In Effect, Drinkable Nostalgia
In today's edition: the supply side, bug collectors, record media consumption, Kraftwerk's first show, and an AI pioneer's disappointment.
***The Real Future Fair is coming to San Francisco, November 6-7. I'm giving away a couple tickets to the Friday conference away each time I send a newsletter. And today, I'm gonna pick the first people to hit my inbox.***
"Beginning in the 1990s, tea connoisseurs from Taiwan, who enjoyed naturally aged pu’er grown decades earlier in Yunnan and stored in the form of compressed cakes, started to travel to Xishuangbanna to learn the origin of the tea, celebrating the link to Chinese history and the notion of artisanal production. Their interest helped convince local officials and businesspeople to try to revive traditional tea production, meanwhile promoting pu’er tea as the distilled essence of rural virtue and simple beauty; in effect, drinkable nostalgia."
2. These Danes collected and cataloged bugs on the roof of a museum for 18 years.
"It was two employees from the Natural History Museum of Denmark with extensive entomological expertise, Ole Karsholt and Jan Pedersen, who collected and identified all the insects. The monitoring took place every week from 1992 to 2009 through spring, summer and autumn using a light trap at the roof of the museum at 17.5 meters height. What started out as a hobby based on scientific curiosity, ended up in an extensive faunal and climate change study."
3. Crazy person tries to record (almost) all of his weekly media consumption.
"What you are about to encounter is a banal itemization. This is accounting, nothing more. Every Sunday, I plan to publish a diaristic ledger of all the cultural artifacts that I consumed over the past week. (Within some parameters — here are the rules.) No commentary about said artifacts will be provided, other than placing recommended items in bold."
4. This very early Kraftwerk show in a small West German town is noisy and awesome.
"In the electronic music realm, they have godlike status, but way back in 1970, German band Kraftwerk was just getting started — and now a video of their very first concert has landed on YouTube. The band later became known for their techy outfits and their slick staging, but as you'll see, at this point they were still in hippie/rocker mode. Still, their trademark quirky sound is all there."
"I was lucky enough to be invited to meet recently with Minsky at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and I took a videographer to capture the conversation. It was a charming, slightly surreal experience. After all, it’s unusual to meet someone who was on a first-name basis with John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Albert Einstein. And despite being unwell for the past couple of years, Minsky, 88, hasn’t lost his playful sense of humor. It was also fascinating because artificial intelligence has had a remarkable renaissance in recent years, thanks especially to progress in simulating the process by which neurons and synapses enable a brain to learn. Minsky has had a huge influence on the field’s progress toward this new dawn."
On Fusion: Meet the people who run Instagram’s most horrifying accounts.
1. foreignpolicy.com 2. eurekalert.com | @unlikelyworlds 3. medium.com 4. music.cbc.ca | 5. technologyreview.com | @antonioregalado
In Effect, Drinkable Nostalgia