Linkfest #29: "Methanotropes", Sign-Language Poetry, and Why Saturn's About To Lose Its Rings
Why hey there, fellow prisoners of the Internet.
It’s time for "the opposite of doomscrolling” — or, my latest “Linkfest”, in which I pan relentlessly for nuggets in the fractal, murky creeks of cyberspace, bringing you 20-carat pieces of science, culture and technology.
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Let’s begin ...
1) 🧶 Felt stop-motion animation
Stop what you’re doing and go check out Andrea Love’s amazing stop-motion animations.
She uses felt as her physical material, bringing it to life in wild and curious ways — i.e. a felt match lighting a felt candle, a felt nail-polish bottle applying felt polish. In addition to her own shorts she’s done work for shows like ParaNorman.
It’s all gorgeously weird and delightful.
2) ☁️ “Anti-tag” word clouds
A regular word cloud shows you the most common words in any given text.
Martin Wattenberg created the inverse, the “anti-tag cloud”. As he explains it …
An Anti-Tag Cloud shows you the most common English words that never appear in a text, visualizing the "negative space" of a literary work. Size indicates how frequent a word is across other texts.
That cloud above? Those are the most common English words that never appear in Pride and Prejudice.
He analyzed 17 nineteenth-century works, and one thing I noticed is that the word “government” is prominent in many of these breakdowns. I wonder what is about this collection of Victorian-era writing that made the (very common) word “government” so rarely appear?
3) 🎸 How Brian May saved NASA’s asteroid-hunting mission
Back in 2018, NASA had a problem.
It had sent a spacecraft 83 million km into deep space to reach the asteroid Bennu. The craft was supposed to land on the asteroid and extract samples that would be flown back to Earth. After two years of travel, the probe was orbiting Bennu and sending back photos of the surface; NASA technicians were poring over those photos, looking for a place safe to alight.
The problem? They’d predicted Bennu would have a flat surface, like a sandy beach. Instead, it was covered in massive boulders the size of houses. If they aimed wrong, they could hit a boulder, tip over the probe, and wreck the whole mission.
So they called in their secret weapon:
Brian May, the guitarist for Queen.
As Robin George Andrews writes in Popular Mechanics …
In addition to shredding guitars, selling out stadiums across the world, and being knighted by the King of England, May is a trained astrophysicist.
May’s focus is stereoscopy — the practice of combining two flat images to make a 3D image. May and his colleague Claudia Manzoni melded multiple images of Bennu taken at slightly different angles to transform the asteroid into an eye-popping 3D object. Potential sampling sites looked flat in regular images, “but then Brian would send the stereo, and you’re like, ‘Woah, look at that, that’s crazy—we could never get into there,’” says Lauretta.
Interestingly, I’d learned about May’s obsession with stereoscopic imagery back in 2017 when I wrote a story for Smithsonian magazine about the Victoria-era vogue for stereoscopes. It turns out that for decades, May has been collecting rare Victorian stereoscopic images — and hardware — and has amassed one of the world’s most comprehensive collections.
Anyway, go read that whole Popular Mechanics story; this is just one cool detail, but the whole tale of sampling Bennu is wild.
4) 🔮 Sci-fi tarot
Todd Alcott is a graphic designer who has produced this delight you see above: A tarot deck in the style of golden-age sci-fi pulp novels.
You can buy a copy at his Etsy store, or see individual cards in his Instagram feed, where he has also written up descriptions of each.
Here’s his description of “The Fool”:
Of all human ideas, “faith” was one of the most pervasive. It was a word that meant “belief without proof,” and it led to great conflicts among different tribes. A fool – that is, someone who was apt to behave carelessly or thoughtlessly, without regard to consequences, was thought to have a sort of divine protection around their person that would keep them from harm. In the tarot, The Fool tosses themselves into the void, not knowing where they will land or if they will survive the fall. For humans, this represented what was known as a ”leap of faith” and the action came with the expectation, or hope, that things would turn out all right. On another, more poetic level, The Fool’s actions are indicative of a disregard for the past or future, but instead indicate a desire to live in the moment.
5) 🤘 Sign-language poetry
Ilaria Parogni has a cool piece in the New York Times (gift link) about a Guggenheim Museum festival of sign-language poetry.
As she writes …
ASL poetry offers an incredible depth of expression through the use of location — a sign normally at the forehead, for example, can be moved somewhere else — as well as handshapes and facial expressions, Timm said: “A single sign choice can evoke a variety of thoughts and emotions depending on how it’s performed.”
ASL poetry’s dynamic quality “allows for a manipulation of space and movement that written poetry can’t quite capture,” she added. “The physicality of the language adds layers to the meaning and emotional impact.”
Poets are able to push the boundaries of the genre by developing their own style. Buchholz, for example, said his poetry blends common elements of spoken and written poetry, such as wordplay and rhyme, with distinctive elements of sign language poetry like spatialization (which involves changing a sign’s location) and classifiers (signs whose handshape, location, movement or palm orientation may be manipulated to depict a detail).
That whole Times piece has terrific photos and video of various ASL poets — def worth seeing.
I went on a hunt for ASL poetry on YouTube, and found there’s a lot! That image up top is from an excellent short documentary on ASL poetry by Great Big Story; it focuses around Douglas Ridloff, who runs a monthly ASL-slam-poetry event in NYC, which I am totally going to see next month.
I dig Ridhoff’s point, midway through that doc, about how ASL poetry hinges heavily on the emotive force of the poet’s face:
The face accounts for 50% of the grammar. The way vocal inflection might show emotion and mood in English, the mood is [gesturing to his face] here.
6) 🏙 The rise and fall of “Googie”
I’d never heard the term “Googie” before, but I’ve certainly seen the trend it names.
“Googie” is the design aesthetic of futuristic-looking roadside restaurants — and their huge, neon signage — that governed America from the 1940s to the 1970s. There’s a terrific story by Anna Kodé in the New York Times (gift link) about Googie, with a gorgeous gallery of restaurants still in existence today.
As she notes …
Just as today’s brands are built to shine on Instagram and TikTok, Googie structures were built to entice through a car window. They were usually at prominent intersections, and along with the neon signs, they had large glass windows “to show off the interior to people as they drove by,” Mr. Hess said. “People would look in and see a lot of happy diners. The whole building was a three-dimensional billboard displaying the color and the activity and the people.”
Advances in glass manufacturing techniques allowed the material to be used more widely, so people came to see it as a “striking new technology,” as Mr. Hess put it, which reflected the technological optimism of the era. After World War II, there was a hopefulness surrounding the future that was promised by American innovation, spurred by the rise of the car, nuclear power and space exploration. A futuristic aesthetic permeated the culture — as seen in the high-tech-obsessed television show “The Jetsons,” which depicted several Googie-style buildings. Googie was the future, and the future was Googie.
When I cycled across the country last year (I’m 80% through writing my book about the experience, wooo), I saw a lot of wonderful examples of Googie! But apparently they’re vanishing due to a bunch of pressures: Local communities wanting to rein in Xtreme signage; chains less willing to spend big on delirious buildings and signs; etc.
Go read the whole piece, and check out the amazing photography.
7) 🚀 NASA rocket engine fireplace
NASA has created an 8-hour-long video of their moon rockets blasting off — inside a cozy little fireplace.
It’s perfect for running on an LCD TV while you sip bourbon or eggnog on a wint’ry night.
As they note in the description on YouTube …
Technically, this fireplace packs the heat of the SLS rocket’s four RS-25 engines and a pair of solid rocket boosters – just enough to get you to the Moon! (And get through the holidays with your in-laws.)
This glowing mood-setter is brought to you by the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that launched Artemis I on its mission around the Moon and back on Nov. 16, 2022. 8.8 million pounds of total thrust.
Keep the volume up on this video — the quiet-but-throaty roar of the engines is like the purr of a cat the size of a public library: Soothing, and terrifying.
(Oh, and: Enable the close-captioning, lol.)
8) 🎲 Poleana, a board game born in Mexico’s prisons
Over on the AP, Caterina Morbiato has an intriguing piece about “poleana”, a board game that initially became popular in Mexico’s prisons.
Poleana is played on a square wooden box with a sunken center for dice rolling. Four players, each with four pieces, race to navigate the board, using specific dice combinations and calculations to move their pieces from their starting positions, around the board, and out through their designated corner, while strategically blocking opponents.
The board symbolizes the confines of prison, and getting out before the others, winning freedom — even if just metaphorically — is the game’s goal. [snip]
Fernando Rojas, 57, learned poleana when he was 18, but it was in prison where he honed his talents. The games, which can last for hours, in prison happen back-to-back.
“It really helps you escape the reality of being a prisoner and that’s how it started,” Rojas said. “No one can understand what it’s like to be a prisoner … you don’t see the end of your sentence. There are people who have to do drugs as their way to escape. Poleana is very important in prison.”
An anthropologist says the game has its roots in Indian pachisi, and took off in the prisons in the 1940, and decades later made the jump to Mexican culture overall. COVID apparently gave the game a new boost — families were stuck at home for weeks on end, and playing a ton of Poleana.
(Check out the whole AP piece — it has wonderful street photography of folks playing poleana.)
I’d love to buy a poleana board; I can’t seem to find any for sale in the US market but there are lots for sale online at Mexican game stores, like that one above …
(Thanks to Irwin on Mastodon for this one!)
9) 🦅 Drones that jump into the air like birds
Two-winged drones are very powerful; unlike the four-propeller hovering ones, two-winged drones can fly very far distances. They can coast, like airplanes.
But they have one big limitation: They need a runway to take off from. (Or someone to hurl them into the air.)
So some scientists wondered about a third possibility: What if you gave the drone legs, and it jumped into the air?
That’s how many birds get aloft, after all. Their legs are springloaded and powerful as heck; being able to leap into flight — at a moment’s notice — is crucial to escaping predators.
So the scientists built RAVEN, a drone with bird-like legs, and whaddya know: It worked really well!
As the New Scientist reports …
In indoor tests, RAVEN could jump almost half a metre into the air and at 2.4 metres per second – which is a similar speed to birds of the same size – at which point a propeller takes over. Being able to launch upwards from anywhere could make RAVEN useful in disaster relief missions where regular fixed-wing drones can’t land or take off, says Shin. First, however, the team will need to develop RAVEN’s ability to land safely, he says.
“We have seen quite a lot of work on flying robots that land on perches, but not a lot of people have focused on take off with legs,” says Raphael Zufferey, also at EPFL, who wasn’t involved with the work. “I think we’ll see the two fields – landing, or perching, and take off – come together in single platforms, where we’re able to have these robots fly, detect a branch, land on it, recover, do a mission and then take off.”
The drone can also hop around on the ground, including jumping up on top of obstacles taller than itself.
The problem with legs on a drone is they add weight, which for a drone is a huge energy problem.
But as the scientists note in their paper — free to read here — this is also a problem for birds! Ornithologists call this (awesome jargon alert) the “leg mass budget”: Evolutionarily, a bird optimizes for how much leg to possess based on its habitat and behavior. Woodpeckers need a lot of leg mass, because they perch on trees so much; aerial birds don’t. Really huge-ass birds like swans and albatrosses have to run to get airborne, because they’re so heavy that leg-mass budget-constraints prevent them from having legs strong enough to jump high.
Drones may have an easier time surmounting the leg-mass problem because, well, engineering. A piece in IEEE Spectrum discusses this nicely.
Me, I suspect this architecture would be neatly suited for the next drones we send to Mars. The terrain there is rocky and uneven, so legs might often work better than wheels. Better yet, an airplane-style drone could cover far more ground than a hovering one.
10) 🪐 Saturn’s rings are about to vanish
If you have a telescope, crack it out in the next few months and enjoy the view of Saturn’s rings — because they’re about to vanish.
Only temporarily! But beginning in March 2025, Saturn’s rings will be perpendicular to the Sun — so they’ll reflect almost no light. The rings will vanish from view of most ordinary telescopes, and remain hidden until November, when Saturn’s orbit again finally tilts the rings back enough to catch some rays and reappear. This happens once every time Saturn completes its 29-year-old circuit around the Sun.
Over at the Economist, Anne Wroe — fittingly, the Obituaries editor — notes that Galileo was freaked out when he too saw the rings vanish …
Galileo Galilei, the first person to study Saturn through a telescope, was the first to see this. It shocked him profoundly. When he initially turned his instrument on Saturn, in July 1610, he concluded that the strange “ears” or “handles” on either side of the central orb were two separate bodies. Galileo assumed that the parts of this “composite of three” never moved nor changed; he had “no doubt as to its constancy”. The planet still had this “triform” shape in June 1612. But by the end of that year the “handles” had vanished. In a letter to a fellow star-gazer, he asked: “Has Saturn devoured his own sons?”
Wroe uses the rest of the essay to meditate, quite beautifully, on how the vanishing of the rings matches Saturn’s mythopoeic status: It’s named after the god of farming, but is also the god of time’s relentless march, old age, and dissolution:
Saturn has always had this double character. The Roman festival of Saturnalia in December celebrated both the bringer of peace and fruitfulness, synonymous with feasts and dancing, and the Lord of Misrule, who upended the social hierarchy. At Saturnalia masters waited on servants, and servants gave masters orders, a reversal that many Romans found seriously disturbing. Saturn was both order and confusion.
Something of this dichotomy comes through in Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” of 1926, where Saturn’s slow, deliberate march, the plod of a clock, builds into a terror of trombones. This movement, Holst’s favourite, is subtitled “The Bringer of Old Age”. Of course, it must be so. Physical bodies inevitably fall to decay and die. Those heavy chords, based on bells Holst heard being rung at Durham Cathedral by two old men in black robes, are death coming. The quieter ending implies a possible acceptance.
It’s a short essay but really nice; unpaywalled link here.
11) 🧮 The Fibonacci clock
In the Fibonacci sequence, you start with 1 and 1, and keep going by adding the previous two numbers together to get the next. So the first five numbers are 1, 1, 2, 3, and 5.
The hardware hacker Philippe Chrétien used these to create this gorgeous clock. How does it work?
The screen of the clock is made up of five squares whose side lengths match the first five Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3 and 5. The hours are displayed using red and the minutes using green. When a square is used to display both the hours and minutes it turns blue. White squares are ignored. To tell time on the Fibonacci clock you need to do some math. To read the hour, simply add up the corresponding values of the red and blue squares. To read the minutes, do the same with the green and blue squares. The minutes are displayed in 5 minute increments (0 to 12) so you have to multiply your result by 5 to get the actual number.
For example …
So, not exactly the easiest clock to use 😂, but pretty cool-looking! Kind of a Mondrian thing going on here, right?
You can buy one fully assembled from Chrétien, or buy the components from him to assemble yourself; or just follow his guide and DIY it. (Another version by another hacker here.)
(BTW, I realize that some people begin the Fibonacci sequences not with 1 but with 0. When I wrote, above, that “you start with 1 and 1” it was because that’s how this clock creator organized his sequence; but both formats are commonly used.)
12) 🎙 A congressional retirement-speech delivered via AI
Jennifer Wexton, a representative from Virginia since 2019, was diagnosed in 2023 with progressive supranuclear pal. It’s a neurodegenerative disease that is, as she notes, “like Parkinson’s on steroids” — so it has quickly impacted her mobility and her ability to speak.
Initially she used text-to-speech typing to communicate, but didn’t like the robot-ish cadence of those voices. But then she hooked up with Eleven Labs, a firm that does AI voice cloning. They trained their AI on her speeches, and Wexton soon began using it in her daily life and congressional work.
Wexton also said the technology isn’t perfect. Because the audio used came from speeches and public events, it isn’t great for regular conversation, often making everything sound “like some big proclamation.” Her two college-aged sons, she said, don’t like it for that reason and, she quipped, she doesn’t use it to “ask my husband to please pass me the ketchup,” displaying a sense of humor that she is known for on Capitol Hill.
“At the end of the day, it will never be me. But it is more me than I ever could have hoped I could hear again and for that, I am so grateful and excited,” she said. “I plan to make the most of it.”
Perhaps most poignantly, she recently used her AI voice to deliver her farewell address to Congress. You can watch the whole thing here — it’s quite lovely.
Given how often we encounter stories of modern AI being used to purposes ranging from malign (deepfake porn, extortion, racist decision-making) to merely depressing (shrimp-Jesus AI slop, marketing copy produced at universal-paperclip velocity), it’s good to get a reminder of many socially deft and empowering uses of artificial intelligence.
After she debuted her voice clone, Wexton jokingly texted a few friends the same message: “AI isn’t entirely evil, just mostly.”
(Thanks to Naomi Pearce for pointing this one out to me!)
13) 🔓 A final, sudden-death round of reading material
“Grand Theft Hamlet”. 🔓 Synesthesiac AI. 🔓 Finding modern use for the ancient Chinese philosopher Menghzi. 🔓 “Everybody Wants To Rule The World sung in classical latin. 🔓 Human thought moves at barely 10 bits per second. 🔓 Doom on a keycap. 🔓 Doom on a sweater. 🔓 The psychology of successful telemarketers. 🔓 Solar-powered snowploughing in Vermont. 🔓 The “Homicidal Chauffeur Problem”. 🔓 New zwitterians just dropped. 🔓 Cocker’s Arithmetick, the 1691 book Benjamin Franklin used to teach himself mathematics. 🔓 “BirdVoxDetect”, an open-source neural network for recognizing birds by their song. 🔓 The surgical origins of the snow globe. 🔓 Human body temperature has been dropping since the 19th century. 🔓 Thomas Edison’s napping technique. 🔓 “Methanotropes.” 🔓 Larry Ellison just bought Tolkien’s local pub? 🔓 A test of chatbots finds they have “mild cognitive impairment and possibly early dementia.” 🔓 Tom Stoppard’s script doctoring of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. 🔓 The mutant trigonometric functions of the “lemniscate constant”. 🔓 Building a wooden calculator. 🔓 Why Belarusians always dominate at the World Morse Championships. 🔓 An argument that you shouldn’t depict The Joker with any interiority. 🔓 Glow-in-the-dark wood. 🔓 AI that guesses your accent. 🔓 They’re finding indigenous dugout canoes as old as the Egyptian pyramids. 🔓 LLMs considered as airlines. 🔓 Southern right whales live an average of 130 years. 🔓 LED Zeppelin II, as if recorded in the 50s. 🔓 The best of Creative Computing from 1976. 🔓 A symphony bassist bicycles to work in frozen Winnipeg. 🔓 The “Landauer Limit”.
CODA ON SOURCING: I read a ton of blogs and sites every week to find this material. A few I relied on this week include Numlock News, Hackaday, Messy Nessy Chic, and Mathew Ingram’s “When The Going Get Weird”; check ‘em out!