Urban oasis

Full coralscape

Latest newsletter: Issue #8

A roughly monthly essay on places in horror filmmaking — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show podcast.

• A 600-Year-Old Blueprint for Weathering Climate Change
  What if the decline of Cahokia and over great cities of indigenous North Americans was a deliberate response to The Little Ice Age?
• Ancient carved drawings found next to dinosaur footprints in Brazil
  The religious right would claim this as existence of humans living during the time of dinosaurs.
• UrbanistAI
  Generative AI for participatory planning (by humans!)
• Heinz Is Putting Up Ketchup Dispensers To Tempt Chicagoans With Forbidden Condiment
  I agree with this: “We’re all for ketchup — up to the age of decision,” Tom McGlade, then a spokesman and vice president for Vienna Beef, said in 2017.
• The fish doorbell
  Ring the bell to let the fish pass through the boat lock in Utrecht. This is what the Internet was made for.
• Against Disruption: On the Bulletpointization of Books
  "It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does."
• Train Robbery for Amazon Packages? More Common Than You Think
  I'd watch a modern day Western flick based on this.
• The 'Chicago Rat Hole' Is The City's Hottest New Tourist Attraction
  This fossil is 100 yards from my old house. A welcome friend on the walk to/from the L. (But it's a squirrel impression!)
• To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare
  How do you make sense of a world sloshing around in AI-generated content? The liberal arts.
• How Big is YouTube?
  Estimating the size of YouTube by "drunk dialing" URL strings.
• Rapid urbanisation is stoking paranormal anxieties in China
  Is it urban form itself that makes ghosts or the lack of community?
• ‘People are happier in a walkable neighborhood’: the US community that banned cars
  If they can pull this off in Phoenix, it can be done anywhere.
• A Guide to the JWST's View of the Universe
  "Our universe's history, fossilized in light."
• How the Youth Boom in Africa Will Change the World
  Thinking like Africa is a solution.
• EV Chargers Should Be Dumber
  The hack that made my summer camper trip possible.
• Listen To The Clouds
  Live air traffic audio from the world's airports overlaid on ambient tunes.
• OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer
  See where any living thing exists in a beautiful interactive taxonomy visualization.
• My 80's TV!
  Flipping between channels of my childhood.
• Stealth swimmers: fish hide behind others to hunt
  More impressive than tool-usage.
• Fonts In Use
  Type at work in the real world.
• Animation vs. Math
  You're probably not prepared for how enthralling this is.
• Rebellious birds make nests out of anti-bird pins
  Anti-bird spikes as nest material, keeping other birds out!
• A Tribute to the ARP 2500, the Close Encounters Synth
  B♭ C A♭ 8vb A♭ E♭.
• Architect Breaks Down Why All American Diners Look Like That
  Trains, automobiles, and rocket ships, basically.
• Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human
  "The act of simplifying reality for a machine results in a great deal of complexity for the human."
• Love Song for Chicago
  Sara Benincasa on the beauty of The Bear.
• Two writers facing one Turing test: A dialog in honor of HAL between Richard Powers and Bruno Latour
  Prescience for our current world from 1998.
• Richard Powers on AI in 2011
  "History is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it. We will concede this trivia game (after a very long run as champions), and find another in which, aided by our compounding prosthetics, we can excel in more powerful and ever more terrifying ways."
• This Word Does Not Exist
  AI neologisms. Could just link #termsfromtoday to this and never manually post again.
• Carbonized Herculaneum papyri to be scanned without unrolling
  Science fiction becomes reality for fossil literature.
• ​​The 'Past Exonerative Tense' In Stories About Police Killings, Traffic Violence
  So much worse than the passive voice.
• Question Mark, Ohio
  AI-generated imagery in the service of mythopoeic storytelling on a small town scale. (Follow via Instagram.)
• Immersive architecture of aquariums
  "Dark magic box": The unique design opportunity of designing a marine ecosystem experience for visitors.
• PLATO: How an educational computer system from the ’60s shaped the future
  "A book with feedback"
• AI Is Ushering in a Textpocalypse
  Matt Kirschenbaum writes his own words about the "ongoing planetary spam event."
• Eunoia: Words that Don't Translate
  Meaning isn't 100% transitive.
• Magnetik Phunk - Open Reel Ensemble
  A one-shot music video performed using only the reel-to-reel tape recorders.
• Please, Lego, let this engineer bring your computer brick to life
  Just because it was inevitable doesn't mean it isn't glorious.
• Elon Musk, please bring back Weird Twitter if you're going to break everything else.
  Dan makes me nostalgic for Twitter 2007-2013.
• The Commodordion
  Incredible instrument made from two Commodore 64s, floppy disks, tape and a giant dose of nerdery.
• Pickleball Is Expanding. Tennis Is Mad.
  ‘Oh, that’s tennis for non-athletes.'
• Could 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' in Chicago really be done? We found out.
  Answer: barely, with a few modifications.
• CU Denver will launch a ‘smart cities incubator’ program
  Some behind-the-scenes of my work life.
• Tending to Grass, and to Grief, on a Tennis Court in Iowa
  The All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club!
• Believe it or not: dry western Kansas is the place to study prehistoric oceans
  "Hell's Aquarium"
• Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene
  "Before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive."
• Albert Camus: The philosopher who resisted despair
  "The problem wasn’t that Sisyphus had to roll his boulder up a hill forever; it’s that he had to roll it alone."
• Crashing Clowns: Human Noise Raises Stress and Hostility
  Same with me, clowns, same with me.
• Against Pickleball - Club Leftist Tennis
  I'm here for the needless politicization of tennis versus pickeball.
• MIT engineers build load-bearing structures from tree forks.
  Biomimicry meet reclaimed waste product.
• People Who Love War Hate Cities
  "Cities are where we see each other.  People who don’t want to see hate that."
• Disney's FastPass: A Complicated History
  How much do you know about lines?
• The Experimental City
  Documentary on Minnesota's failed attempt at a city of the future in the late 1960's.
• We Need To Talk: Marriage Counseling with Capitalism Itself
  "Humanity, how are you doing on this beautiful Monday?"
• Lights at Sea
  Amazing visualization of European lighthouses showing light color, actual pattern, and radius of visibility.
• It Takes 1.71 Days to Poop Out a Lego
  An interesting data point, for sure, but this metric may be the best part: Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score.
• Literature Clock
  The exact time of day, pulled from books.
• COVID Standard Time
  Einstein confirms.
• Sonifying Ganymede
  Mapping magnetic fields to the audio spectrum.
• Hear the new sounds that show life returning in these coral reefs
  So pretty you often don't stop to listen.
• Renay Mandel Corren Obituary
  The greatest tribute ever penned by a child for a parent.
• Pointiest Path
  Humans walking through a city don't take the shortest route but the one that physically points them at their destination most consistently.
• It’s Never Too Late to Pick Up Your Life and Move to Italy
  Placing this here to remind future me.
• Scientists have worked out how dung beetles use the Milky Way to hold their course
  LIght pollution of course ruins this.
• These Singapore Marine Scientists Are Using Lego To Rebuild Coral Reefs
  Clever. Would be even better using LEGO's bioplastic bricks.
• The Missing Link of Climate Change: Single-Family Suburban Homes
  It doesn’t solve the problem to buy a hybrid and retrofit your house if all of that takes place 20 miles from your job.
• Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
  Eno on urban design is masterful.
• 300 days of sun in Colorado? Turns out it's a myth and we're just as shocked as you
  Railroad marketing ploy. But it's still quite nice here.
• Colorado launches ‘America’s largest fleet of autonomous, electric shuttles’
  Particularly proud of this project from the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance.
• An Italian Tourist Walks into an Olive Garden…
  "'There is an Italian phrase,' said Marco after we ordered our food. '"Li ti avvelenano", which translates to "there they will poison you." This is my prediction for the night.'"