📡 – 2023-04-07

Right to business

Image via DALL•E

🖋️

Friends! It’s Bandcamp Friday! And did you know the workers at Bandcamp are attempting to unionize? They are! If you have a moment (and you do, because you opened this here newsletter) here’s a Twitter thread of things you can do to help their cause:

https://twitter.com/bandcampunited/status/1643761126465740801

(also, if by the time this goes out, the above remains a link and not an embed, here is why)

Here are some things I liked:

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👂

Ryuichi Sakamoto died on March 28. His final record, 12, is as beautiful as anything he ever did.

Recommending both a record, and a whole discography. There is something a Kaynaissance happening at the moment and I am here for it: Kayn was a German composer of electroacoustic / “cybernetic” music, and though his discography is both large and impressive, he has gone largely under-appreciated until recently. If you’re into weird electronic textures and wild structures, highly, highly recommend.

Deathless is meant as a judgement of the purveyors of systemic transphobia and a balm to those suffering beneath its hold.

Live radio broadcast of some of Radigue’s best works, and in her own estimation the best performance of each.

Saw Ava Mendoza play with Bill Orcutt recently and was reminded of how much I loved her solo record, so here it is!

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📚

GHOST TAGS: Inside New York City’s Black Market for Temporary License Plates

https://www.streetsblogprojects.org/ghost-tags-index

A Streetsblog investigation uncovered scores of used car dealerships that have fraudulently issued temporary license plates, which flow through a thriving black market to drivers who use them to skirt accountability on the road. Streetsblog found still more dealerships that, like ECL, issue large numbers of tags with little or no other discernible business activity. Some of these companies are run by New Yorkers but registered elsewhere, in states where loose regulations make it easier to obtain dealership licenses and print tags.

The Extraordinary Ways Rhythm Shapes Our Lives

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-extraordinary-ways-rhythm-shapes-our-lives/

Music and rhythm are rooted in every known culture. What parent does not use rhythmic rocking to soothe a crying baby? The repetitive sounds and silences that comprise rhythmic patterns make dancing possible, aid in the memory and reproduction of music, and facilitate group singing, playing, or drumming. Rhythm has been used for millennia to tie societal members together — the chants of a religious order or the cadence calls of military ranks are just two examples. Poetic works thousands of years ago, such as those of Homer, were chanted or sung with rhythm serving a mnemonic function. Repetitive or complex work engenders rhythmic accompaniment, in some cases to break the monotony, in others to actually help you perform the work better. Workers performing hard labor like rock breaking chant to keep their sledgehammers swinging in rhythm. Postal workers in Ghana hand-cancel stamps with a distinct rhythm. Rug weavers in Iran use chants with a complex musical structure to communicate weaving patterns to their co-weavers. All musical systems and styles have organizational rhythmic motifs. Indeed, the very universality of rhythm is a strong argument for the existence of biological processes governing the perception and production of rhythm. Rhythms in the brain have been called out as a basis for consciousness itself.

AI and the American Smile

https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf

Every American knows to say “cheese” when taking a photo, and, therefore, so does the AI when generating new images based on the pattern established by previous ones. But it wasn’t always like this. More than a century after the first photograph was captured, a reference to “cheesing” for photos first appeared in a local Texas newspaper in 1943. “Need To Put On A Smile?” the headline asked, “Here’s How: Say ‘Cheese.’” The article quoted former U.S. ambassador Joseph E. Davies who explained that this influencer photo hack would be “Guaranteed to make you look pleasant no matter what you’re thinking […] it’s an automatic smile.” Davies served as ambassador under Franklin D. Roosevelt to the U.S.S.R.

Elusive ‘Einstein’ Solves a Longstanding Math Problem

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/science/mathematics-tiling-einstein.html

“It’s always nice to get hands-on,” Mr. Smith said. “It can be quite meditative. And it provides a better understanding of how a shape does or does not tessellate.”

When in November he found a tile that seemed to fill the plane without a repeating pattern, he emailed Craig Kaplan, a co-author and a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo.

“Could this shape be an answer to the so-called ‘einstein problem’ — now wouldn’t that be a thing?” Mr. Smith wrote.

“It was clear that something unusual was happening with this shape,” Dr. Kaplan said. Taking a computational approach that built on previous research, his algorithm generated larger and larger swaths of hat tiles. “There didn’t seem to be any limit to how large a blob of tiles the software could construct,” he said.

The Wonderful Death of a State

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-wonderful-death-of-a-state-slobodian

We often speak of secessionist and far-right movements such as the neo-Confederates in purely political or cultural terms, as symptoms of a sometimes pathologized fixation on ethnicity that crowds out all economic concerns. But this is wrong. We should also think of the radical politics of the 1990s in terms of capitalism. Rothbard and Rockwell’s own reasoning began with economics. As adherents of the gold standard, abandoned by the United States in the 1970s, they felt that the fiat money system was doomed to a coming period of hyperinflation. Breaking up large states was a way to get out ahead of the pending monetary meltdown and create smaller states more able to reorganize after the crash. Ron Paul spoke of his conviction that change would come “with a calamity and with a bang.” “Eventually the state disintegrates under the conditions we have today,” he said, comparing the United States to the Soviet Union. He described his daydream of a Republic of Texas with “no income tax and a sound currency and a thriving metropolis.”

The semiotics of digital cartography at the Geoguessr interface: A practice-oriented case study

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448231160132

In digital cartography, Google Maps and Google Street View (GSV) are often used side-by-side at the computer interface. This study consists of an analysis of recordings of Geoguessr, an online game that presents players with GSV imagery and challenges them to guess the location of the images on a digital map. Gameplay requires semiotic moves that put the diagrammatic signs of the GSV images and the map into a dynamic interplay. By specifying these practices, the present analysis offers a processual, practice-oriented perspective on theoretical debates in the study of digital mapping. Rather than existing a priori, the constructed or transparent nature of the map, as well as the kind of cartographical subject involved in manipulations of the map both emerge and change through the practical use of the two representations. Furthermore, the abductive inferences that characterize particular moments of gameplay constitute an intersection of reasoning and play.

Research on a method of conveying material sensations through sound effects

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09298215.2023.2187311?af=R

Material sound effects are widely used in virtual reality and games to convey specific material sensations to the audience and improve the immersion experience. However, systematic research on parametrically controlling the material sensations evoked by sound effects is lacking. This study presents a new method of sound design regarding the control of parameters – pitch, waveform, attenuation time and artificial harmonics. The acoustic semantic experiments demonstrate that these sound effects can convey virtual material sensations with a 78% understanding rate with only auditory cues. This study can broaden our thinking regarding sound effects, music production and related disciplines.

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📹

Aside from this being the normal Extremely Good deep dive you’ve come to expect form Dan, I also have a short (VO) cameo towards the end.

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😎

Did a checkpoint stream last weekend, the VOD for which will be up on Twitch for another week or so. After that it’ll be available in the archive for patrons.

And speaking of which, posted the first, new, full Reasonably Sound episode script in a few years for patrons earlier this week. It’s about scam and spam phone calls, how they work, why they go so bad, and what various government agencies are trying to do to stop them. Just a script right now; hoping to get it recorded and published by early May, latest.

And finally, the Brindlewood Bay arc of Fun City is set to wrap up in the next couple weeks, so if you haven’t listened to the first four episodes of that, now’s a great time to get caught up for the thrilling conclusion, where the Mavens learn the secrets behind a mysterious murder at sea!

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✌️

That’s what I got for you - hope you enjoy, and have a good weekend! I’m traveling on the 21st, so the next time you’ll see me here is early May.

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