Reading this Wirecutter review of “tabletop radios,” as I guess they’re called now, made me want one.
I use an old Echo Spot in the kitchen for radio, as well as for access to Amazon Music, and the sound quality doesn’t seem to me to be much different from the radio sets of my youth. When I was a kid, the radio was always on in the kitchen, and, growing up, it was my little lifeline to culture and discovery. John Peel, Annie Nightingale, Alexis Korner, Linton Kwesi Johnson. I’m sure it’s just memory and nostalgia that made me instantly think, wow, I’d love a radio on the kitchen counter with a proper dial. I don’t need one, obviously. But I’m bookmarking it anyway, against that time in the future when I don’t have access to the internet and still need that little lifeline to the world of sound.
I was not surprised by the number of notebooks in which Henry James recorded his ideas for stories – he had an intensely active mind, a vivid imagination and, being social – a constant diner-out – he was the recipient of all sorts of snippets, gossip and asides. And he was lonely, another trait of the note-taker. It is not a surprise that he did not get around to using all this material. Some writers struggle to come up with a new idea. Others keep notebooks.
…digital analysis of rock surfaces reveals how other ghosts of the deep past—this time from almost 2,000 years ago in North America—have been coaxed into the light. Writing in the journal Antiquity, Professor Jan Simek of the University of Tennessee and colleagues have published images of giant glyphs carved into the mud surface of the low ceiling of a cave in Alabama.
The motifs, which depict human forms and animals, are some of the largest known cave images found in North America and may represent spirits of the underworld.
Archaeologists have discovered rare rock art in an Iron Age subterranean complex, located underneath a house in Başbük, Turkey. The finding, reported Wednesday in the journal Antiquity, depicts a divine processional with eight deities across a 13-foot rock wall panel using a mix of cultural influences from the vast Assyrian Empire and local Syro-Anatolian deities.
The discovery is the first known example of a Neo-Assyrian-period rock relief with Aramaic inscriptions; it contains the earliest-known regional attestation of Atargatis, the principal goddess of Syria.
The Shkadov Thruster: stripmine Mercury, turn the product into a vast mirror belting one side of the sun, wait 200 million years, and the entire solar system is transported a hundred light years away. I came across this while reading a consideration of free-floating planets as interstellar arks, which caught my eye because I remembered being amused by THE WANDERING EARTH.
The piece includes one of my favourite observations about a Type 3 civilisation – and I am using this excuse to see if I can get Quotebacks working here:
In 2020, Valentin Ivanov (ESO Paranal) and colleagues proposed a modification to the Kardashev scale based on how a civilization integrates with its environment (citation below). The authors offered a set of classes. Class 0 is a civilization that uses the environment without substantially changing it. Class 1 modifies its environment to fit its needs, while Class 2 modifies itself to fit its environment. A Class 3 civilization under this scheme would be maddeningly difficult to find because it is indistinguishable from its environment.
(That only took fifteen minutes to figure out, bloody hell… I’m sure Quotebacks and WordPress used to play more nicely together, but I found the “insert HTML workaround)
“In 2011, the Boston-based artist Yu-Wen Wu looked up how she might walk from Beantown to Taiwan, to visit her ailing grandmother. She had looked up airline tickets, but they were astronomical. At the time Google Maps was still in its infancy, and so the site compiled and returned detailed results about how she could walk the continental U.S. and then kayak from the West Coast to Hawai’i on to Japan and finally to Taipei. (Google now will say it can’t find the route.) The 11,749-mile journey was estimated to take about 155 days and 5 hours. Wu saved these directions as a PDF and has now translated them into the format of a landscape scroll…“
You barely glimpse the heighliners, the vast container spaceships that famously travel without moving in the new film version of DUNE.
On rewatching the film, I noted that we barely see inside spaceships either, and it started to feel like a choice, so I went hunting. And sure enough, the director had a plan:
I tried to keep all the space-travelling as mysterious as possible, like almost bringing some kind of mysticism or sacred relationship with that part of the movie. Everything involving space is just evocated and very mysterious…
I insisted that we will never go inside the spaceships. Dune is really a project that was, for me, focusing entirely on Arrakis and the Fremen planet, and focusing on the ecosystem of the planet. It’s a story that is very grounded. It’s not a story about space-travelling. It’s so [much] more beautiful when we don’t see.
Apparently there was too much happy news, because a new theory has been aired suggesting that in 100 million years the universe will start contracting back into the infinitely dense dot of hot garbage it started out as. But we won’t be able to test that theory for another 65 million years or so.
There’s probably also a point to be made here about how, to use Twitter the way Twitter wants you to, you basically have to make it your job, but other people are getting to that for me.
Astronaut habitats on Mars will have to be buried 1.5 metres under the surface. Shielding isn’t going to cut it. “…the presence of this shielding can lead to “cosmic ray showers,” where the impact of (heavy-ion radiation) against shielding creates secondary particles that can flood a habitat’s interior with varying levels of neutron radiation (aka. neutron flux). These can contribute significantly to the effective dose of radiation astronauts will absorb.”
“If there are so many galaxies, stars, and planets, where are all the aliens, and why haven’t we heard from them? Those are the simple questions at the heart of the Fermi Paradox. In a new paper, a pair of researchers ask the next obvious question: How long will we have to survive to hear from another alien civilization? Their answer? 400,000 years.“
The album was provoked by a selection of reports of UFO/USO sightings at various locations in Cornwall , and particularly focuses on the anticipation and aftermath surrounding unexplained, momentous or transformative events. “Estrenyon” is Cornish for ” outsiders”.
“In the coming months, two teams of astronomers are going to send messages into space in an attempt to communicate with any intelligent aliens who may be out there listening. These efforts are like building a big bonfire in the woods and hoping someone finds you. But some people question whether it is wise to do this at all.“
“Juan Emar (1893–1964) was born Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi but was “Pilo” to his friends, and later, during his years as an art critic, he went by the name Jean Emar: “J’en ai marre, “which means “I’m fed up” in French.” Nice piece on the avant-garde outsider writer.
Wishful descriptions of Twitter as “the de facto public town square” or “the closest thing we have to a global consciousness” sound, to me, like Peter Pan begging the audience to clap and raise a swooning Tinkerbell.
