Amassing Hundreds of Quotations He Deemed Relevant
The second episode of my audio documentary on global shipping, technology, and the complexity of modern capitalism is out. This one is an intimate look at the lives of two Filipino sailors, fresh off a trip across the Pacific Ocean (Soundcloud, iTunes). We meet them at the Target in Emeryville, California, which could not be a more appropriate location. Target is the nation's #2 importer (after Walmart) — and most of the things on the shelves came over from Asia in ships like the ones these guys crewed. Listening back to this episode, I was struck again by the heroism of the work these men are doing to support their families, pushing the gears of global trade in the process.
"Four decades of rapid dam development followed. It peaked in the 1960s, when more than 20,200 dams were completed, according to the Army Corps' National Inventory of Dams. By the end of the 1970s, more than 62,000 dams had been built. They became pet projects for members of Congress, and nearly every important piece of legislation featured riders authorizing water development. The country's major rivers were dammed — and dammed again."
"Navigational maps typically locate a car’s position within several yards. Digital maps for autonomous cars must know the locations of cars, curbs and other objects within about four inches. So far the drive to create digital maps has been slow. Google’s former self-driving car division — now a company called Waymo — has created maps for roads around its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and a handful of other cities, including Austin, Tex., and Kirkland, Wash."
3. April Glaser spots a fascinating branch in the genealogical tree of knowledge.
"One of the variables, the probability of fatality from getting hit by an object, has a rather long history, and ultimately dates back to an estimate derived from a 1968 computer simulation on the dangers of nuclear war. (To figure this out, the report traces back through almost 50 years of citations, starting with a chart from a 2012 study, which then cites a 2010 report, referring to data from a 2007 paper, citing a study from 2000, that ultimately goes back to the 1960s.)"
4. A new exhibition "refracts" Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project through modern work.
"He also left behind a less-studied and unfinished opus devoted to 19th-century Paris known as the Arcades Project. The work gets its name from the architectural features that inspired Benjamin, and which for him embodied early capitalism—the glass-and-steel arcades that sprung up around Paris in the later 19th century. Parisians, rich and poor, flocked to the shops and cafes of these covered passageways. They became emblematic urban spaces of the period, ripe with social, cultural, and artistic significance. To study them, Benjamin abandoned a linear, academic approach. Instead, he turned to what he called the 'refuse' and 'detritus' of history, amassing hundreds of quotations he deemed relevant to the cultural and social significance of the arcades. These he arranged according to 36 different thematic subheadings called 'convolutes,' creating a multivalent, allusive, and at times, incomprehensible, sketch of 19th-century life."
5. A great walkthrough of Baidu's neural-net powered text-to-speech system.
"We’ll also want to predict the tone and intonation of each phoneme to make it sound as human as possible. This, in many ways, is especially important in languages like Mandarin where the same sound can have an entirely different meaning based on the tone and accent. Predicting the fundamental frequency of each phoneme helps us do just this. The frequency tells the system exactly what approximate pitch or tone the phoneme should be pronounced at."
1. eenews.net | @greenwirejeremy 2. nytimes.com | @arkindu 3. recode.net 4. artltdmag.com | @kg_ubu 5. medium.com
+ Dear god I hope the links worked this time.
Amassing Hundreds of Quotations He Deemed Relevant