ephemera/transitory written and printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved. The word derives from the Greek, meaning things lasting no more than a day
Bruce Sterling's "An Essay on the New Aesthetic," is a dense, difficult, exciting critical look at the New Aesthetic, a kind of art movement centered in my neighbourhood in east London ("If you wanted a creative movement whose logo is a Predator supported by glossy, multicolored toy balloons, London would be its natural launchpad."). Sterling was set afire by a panel at SXSW this year, and hammered out this essay in response. It's part critique, part mash-note, and makes larger points about our relationship to machines and the aesthetics of their output ("an eruption of the digital into the physical").
Look at those images objectively. Scarcely one of the real things in there would have made any sense to anyone in 1982, or even in 1992. People of those times would not have known what they were seeing with those New Aesthetic images. It’s the news, and it’s the truth.
Next, the New Aesthetic is culturally agnostic. Most anybody with a net connection ought to be able to see the New Aesthetic transpiring in real time. It is British in origin (more specifically, it’s part and parcel of region of London seething with creative atelier “tech houses”). However, it exists wherever there is satellite surveillance, locative mapping, smartphone photos, wifi coverage and Photoshop.
The New Aesthetic is comprehensible. It’s easier to perceive than, for instance, the “surrealism” of a fur-covered teacup. Your Mom could get it. It’s funny. It’s pop. It’s transgressive and punk. Parts of it are cute.
It’s also deep. If you want to get into arcane matters such as interaction design, computational aesthetics, covert surveillance, military tech, there’s a lot of room for that activity in the New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic carries a severe, involved air of Pynchonian erudition.
It’s contemporary. It’s temporal rather than atemporal. Atemporality is all about cerebral, postulated, time-refuting design-fictions. Atemporality is for Zenlike gray-eminence historian-futurist types. The New Aesthetic is very hands-on, immediate, grainy and evidence-based. Its core is a catalogue of visible glitches in the here-and-now, for the here and for the now.
It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.
The New Aesthetic is constructive. Most New Aesthetic icons carry a subtext about getting excited and making something similar. The New Aesthetic doesn’t look, act, or feel postmodern. It’s not deconstructively analytical of a bourgeois order that’s been dead quite a while now. It’s built by and for working creatives.
John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States, has two living grandchildren.
Tyler (1790-1862) was 63 when he fathered his seventh son, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, in 1853. And Lyon was in his 70s when he fathered two boys, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924 and Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1928. (Harrison, now 84, owns Sherwood Forest, the Virginia plantation that his grandfather purchased in 1842.)
This makes Tyler the oldest U.S. president with living grandchildren. Second place belongs to James Garfield, who was 41 years younger than Tyler.
In 1932, Winston Churchill wrote an article for Popular Mechanics examining the technological promise of the coming half-century:
- “Wireless and television would enable their owner to connect up to any room similarly equipped and hear and take part in the conversation as well as if he put his head in through the window.”
- “Vast cellars, in which artificial radiation is generated, may replace the cornfields and potato patches. Parks and gardens will cover our plowed fields.”
- “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or the wing, by growing these parts separately.”
- “A few years ago London was surprised by a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots. The production of such beings may well be possible within fifty years. They will not be made, but grown under glass.”
- “There seems little doubt that it will be possible to carry out the entire cycle which now leads to the birth of a child, in artificial surroundings. Interference with the mental development of such beings, expert suggestion and treatment in the earlier years, would produce beings specialized to thought or toil.”
- If the potential of nuclear power were realized, “we could make an engine of six hundred horsepower weighing twenty pounds and carrying fuel for a thousand hours in a tank the size of a fountain pen.”
“Mankind has sometimes traveled forward and sometimes backward, or has stood still for hundreds of years,” he wrote. “Now it is moving very fast.”
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do,
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage–
I can’t afford a carriage–
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.
In 2002 Ross Long came very near to patenting a stick:
An apparatus for use as a toy by an animal, for example a dog, to either fetch carry or chew includes a main section with at least one protrusion extending therefrom that resembles a branch in appearance. The toy is formed of any of a number of materials including rubber, plastic, or wood including wood composites and is solid. It is either rigid or flexible.
“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” — Samuel Johnson
“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” — Plato
“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.” — Oscar Wilde
Illlusions galore: check them out http://web.mit.edu/persci/gaz/gaz-teaching/index.html
Imagine that we learned that the object before us [that] looks like a painting that would spontaneously move us if we believed it had been painted — say the Polish Rider of Rembrandt, in which an isolated mounted figure is shown midjourney to an uncertain destiny — was not painted at all but is the result of someone’s having dumped lots of paint in a centrifuge, giving the contrivance a spin, and having the result splat onto canvas, ‘just to see what would happen.’ … Now the question is whether, knowing this fact, we are prepared to consider this randomly generated object a work of art.
– Arthur Coleman Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 1981
Teacher: “If you have seven apples and I asked for three, how many would you have left?”
Pupil: “Seven.”
– Ralph Louis Woods, Modern Handbook of Humor, 1967
Bug eating plant - fast - very fast: view the video here
“Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.” — Alfred North Whitehead
If a cork ball about an inch in diameter be tied at the end of a thread about a foot in length, and then swung so that it enters a smooth stream of water flowing from a tap at about three inches from the mouth of the latter, it will be found that the ball will remain in the water, and that the thread will make an angle of about thirty degrees with a vertical line passing through the ball. The latter, it should be added, must be thoroughly wetted before this result is produced.
– Strand, September 1908
If you are somewhere else, you are not here.
You are not in Rome; you are somewhere else.
Therefore you are not here.
“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.” — Edward R. Murrow
“To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.” — George Orwell
“How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!” — Wittgenstein
In 1994, inventor Albert Cohen saw a peculiar opportunity:
During a televised sporting event, a ‘high five’ is commonly shared between fans to express the joy and excitement of a touchdown, home run, game-winning basket, birdie or other positive occurrence. Unfortunately, as known in the art, a ‘high five’ requires the mutual hand slapping of two participants, wherein a first participant slaps an upraised hand against the elevated hand of a second participant. As such, a solitary fan is unable to perform a ‘high five’ to express excitement during a televised sporting event.
His “apparatus for simulating a high five” can be mounted on a table, wall, or floor — and it even promotes physical fitness: “When the hand-arm configuration is mounted at a sufficient height above the normal reach of a user, the user must jump upwards to strike the simulated hand, thereby simulating many of the jumping drills commonly practiced by basketball players. As such, the leg strength and coordination of a user may be improved through the practice of the present invention.”
A few miles to the northeast of Woodstock lies the village of Saugerties, and just before entering it, Routes 212 and 32 come together. We do not know who first gave this juncture the name of Fahrenheit Corners, but as a large IBM plant is in the vicinity, we may reasonably suspect one of its more whimsical employees.
– Journal of Recreational Mathematics, October 1981
Two very old stories are worth repeating for their peculiar excellence. A Scottish newspaper, reporting the danger that an express-train had run in consequence of a cow going upon the line, said, ‘As the safest way, the engineer put on full steam, dashed up against the cow, and literally cut her into calves.’ In the earlier half of this century a London paper announced that Sir Robert Peel and a party of fiends were shooting peasants in Ireland.
– William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
Keeping an eye to the sky / meteor showers for 2011
Quadrantids
Comet of Origin: 2003 EH1
Radiant: constellation Quadrant Murales
Active: Dec. 28, 2010-Jan. 12, 2011
Peak Activity: Jan. 3-4, 2011
Peak Activity Meteor Count: Approximately 40 meteors per hour
Time of Optimal Viewing: 2:30 a.m. to dawn
Meteor Velocity: 41 kilometers (25.5 miles) per second
Note: The alternate name for the Quadrantids is the Bootids. Constellation Quadrant Murales is now defunct, and the meteors appear to radiate from the modern constellation Bootes. Since the show is usually only a few hours long and often obscured by winter weather, it doesn't have the same celebrated status as the Geminids or Perseids.
Lyrids
Comet of Origin: C/1861 G1 Thatcher
Radiant: constellation Lyra
Active: April 16-25, 2011
Peak Activity: April 21-22, 2011
Peak Activity Meteor Count: 18-20 meteors per hour
Time of Optimal Viewing: 11 p.m.-dawn
Meteor Velocity: Lyrid meteors hit the atmosphere at a moderate speed of 48 kilometers (30 miles) per second. They often produce luminous dust trains observable for several seconds.
Note: Light from the waning gibbous moon will degrade viewing
Eta Aquarids
Comet of Origin: 1P Halley
Radiant: constellation Aquarius
Active: April 19-May 28, 2011
Peak Activity: Early morning May 5-7, 2011
Peak Activity Meteor Count: Approximately 20 meteors per hour
Time of Optimal Viewing: 3:30-5 a.m.
Meteor Velocity: 66 kilometers (44 miles) per second
Delta Aquarids
Comet of Origin: unknown
Radiant: constellation Aquarius
Active: July 12–Aug. 23, 2011
Peak Activity: July 30, 2011
Peak Activity Meteor Count: Approximately 16 meteors per hour
Meteor Velocity: 41 kilometers (25 miles) per second
Notes: Meteor watchers in the Southern Hemisphere and in the Northern Hemisphere's tropical latitudes enjoy the best views.
Perseids
Comet of Origin: 109P/Swift-Tuttle
Radiant: constellation Perseus
Active: July 17-Aug. 24, 2011
Peak Activity: Aug. 13, 2011
Peak Activity Meteor Count: Approximately 100 meteors per hour
Meteor Velocity: 59 kilometers (37 miles) per second
Notes: The International Meteor Organization calls the 2011 Perseids "hopelessly moonlit." This will render lackluster what is usually an impressive show.
Orionids
Comet of Origin: 1P/Halley
Radiant: Just to the north of constellation Orion's bright star Betelgeuse
Active: Oct. 2-Nov. 7, 2011
Peak Activity: Oct. 21, 2011
Peak Activity Meteor Count: Approximately 25 meteors per hour
Meteor Velocity: 66 kilometers (41 miles) per second
Note: With the second-fastest entry velocity of the annual meteor showers, meteors from the Orionids produce yellow and green colors and have been known to produce an odd fireball from time to time.
In making up newspapers–that is, in piecing together paragraphs into columns–two separate items may sometimes be jumbled together with amazing results. Thus, the New Haven Journal announced in one paragraph that ‘The large cast-iron wheel, revolving nine hundred times a minute, exploded in that city yesterday after a long and painful illness. Deceased was a prominent thirty-second degree Mason,’ and in another that ‘John Fadden, a well-known florist and real-estate broker of Newport, Rhode Island, died in Wardner Russell’s sugar-mill at Crystal Lake, Illinois, on Saturday, doing $3000 damages to the building and injuring several workmen severely.’
– William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
Total lunar eclipse in the morning of 12.21.201
Late Monday night—well, actually, early Tuesday morning—the moon will move into the earth's shadow, causing a lunar eclipse visible to anyone in North America. Even better, it's happening on the Winter Solstice, for the first time since 1638.
- Locate the moon. (Hint: It's in the sky.) The earth's shadow should start showing on the moon's lower left around 1:33 a.m. Eastern time, which is when Fallon ends, if you're on the east coast, or halfway through Hawaii Five-0, if you're on the west coast.
- The shadow moves slowly, but by 2:41 a.m., the entire moon will be covered, and will stay that way for an hour.
- The shadow will start moving again at 3:53 a.m., and the moon will be back to normal by 5:00 a.m. At this point it's appropriate to do your winter solstice folk dances and poetry recitals.
So, you see: It's pretty simple. But you might be wondering: What, exactly, is the point of watching a lunar eclipse? Why can't I just close my eyes? Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait explains what's so cool:
Sometimes, atmospheric conditions on Earth will cast an eerie, blood-red shadow on the Moon... it's really quite stunning, and worth staying up (or getting up early) to see. Also, the Moon does not pass directly through the center of the Earth's umbral shadow, so the top and bottom halves of the Moon may be dramatically different in appearance and color. There's no way to predict this, so you'll just have to go out and see for yourself.
How being a physicist/mathematician can save your life...
"During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukrainian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader. Asked what he did for a living, he said he was a mathematician. The sceptical gang leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung round his neck. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation to a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free. Fail and you will be shot.’ Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished, the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way. Tamm won the 1958 Nobel prize for physics but he never did discover the identity of the unusual bandit leader."
– John Barrow, “It’s All Platonic Pi in the Sky,” The Times Educational Supplement, May 11, 1993
Electron Microscope: images of snow flakes
View the video here: Go Video
Documentary which takes viewers on a rollercoaster ride through the wonderful world of statistics to explore the remarkable power thay have to change our understanding of the world, presented by superstar boffin Professor Hans Rosling, whose eye-opening, mind-expanding and funny online lectures have made him an international internet legend.
Rosling is a man who revels in the glorious nerdiness of statistics, and here he entertainingly explores their history, how they work mathematically and how they can be used in today's computer age to see the world as it really is, not just as we imagine it to be.
Rosling's lectures use huge quantities of public data to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes.
The film also explores cutting-edge examples of statistics in action today. In San Francisco, a new app mashes up police department data with the city's street map to show what crime is being reported street by street, house by house, in near real-time. Every citizen can use it and the hidden patterns of their city are starkly revealed. Meanwhile, at Google HQ the machine translation project tries to translate between 57 languages, using lots of statistics and no linguists.
Despite its light and witty touch, the film nonetheless has a serious message - without statistics we are cast adrift on an ocean of confusion, but armed with stats we can take control of our lives, hold our rulers to account and see the world as it really is. What's more, Hans concludes, we can now collect and analyse such huge quantities of data and at such speeds that scientific method itself seems to be changing.
credits / to futility closet - an ever interesting stream of bits - thanks
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