Everything West of Interstate 5 Will Be Toast
1. The biggest of big ones—earthquakes, that is—is unthinkable and yet...
"When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, 'Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.'"
+ Seeing a great writer grapple with the consequences of geological time intersecting with human time is always thrilling.
2. Apple makes all the money in the smartphone game.
"Apple grabbed 92% of the operating profit of the world's top eight smartphone companies in Q1, financial firm Canaccord Genuity calculates, up from 65% a year earlier. Samsung took 15% in this year's period. The reason why Apple and Samsung earned over 100% combined is because some rivals only broke even or lost money."
"You might think that TV and movies and the general mobility of the population would mean accents are getting more and more similar across the country. This turns out not to be the case. Kids don't learn their accents from TV; they learn them from the people around them. And different regions are in some ways becoming more different from each other. Thanks to detailed research done by many linguists (such as in the Atlas of North American English by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg), we have a good picture of what's been going on in American English. Some parts of the U.S. are going through gradual but identifiable shifts of vowel sounds right now."
4. The miniature models of the Blade Runner universe.
"Blade Runner, you see, represents perhaps the high water mark of the now seemingly lost art of miniature-based practical visual effects. Most everything in its slickly futuristic yet worn and often makeshift Los Angeles actually existed in reality, because, in that time before realistic CGI, everything had to take the form of a model (or, farther in the background, a matte painting) to get into the shot at all. You can take an extensive behind-the-scenes look at the blood, sweat, and tears involved in building all this in a gallery showcasing 142 photos taken in the Blade Runner model shop."
5. Turing tests for short fiction, poetry, and music.
"The Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College is pleased to announce the first annual Neukom Institute Prizes in Computational Arts. These competitions aim to inspire innovations in computational methods that generate artistic products, such as literary, musical, and visual art... The 'DigiLit' prize competition encourages the creation of algorithms able to produce a 'human-level" short story of the kind that might be intended for a short story collection produced in a well-regarded MfA program or a piece forThe New Yorker. The prize seeks to reward algorithms that could, for example, write stories for a creative writing class in which students are asked to submit a new short story each day."
1. newyorker.com | @billwasik 2. seekingalpha.com 3. theweek.com | @stancarey 4. openculture.com | @loretobgude 5. math.dartmouth.edu
Everything West of Interstate 5 Will Be Toast