Linkfest #39: "Xenoparity", Navajo Microchips, and In Defense of the Em-Dash
Hello!
It’s time for "the opposite of doomscrolling” — or, my next Linkfest, for which I rifle through the infinite stoop-sale vinyl-crates of the Internet, hunting for the finest singles in science, culture and technology, just for you.
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Let’s begin ...
1) 📬 Chris Ware stamp-sheet shows a day in the life of a postwoman
The cartoonist Chris Ware was asked to create a sheet of stamps to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the USPS. He decided to do a linked series of images that show a day in the life of a postwoman.
Titled “250 Years of Delivering,” the sheet honors the post office’s milestone anniversary by documenting the quotidian life of a mail carrier making deliveries. The 20 interconnected stamps (printed in four rows of five) deliver a bird’s-eye view of a busy city, packed with perfectly drawn buildings, geometric trees and dozens of humans bustling about. In inimitable Chris Ware fashion, the progression of stamps also takes the viewer through all four seasons.
The carrier strolls past coffee shops, government buildings and various public gatherings across her busy year, visiting settings that would fit into any Chicago neighborhood. Across the stamps, she waves frequently and accepts letters from neighbors, including a construction worker who pops out of a manhole cover to give her one. The last stamp shows the carrier in her cozy home with her family, after an extremely long day.
Cool trivia: Ware notes that “as far as [the USPS] historian could determine, this was the first time anyone had ever tried to tell a story with a sheet of stamps.”
You can order a sheet of the stamps here; I already have.
2) 🎟 Which color dominates movie posters? Orange!
Stephen Follows does fascinating data crunches of movies; back in Linkfest #31 I wrote about his analysis on how romance was vanishing as a major plot.
He’s done a new dataviz — this one looking at which colors are most commonly used in movie posters!
After analyzing posters going back to the 1950s, he found a couple of cool things, including that the overall colorfulness of posters has been trending downwards for decades. (He doesn’t offer any hypotheses as to why; I’m really fascinated to figure this out, now.)
His other top-shelf finding? That the most common color in movie posters is orange.
(Well, after black, but black is, bien sur, not a color.)
Why orange? As Follows notes, orange turns out to be suitable for nearly any genre …
Comedies, adventures and family films are the biggest users of orange heavy palettes, often pairing it with sunny yellows to convey warmth, fun and accessibility. Action, sci fi and thrillers also rely on orange, especially when contrasted with blue, to signal spectacle, high stakes and elemental conflicts like fire versus ice or humanity versus technology.
Horror, thriller and mystery movies don’t tend to use much orange, save for things like firelight, sodium lamps and warning glows.
Orange if often used when:
Sun, dust or fire define the movie’s world(s). Deserts, sunsets, torches, explosions.
Historical texture matters. Sepia light, parchment, wood, brass and smoke.
Warm and approachable tone. Comedies, family travel, food stories, summer settings.
Post‑apocalyptic wastelands. Rust and ochre surfaces with cool tech accents.
Here’s his example gallery:
He goes through all the major colors and offers a similar analysis of what they’re most used for — it’s really fun to see, go check out his whole post!
3) 🍳 Kitchen robot analyzes leftovers, suggests recipes
Some students at MIT created a fun prototype of a kitchen robot — the “Kitchen Cosmo”. Show it a collection of ingredients or leftovers, and it’ll use visual-recognition to figure out what it’s looking at, then genAI to create a recipe you could cook using precisely that stuff. You can see a video of it in action here.
I’m tickled by the design: While it uses LLMs for recipe-generation, the input-output UI is deeply analog. You use a bunch of clicky buttons and dials and sliders to pick the parameters of the meal — “meat” or “dairy” etc, how many servings, whether it’s a side dish or a main, how long you have to cook, and emotionally what sort of meal this is.
The industrial design here is delicious — I mean, would you look at those controls …
… and there’s no screen: The recipe is output via built-in thermal-paper printer.
The retro style of the robot is a very meta historical reference! Back in the early, “retro” days of industrial computation — the 60s and 70s — computer-makers struggled to explain why any regular person might need a computer in their home. I mean, who had data that they needed to organize, crunch, or retrieve?
The one answer that computer-makers kept suggesting was … housewives organizing recipes! Surely the denizens of America’s kitchens would want a $10,000 computer in their kitchen, right? To help, y’know, retrieve all those recipes?
This was actually the argument behind the design of the Honeywell Kitchen Computer in 1969, marketed by Neiman Marcus …
It was completely batshit, of course, and there’s no record that Neiman Marcus ever actually made or sold any of these. (You can see more pics here.) But as the MIT designers of the Kitchen Cosmo note …
Formally, Cosmo draws inspiration from the 1969 Honeywell Kitchen Computer, a speculative product that famously promised to bring computing into the domestic sphere. With its red retrofuturistic shell and cylindrical recipe archive, Cosmo both pays homage to and critiques that lineage. But where Honeywell’s machine never functioned, Cosmo works, and works differently: improvisational rather than prescriptive, situated rather than universal. This human-centered approach is particularly evident in the novel ‘Cooking Mood’ dial, which allows the emotional character of a moment, including settings such as ‘Nostalgic,’ ‘Spectacle,’ and ‘Surreal,’ to influence the structure, tone, and logic of the generated recipe.
4) 🎶 Music generated using the weather of cities
![This image shows the interface of me’te.o.ra, a project described as a “long-distance [friend | relation]ships weather synth.” The background is a soft pastel gradient of pink, orange, blue, and purple. Overlayed are translucent grey boxes displaying live weather data for different cities—Dublin, Brooklyn, Cairo, Las Vegas, and Toronto—each showing temperature, wind speed, humidity, and precipitation. Sliders beneath each city suggest user interaction, possibly to adjust or mix weather-based sounds. The interface text recommends listening with headphones at 60% volume.](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/f41fb6c7-78f1-4c26-adda-6a019caee8f1.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
The hacker and artist Drice Ducongé dos Santos has created “me'te.o.ra” — a web site that generates ambient music triggered by the weather of cities.
It works like this: You go to the site and type in any city you want. Then …
This website uses openly available meteorological data (openmeteo API) to generate sounds depending on the weather of the location typed.
You can pick as many cities as you like and their sounds mix together. I chose Brooklyn — which generated a low drone — then Toronto, which generated some crashing noises, like thunder or waves. Las Vegas, Dublin and Cairo added some interesting warbly, synthy overtones. Altogether, it created a trippy little five-track ambient song that I left looping while I worked.
I like the idea that you could pick three or four friends who live/work in other cities, and jointly all pump in each other’s locales, so you can each work while listening to a unique piece of music generated by your collected geographies.
5) ⌨️ In defense of the em-dash
Lately the em-dash has become a suspicious piece of punctuation — because apparently LLM AI chatbots tend to overuse them. So if you use them? You risk sounding like a chatbot.
Over at The Ringer, Brian Phillips disagrees, and mounts a delicious defense of the em-dash.
As he points out, modern writing prizes simplicity, a trend that originated in the early 20th century. Simplicity is a good goal; as a journalist, I’d be the first one to agree that spare, precise prose appeals to the biggest audience. Forcing yourself to be ruthlessly clear in your writing usually also forces yourself to be ruthlessly clear in your thinking.
But as Phillips points out, some thinking is complex and digressive — and thus requires a suitable style of writing …
And that’s where the em dash comes to your rescue. This may be a bizarre thing to say, but I think of the em dash as the evolutionary heir of 18th- and 19th-century rhetoric, in the same way that birds are the heirs of dinosaurs. The em dash is a tool that lets writers expand their ideas without making them inaccessible. It’s almost always easy to follow in use, and the rules that govern it aren’t as ironclad as the rules that govern parentheses or semicolons; you’re able to deploy the em dash in more discretionary ways. It lets you break up sentences into parts that rub up against each other, challenge each other, give each other new inflections, or change each other’s meanings in ways that resemble the flow of human thought.
I agree; indeed I agree so much that I wrote my own defense of the em-dash three years ago, offering six reasons why it rocks. The first reason?
1. Em dashes feel slightly anarchic
People have a pretty good sense of the function of the various punctuation marks. The comma gives a short rest, while the semicolon joins two related ideas. The colon often introduces a list.
But the em dash? It’s weirdly all-fungible. It can be used in place of all of those punctuation marks I noted above, as the Punctuation Guide notes: “The em dash is perhaps the most versatile punctuation mark. Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons — in each case to slightly different effect.”
So it’s a shapeshifter, which makes it hard to pin down. Yet that also makes it exciting for me — because it suggests you can bust out an em dash, for, like, no reason at all except that you feel like it.
As Ben Yagoda notes, “It’s the mark that — unlike commas, periods, semicolons and all the others — doesn’t seem to be subject to any rules.” Or as Kate Mooney of the New York Times puts it…
[…] the em dash is emphatic, agile and still largely undefined. Sometimes it indicates an afterthought. Other times, it’s a fist pump. You might call it the bad boy, or cool girl, of punctuation. A freewheeling scofflaw. A rebel without a clause.
I stand by this one: Go forth and let the em-dashes fly.
6) 🎨 Navajo weaving of a 555 timer chip
The 555 microchip is famous in the world of electronics, because it’s a reliable timer and incredibly cheap: First introduced 50 years ago, you can buy one now for a couple pennies. There are 555 microchips in tons of everyday electronic devices and all over industry.
Marilou Schultz is a Navajo weaver renowned for doing artistic renditions of famous microchip circuits. Back in 1994, Intel hired her to do a huge illustration of their first Pentium chip. She kept doing more electronic-weaving art, and — above — is her version of the 555 circuitry.
For the 555 timer weaving, Schultz experimented with different materials. Silver and gold metallic threads represent the aluminum and copper in the chip. The artist explains that "it took a lot more time to incorporate the metallic threads," but it was worth the effort because "it is spectacular to see the rug with the metallics in the dark with a little light hitting it." Aniline dyes provided the black and lavender colors. Although natural logwood dye produces a beautiful purple, it fades over time, so Schultz used an aniline dye instead. The lavender colors are dedicated to the weaver's mother, who passed away in February; purple was her favorite color.
BTW, the connections between circuitry and the Navajo are quite old. As Shirriff wrote in another blog post, Fairchild — a pioneering tech firm in the 60s — hired hundreds of Navajo workers to build its famous “9040” chip.
7) 💡 Mathematicians’ body movements change before an “aha” breakthrough
Mathematics sounds like something you do entirely in your head — but in reality, it’s practically a full-body sport.
When a mathematician is working on a problem, they’re not just sitting there quietly like Rodin’s The Thinker. No, they’re almost always scribbling away, very often on a chalkboard or whiteboard. So if you watch a mathematician at work, you’ll see them writing stuff down, standing back to look at it, fidgeting, writing more, puzzling, pacing.
This gave a team of scientists an idea: Given all the physical movement, maybe there are physical “tells” that suggest that a mathematician is about to have a breakthrough inside — and maybe you can spot those tells before even the mathematicians themselves are aware they’re about to have the insight.
So the scientists took a bunch of mathematicians and had them work on problems from the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. (Very hard: The competition lasts six hours, has ten problems, and most competitors score 0 or 1 out of 120.) The mathematicians all worked on a chalkboard, and the scientists videotaped them.
Sure enough, you could see the mathematicians’ physical movements change just before they had a breakthrough “aha” …
This process of behavioral destabilization began minutes before the insight occurred (Fig. 4E). Mathematicians’ situated activity became increasingly unpredictable in the lead up to a sudden insight, starting more than two minutes before they expressed an insight (Fig. 4E). Surprisal ramped up gradually in the minutes before the insight, peaked after the moment of insight, and then decreased precipitously.
A concrete example: One mathematician had drawn a line to represent a bounded interval of real numbers. While she worked on the problem, usually she’d look at that line and then go look at a nearby list of real numbers.
But thirty seconds before her breakthrough she looked somewhere else — she looked towards …
… a drawing of a triangle on the opposite side of the blackboard
It makes me wonder what sort of physical “tells” there might be in other lines of insight-based work!
Here’s the original paper, and he’s a layperson’s writeup of it.
8) ☁️ Aeroecology
In Smithsonian Magazine, Jim Robbins writes a fascinating piece about the emerging field of “aeroecology” — the study of the skies as a complex ecosystem teeming with life.
Some 11,000 species of birds and 1,400 species of bats spend part of their lives in the air. Common swifts, for example, spend up to ten months at a time on the wing. Albatrosses can likewise go months without landing on solid ground. The bar-tailed godwit has the longest nonstop migration in the world, leaving southern Alaska and flying for more than a week, night and day, to New Zealand. The bar-headed goose migrates over the Himalayas, with reported sightings over Mount Everest more than five miles above sea level.
The aerosphere is also filled with populations of microbes so abundant they boggle the mind. Every day, 800 million viruses fall from the sky on every square meter of the earth. While some cause disease, others contain DNA that could be essential to life on earth. Early humans benefited from a snippet of viral DNA that now plays a role in our nerve communication and higher-order thinking. Researchers recently published a study that sampled microbes attached to dust circling in the atmosphere and identified 266 types of fungi and 305 types of bacteria. Even the dust, while not alive, plays a role in living systems. Significant amounts of phosphorus, calcium, magnesium and potassium travel on the jet stream from the Gobi Desert to the forests of California, where they fuel a nutrient-poor environment, nourishing trees that include the giant sequoias.
The piece focuses heavily on how new discoveries about bird navigation and migration can help retrofit wind-farms and glass skyscrapers with tech to reduce bird-strikes.
If you read nothing else in this piece, check out the fantastic opening segment: Robbins describes going to the World Trade Center last 9/11 to hang out with a group of bird-watchers. New York commemorates 9/11 each year by shining spotlights into the sky, a spectacle that’s magnificent but which also unfortunately bedazzles tons of birds. So the birdwatchers spend hours scrutinizing the skies and warning the light-operators whenever a huge crowd of birds is about to collide with the WTC — whereupon the lights are turned off for 10 minutes or so until the birds disperse. It’s a weirdly dramatic scene!
9) 🎙 Avant-garde bagpipes
In the New Yorker, Elena Saavedra Buckley has a fascinating profile of Brìghde Chaimbeul, a young musician who is “bringing bagpipes into the avant-garde”. (Nonpaywalled link here just in case.)
Making bagpipes avante-garde isn’t as much of a stretch as one might imagine, because the instrument already has a rather uncanny affect. The drone of a bagpipe is a long, single, wild note, ebbing and flowing and evolving like a pseudorandomized loop. It fits in nicely with experimental art, as the composer quoted here explains …
Every bagpipe performance starts with a squawking rev-up, in which the bag fills with air, the drones perk up with inhuman attention, like rabbit ears, and the sounds coalesce in tune and begin to announce themselves. Chaimbeul often stays in the droning place for long, exploratory stretches, revelling in a mass of tones before introducing melody. Her playing has little resemblance to the predictable, nasal assaults that one usually associates with bagpipe music. [snip]
Her final piece ended with nearly fifteen minutes of drone—four notes that emerged out of themselves, rolling around inside their own linked harmonics that made the space vibrate. Everyone else, by the sounds of their applause, could have gone on with her for much longer. [snip]
It might be easy to call Chaimbeul’s melting drones futuristic, but there’s something ancient about their primacy, which reaches back beyond the conventions, mostly established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that have determined what counts as tradition. People tend to say that Chaimbeul’s music collapses any sense of what is either orthodox or experimental. “The drone is the first sound,” as the composer La Monte Young wrote, in 1964. “It lasts forever and cannot have begun, but is taken up again from time to time.”
Part of what makes Chaimbeul’s music so lovely is that she plays the Scottish “smallpipes” — a bagpipe that’s propelled not by blowing into a mouthpiece but by squeezing a pump bellows under the right elbow. This produces a tone mellower than that of the more-piercing traditional pipes you’re likely familiar with.
You can hear Chaimbuel’s breakout album The Reeling right here on YouTube. (I bought her album myself via her Bandcamp account, which is here.)
It’s gorgeous stuff. It occurred to me that while her music is very analog, it has a digital vibe to it — not just because of that loop-like quality, but because Chaimbuel’s attack often has a bit of “glide” that, coupled with the reedy quality of the notes, reminds me of the attack-and-release of notes in 16-bit MIDI music for early console video-games.
10) 👾 A font that’s only two pixels high
Many people create low-rez fonts, but the designer and illustrator Joe Fatula has gone about as small as one can: His font “Two Slice” is only two pixels high.
Yet it’s reasonably legible? I think? As Rob Beschizza notes over at Boing Boing …
I figure it works because it's not worrying about letterforms at all, so the resulting visual consistency makes it easier to scan and read than Nanofont or those subpixel retina-wreckers. Perfect for your in-game signs and flavor text, pixel art game devs!
You can try it out here and download it to use as your daily word-processing font; I am morbidly interested to try thus writing — and filing — my next magazine feature. My editor’s reaction will be informative.
(BTW, in case it isn’t obvious, that image above is this entire Linkfest post rendered in Two Slice.)
11) 🕶 What it’s like to try a sensory deprivation tank
Back in the 80s I watched Altered States, a terribly-scripted movie in which William Hurt plays a scientist who floats in a sensory deprivation chamber while taking psychedelic drugs, and winds up regressing to caveman status. Sensory-deprivation tanks were kind of a thing in the 80s, I gather?
Anyhoo, I’d always wondered what it’s like to actually try one out, and I just stumbled across a terrific essay by Blair Braverman describing it.
Basically, a float tank is forced meditation—and there’s plenty of evidence that that’s helpful with about a million things, from reducing stress and anxiety to offsetting cognitive decline. But is it worth $90 an hour to be forced to meditate? And is meditation even something that can be imposed from the outside in? I was skeptical, mainly because last month I tried cryotherapy, which involved standing for three minutes in a -200 degrees Fahrenheit freezer, and the owner of that spa—which literally specializes in discomfort!—told me she doesn’t offer float tanks because everyone hates them. “You’re in water, in the dark,” she told me. “Just think about it.”
But the actual experience makes her a convert …
It’s hard to relax every single bit of your body. Without the pressure of a surface below me, I kept finding micro-muscles that were tense, parts of my ankles or shoulders or butt. When I moved, the water lapped, little tongues all over my skin. When I melted still and took deep breaths, my whole body rose with each inhale.
Noticing this took some medium amount of time. If time existed. Which it didn’t, really. Not here.
Why did I think this was sensory deprivation? There was so much to observe in my head, my breath. I slipped into waking dreams, scenes drifting before and around me that dissolved like mist when I tried to think enough to describe them with words. I felt loved ones, gratitude, beauty, grace. I was simultaneously asleep and alert.
I developed, in the dark, a kind of entitlement to sensationlessness. At one point, I felt genuinely affronted when the edge of my pinky brushed gently on the wall.
Go check out the rest of the piece, it’s pretty funny as well.
12) 📖 How Christopher Marlow made William Shakespeare possible
You know the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlow? Stabbed at age 29? Author of Doctor Faustus?
A new book argues that he basically kickstarted the literary revolution that led to Shakespeare …
When Marlowe was born in 1564, says Stephen Greenblatt, the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, England was still stuck in the Middle Ages, even as the Renaissance bloomed on the continent. Public entertainment revolved around bearbaiting and hangings; poetry was weighed down by moralizing and clumsy rhymes; brutal censorship stifled any art that challenged the crown’s authority.
By the time Marlowe died in 1593, at just 29 years old, England was in the midst of a cultural and intellectual flourishing. Greenblatt credits Marlowe with sparking this transformation. In a new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, Greenblatt—one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars—argues that Marlowe didn’t merely precede Shakespeare, he made Shakespeare’s career possible.
Marlowe’s work was politically daring — awash in bloodshed and, defiantly for the age, unwilling to quickly moralize. But even more importantly, he was a stylistic pioneer …
… the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says. Marlowe’s characters spoke in unrhymed iambic pentameter—“elegant, musical, and forward-thrusting,” Greenblatt writes—which gave English drama a new expressive register.
Before Tamburlaine, English playwrights were trapped in stiff structures such as Poulter’s measures—couplets in which 12-syllable iambic lines rhyme with 14-syllable iambic lines. Blank verse enabled Marlowe’s characters to sound like they were “actually speaking English,” Greenblatt says, dramatized by some structure, but still alive. Shakespeare would come to rely heavily on blank verse in his own work.
Damn, I’m gonna have to read Greenblatt’s book. This is damn interesting stuff.
13) 🏓 A final, sudden-death round of reading material
Xenoparity. 🏓 Barbara Smith xeroxes her face. 🏓 4D golf. 🏓 “Lottocracy”. 🏓 Kanji amnesia. 🏓 Mapping every pool table in NYC. 🏓 Birdcast. 🏓 Alexander Pope’s peers hated his grotto. 🏓 Malware that writes new code using LLMs. 🏓 Doorbell prankster turned out to be a slug. 🏓 INTIMA, “A Benchmark for Human-AI Companionship Behavior”. 🏓 Black moon. 🏓 Vacuum robot climbs stairs. 🏓 Archive of Japanese train-station melodies. 🏓 QWERTY theremin. 🏓 Live-human alarm-service. 🏓 The stock for Domino’s Pizza has outperformed Google’s. 🏓 Toyota hamster-ball vehicle. 🏓 Swipe to age him. 🏓 The Victorian craze for Mars. 🏓 EV batteries degrade far less than predicted. 🏓 “I’ve got a solution: Wolves.” 🏓 Busy Beaver Numbers. 🏓 Six living descendents share da Vinci’s DNA. 🏓 Landlines for kids. 🏓 Wifi signals can measure heart-rate. 🏓 Build your own LLM from scratch. 🏓 Google rival run from a guy’s laundry room. 🏓 “CycleClick” bike-power meter. 🏓 Vermeer or not? 🏓 Lewis and Clark marked their trail with laxatives. 🏓 Lyrics to the theme for Bewitched. 🏓 Soft-serve beer. 🏓 Drone flies and swims. 🏓 Trash-can reverb. 🏓 Realdice.org.
CODA ON SOURCING: I read a ton of blogs and sites every day to find this material. A few I relied on this week include Strange Company, Hackaday, Messy Nessy, Numlock News, the Awesomer, the Morning News, and Mathew Ingram’s “When The Going Gets Weird”; check ‘em out!