Hop in Any Unproven Aircraft
In today's edition: the New Deep South, slowed-down Chippunk, new spreadsheets, regional language, and two guys who will fly anything.
***The Real Future Fair is tomorrow! There are now 937 people signed up for various parts of the conference, so I expect to see many of you soon. Three big thank-yous in advance: Cara De Fabio, Kennedy Events, and Inner Circle Labs. I owe y'all.***
"New Deep South ventures into the lives of queer youth to explore the tangled and complex nature of sexual identity and family in the 21st-century American South. Our first episode follows a couple in Jackson, Mississippi trying to start a family in a state where same-sex adoption is still illegal. But overall, for queer couples living in areas remote from major gay urban centers, the question is less 'Can we?' than 'How do we?' In the absence of local family planning resources and without the means or connections to professional adoption agencies, Toni and Keeta improvise with the best resource at their disposal: Instagram."
2. 80s punk(ish) songs played by the Chipmunks, but then slowed down.
There is no text to accompany this effort, so I breaking form and just telling you that these are amazing. Like sludgey Television. And just another reminder: digitize sound and it just turns to putty.
3. IEA makes trove of energy data available.
"The more than 200 000 data points in the new release include energy statistics covering 40-plus years for OECD countries, including figures for 2014, plus statistics from other regions, reinforcing the position of the IEA as the most informative source of energy data. The freely available headline statistics not only provide valuable insight to climate change negotiators, they also show how the IEA is responding to the call from the Group of 20 nations acknowledging the importance of public disclosure of market-related information on all energy resources."
+ Important because: if you control the spreadsheets, you probably control the outcomes.
4. Could climate and topography have shaped regional languages? Maybe, actually.
"A subtle, but clear pattern emerged: Languages in hotter, more forested regions such as the tropics tended to be 'sonorous,' employing lower frequency sounds and using fewer distinct consonants, whereas languages in colder, drier, more mountainous places were consonant-heavy, the team reported today at the 170th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America(ASA) in Jacksonville, Florida. Taken together, these ecological variables accounted for about one-fourth of the variation in how 'consonant-heavy' a language is, Maddieson says. One possible explanation for why vowel-rich languages appear more frequently in the tropics is that they travel farther than languages dominated by rapid-fire, high-frequency consonants, which lose their fidelity in humid, forested environments, he says. Heat and humidity interrupt sound, as do solid tree branches and leaves, he adds."
5. Two guys who will fly all kinds of crazy shit.
"Today, Seguin and Gillen are testing a brand-new one built by an older Air Force veteran, which has spent just three hours in the air. On its sleek nose cone, the builder used a Sharpie to draw the teeth-bared mouth of a shark, which remains the only decoration on the otherwise white body. You can see a bit of roughness in the seams, tiny inconsistencies you wouldn’t want to find if you bought an airplane from a manufacturer. But Seguin and Gillen will hop in any unproven aircraft like this one, test its performance, and fix whatever is wrong. And word of their willingness is spreading across the aerospace community. 'We know two guys who will fly all kinds of crazy shit' is how Seguin characterizes the grapevine talk."
On Fusion: A fascinating little trailer about futures past (in film).
1. thefront.com 2. soundcloud.com | @danhett 3. iea.org | @nelderini 4. news.sciencemag.org | @vaughanbell 5. motherboard.vice.com
Hop in Any Unproven Aircraft