etc., recall the word
resoldered here
in a pane of sand.
— R. Kenney

March 5, 2007  
  • in Notes

Shadows of ice

Img 3332

All that is solid melts into air.

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Hi, I’m John Tolva!

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The Ampcamper

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Gravid With Decay

Latest newsletter: Issue #8

 

Short recommendations, reviews, and cautionary tales about horror in fiction (mostly movies). Read through the archives and subscribe here.

Marginalia

  • 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.'"
  • CU Denver's Growing Research Enterprise Fuels Partnership with Colorado Smart Cities Alliance 
    Bringing together a few things I'm working on.
  • When IBM Nearly Missed the Internet
    The condiutions and accomplishments that this story described laid the foundation for the beginning of my career.
  • Fish Form Social Networks—and They're Actually Good
    “And so those fish are then left with less information about when it's safe to go out and eat and control these algae. And this feedback has these ecosystem-level consequences.”
  • America’s ‘Smart City’ Didn’t Get Much Smarter
    "It’s not Columbus’ fault that industry promises about the imminent arrival of self-driving cars were way overblown." ← Actually, it is Columbus' fault.
  • A Battle Between a Great City and a Great Lake
    "Chicago has a weakness at its very foundations. The towering skyscrapers and temples of commerce were built upon a swamp."
  • BONE MUSIC
    The story of bootlegged records pressed to x-ray film in Soviet Russia.
  • Design History of New Orleans' Iconic Shotgun Home
    This simple vernacular architecture is more complex than it seems.
  • Fauxliage
    Disguised Cell Towers of the American West
  • City Describer on Twitter: "a circuit board"
    A photo of the city of Chicago, awkwardly described by Microsoft's computer vision AI.
  • We Rode Amtrak’s California Zephyr Train Across Colorado. Here’s What We Saw And Who We Met
    Classic travel. Recommend.
More ...

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The Ampcamper How-To

This is a tale of towing a camper trailer 4,000+ miles with an electric vehicle. When the summer vacation idea to tool around the Western USA in an RV first was hatched it was pretty traditional. We didn’t own an RV, so we’d rent one, probably a big gas-guzzler that we’d drive around like a […]

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Day Twenty – Home

4,192 miles traveled. 2,134 kilowatt-hours used. 2,013 photos. 117 videos. 6 states. 5 national parks. 0 carbon emissions. What an epic adventure. It’s going to take me a while to synthesize the last 20 days (but I will — so much more to say than my nightly missives). Many thanks to all who followed along!

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Day Nineteen – Hoodoo Gurus

Just my daughter, dog, and I now so we took a day in Moab to ease down before the final journey home tomorrow. I finally emptied the trailer’s gray water (no Cousin Eddie “shitter’s full!” moment as we successfully avoiding pooping in the camper), though you can still smell the tank from 20 yards away. […]

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