5IT, 11/18
1. The machines can write captions now.
"Automatically captioned: 'Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven'"
+ Human captioned: "Whoa, what happened last night."
2. We forget, but the servers don't.
"I must have spent half of college ducking into a computer lab, sending group emails. The bulk of the messages were to my friends on campus, who were locked up in computer labs or waiting elsewhere, patiently, for the static of a dial-up modem to clear. (It was probably possible to email my parents but I couldn’t find any messages to them in my account.) One thing that never occurred to us—or at least to me—was whether those messages were being stored. But of course they were. The truth is that we are surrounded by digital ghosts, easily conjured."
3. Soon, when you search for tweets, you'll actually be searching through all the (public) tweets.
"Since that first simple Tweet over eight years ago, hundreds of billions of Tweets have captured everyday human experiences and major historical events. Our search engine excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, and our search index infrastructure reflected this strong emphasis on recency. But our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published."
4. A bunch of interesting writers take the Golden Record, floating through space, as a prompt.
"Given such astronomical entropy, Joni Mitchell got it half-right. We are stardust, but not yet golden. Astronomers stress that the hemoglobin in our blood carries the same iron atoms that once belonged to now-dead type 1A supernovae, which themselves resulted from the violent explosions of white dwarf stars. Eventually, the Voyager Golden Records and the vessels that carry them will be rendered to smithereens and, if we’ve learned anything from the behavior of prior space dusts, said particles will find their way into our bloodstreams. Bach and Berry will be returned to us, inside of our new alien breed."
5. Completely compostable clothing, made from regional materials only.
"And just because you have a compostable fabric doesn’t mean you have a biodegradable garment. Freitag had to ensure that all the other components like linings, labels, and selvages were also biodegradable. Rivets were avoided altogether and instead of using cheap, standard polyester thread for stitching, they found a compostable thread. They also developed a button that can be unscrewed and removed from the garment."
Our literary tips will be on hiatus until Friday because I'm traveling to Fusion's RiseUp event in Washington, DC. In the meantime, might I direct you to the excellent Jay Smooth's debut on Fusion, talking hip hop and history?
The Credits: 1. googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk 2. theawl.com 3. blog.twitter.com 4. kenyonreview.org 5. domusweb.it / @cotton
Of Prior Space Dusts