Linkfest #30: Greyscale Gelato, the "Ott Derivimeter", and Vangelis' Ambient Music For Surgeries
Hello again!
Time once again for "the opposite of doomscrolling” — my latest “Linkfest”, for which I cruise the endless overpasses of the Global Information Superhighway, searching for the finest pit-stops of science, culture and technology.
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Let’s begin ...
1) 📊 An embroidered dataviz of daily activities
Each year, Sophie O’Neill keeps an “embroidery journal”: Every day she stitches an icon that represents something that happened to her.
It slowly grows into a gorgeous riot of imagery. That picture above is last year’s journal, as of the middle of April — during which transpired …
April was spent celebrating Sam’s new job, reading tons of books, and still playing Stardew Valley.
A highlight of the month was exploring areas near Glasgow that we could see ourselves living. We even picked out an area that seemed quiet, but had a good sense of community. We started actively viewing houses together.
Icons of note:
- Gazebo – Sam and I visited the area that we decided to house hunt in.
- Ice cream – After a picnic at Queen’s Park in Glasgow, I got myself an ice cream.
- Party popper – Sam was offered a new job in a better area.
Here’s the final journal for all of 2024 …
I love this idea! It’s a sumptuous enough product for an outsider to admire. But for O’Neill herself, it’s got to be a really mesmerizing way to look back at a year — since she knows the import of each icon, and the mood or moment in which she stitched it.
2) 🎶 When Vangelis wrote background music for surgeries
Vangelis was a synthesizer pioneer famous for creating the scores for 80s movies like Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner. I knew that!
But I didn’t realize he had also — as one of innumerable side-projects — recorded the “Tegos Tapes”, hours of ambient synth-music for surgeons to listen to, in the background, while they performed surgeries:
Originally available in 1998 as an expensive set of three 4 hour video tapes plus large book in a case and only available to practicing surgeons via Dr. Tegos. Vangelis was friends with the surgeon and had recorded music specifically for these tapes from special requests, as the subject matter could be ‘monotonous’.
These audio files were nowhere on the Internet until a Vangelis superfan hunted down a copy of the original hardcover book (with tapes) in Athens; he wrote a blog post about the quest here.
Now they’ve been scanned and you can hear them on Soundcloud.
3) 🎮 “Stimulation Clicker”
Back in Linkfest #18 I wrote about “Infinite Craft”, a witty game made by the creative coder Neal Agarwal — a riff/parody of the often-byzantine crafting-mechanics now built into many video games.
He’s got a new parody game out: “Stimulation Clicker”, and it’s a doozy!
Basically, you frantically click the main button, and as your clicks build up, you can “spend” them to display various on-screen stimulations. That gif above is my screen after about three or four minutes of play; I had floating DVD bouncers, a subway-surfer video, an ASMR mukbang video, and various other bits of screenstuff.
I can’t imagine what it looks like if you play for an hour. I think I’m gonna clear aside an hour and find out.
4) 📃 Isaac Newton’s list of sins
In 1662, when he was 20 and still a student at Cambridge, Isaac Newton made a list of his sins.
It’s a pretty nutty collection, I gotta say. Here’s how it begins …
1. Vsing the word (God) openly
2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it.
5. Making a mousetrap on Thy day
6. Contriving of the chimes on Thy day
7. Squirting water on Thy day
8. Making pies on Sunday night
9. Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day
10. Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.
11. Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons
12. Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command.
13. Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
It goes on much longer!
The sins really vary in terms of moral gravity, don’t they? I mean, eating an apple in church or stealing cherry cobs from Edward Storer feel like rather … less serious offenses compared to “Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them”.
Go check out the rest of Isaac Newton’s sins.
5) 🔦 Looking at your garden using a UV flashlight
Over at the Guardian, two columnists have discovered a fun night-time activity: You buy a UV flashlight and go check out plants and insects when it’s dark.
If a UV torch is pointed at plants and animals after dark, its photons interact at a molecular level, causing a lower-energy light to be re-emitted, but in the visible spectrum. In essence, the subjects fluoresce and the beam turns everyday parts of our world into a baroque psychedelia. A gritstone wall, for example, becomes a matt red sheet (algae) studded with glittering lime (any lichen patches).
Above, you can see some of the golden saxifrage in Cocker’s garden — daylight on the right, UV on the left. Trippy, eh?
Or check out his spiky bogmoss …
As he describes it …
By day, it’s a superb cushion of freshest green, with each plant’s central floret fringed with seven or eight lateral shoots that droop around the head like huge vegetative spiders. See it under UV and the whole organism becomes a dancing troupe of lavender, aquamarine, turquoise, purple or pink.
Here’s another Guardian piece by Kate Blincoe with pictures of her garden too.
Tomorrow I’m cycling down to my local Microcenter to get my own UV flashlight, I gotta get in on this.
6) ❓ “Wikenigma”
a unique wiki-based resource specifically dedicated to documenting fundamental gaps in human knowledge.
Listing scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer.
That's to say, a compendium of so-called 'Known Unknowns'.
I really like this idea! I can’t speak to how accurate are its entries. One danger, I suspect, is that this type of project is liable to quickly attract the attention of people who regard chemtrails and reptilians as “unsolved mysteries”, among other conspiracies.
When I poked around on Wikenigma I discovered, to my delight, that there are some entries on cycling — including the puzzle over why riderless bicycles, set in motion, tend to self-stabilize. Also, they apparently don’t know who invented the bicycle crank.
The interesting challenge here, I suspect, is in crafting entries that are usefully specific enough. For example, there’s an entry noting that boredom is poorly understood … which is certainly true but feels, I dunno, kind of vague? I’d be more interested in a series of entries about various facets of boredom, each of which goes deep, rather than a blanket assertion about the overall domain.
Then again, if Wikenigma succeeds — which I hope it does — I would assume these Linnean forking branches will emerge.
I’m certainly tempted to dive in and add some entries.
7) 🎸 Roadies in their 70s
For rock bands, apparently some of the most in-demand roadies are in their late 60s and 70s.
Tim Sommer has a wonderful piece profiling a handful of these AARP members, who keep on getting work because their deep well of experience means they’re unfazed by any musical emergency. Since their careers date back to the 1960s, they’ve seen it all. Sure, they may have knee replacements and back issues, but there is no sound-board crisis with which they have not dealt.
A sample from the piece (gift link) …
A good tech’s work is mostly invisible to the audience. “People go, ‘Wow, what an awesome show, man. They played 90 minutes!’ But you have no idea what it takes to make these 90 minutes,” said Ingo Marte, who has worked with hard rock bands like Danzig, Saxon and Armored Saint for 41 years. (He’s a relatively young 65.) “I had actually a really bad heart attack like eight years ago,” he added, “and that’s when I thought, OK, I am done. No more touring. But I picked myself up and I’m still at it.”
Schoo’s work with the Edge involves maintaining and tuning as many as 27 guitars a night, as well as precisely finessing the mind-boggling array of effects the musician uses, in real time, to build his sound. Schoo said that U2’s residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2023 and 2024 was particularly arduous.
“There are 17 steps from the floor — where my guitar world is — up to that stage. So, I was 70 years old at the time, and I am running up and down and up and down those steps with an eight-pound guitar, for 40 shows. I get paid handsomely for that, but I’m always thinking, when will I trip? Is tonight the night I fall down those stairs?”
Go check out the whole thing — the photography is amazing.
8) 🧱 Cracking the secrets of Roman concrete
Ancient Roman concrete is amazing stuff.
Our modern concrete is super strong, but over time it develops cracks that let water in, making it crumble. In contrast, 2,000-year-old Roman concrete? It takes a licking but keeps on ticking. “Roman marine concretes have survived in one of the most aggressive environments on Earth with no maintenance at all,” as geologist Marie Jackson notes.
In recent years, scientists think they’ve figured out the secret, and in the New York Times (gift link), Amos Zeeberg dove into it.
The main clue is these little white chunks studded throughout the Roman concrete. Scientists used to think these chunks were evidence of impurities — i.e. screwups by the Romans mixing the concrete.
According to Dr. Masic’s research, these lime clasts were actually reservoirs of calcium that helped fill in cracks, making the concrete self-healing. As cracks formed, water would seep in and dissolve the calcium in the lime, which then formed solid calcium carbonate, essentially creating new rock that filled in the crack.
The chunks are typically thought to be unintentional products of poor workmanship, but Dr. Masic maintains that Roman engineers were too clever to consistently make concrete riddled with mistakes. “People said lime clasts are bad mixing of slaked lime,” he said. “Our hypothesis is it’s not part of bad processing; it’s part of the technology.”
Now various teams of researchers are reverse-engineering the Roman techniques to produce new concrete with that same self-healing property. Early tests are promising:
In one experiment, the researchers built concrete arches, submerged them in seawater for 50 days and then pushed the top of the arches with increasing pressure until the concrete started to bend and crack. Then the arches were submerged for almost a year and tested again. The researchers found that CASH compounds had filled the tiny cracks, and that the arches could withstand two to three times as much force as before, depending on the particular test.
And, bonus! The ancient Roman style requires far less energy.
Manufacturing normal concrete these days requires firing it at 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, which is mostly done using coal — so concrete production is fully 8 per cent of global CO2 emissions. But these Roman techniques? They only require 1,300 Fahrenheit. If we could actually mass-produce this stuff we’d have far stronger, more durable materials with dramatically slashed carbon emissions.
9) 📐 The “Ott Derivimeter” of the 1930s
Behold the extremely cool “Ott Derivimeter” — a high-tech protractor from the 1930s. It’s designed to let you precisely identify the derivative of a curve.
If you watch the video, Chris Staecker shows how it works: The derivimeter has a mirror that you swivel until its angle produces a precise image of the curve. At that point, the derivimeter is oriented such that its angle is the perfect tangent. You read the degrees on the metal semicircle and there’s your derivative.
So elegant! I’d love to get my hands on one, but I can’t seem to find any for sale anywhere, waaah.
10) 🐜 How armies of ants can reduce pesticide use
Ancient farmers had long observed that whenever there was a really massive ant population on their farm, they had less blight and mold. For millennia, in fact, Chinese farms specifically cultivated ant populations precisely because it always correlated to healthier crops.
Modern research had backed up this farmer wisdom. Studies have found that wood ants in Denmark reduced apple scab — a real crop-destroyer — by 61 percent; in fact the ants did twice as good a job as pesticides. The same deal with mango, cashew and citrus crops.
Okay, cool. But … how precisely do ants have this effect?
The answer, Jensen said, lies in how ants function. All species of the arthropod possess a body that is essentially hostile for bacteria because they produce formic acid, which they use to constantly disinfect themselves. Ants are also perpetually hungry little things that will feast on the spores of plant pathogens, among other things, and their secretion of formic acid and highly territorial nature tends to deter a medley of other insects that could be transmitting diseases or making lunch of some farmers’ crops. Ultimately, their greatest trick is what Jensen’s newest research reveals: Ants also inherently have antimicrobial bacteria and fungi on their bodies and feet, which can reduce plant diseases in afflicted crops, with these microorganisms deposited as the critters walk. When the bugs are cultivated in fruit orchards, they march all over trees, their feet coating the plants in microbial organisms that can curb emerging pathogens.
Very cool piece — worth reading in full! Cultivating ants en masse could let farmers walk back their use of pesticides, which would have terrific knock-on effects on soil quality, too.
11) 🍦 Greyscale gelato
How much does the color of a food influence how you taste it?
Down in Melbourne, the artist João Loureiro is doing a fun project to test this out. He’s working with a local gelateria to concoct six flavors of gelato that are various shades of grey.
On-site, customers can ask Piccolina about the flavors of the grayscale gelato, which range from light grey to almost black. João Loureiro tells designboom in an email that the flavors change every time the work is shown. ‘It depends on local flavors and the ice cream production system,’ he shares with us. Users across social platforms still try to guess the flavors, including black sesame, but only when they visit the stall at MPavilion 10 can they confirm their hunches.
I’d love to taste these! Me, I feel like I’d be primed to taste them as ashy, or charcoal-flavored? But we might be quite surprised. Years ago while working on a story about “molecular gastronomy” — i.e. high-end chefs devising meals in exceptionally weird shapes and forms, using industrial food-prep techniques — I visited a corporate flavor lab, where a food chemist showed me hundreds of vials of artificial flavors, everything from blueberry to bacon.
“I can make anything taste like anything else,” he told me. I believed him.
12) 🌑 Rebuilding the Apollo moon-landing computer as a watch
The “DSKY Moonwatch” is one of the nerdiest things I’ve ever seen in my life.
A group of designers got obsessed with NASA’s computer that was in the original Apollo moon lander, and have recreated it as an $800 wristwatch.
They reimplemented the original code written by Margaret Hamilton (of that famous NASA photo), copied the exact keypad-controls, and even hired a designer to replicate the exact font — and hue of green — on the original NASA display.
It does the usual watch stuff (time, date, stopwatch), but since the watch also contains Hamilton’s OG code, you can — if you want — run the actual moon-landing sequence on your wrist.
Mind you, you’ll have to master the original NASA user-interface for this deeply idiosyncratic computer. As a story about the watch’s design notes …
To those accustomed to modern point-and-click setups, the AGC's approach can appear challenging to grasp. In essence, verbs represented actions the computer could perform, while nouns were specific data inputs.
For example, pressing "verb" followed by "35" triggered a test of the indicator lights and display. Verb and noun commands also instructed the Apollo lunar module's computer to begin the landing routine. Both of these actions can be replicated on the DSKY Moonwatch.
Verb and noun codes also allow users to adjust the watch's time, alarm, stopwatch and GPS navigation functionalities. On the Apollo missions, astronauts used a "cheat sheet" to keep track of nearly 200 verbs and nouns. Wearers have a similar guide, so there is no long list of codes to memorize.
"We felt a profound responsibility to get this right," said Clayton. "We wanted to create something that the community is going to be accepting of, where they say, 'this is exactly how we would have designed it ourselves.'"
These people are totally unglued. I love it! Not enough to, y’know, shell out $800 for this watch, but I admire how much they have committed to the bit.
13) 🐝 A poem about unhappy bees that was put on trial in 1723
In 1723, the writer Bernard Mandeville was pretty unknown. But that all changed when he published a poem called “The Grumbling Hive”.
The poem is about a bee society that is beset by vice: There’s drunkness, gluttony, idle leisure, endless primping fashion. The morally upright bees in the population bemoan this state of affairs, and eventually their god, Jove, heeds their complains and intervenes — by suddenly making all the bees utterly honest, upright, and clean-living.
The problem is that the hive’s economy utterly collapses. Without people spending money on booze, frivolous clothing, gambling and other such vices, there’s precious little economic activity. As Mandeville describes it in his poem, all foreign trade dries up …
As pride and luxury decrease,
So by degrees they leave the seas,
Not merchants now, but companies,
Remove whole manufactories,
All arts and crafts neglected lie,
Content, the bane of industry.
This idea — that prosperity relies on “vice” spending — went off like a bomb in polite 18th-century society. Back then, philosophies of “how society worked” most often proceeded from an insistence on the basic morality of humanity. The idea that vice could be fruitfully productive seemed bananas, and dangerous.
So writers and priests and philosophers all ganged up on Mandeville, penning tracts that furiously denounced “The Grumbling Hive”. Soon Mandeville himself was literally put on trial.
He escaped punishment. And he kind of won the argument, in the long run, as John Callanan writes in a terrific essay about “The Grumbling Hive”. In his weird little poem, Mandeville had opened a new intellectual door: He had described society not as it ought to be, but as it actually was.
He more or less invented anthropology …
Mandeville approached his subject matter — the nature of human beings and their society — in a manner quite unlike anyone before him. He did not proceed from a stipulated definition of the human being, setting down the rules of society a priori, or by sermonizing upon God’s plan for humanity. Instead, Mandeville adopted the method of a social anthropologist. The introduction to the Fable begins with a complaint: “One of the greatest reasons why so few people understand themselves, is, that most writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are.”
And he was asking a question that is incredibly relevant even today …
Was it possible to be morally good in a commercial capitalist society? Is the very idea of virtue out of place in the market? Isn’t greed just a straightforward good for the modern individual, who is now as much a consumer as they are a citizen?
I had never heard of this odd literary work, but damned if I’m not downloading all of “The Grumbling Hive” to read it right now. Check out the rest of that essay by Callanan — it’s damn interesting.
14) 🔊 The “sonic heirloom”
The designers at two firms — Map Project Office, and Father — created this intriguing art piece, the Sonic Heirloom.
It’s got a little round recording “puck” you carry with you to sample sound from your daily life. Then when you get home you put the puck into Sonic Heirloom … and it plays the audio back, while also spinning the Heirloom’s tin-and-copper bell — and mixing the playback with the eerie, churchlike resonance of the ringing metal bell.
Basically, it’s a way of remembering your day by re-experiencing its sound.
You can hear what it sounds like in this demo reel video on YouTube.
As the designers write on their web site …
This project encourages reflection on the profound role sound plays in capturing life’s significant moments, urging us to engage more intentionally with the soundscapes of our lives. Rather than allowing sound to passively complement the visual, Sonic Heirloom invites users to embrace sound as a primary sense for storytelling and memory. [snip]
Inspired by historical sonic tools imbued with meaning, such as bells and clocks, the Sonic Heirloom reflects these timeless forms in its materiality, interaction, and design language. Built to endure, the heirloom can be passed down through generations, inviting each new generation to connect with, reinterpret, and cherish the memories it holds.
I’m not sure I’d want to listen to this thing a lot, but it’s a really intriguing concept.
An ur-point: The designers are quite correct that audio is a neglected dimension in the media we use to record (and revisit) our lives. We’ll often look at pictures or video to evoke memories. But we’ll rarely listen to only sound captured from our everyday activities.
Given how evocative audio alone can be, it’s an interesting area for designers to explore.
15) 💿 The Phaistos Disk
Behold the Phaistos Disk: Discovered in 1908 during an archaeological dig of a bronze-age Minoan are, it is covered in symbols the meaning of which nobody, to this day, can decipher.
“Nobody really knows who made it or if we’re even holding it right-side up, let alone what language it’s in,” as Adnan Qiblawi writes for Artnet.
As he notes …
What makes the Phaistos Disk particularly mind-bending is its method of creation. Each of its 241 symbols was carefully pressed into the soft clay using individual stamps. The 45 different signs spiral inward from the disk’s edge on both sides, arranged in tidy little groups that closely—and tantalizingly—resemble words. The symbols themselves are a parade of miniature artworks: strutting figures wearing feathered headdresses, fish swimming nowhere, birds frozen in flight, along with tools, plants, and buildings rendered in remarkable detail. [snip]
Scholars, some who have dedicated decades of their lives to deciphering the disk, have suggested everything from a prayer to an adventure story, from military propaganda to instructions for a board game. Some regard it as a sacred text, others as an ancient geometric theorem. It’s like having one of the world’s oldest storybooks, but no way to read it, and without more examples of this mysterious writing system, the code might never be cracked.
Apparently the sophistication of the individual stamps used in its creation — and their style — made some archaeologists believe for years that it was a hoax. But later on they found artifacts from the same period with similar glyphs, and others with the same spiral pattern … so it seems legit. Still a big mystery, though.
I’d never before heard of the disk, but am now intrigued to read more. Wikipedia has a good entry on it, to start me off.
16) 🌋 A final, suddden-death round of reading material
Porting Dragon’s Lair to the Game Boy Color. 🌋 Stealth bomber caught on Google Satellite view. 🌋 Delmar’s Highball Signal. 🌋 3D-printable Lego brick-sorting tray. 🌋 A new solution to “Moser’s Couch Problem”. 🌋 Can animals make art? 🌋 I really want a Whitman Audio Decoherence Drive. 🌋 Griffinology. 🌋 Zebrafish on ketamine are less depressed. 🌋 A 19th-century sheep painting goes viral. 🌋 Very cool concept ruler. 🌋 Robotic AI keyboard/mouse-tray moves around in anticipation of your actions. 🌋 Doom in a PDF. 🌋 Massive, astounding list of papercraft sites online. 🌋 They found a new dinosaur highway. 🌋 Vaccuum-robot with extra arm for picking up loose socks. 🌋 Plagiarism, as a plot device, is having a moment. 🌋 Which animals are least likely to get drunk? 🌋 A history of the screensaver. 🌋 Using 16 chainsaws to make a V16 car engine. 🌋 List of thrift-store art that turned out to be lost masterpieces. 🌋 3D print of the John Snow cholera map. 🌋 “Hydroclime whiplash”. 🌋 Turns out humans suck at predicting the strength of a knot. 🌋 Trippy 70s-style mod cuckoo clock. 🌋 Mailing insects in the 18th century. 🌋 The luxury passenger train that got trapped in the Donner Pass. 🌋 An espresso machine that refills itself by condensing water from the surrounding air. 🌋 Survey finds most scientists think alien life exists. 🌋 The danger of lightning strikes during Chinese caterpillar-fungus harvesting. 🌋 The Light Eaters. 🌋 What we learned about LLMs in 2024. 🌋 Map of the Star Wars galaxies. 🌋 William S. Burroughs’ xmas claymation movie. 🌋 Why the Mars Sample Return project is probably cooked. 🌋 Looks like he’ll never find those 7,500 Bitcoins he accidentally dumped in a landfill. 🌋 Regions of Germany under Roman rule 2,000 years ago fare better today. 🌋 Timber kindergarten building. 🌋 A huge, mysterious ring of metal that fell to earth in Kenya. 🌋 Thermal drone finds a dog missing for a week in the woods. 🌋 The San Diego Symphony’s 104-year-old organ runs Windows 7. 🌋 Navigating by “LORAN curves”.
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 Flowing Data, Numlock News, Hackaday, Messy Nessy Chic, The Morning News, and Mathew Ingram’s “When The Going Get Weird”; check ‘em out! Thanks also to Mastodon folks @brianb and Melissa.