Linkfest #2: "Trailerization", the Nokia Risk, and the Mystery of Ancient Rome's Impossibly Strong Concrete
Linkfest #2: "Trailerization", the Nokia Risk, and the Mystery of Ancient Rome's Impossibly Strong Concrete
Welcome to the latest edition of the Linkfest! Thank you for being a subscriber; if you’re enjoying it, spread the word – it’s a pay-what-you can signup here; the folks who can afford to contribute help keep it free for everyone else, too.
Let’s get to it! Here’s the best stuff I found online this week -- with a surprising number of findings about music 🎶 …
1) 📊 Tracking every hour of your life for five years
The Redditor "tsweezy" tracked every hour of his life for five years, and graphed it in a fantastic dataviz.
It's pretty huge; that screenshot above is only the top half, zoomed way out. You can click through here to see the whole thing and zoom in.
His key is at the top; 8 (purple) is "relaxation" and 9 (lighter bright red) is "waste". What's fascinating to me is how his wee hours -- like 1 to 3 am -- often start as "relaxation" but then transform to "waste". Here's a closeup ...
I recognize this pattern in my own life, LOL. I'm a night owl, so I'll often work until midnight or 1 pm, then relax for a bit before bed. But at that late hour, what starts as relaxation (playing a game, dorking around online) can transform suddenly, and unnoticeably, into "waste": What am I still doing awake?
2) 🎻 Symphonic music drawn in the shape of animals
"Sympawnies" is a YouTuber who composes classical music in which the notes of the score form pictures -- specifically, pictures of cute animals.
Above is "Sympawny no.4 (Chubby Cat)".
This is all too adorable. In pursuit of creating a drawing out of musical notes, the composer plays fast and loose with the shape of flags on each note. But hey, nonetheless, I'm impressed; it can't be easy to craft melodies with the constraint of making the arrangement of notes look like a sleepy kitty.
3) 🚁 Using a drone to fly a transplant lung across town
Organ transplants require hospitals to ferry organs from the donor to the recipient very quickly -- because organs deteriorate rapidly outside the body, minutes count. Given the vagaries of street traffic, medical helicopters are great; but it requires hospitals to have landing pads, and it's expensive.
So a group of Toronto doctors recently wrote a paper about successfully using a drone to get a lung across town for a transplant. A Singularity Hub notes ...
The drone they used was an M600 Pro, made by a Chinese company called DJI (this model is no longer in production). The team modified it to remove its original landing gear and payload rack so that the team could install a specially-designed lung transport box. They also modified the drone’s electronic systems for better connectivity to make sure it wouldn’t get thrown off track by interfering signals, and added safety features like a parachute recovery system, cameras, lights, and GPS trackers. Including the lung transport box and the lungs themselves, the drone was designed to weigh a maximum of 25 kg (55 pounds).
Flight time to go from one hospital to the other was about five minutes.
Not bad! Far cheaper than a helicopter, and no copter landing-pad needed. The researchers conducted 400 demo flights to make sure they had the tech down cold. The original (paywalled) scientific paper is here, in which they predict: "It is likely that all donor organs will be delivered by drone in the future, irrespective of distance from the transplant hospital.”
My other favorite story of rapid-organ transit was the Italians who used a police Ferrari (yep, the Italian police own Ferraris) to ferry a kidney 300 miles in two hours. Whoosh!
4) 🧱 Why Roman concrete is so strong
"Pantheon, Rome" by Gary Campbell-Hall (CC 2.0 license, unmodified)
Ancient Romans built tons of stuff out of concrete -- and that concrete has turned out to be incredibly durable. Everything from their aqueducts to the dome of the Pantheon is still standing, something has long gently mystified scientists and materials engineers. Why has Roman concrete outlasted many of today's concrete structures? How did they make it so strong?
A new study thinks it has found the answer: The Romans used an unusually high-temperature technique for mixing in more lime than you'd typically expect. Scientists had long noticed the Roman concrete had sizable chunks of lime, and it seemed like a flaw.
Nope. It was intentional, because the extra lime makes the concrete self-healing ...
When cracks form in the concrete, they preferentially travel to the lime clasts, which have a higher surface area than other particles in the matrix. When water gets into the crack, it reacts with the lime to form a solution rich in calcium that dries and hardens as calcium carbonate, gluing the crack back together and preventing it from spreading further.
This has been observed in concrete from another 2,000-year-old site, the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, where cracks in the concrete have been filled with calcite. It could also explain why Roman concrete from seawalls built 2,000 years ago has survived intact for millennia despite the ocean's constant battering.
5) 🎛️ A short story about a synthesizer, with a synthesizer included
Robin Sloan is one of my favorite fiction writers, and he's also an adept programmer. He just blended the two together with his latest online short story, "In The Stacks (Maizie's Tune)" -- which is about an old 1970s-era synthesizer at a library, and the unexpected patron who brings it to life.
The story is incredibly charming, and a quick read, so: Read it! But also ...
... at the top of the page is a little web synthesizer that Robin created. You can pick different notes, then fiddle with the waveforms (which changes the sound of the tone) as well as the delay (echoey sound) and attack (how hard or softly each note arrives). You set it playing and it becomes a fun little looping melody that's in the background while you read.
Truly cool.
6) 🎥 The value of watching movies while you're legally blind
Kathie Wolfe has been legally blind her whole life; she can see blurry colors, motions and faces, but no detail. She grew up not really knowing what smiles were, for example.
When she was a child, a doctor recommended taking her to the movies -- because she'd see much more detail in the massively-blown-up faces in closeups. He was right; as Wolfe writes in the New York Times ("friend" link here for non-subscribers) ...
My grandmother would tell me to smile when she took my picture, but I had no idea what a smile looked like. I didn’t know what my dad was talking about when he’d tell me not to curl my lip. I was later thrilled to discover what smiling and dancing looked like when I saw Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in “Mary Poppins.” I shivered as I looked into the deliciously evil eyes of Cruella de Vil in “101 Dalmatians.”
At the movies, for the first time, close to the giant silver screen, I could see clenched fists, grimaces, smiles, nods and other expressions and gestures. Back in the day, I would have had no idea of what a life hack was. But that’s what movies have been for me. [snip]
From watching films, I got my first idea of what people were talking about when they said someone was smirking, snarling or shrugging. Today I’m not bewildered if I’m asked to smile for a photo. One day, I’ll learn how to roll my eyes.
7) 🎥 How old pop song are "trailerized" for modern movies
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"Trailerization" is the modern trend of taking a well-known pop song and transforming it to become the emotional hook of a movie trailer. If you watch the video for the new Ant-Man movie, you'll hear (around the one-minute mark) a trailerized version of Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road".
It's recognizably the song: It's Elton John's original vocal track, the same melody, the same lyrics. But in place of the piano you hear in the original track, there's a thudding electronic drum and a dark, moody, slightly buzzing bass-synth.
The New York Times has a fascinating piece trailerization, which basically entails stripping the song down to its essence -- often the vocal performance -- and modernizing everything else. The Times profiles Bryce Miller, the Mozart of trailerization, who redid "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" for 2019's "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" trailer, and Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” for “House of Gucci". He also transformed the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” into a moody orchestral swell for "Wednesday".
As he tells the Times (that's a "friend" link, you can read it even if you don't subscribe):
“As soon as I can get rid of dated-sounding guitars and drums, I can build a more contemporary production that is pulling from more pop music sounds,” Miller said. “Older recordings sonically are a little thin and lack the heft that so many contemporary songs have.”
That's a fascinating point! As the neuroscientist/producer Daniel Levitin told me when I profiled him back in 2006, "timbre" -- the overall "sound" of a track -- is crucial in pop music. It's how you recognize a band or an artist. Elton John's voice has a distinct timbre; nobody sounds like him. But Miller's goal is to revamp the rest of the timbre in "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road": When he calls those guitars and drums in 70s or 80 rock "dated", what he's saying is they have the timbre of their time ... which he doesn't want in 2023.
Go read the whole piece; it's an amazing meditation on the role of music in Hollywood. As Miller notes, trailers these days often don't explain much of a movie's plot; what they sell is not so much the story ("In a world where the sun is dying ...") as the mood of the film. Since music is exceptionally powerful at evoking emotion ...
... the trailer’s soundtrack has become increasingly crucial. “Music is sometimes 80 to 90 percent of the process to us,” Woollen said. “It’s trying to cast that right piece of music that’s going to inspire and dictate rhythm and set tone and inform character and story, and hopefully make an impression.”
9) 🎙️ A final, sudden-death round of reading material
🎙️ Chicago's wooden streets. 🎙️ The most powerful Uber driver in India. 🎙️ He logged (rated) every slice of pizza he ate in NYC for eight years. 🎙️ Unsettlingly good deepfake mashup of “Pulp Fiction” and “Seinfeld”. 🎙️ Pretty photos of winter ice on Mars. 🎙️ If you can’t make your video meetings, send your metahuman clone. 🎙️ Haptic video game shirt. 🎙️ The "Nokia Risk". 🎙️ Why some people can't tell left from right. 🎙️ The 17th-century fraud that made cheese bright orange. 🎙️ Grey whales give birth in front of a tour group. 🎙️ "Video game studio called Proletariat refuses to recognize union". 🎙️ When you're sexually harassed by a chatbot. 🎙️ A marine biologist rates shark attacks in movies. 🎙️ Facebook's abandoned attempt to build a railroad. 🎙️ DARPA is trying to make a drug that stops you from feeling cold. 🎙️ The top five items Walmart delivered by drone last year. 🎙️ Testing the use of a robot seal as emotional support for astronauts on Mars. 🎙️ "Garden Shifter" is a sweet little casual browser game.