Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:
At the end of March, I posted some news about three prominent scholars of fascism and authoritarianism who were leaving the United States to live and work in Canada. In this video for the NY Times, We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S., Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley explain their reasons for going. Here’s some of what they had to say:
I’m leaving to the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.
The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later.
My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, “We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.” And I thought my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. Our ship can’t sink. And what you know is a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.
I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency.
Toni Morrison warned us: “The descent into a final solution is not a jump. It’s one step. And then another. And then another.” We are seeing those steps accelerated right now.
This video feels like a throwback to a simpler time on YouTube: 331 film clips edited together to recreate Eminem’s Lose Yourself. A particularly well-done example of a time-worn genre. I lol’d at “let it go!!”
I love me some Wallace & Gromit and so I was delighted to see that this guy made a real life version of Wallace & Gromit’s breakfast machine, complete with a spoonful of jam flying through the air perfectly meeting a piece of toast popping out of a toaster.
It starts with this crazy part here, where he falls out of bed into a pair of trousers, landing in a chair, and then his sleeves go on, and the vest. And then, probably the hardest part of all, is throwing jam — through the air — and hitting toast — in the air — perfectly. Some of these stunts are going to be the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted.
Daft Punk are famously secret about, well, most everything they do. Marc Edwards recently took a detailed look at some of the devices that the duo probably used for the vocal effects on their albums.
Talk boxes are relatively simple devices — they’re a speaker in a sealed box with a small opening. One end of a hose is fitted to the opening, and the other end is placed into the performer’s mouth, blasting noise towards their throat. The performer can pretend to speak, shaping and filtering the sound coming out of the tube with their vocal tract. A microphone is then needed to record the resulting sound. A keyboard or guitar is typically connected to the talk box unit as the sound source for the speaker. This lets the keyboard or guitar sound like it’s singing. If you’ve heard Chromeo, 2Pac’s California Love, Peter Frampton’s Do You Feel Like We Do, or Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer before, you’ve heard a talk box.
I can confirm firing loud sounds into your mouth while holding a tube with your teeth is a bit uncomfortable. In terms of vocal effects used by Daft Punk, I think talk box might be the least used and least interesting, in terms of hunting down the exact hardware used. Talk boxes are simple devices and typically all sound similar. The sound source and performance play a bigger role in the result than the hardware itself.
The two videos above are worth watching for their comparisons of the effects of the different devices. They don’t include any direct Daft Punk samples (rights issues?), but if you’re familiar enough with their oeuvre, it’s easy enough to compare w/o samples.
At a recent Princeton Public Schools’ Board of Education meeting, Teddy, a fourth-grader from one of the district’s schools, got up and delivered a speech about the many reasons that PPS should teach about autism and other disabilities, including “so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future”. Here are Teddy’s full remarks:
Recently, the U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr, made false comments about autism like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families. But that’s not true. I have autism and I’m not broken, and I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr’s lies.
Autism and all disabilities should be taught in the Princeton Public Schools curriculum at all grade levels because it will raise awareness, increase acceptance, and improve the quality of life for kids with disabilities.
But first, here is a quote from a Changing Perspectives article called Disability Inclusion in Education: “A truly inclusive environment does not value one marginalized group over another; instead, it recognizes the unique backgrounds of all members of the community, including but not limited to cultural heritage, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender, disability, or any other differences.”
Princeton Public Schools already recognizes Autism Awareness Month, but not much. There are posters in the cafeteria that say to be kind and inclusive. Students wear blue on April 2nd. But we are never taught about the spectrum of autism. Kids need to be taught more about the different kinds of autism, that autism is a natural variation in the genes that you are born with, not caused by vaccines, and about successful people with autism. The lessons should also be extended to other disabilities like ADHD, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, dyslexia, apraxia, and more.
This is important because it will teach kids how to accept people with disabilities. Accepting someone means really understanding someone for who they are and not minding their differences. I want everyone to know that people with autism and other disabilities are not tragedies, but just different, like all people. If everyone understood more about autistic people, and about people with other disabilities, they would know more about how to treat them, what their lives are like, and that they don’t need to be fixed or cured. This will help kids with disabilities have a better life.
When people are aware of disabilities and are accepting them, they will have friends and less bullying. Also, the teachers might be more aware because they learned about the disabilities also. Kids and teachers should know more about disabilities so they do not believe RFK Jr is right about autism, and they choose to treat them in a nice way that is good for the kid. By knowing more about it, kids and teachers will be nicer to the kids with disabilities.
This is important to me and Princeton Public Schools because I have a disability, and I noticed that disabilities are not being taught, only a few people mentioning autism. When teaching about culture, we teach many different cultures to accept them better — because that’s what disabilities are like, a culture, a culture of differences. Princeton Public Schools must add this to the curriculum of all grades and students, so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future.
I want to end with the district mission statement: “Our mission is to prepare all of our students to lead lives of joy and purpose as knowledgeable, creative, and compassionate citizens of a global society.” Adding disabilities to kids’ education will make them knowledgeable and compassionate, and help kids with disabilities to lead lives of joy and purpose.
Come on, challenging the district to uphold their own mission statement? That’s an S-tier move right there.
In this video, 98-year-old British WWII veteran Ken Turner demolishes a Tesla with a Sherman tank. Here’s what Turner had to say before getting down to business:
I’m old enough to have seen fascism the first time around; now it’s coming back. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is using his immense power to support the far-right in Europe, and his money comes from Tesla cars. Well, I’ve got this message for Mr Musk. We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again.
In this episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak takes a look at a simple scene from one of my favorite recent films and shows how director Steven Soderbergh makes it sing.
Like Spielberg or Fincher, Soderbergh is a master craftsman, who can translate a scene from page to screen with the confidence of a seasoned pro. You feel that confidence when you watch his movies, and it’s both relieving and engaging.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this video except wow. Wow wow. It’s almost inconceivable that we live in a world of sights like this. Feels like science fiction but is actually real. Captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS.
Photographer Stephen Voss has been working on a project about data centers and recently travelled to Abilene, Texas to document the first data center built as part of the Stargate Project. When completed, it will be the largest data center in the world. Here’s a short drone video he took of the project:
“The place was mesmerizing and deeply unsettling,” Voss told me over email. “When finished, it’ll have the power demands of a mid-sized city and is on a piece of land that’s the size of Central Park.”
The video immediately reminded me of Edward Burtynsky’s work that documents “the impacts of human industry on the planet”.
Do yourself a favor and watch this: Erin Morton is a junior in the BFA Musical Theatre program at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and she absolutely blisters the paint off of the walls with her performance of Radiohead’s Creep. Wow. I actually got some goosebumps watching this.
TIL I learned about gravastars (aka a gravitational vacuum star), theoretical objects related to black holes. Both are massive & dense, but instead of a singularity surrounded by an event horizon, gravastars are made up of dark energy surrounded by a extremely thin shell of exotic matter.
The shell of the gravastar is utterly dark and the coldest thing in the universe, only a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. If we look at it in deep infrared, even the cosmic microwave background glows bright in comparison. It is made from an entirely new, unique and extreme matter that is at the very limit of what is physically possible in nature and doesn’t have a name yet. Actually, the shell is so incredibly thin that atoms seem truly gigantic next to it.
Even after 60+ years, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best-looking films out there; this video explores why. I got to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen last fall and it was stunning — the colors, the amount of detail, the cinematography in general.
This is a great data-driven short documentary by Neil Halloran about how smallpox was eradicated from the face of the Earth. And what it took was humanity, through the use of science & humanitarianism, answering its own plea for something to be done about it.
Some philosophers believe there was a secondary humanitarian revolution that followed the scientific revolution. And I note this because the eradication of smallpox also had these two phases. The scientific breakthroughs of inoculation and the vaccine allowed many countries to become virtually smallpox-free — but not all countries. In fact, those 300 to 500 million deaths in the 20th century? They came well after the vaccine had been discovered. So clearly, for much of the world, something more was needed than medical innovation. And fortunately there’s reason to think that these two types of progress might be connected.
Part of being a human is contemplating why some of us get so sick. It’s a practical question and it’s more than that. As we learned about disease, the theory goes that we began to think a little differently about those who fell ill — to see that their suffering truly wasn’t meant to be. We stepped away from thinking it was up to a higher power and into the belief that, well, it was up to us.
This is a lovely little short film about the many snowy owls that migrate down from the Arctic and settle at Boston’s Logan airport and the man who safely captures & relocates the owls away from the airport. I love this story about what a fierce hunter the snowy owl is:
A snowy owl, several years ago, took a peregrine falcon. This peregrine came in — it was a young bird — came in, harassed the snowy owl while the snowy owl was roosting and sleeping. Bopped him off the back of the head, woke the owl up. [The peregrine] proceeded to take off and flew into a flock of starlings. It grabbed one of the starlings, it took the starling to the ground. And little did it know but that the snowy owl was right onto its tail. That snowy owl came in and grabbed that peregrine falcon and had him for dinner.
I think we all suspect that world view comes from every day of your life in combination and all those experiences. But where are the moments where you thought, “Oh, here’s a big bloody fork in the road. There’s a powerful day of inspiration or a day of tragedy or something that is going to change your course”?
I’ve talked before about one of the big inflection points in my life:
When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.
I’d have to think hard about whether that was the moment or if it actually happened earlier, like going off to college (which was revelatory to me and opened me up to so many possibilities I didn’t even know existed) or deciding on physics as a major or even, much later, moving to NYC and finally feeling at home somewhere. (via sean breslin)
A few months ago, I wrote about Pee-wee as Himself, a two-part HBO documentary about the life and career of Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) that had then just premiered at Sundance. Now we’ve got a trailer and a premiere date: May 23.
It’s weird to be in this situation, having a documentary made, because I’m used to having control of my alter ego.
Earlier this week, Aaron found this clip featuring a set of twins who were eyewitnesses to an accident and who also speak mostly in unison.
This short clip reveals more about the Powers sisters’ unusual way of communicating (“we don’t know why, but we have tried to talk separately, but it’s not ourselves, it’s not us”):
This synchronicity between twins is uncommon but not unique. In fact, Werner Herzog is filming a movie called Bucking Fastard right now that stars Rooney and Kate Mara as a pair of inseparable twin sisters based on the true story of Freda and Greta Chaplin.
Here’s how Herzog describes the Chaplin twins:
In 1981 they had a short run in the British ‘red tops,’ or tabloid newspapers, and were famous for a few weeks for being the ‘sex-crazed twins’ who were so infatuated with their neighbor, a lorry driver, that he took them to court and had a restraining order taken out against them. Their story is unique. They are the only identical twins we know of who speak synchronously.
We know that twins sometimes develop their own secret language when they are all alone by which they can exclude the rest of the world, but Freda and Greta spoke the same words at the same time. I have had the experience where they open the door, greet me, and ask me inside, all completely synchronous in word and gesture. I suppose this type of a conversation could be a ritual developed by practice. But later on, they answered questions they can’t have been expecting absolutely in unison. Sometimes they spoke separately, then Freda, for the sake of argument, would speak the first half of a sentence, at which point Greta would chime in with a word or two in unison, and then bring the sentence to a conclusion herself. Or the other way around. They wore exactly the same clothes, hairstyles, shoes. Their handbags and umbrellas were identical; they were as coordinated as a Rorschach test ready to be folded in two at any moment. When they walked, they didn’t walk in step like soldiers, left-right, left-right, but they had their inside feet together and kept time with their outside feet. It was the same with their handbags, which they didn’t both carry in their left hands; they carried them in their outer hands and their umbrellas with their inside hands. You could have folded a picture of them, and the two halves would have matched. Their gestures were synchronized, their physical awareness of each other continuous. Who was left and who was right in sitting or walking was for me the only way of telling which one was Greta and which was Freda at our early meetings.
You can see them speaking & interacting in this 1987 short documentary about the twins, A Pair of One.
Primer is an introduction to oscilloscope music, a genre and art form where vector visuals are formed by the music itself. The image is produced by using the left audio channel to control the beam on the X axis, and the right audio channel to control the beam on the Y axis.
Once I wrapped my brain around what was happening here, I found this to be quite an impressive achievement: creating beautiful & coherent visuals from non-discordant music. (via waxy)
On Friday, Heather Cox Richardson spoke at an event marking the 250th anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns at Boston’s Old North Church. The lantern lighting — “one if by land, two if by seas” — was part of years-long effort by some American colonists to resist what they thought of as unjust behavior by a tyrant king, and led to the start of the Revolutionary War. Richardson’s speech is well worth reading.
It was hard for people to fathom that the country had come to such division. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War, Bostonians looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.
That euphoria faded fast.
Almost as soon as the French and Indian War was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.
In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.
But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury, and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.
You can also watch Richardson give her speech at the Old North Church (she begins at the ~1:18:30 mark):
You can also listen to her read it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. (thx, meg)
While I prefer the charming homemade quality of the original that she made in her small NYC apartment at age 21, this version is pretty great too. It’s going to be super interesting to see what Doechii does next — looking forward to it!
This is a lovely cover of Bush’s Glycerine by Allison Lorenzen and Midwife, set to a poignant series of very short videos of everyday life. Give this 20 seconds of your complete attention and you’ll watch the whole thing, I promise. (via @mariabustillos.com)
If you’re one of those people who watches the Olympics and wishes they’d put a normal person in the competition so we can see how fast the athletes really are, this one’s for you.
Stay Connected