Category: morning computer

One to bookmark for later: a primer on Southeast Asian speculative fiction.

Also from LitHub: On the New Golden Age Of African Fashion.

Another one to bookmark, because I like the title: Cosmic Ancestry: Afrobliss Inner Space Explorations.

In October, Fantagraphics Books are releasing a book of the cover art from Sun Ra’s label:

The creative solitude of Emily Dickinson: “Dickinson’s profound isolation granted her perspectives – ranging from the mystical to the ruminative to the critical – that daily social living might have cut off.”

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Long profile on economist Adam Tooze, who is apparently very big on the Twitter, which it seems he uses A Lot. It doesn’t seem unfair to suggest that, at least in part, Twitter is his deep work.

As opposed to this guy, who couldn’t do good science with his phone on, Tooze appears to synthesise and broadcast on the fly. I’m so far removed from that kind of processing now that receiving two emails back to back is like:

(from experimental cinema tumblr)

In other news, hundreds of people have just been fitted with an artificial pancreas by the NHS. Curiously, my first thought was of a woman I once met at a dinner thrown by Google, who had discovered that her pacemaker could be hacked by bad actors through Bluetooth.

I have to read this again with more coffee inside me, but apparently there’s been a blockchain hack? I mean, if your heart and your mind aren’t safe from the internet, you have to reasonably assume your NFT collection and your pancreas are up for grabs too…

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I said in the newsletter the other week that we’re wary of false springtime out here. Yesterday, hailstones. Right now? Snow.

At the Economist: anti-anti-tank weapons development.

Marcia Resnick, They were continually telling her that she had stars in her eyes, from “Re-visions,” 1978.

“Duane Hamacher’s “The First Astronomers” explores the deep and living star knowledge of First Nations people from around the world—and challenges the notion that Indigenous knowledge is not scientific.” This article connects back to Gordon White’s STAR SHIPS for me, and I will need to get this book. Also, nice quote in the piece:

Sámi—the indigenous people of the northernmost parts of Sweden, Finland and Norway—refer to auroras as guovssahas, meaning “the light you can hear.”

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This is the Dyson Visor. Noise-cancelling headphones with air pollution sensors and mask filters that prove a plume of clean air to the mouth and nostrils. The filters will last for twelve months in a European city. On its maximum setting, it will provide five litres of purified air per second for ninety minutes.

I kind of want to see Google Glass superimposed on the image. I only saw Google Glass out in the wild once, on the corner of Mercer and Prince in New York, and it was an unmysterious fucking oddness, like the uncomprehension of a social cue stuck to the uncomprehending owner’s face. Like Glass, these Visors are going to be bloody expensive, like the thick end of a thousand pounds. Glass sent the social signal of seeing, recording, streaming everything around the owner. Visor will, if it actually makes it to the street, be the badge of “I can afford to breathe better than you.” It’s a prop for a bad science fiction novel. Except I guess we actually unironically live in a bad science fiction novel now, and nobody bats an eyelid at a clunking great crap metaphor being brought to market as physical goods.

What I didn’t expect to ask myself was: I wonder if Kafka would have been into it? For a hypochondriac, he was seriously into “wellness.”

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Autonomous molecular machines: “As far as we know, this is the first time a DNA nanobot capable of carrying arbitrary cargo has been demonstrated.”

“Photographer Kathrin Swoboda frequents Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria in search of red-wing blackbirds as they sing. On a cold morning back in 2019, she captured the conspicuous avians mid-tune, an activity that produced what appears to be smoke rings emanating from their beaks. The frigid temperatures make the hazy formations of condensation visible.”

“It’s a nurturing period to let those ideas come forth when they’re ready to come forth. You have to respect those periods. Inspiration comes when it comes.” Great interview with Meredith Monk.

Eivind Hjertnes and their fairly involved, long-view process for writing a blog. It is, as much as anything, about waiting for the moment. Like Meredith Monk waiting for the voices to come, like waiting in a cold park for a bird to sing, waiting for the tiniest machines to dive in and do their tiny work.

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“…the newly-formed U.S. Space Force announced plans to create CHPS, the Cis-lunar Highway Patrol System. Despite an acronym harking back to a certain cheesy TV series in the 1970s, CHPS will provide a serious look at space traffic further out in orbit around the Earth-moon system. Such a network is vital, as private companies and space agencies are set to return to the moon in a big way in the coming decade.”

Space Chips. God help us all.

There’s a new Bauhaus song, so these could in fact be the end times.

Yes, Foulness Island is a real place. It’s sealed off and used as a military testing site. I have spent close to my entire life hearing the guns and booms from Foulness. Here’s a picture of a destroyed aircraft at Foulness that expressly refuses permission for reproduction. I always imagined Foulness as wild and bombed-out terrain, just because of a lifetime of listening to the explosion.

“Chaos Terrains,” in fact. In this instance, the wild cold landscapes of Europa that could be circulating and transporting oxygen through the water beneath them: “the amount of oxygen brought into Europa’s ocean could be on a par with the quantity of oxygen in Earth’s oceans today.”

I’m still far from sold on the whole NFT thing, but this is curious enough to record:

“Atlas” (2021–present), a new NFT series by Xin Liu, is the collision of digital technology with the analog. Billed as the first NFTs to be created in space, the works use an antenna installed in Hong Kong to receive radio frequencies from decommissioned weather satellites. The satellites Liu utilizes were launched by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1998. The data from those devices is translated into cartographic images that mirror Xerox copies of surveillance photos of Earth’s mountainous regions. The images, transmission metadata, and radio frequency are then minted as an NFT.

Listening: lovely new Midwife song.

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Machu Picchu not actually called Machu Picchu: “researchers conclude that the Incas originally called it Huayna Picchu, for the rocky summit that lies nearest to the site, and not Machu Picchu, which is the name of the highest mountain near the ancient city.”

It wasn’t the cold that drove the Vikings out of Greenland: it was drought. Since I also come from a Viking colony, this caught my eye.

Microplastics found in human blood for the first time. Internalised Timothy Morton hyperobject. Per Johanna Gunzl, quoted here:

Looking at microplastics as hyperobjects triggers us to think of them as a very complex, multidimensional problem that might need several solutions to attack them.

(That bit from HURRICANE SEASON about floating corpses and plastic bags. Now we are the floating corpses and the floating plastic bag.)

This has nothing to do with anything else: A short documentary from 1969 on the traditional forging of a Japanese sword, narrated by George Takei.

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Physicist Dr. Melvin Vopson has already published research suggesting that information has mass and that all elementary particles, the smallest known building blocks of the universe, store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA. Now, he has designed an experiment—which if proved correct—means he will have discovered that information is the fifth form of matter, alongside solid, liquid, gas and plasma.

Information as the fifth form of matter. Damn. As previously noted, these posts are for processing my morning reading, and I’m looking forward to folding this into my bookmarks and files and seeing what it connects to.

Glitch art rendered in marble by Léo Caillard.

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Haha. Found at 70s Sci Fi Art. I owned this as a kid. I still vividly recall their mad arrangement of the DOCTOR WHO theme, which — and I just checked, here’s the YouTube — you have to hang in there to get to the part that starts around 1.27. I seem to recall there was a storming “Thunderbirds” on there, too. Note how the cover very carefully avoids copyright issues with the weird tweaks on recognisable imagery – the pointy four-nacelled Enterprise, the 2001 space station with two rings. Also the misspelling of “Quatermass,” in case you were thinking this was not a very cheap project. Here’s a nice little article on the making of this and the sequel album, from which I only remember one tune.

Geoff Love was an interesting guy. Born in Yorkshire to an African-American entertainer and an actress from Yorkshire, he was immersed in music from birth, and spent his time in WW2 “learning orchestration by questioning musicians how best to write for their individual instruments.” That, to me, is the true mark of a collaborative artist – asking the damn questions so you can do better for your collaborators. He spent years at Abbey Road, arranging for the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Eartha Kitt and, Paul Robeson. And it was at Abbey Road that he suddenly threw off decades of easy-listening recording and made four albums under the name of, um, Mandingo:

Working again with Norman Newell in Abbey Road, he recorded four albums from 1974 using the same title as a novel he had read about the exploits of a southern black slave called Mandingo on a plantation in Alabama during the 1830s. The records, done mostly in Studio Two, bring an eclectic mix of instruments and sounds drawing on African influences, experimental drums, layers of brass and electronic devices. The result is an explosive sound that’s completely unique, although at the time, sales of the records came nowhere near expectations.

Like Sun Ra, Love’s jazz background informs these weird new albums, and there are some full-on freak-outs to be found on the first record. For an “unashamed populist,” going full Space Is The Place must have been joyous.

Space is cool. There is even ice at Mercury’s poles.

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William Anzalone, Red Passage, 2021

“It is too often accepted that during the 19th and early 20th centuries it was the male writers who developed and pushed the boundaries of the weird tale, with women writers following in their wake—but this is far from the truth.” – Wyrd Britain on Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird.

Mermaids in Japanese folklore, and how they seem to have been replaced by the Western version.

When a hashtag seems to mutate into a literary subgenre: “dark academia” as the new campus novel.

Ruslan Kiprich

Nadin Mai on the film BALLAD OF A WHITE COW, which sounds terrifying, but I’m fascinated by this image:

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