The internet arrived at a time when we gained social clout from arbitraging information, so our first instinct was to share information online. Perhaps we are now entering an era of information hoarding. This may mean that, for a while, the most interesting developments will happen somewhere off the grid. But over time, this practice will restore some value to art and cultural exploration, and bring back opportunities for tastemaking. Whatever the case, we first must recognize the role that arbitrage played in preventing our culture from growing stale while literally making us friends along the way. Winning respect by sharing video-game cheat codes may be a thing of the past, but we need to promote new methods for innovators and mediators to move the culture—otherwise it may not move much at all.
i’m so obsessed with this guy who just makes weird hand-stitched footballs. this video has millions of views on ig and tiktok but w/e look at this reference orange immortalized forever through the medium of Ball
Ted Nelson conceives of the idea of the hypertext as an exercise in freedom. The hypertext can be interpreted as a symbol for general emancipation. According to Nelson, the production of a linear-hierarchical order is based on compulsion, on a ‘destructive process’.
[We argue that at minimum, the outputs of LLMs like ChatGPT are soft bullshit: bullshit–that is, speech or text produced without concern for its truth–that is produced without any intent to mislead the audience about the utterer’s attitude towards truth. We also suggest, more controversially, that ChatGPT may indeed produce hard bullshit: if we view it as having intentions (for example, in virtue of how it is designed), then the fact that it is designed to give the impression of concern for truth qualifies it as attempting to mislead the audience about its aims, goals, or agenda. So, with the caveat that the particular kind of bullshit ChatGPT outputs is dependent on particular views of mind or meaning, we conclude that it is appropriate to talk about ChatGPT-generated text as bullshit, and flag up why it matters that – rather than thinking of its untrue claims as lies or hallucinations – we call bullshit on ChatGPT.]
Submitter comment: One of my favourite recent papers on AI - the authors pull no punches, actually substantiate their argument, and it’s also extremely readable and hilarious. Free to read: ChatGPT is Bullshit
“My voice was given to me as an instrument of inspiration for my friends, and a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies. An instrument of truth.”
Rome is Building an Eight-Story Underground Museum – But Treasures Keep Getting in the way
Rome, as it’s often said, wasn’t built in a day. And nowhere is that more evident than its state-of-the-art Metro Line C, an ambitious project meant to help relieve the Italian capital’s renowned traffic hellscape and celebrate its rich archeological history with a unique-in-the-world underground museum.
The €700 million line ($757.7 million) was originally envisioned for the Catholic Jubilee of 2000 as a vital link between Rome’s San Giovanni Cathedral and Vatican City’s St. Peter’s Basilica, making it easier for visiting pilgrims to collect indulgences by walking through the churches’ holy doors. Rome’s major basilicas open their holy doors only during Jubilee years, allowing Catholics from all over the world to make pilgrimages to the city to walk through them, symbolizing an openness to receive mercy and reconciliation.
But the 2000 dream never happened, thanks to a series of problems ranging from a corruption scandal in the city government and the sheer number of archeological objects – 40,000 in all, from petrified peach pits to pottery and vases and even the walls and mosaics of Emperor Hadrian’s 2,000-year-old military barracks – found with each shovel full of dirt during the initial preparations.
Now the hope is to have the line’s showcase Piazza Venezia stop, featuring an eight-story underground museum, ready in 10 years, according to engineer Andrea Sciotti, who is in charge of the metro museum complex. This will allow them to open around the Jubilee of 2033, which will mark 2,000 years since the death of Jesus Christ.
“It’s true, 10 years seems like a long time, but we aren’t just dealing with the engineering issues,” Sciotti said inside the construction site. “This station will be judged as the most beautiful in the world … we don’t have to rely on museum items being brought in, the museum station is in its original context in ancient Rome.”
Displayed where they were found:
During the initial phases of work carried out in the last five years, Sciotti said all of the artifacts were removed from the site for restoration. Each will be placed exactly where it was found inside the metro museum, which is being dug some 85 meters (280 feet) deep, encompassing eight stories below the modern city of Rome.
Over the millennia the modern city has been built over covered ruins. Only around 10% of ancient Rome has been excavated, with the rest still buried some nine meters (30 feet) below the current city, according to Rome’s tourist bureau. The city dates back to the stone age and construction work is notoriously hampered by the discovery of ruins that are too plentiful to even excavate and are often reburied to preserve them. Even simple infrastructure work, like sewage repairs, have to be attended by archeologists who have the power to stop the work if something is found.
There will be 27 escalators, six elevators and 66,000 square meters of archeological exhibit space. Ancient walls found during excavations will be placed “in situ” in the modern station and the ancient Via Flaminia that ran through the ancient city to the nearby Roman Forum and Colosseum.
The station’s three main entrances will connect the three museums around the square: the Vittoriano, the Palazzo Venezia and the outdoor ruins of the Roman Forum anchored by the Colosseum at the far end, which has its own metro station that will also feature museum and exhibit space.
Several of the archeological sites will have access points from inside the metro museum, meaning commuters and tourists alike can exit the station by rambling through historically significant ruins like Hadrian’s Auditorium, which was discovered when the initial archeological investigation into the project started and was meant to be the location of the station entrance. Since then, they moved the site and excavated the ruins, which are currently only visible looking down from street level.
‘Top down’ excavation system:
To secure the site as they dig, engineers are using a “top down” excavation system, which has never been used in Italy but was an integral part of the Jubilee line in London. Cross walls and diaphragms are being buried deep into the soil to form the perimeter of the underground complex, with the dirt taken out recycled and enhanced to be used in the building materials, Sciotti said.
The train tunnels themselves are not the issue since they will be more than 100 feet below ground.
The Venezia station museum stop is not the only treasure on the new line. In 2016, archeologists working on the site of the Porta Metronia (previously known as the Ambra Aradam) station found a 39-room complex that spanned more than 9,700 square feet that has been incorporated into the underground station, which will open by the end of 2024. In 2025, the new Colosseo-Fori station, complete with a four-level underground museum to showcase artifacts including 25 archaic wells unearthed when it was built, will also open after activation tests, meant to begin in October, are completed.
The entire 26-kilometer C-line will be Italy’s first fully automated driver-less subway system and will reduce road traffic by 400,000 vehicles a day, meaning CO2 emissions will be reduced by some 310,000 tonnes a year, according to the WeBuild group, which is the main contractor for the project.
The original plans from the 2000 Jubilee have been modified to eliminate several stations in the historical center that would have simply been too difficult to excavate.
A superior mirage caused by warm air resting on patches of colder air in an atmospheric duct that acts like a refracting lens. Objects on the horizon could appear to be mirrored, distorted, or float. This form of mirage could be the reason for the Flying Dutchman Legend.
The Playa Crawler: A Kinetic Walking Chair for Burning Man
In 2017, engineer Mark Ellis designed an innovative kinetic chair called The Playa Crawler to navigate the vast expanse of Burning Man. Inspired by the Strandbeest sculptures of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, this unique chair is specifically crafted to withstand the alkaline terrain of the Black Rock Desert.
Mark Ellis wanted a personal vehicle that was both functional and original for getting around Burning Man. This led him to create a chair that walks using a system of articulated legs. This mechanism, invented by Theo Jansen, allows the chair to move similarly to Jansen’s giant sculptures, which are propelled by the wind along the beaches.
Built from laser-cut aluminum and steel, The Playa Crawler is equipped with two electric wheelchair motors, batteries, and is controlled via a wheelchair joystick.
A Man Who Lost Four Fingers Has Built Highly Articulated Prosthetic Fingers, All Controlled By Wrist Movements.
Engineer Ian Davisbuilt his own mechanical prosthetic when his medical insurance did not cover the cost. His prosthetic functions without batteries or electricity. In early 2019, Davis lost four digits on his left hand due to a work accident, prompting him to create the prosthetic
Wat Rong Khun, better known to foreigners as the
White Temple, is a contemporary, unconventional, privately-owned art exhibit in the style of a
Buddhist temple in Chiang Rai, Thailand.
Chalermchai Kositpipat constructed it and opened it to visitors in 1997.
Bohm: Now, the ordinary idea of matter is: it’s an object which exists external to other objects, passes through space continuously, goes from here to there, and connects up with other objects. Makes the whole that way. Now, to just give the idea of what I mean: I saw once on BBC television a device which I realized would be very useful for my purposes. It was made at the Royal Institution in London, and it consisted of two glass cylinders, concentric, one inside the other. The inner one was held fixed, and the outer one turned slowly, and you placed a very viscous fluid such as glycerin in between the two cylinders. Now, as you turn the outer cylinder, the glycerin on the outside is turning, the glycerin on the inside is fixed, and in between it’s moving at an intermediate rate. So if you took a small bit of glycerin it would slowly get drawn out into a thread. Is that clear?
Suzuki: No, you’ve got glycerin in your tube, in your cylinder, and then you put a drop of…
Bohm: The next stage is to put a drop of insoluble ink, which consists of particles of carbon, for example.
Suzuki: So you can see this drop suspended in the glycerin.
Bohm: And each particle of carbon is now carried along by the glycerin at the speed of the glycerin. And since the outer parts of the glycerin move faster, the particles of carbon are carried apart. Eventually they become so fine as to be invisible, right? Now, you then turn this machine around slowly, and the particles retrace their paths, and suddenly it forms a drop, again, of glycerin, right? And that actually happens. I saw this happening for the first time there when it was shown on the program.
Now, I propose now that this droplet has been folded into the glycerin, right? And it is then unfolded. Now I want to say that that sort of process helps to explain the behavior of particles. It’s only an analogy; we mustn’t take it too literally. But for example, suppose I put two droplets in, one next to or near the other, and I fold it up. Now, the particles from one droplet are going to sort of mix with the particles of the other, so they’re indistinguishable. Yet, if we turn the machine around, each particle seems to know where it must go and it goes backward to help form its own droplet again, right?
Suzuki: Now, what does that illustrate?
Bohm: Well, that illustrates a new order, because… see, if we put in a number of droplets in a row, you have an order, right? And we could pull them all up. The order seems to be absent, but it’s still present, because when you unfold it it’ll all come right out again. So I say there’s a non-manifest order. There’s an implicate, enfolded order, right?
Suzuki: Okay.
Bohm: I say that that notion of order is a different notion of order from the one which science has been using, which is the unfolded or explicate order, in which we say only things outside each other count and only external relationships of things outside each other are to be part of the fundamental laws of physics.
David Bohm, interviewed by David Suzuki, 1979 (video, transcript)
John Cage Jr. (1912 - 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage’s romantic partner for most of their lives.
i can’t stop thinking about this. this kind of shit is not like milsim plane nerds with their own super-expensive desktop cockpit recreations. that kind of hardware makes sense to exist.
this does not. they’re playing world of tanks which is like the “call of duty” of tank games (casual, players only slightly bad-smelling). it also doesn’t have support for tank peripherals. no game does. no
trainersdo afaik. which means that (assuming this isn’t just a video editing) all of that shit they are fucking with translates into mouse/keyboard inputs that the game understands. that’s weird/hard and perplexing, uh, and considering that “tank peripherals” aren’t a thing that exist i can only guess they built them theirselves
which is fucking hilarious because
why are they so good. why does the fucking cannon breech have a little dry ice smoke effect when the breech opens like they just shot a shell.
what. manual turret traverse crank?? did they build a fucking ready rack!! they’re even using the correct phraseology which means one of these mofos read a PDF file
the current thing trad losers are losing their minds over is one singular dude on reddit that refurbished and hand painted a grandfather clock and they keep saying the guy “ruined its value” or “threw thousands out the window by vandalizing a precious heirloom” and let me just say as someone densely familiar with the world of antiques, there’s a 99% chance that this clock was a mass produced reproduction and there’s a 100% chance that clock is
not as valuable as ppl think it is. when people hear the word ‘grandfather clock’ they’re always gonna assume you’re talking about something that was handmade in a woodshop by a jolly old man when rlly repros take up a
waaay bigger slice of the market far more than any handcrafted items. and besides people will repaint or redecorate these ‘oh so sacred handcrafted items’ every day there’s a huge market for them. it’s the same reason why people like long furbies or dolls that have been customized to have like gore mouths or something. this is literally like watching a bunch of pretentious farts make a mountain out of a molehill. also the clock is kinda cool if I’m being honest
this is what’s got them so mad. like the dude didn’t destroy it or anything, just made it more interesting to look at. when I see this I don’t go “this man is a danger to society because he RUINED a precious antique” i just think to myself “huh that’s actually some very impressive work with patterns, getting all those intricate geometric shapes done with just paint must’ve been hard work and it looks cool and the colors really pop” but idk maybe that’s just because I’m not completely deranged
This is all work that can be stripped if anyone wants to restore it to its original state in the future (I mean, why would you but ok), and the fact that they restored it, including putting hands on it and getting it to work, obviously, has far greater value than preserving the original wood finish of what looks like an 80s repro of a Victorian aesthetic.
the same guy also made this which looks to be an actual Old Thing but still cannot be called anything but an unambiguous improvement, and also holy shit it fucks
severely
A big reason I can prob never truly quit Tumblr is this is the only website where I can read
[goof joke post about, say, Scandanavian geese]
[witty rejoinder]
followed by “Actually? I’m an ornithologist specializing in the migratory patterns of three specific species of geese over the Scandanavian peninsula, here’s a genuinely fascinating short essay about a highly specific field of work and study, I took quite a lot of time out of my day to write this just because I wanted to share my passion, you’re welcome”
“
When a severe water shortage hit the Indian city of Kozhikode in the state of Kerala, a group of engineers turned to science fiction to keep the taps running.
Like everyone else in the city, engineering student Swapnil Shrivastav received a ration of two buckets of water a day collected from India’s arsenal of small water towers.
It was a ‘watershed’ moment for Shrivastav, who according to the BBC had won a student competition four years earlier on the subject of tackling water scarcity, and armed with a hypothetical template from the original
Star Wars films, Shrivastav and two partners set to work harvesting water from the humid air.
“One element of inspiration was from Star Wars where there’s an air-to-water device. I thought why don’t we give it a try? It was more of a curiosity project,” he told the BBC.
According to ‘Wookiepedia’ a ‘moisture vaporator’ is a device used on moisture farms to capture water from a dry planet’s atmosphere, like Tatooine, where protagonist Luke Skywalker grew up.
This fictional device functions according to
Star Wars lore by coaxing moisture from the air by means of refrigerated condensers, which generate low-energy ionization fields. Captured water is then pumped or gravity-directed into a storage cistern that adjusts its pH levels. Vaporators are capable of collecting 1.5 liters of water per day.
ALT
Pictured: Moisture vaporators on the largely abandoned Star Wars film set of Mos Espa, in Tunisia
If science fiction authors could come up with the particulars of such a device, Shrivastav must have felt his had a good chance of succeeding. He and colleagues Govinda Balaji and Venkatesh Raja founded Uravu Labs, a Bangalore-based startup in 2019.
Their initial offering is
a machine that converts air to water using a liquid desiccant. Absorbing moisture from the air, sunlight or renewable energy heats the desiccant to around 100°F which releases the captured moisture into a chamber where it’s condensed into drinking water.
The whole process takes 12 hours but can produce a staggering 2,000 liters, or about 500 gallons of drinking-quality water per day.[Note: that IS staggering! That’s huge!!] Uravu has since had to adjust course due to
the cost of manufacturing and running the machines—it’s just too high for civic use with current materials technology.
“We had to shift to commercial consumption applications as they were ready to pay us and it’s a sustainability driver for them,”Shrivastav explained. This pivot has so far been enough to keep the start-up afloat, and
they produce water for 40 different hospitality clients.
Looking ahead, Shrivastav, Raja, and Balaji are p
lanning to investigate whether the desiccant can be made more efficient; can it work at a lower temperature to reduce running costs, or is there another material altogether that might prove more cost-effective?
They’re also looking at running their device attached to data centers in a pilot project that would see them utilize the waste heat coming off the centers to heat the desiccant.”
The Keaton Music Typewriter, invented around 1936, revolutionized music publishing. With a specialized keyboard for musical symbols, it allowed for quick and accurate typing of sheet music. This innovation significantly sped up the production process, meeting the high demand for printed music in the 1930s.
This historical archetype — made of glass panels and concrete blocks — was originally conceived for MASP’s picture gallery and first introduced in 1968 at the inauguration of the museum’s headquarters on Paulista Avenue
Concrete, glass, wood, neoprene and stainless steel,
Culture is busting at the seams, so to speak. It is exploding all ties and joints. It is becoming unbound, un-restricted, un-ravelled: a hyperculture. The hyperspace of culture is organized not by borders but by links and network connections.
Byung-Chul Han. 2022.
Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.
I think one big reason why we don’t consider the stars as important as before (not even pop-astrology anymore cares about the stars or the sky on itself, just the signs deprived of context) is because of light pollution.
For most of human history the sky looked between 1-3, 4 at
most. And then all of a sudden with electrification it was gone (I’m lucky if I get 6 in my small city). The first time I saw the Milky Way fully as a kid was a spiritual experience, I was almost scared on how BRIGHT it was, it felt like someone was looking back at me. You don’t get that at all with modern light pollution.
When most people talk about stargazing nowadays they think about watching about a couple of bright dots. The stars are really, really not like that. The unpolluted night sky is a festival of fireworks. There is nothing like it.
La Hauss. Máster Online Diseño Visual 2021-22. Diseño de sobrecubiertas, cubiertas, guardas y
packaging contenedor para colección Fenómenos, compuesta por las siguientes obras:
ALT
