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Tag: sculpture

Glass Dinosaur: 8mar26

Published March 8, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Grant Garmezy made a full size raptor from glass. Which is a sentence that feels like it contains a lot of things.

Today’s newsletter went out at 10am UK time.

The news continues to feature a depressing volume of video of the US President speaking directly to his base – “I love the poorly educated” – in that specific manner of his, using a restricted vocabulary and giant claims. Obviously, he has midterms on his mind, but in a moment where he has command of the global news cycles, it seems like a poor choice. I have Bloomberg up on the big screen right now, with stories about embassy blasts and the Hormuz Strait being shut. Fuel prices going up isn’t good for him – Jimmy Carter was screwed in part by having the legend “the man who killed cheap gasoline in America” hung around his neck, and the current President’s pivot from domestic-first to foreign-first policy seems less like a choice than a flail. He doesn’t look well.

OPERATIONS: Taking today to reconfigure some stuff.
READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
LAST WATCHED: rewatched THE MENU

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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morning computer loops

Published November 25, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Shusei Nagaoka / Androla in Labyrinth | 1984 |

Scientists in Switzerland have created a robot the size of a grain of sand that is controlled by magnets and can deliver drugs to a precise location in the human body, a breakthrough aimed at reducing the severe side effects that stop many medicines from advancing in clinical trials…

Fucking finally. I remember talking about this at the Architectural Association probably fifteen years ago.

Work has begun on a looped Christian landmark named the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, which was designed by UK studio Snug Architects to rise over 50 metres in Warwickshire.

I wasn’t sure what made this Christian art, as it’s obviously a Mobius loop:

Set to be built near Coleshill, the monument will be made up of 188 differently shaped precast concrete elements clad in one million white bricks.

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Each brick on the looping wall will represent the story of an answered prayer, which visitors will be able to read via a mobile app.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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telemetry 25oct25

Published October 25, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Thank you Zoharum!

Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that’s going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup …

I’m calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.

CHRONOGLYPH, Sougwen Chung. I love that word.

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morning computer moon walk

Published October 13, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Murmure.

In a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, researchers report a sulfuric surprise in rock samples taken from the moon‘s Taurus Littrow region during Apollo 17. The analysis shows that volcanic material in the sample contains sulfur compounds that are highly depleted of sulfur-33 (or 33S), one of four radioactively stable sulfur isotopes. The depleted 33S samples contrast sharply with sulfur isotope ratios found on Earth, the researchers say.

Michael Davydov.

NASA’s Artemis II Mission Is Crucial as Doubts Build That America Can Beat China Back to the Moon

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer big giant rocks

Published May 13, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The Olmec heads are among the largest non-architectural monuments ever discovered in Mexico, ranging between roughly 3.5 and 11.5 feet in height and weighing up to eight tons, with the largest of them weighing a head-spinning 45 tons. They all have a similar appearance, one strikingly similar to that of modern-day indigenous groups living in southern Mexico, featuring large cheekbones and flat noses. 

Researchers have found evidence that a giant “lid” made of magma could be stopping the supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park from erupting.

As detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature last month, a team of researchers discovered a “volatile-rich cap” a mere 2.36 miles below the surface, trapping pressure and heat below it.

In fact, the researchers believe the obstruction may be what’s preventing the volcanic system from erupting — a blast that’s happened several times previously in the history of our planet, and which could have devastating consequences for civilization if it happened again.

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morning computer pluriverse

Published March 26, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Leonora Carrington, whom people are complaining about, again.

Ancient sculptures were scented.

…visiting ancient sacred sites would have been a rich olfactory experience. Sculptures in ancient Greece were covered with perfume just as bodies were. The practice was known as kosmesis, a “super-adornment” that also involved applying textiles and jewelry. Among the nearly 3,000 stone inscriptions found on Delos are those that record the ingredients necessary for kosmesis for the statues of Hera and Artemis. The list included sponges, oil, soda carbonate, linen, wax, and rose perfume.

Super-adornment!

Kerstin Brätsch.

This idea that there can be at any one given time multiple intersecting, beautiful in some cases, conflicting worlds in which design occupies, operates, and works is a really powerful concept that is driving where design is heading.

This links to a podcast episode that I haven’t listened to yet, but I like the term pluriverse. There’s a transcript lower down the page, which is great for me as I read faster than people talk.

Pluriversal design, the concept of a world of many worlds as design practice, is not a new idea but one that has drastically increased in influence. First, here’s Renata Marques Leitão explaining how the pluriversal design paradigm can restart discussions of change:

I think that we have to start to identify what I name theories of change, how change happens. What are our assumptions about how change happens and what’s the final result? What do we want to produce? What is the pathway towards change? And then our partners, they also have their theories of change. They also have their pathways. And you can’t really imagine that your pathway, just because you are a very educated person, is better than their pathway. So it’s a lot about recognizing our assumptions, especially assumptions about how change happens.

The idea that we all live in intersecting worlds is worth picking apart a bit: it’s either blindingly obvious or it’s a useful filter to look at life through, and I’m not sure which yet.

Sometimes it’s very difficult to separate what is real help and what is simply oppression. 

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer totems

Published December 18, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Yu Maeda.

I like this poster for the film TOTEM by Lilia Aviles.

…found something wonderful at Brockley Station.

Placed along the platform were “InfoTotems” (at least that’s what they were called on the back of them). Sturdy, about 1.5m high and with – crucially in the bright SE London sunlight of August – easily-readable low-power E-Ink screens.

INFOTOTEMS. Quite fond of that. Worth stealing.

(Also note the first ever appearance in the English language of the phrase “found something wonderful at Brockley”)

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