Category: morning computer

’m reminded of a DARPA proposal called the “Upward Falling Payloads” program. For that, critical goods, including weapons and war-fighting materiel—but, why not, perhaps also emergency organs for frontline surgery—could be stored underwater, in the middle of the ocean, using “deployable, unmanned, distributed systems that lie on the deep-ocean floor in special containers for years at a time. These deep-sea nodes would then be woken up remotely when needed and recalled to the surface. In other words, they ‘fall upward.’”

In that link, a plan to drop goods from orbit. But it’s “falling upwards” that I liked.

The ancient Greek historian Strabo referred to the presence of an important shrine located on the west coast of the Peloponnese some 2,000 years ago. Remains of such an Archaic temple have now been uncovered at the Kleidi site near Samikon, which presumably once formed part of the sanctuary of Poseidon.

Notes on a new Meret Oppenheim retrospective:

Portfolio: Andie Taylor:

A chart of the basic options and paths to getting a book published in 2023.

A newly discovered comet could be visible to the naked eye as it shoots past Earth and the Sun in the coming weeks for the first time in 50,000 years, astronomers have said.

A Wikipedia stub: comets in fiction.

“Young stars burst forth from a nebula, like seeds spreading through the galaxy. Just as seeds grow flowers that make more seeds, nebulae form stars that eventually form new nebulae. Cosmic cycles of life and death are apparent at all scales.

This painting was the inspiration for the dandelion motif that runs through the TV series COSMOS. Carl Sagan did not want his “spaceship of the imagination” to have a realistic, technological feel, and this painting brought forth the idea that the spaceship, when seen from outside, resembled a seed, blowing through the cosmos.”

-Artist Jon Lomberg

(via 70s Sci Fi Art)

Gallery: Michael Lange’s photos of the French Alps.

On scheduling creativity:

She goes on to say that she finds it “pathetic” that she has to “block out time for thinking.” Patchett is not alone in this dismay:  many authors share a similar despair. (I remember my friend Ryan Holiday once putting it this way in an interview: “The better you become at writing, the more the world conspires to prevent you from writing.”)

Winter’s Watch (2017), a 14-minute 2017 film directed by Brian Bolster, presents a quiet portrait of nature, solitude — and the presence of one person on an island. From the website: “The quiet exuberance of wintering alone on an empty island off New England.”

I haven’t bought vinyl or cassette since I was a kid. All my adult music collecting has been on CD. People think I’m nuts. Marc Weidenbaum:

I sometimes wonder if much of the music I most enjoy wouldn’t have existed, wouldn’t have taken the form that it did, wouldn’t have risen to the prominence it did, without the arrival of the CD. The tabula rasa of digital sound, not only recording but reproduction, meaning production and consumption in union — the lack of surface noise, the lack of ground hum, the ability for the quietest, humblest sounds to make themselves present in a room — allowed for experiments in subtlety, in nuance, that wouldn’t merely have been drowned out on cassette and vinyl, but likely wouldn’t have been attempted, let alone flourished.

Mikko Lagerstedt photo gallery. I do love a bit of Nordic photography. Good morning.

An old web tradition: Bruce Sterling’s State Of The World conference on The Well.

In 02023, people are becoming poorer, their lifespans are shorter;
food costs more, and housing is worse.   You'd think there would be
more focussed, radical indignation about such an obvious bad scene
-- a culture in visible decline -- but the temper of the times seems
to welcome it, somehow.  

Events are indeed pretty bad, yet it doesn't feel like any collapse
is near at hand; there's a mood almost of public penitence, like,
"Man, we've got this punishment coming, but it could have been so
much worse, considering what we deserved!" 

Best headline I’ve seen today: Archaeologists Find Nine Mysterious Crocodile Heads Hidden in Egyptian Tomb

Magculture did a round-up of 2022 in magazines that I need to return to for an in-depth read later. Magculture’s shop is excellent, by the way.

Finally today, a new Bad Space comic short.

It’s 2023 and we should probably get ready.

Sooner or later, every single conversation I have will be recorded and transcribed and I’ll be able to look back at it later – details from a phone call with the bank, in the hardware store asking a question, someone mentions a book at the pub, an idea in a workshop. Ignoring the societal consequences for a sec lol ahem… how should the app to manage all that chatter work?

Very early ACCELERANDO vibe here. Remember when these ideas seemed vital and innocently progressive? I still love the idea of memory prosthetics, but I don’t know if anyone’s okay with their every spoken word being hackable.

Over here, the UK government spent the end of 2022 trying to weaken encryption, by the way.

A Berlin-based scientist has unveiled a novel solution for Europe’s tumbling birth rates: “the world’s first artificial womb facility.”

Dubbed EctoLife, the concept is the brainchild of Hashem Al-Ghaili, a Yemen-born biotechnologist and science communicator. His invention comprises 75 separate labs, each of which accommodates up to 400 adorable “growth pods,” which replicate the conditions of a mother’s womb. Al-Ghaili claims a single building can incubate 30,000 babies a year. 

EctoLife is basically a design-fiction “provocation,” but the tech scene is apparently full of bros who want to put their babies into as many gestation receptacles as possible, and cutting out the human breeding object that requires emotional investment and personhood may seem like an excellent option.

Sad to see BOOKFORUM folding. It’s going to be an interesting and combative year in culture. Happy new year.

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.