hoping to capture the ominous shelf cloud leading that night’s torrent but instead found himself witnessing an unusually lucky sight: as the rain broke during twilight, a double rainbow emerged over the horizon, an already stunning phenomenon made more serendipitous when it was punctured by a bright lightning bolt in the distance.
The Utopian Avant-Garde: Soviet Film Posters of the 1920s.
Michael Velliquette’s Meditative Paper Sculptures.
THE END OF THE WORLD, Jack Pierson, via.
The Fall as sound / the sound of The Fall: Simon Reynolds on top ruminative form.
A clip from Peter Greenaway’s THE FALLS:
A recent (?) production of Beckett’s ALL THAT FALL. (I was looking for the MacWhinnie original)
Headline of the day: Maurizio Cattelan Faces Plagiarism Lawsuit Over Banana Duct-Taped To Wall.
A Temporary Sanctuary at Hitokotonushi Shrine Provides Fresh Water for Japan’s Honeybees. This has me wanting to build a new water feature near the mini-greenhouse and potting area in the garden.
Short interview with editor of interesting-looking new travel magazine OPEN SPACES.
