Category: morning computer

My favourite column on The Quietus is Jennifer Lucy Allan’s Rum Music, this month’s is, as ever, great reading. It i a joy to open something where you know you’ll discover the existence of half a dozen things you’ve never heard of.

Henrique Oliveira:

Very sad to note the death of Klaus Schulze, a central electronic musician. That’s a man who lived the art life – or, indeed, as the ongoing CD series cataloguing his entire output has it, la vie electronique. I have the first six of those bricks, and have always coveted more, racked next to those of his solo works that I own and that astonishing first Ash Ra Tempel record.

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Variants on this article are all over my RSS reader this morning: how to delete or deactivate your Twitter account. Other stories mention that hundreds of thousands of Twitter bots vanished overnight.

James Bama, perhaps best known as the artist of the legendary Doc Savage paperback covers, has died at the age of 95.

Ancient underground city rediscovered in Turkey.

On my newsletter this past Sunday, I ran a screenshot of the “sounds” screen on my phone, and commented that probably even Marc Weidenbaum was looking at me like I was nuts. Turns out he has the same protocol. I am delighted.

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“A team of astronomers, with the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), have observed a new type of stellar explosion—a micronova. These outbursts happen on the surface of certain stars, and can each burn through around 3.5 billion Great Pyramids of Giza of stellar material in only a few hours.”

“An experimental survey (N = 543) assessed the extent to which individuals ignored privacy policy and terms of service when joining a fictitious social networking service (SNS),.. Qualitative findings suggest that participants view policies as nuisance, ignoring them to pursue the ends of digital production, without being inhibited by the means. Implications are revealed as 98% missed TOS ‘gotcha clauses’ about data sharing with the NSA and employers, and about providing a first-born child as payment for SNS access.” (lnk to abstract)

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Headline of the day: “An inventor resurrected his imaginary friend with AI — then it tried to murder him.” True or not, it’s an amusing little story.

The excellent David Stubbs, author of MARS BY 1980, on his early days at British music paper MELODY MAKER. He was part of the peak Maker experience that I was just in time to read. Back then, you either read the Maker or the NME — it was an identity definition. My best friend of the time read the NME, I read the Maker. Some of the best, most exciting and challenging writing about anything anywhere in the UK was coming out of the Maker at that time, we all firmly believed. it was a moment.

“Very few people in England ate large amounts of meat before the Vikings settled, and there is no evidence that elites ate more meat than other people, a major new bioarchaeological study suggests. Its sister study also argues that peasants occasionally hosted lavish meat feasts for their rulers. The findings overturn major assumptions about early medieval English history.”

“A NASA doctor appeared as a hologram at the International Space Station for a telemedicine visit with an astronaut in Oct. 8, 2021, according to a recent release from NASA. The “holoportation”, a word made from hologram and transportation, features a life-like visual and audio connection between the space center and those back on Earth.”

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Woody Guthrie’s notebooks.

The Strandbeests fly now.

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I exported my entire list of RSS website subscriptions out of Feedbin, converted them to a proper web page, and started sorting through them in order to offer an updated Blog Diet post. It is full of dead blogs and dead links. I am also sad to note that the RSS-Bridge system, that allows you to make RSS feeds out of things that don’t emit their own — Instagram pages, for example — seems to have been blocked by many of the sites it made legible in RSS. Instagram, for example. But, in clicking around, I discovered that the IG account I was trying to get into RSS, the Daily Rothko, also has a Tumblr account, and you don’t need to have your own Tumblr account to grab the RSS –

This is my retrograde hermitage action.

Jonathan Crary: “The DIgital Age Is Destroying Us.”

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Dutch workplace safety posters were pretty amazing. Here’s a short archive of them.

British Space Group announces a very fine new record that I got an advance listening of. Sitting with it is like sitting in an endless moment at the end of a dream, and I like it very much.

“There is a Shinto myth called kotodama that implies there are divine powers in the Old Japanese language—koto meaning “speech” or “word” and dama meaning “soul” or “ghost.” In this cosmogony, different words were believed to contain different qualities: a positive word could bring positive spirits and a negative word could wake up the demons inside. Practitioners of Shinto would erase loanwords from Chinese during their rituals to make their prayers as linguistically “pure” as possible.”

From a Julia Kornberg review of SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH by Yoko Tawada.

Debora Lombardi taking UV photography to new places.

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Great one from APOD this morning: “Space Station Crosses A Busy Sun.”

I dropped a new short story Sunday morning.

Barbara Kruger. “She is legendary for her brevity and wit, her boldness and her dark humor. Her career is based on text being placed in large-format and immersive installations, often overwhelming the viewer with slogan-esque proclamations and guilty-pleasure innuendos that sort of make you feel, well, guilty for your own consumer impulses.” That’s another busy sun at the centre.

Prime piece of Druillet via 70s Sci-Fi Art:

Skyglow project: timelapse video, suns swirling over the Mojave:

The sun is out, here, and it’s going to be a busy day, so I’ll leave this here, filtered for busy suns.

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Glorious news: a new record from Elizabeth Fraser. Her and her partner recording as Sun’s Signature. Video at the link. Takes me back to the day I first listened to Cocteau Twins, and discovered that alien choir of angels living in one body.

There’s also a new single from the Besnard Lakes:

HIGH AND LONESOME by the Howard Hughes Suite is described as “ambient Americana,” which put me in mind of the excellent Scott Tuma:

Americana: 25 artworks about the American flag.

“Researchers from NYU Abu Dhabi’s (NYUAD) Center for Space Science have discovered a new set of waves in the sun that, unexpectedly, appear to travel much faster than predicted by theory.” Sun’s signature:

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I adore the simplicity of this cover, found at this piece on art director Ronaldo Alves.

Lithub has the best headline: The novelist who wrote “How to Murder Your Husband” is now on trial for murdering her husband.

After the Huns came the Avars, who ran a shitload of Europe for 250 years and left no written records. A mysterious empire. Now, ancient DNA has provided insight into “one of the largest and most rapid long-distance migrations in ancient human history.”

Via Casual Optimist’s roundup, another cover I like:

“Created by researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, the simulations represent a monumental advancement in simulating the formation of the first galaxies and reionization—the process by which neutral hydrogen atoms in space were transformed into positively charged, or ionized, hydrogen, allowing light to spread throughout the universe.” Full explanation and video at link, but, if they’re right, this is a snapshot of light entering the universe:

If you’ve read this far: my free weekly newsletter, Orbital Operations, goes out on Sundays and can be subscribed to at this link here.

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