SCALES #17: ice-lolly formation
Hello!
Brain is feeling a little emptied out, but I want to fill up a newsletter with links, so here we go!
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My current coping method with awful political news has leaned heavily on obsessive listening to BBC Radio 5's Electioncast. Politics, but at a little more psychological distance than stateside. My brain is comforted by the knowability of what exactly the DUP is, the slight shuffling around of Labour's shadow cabinet, and the whole deal of the Queen's Speech.
Hasn't been much of a week for podcasts otherwise, except for continuing to follow the Jeronimo Yanez trial, and a new Death, Sex & Money episode featuring interviews with Uber drivers. There's big news in the podcast world with Apple's announcement of providing in-episode listening analytics, which Hot Pod has started to unpack.
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I love that the Globe had a trend piece about Roman Mars acolytes agitating for better city flags: "“They just hard-core shot me down,” Mark Van Der Hyde said of his efforts to convince leaders in Lowell to redesign the city’s flag." Also of parochial interest: a series of maps tracing the step-by-step infilling of Boston, from the Shawmut peninsula onward. I hadn't known about the role of damming and tidal-powered mills!
(Tilly Minute voice:) The conceit of Sebald-as-underappreciated-humorist is a little thin, but a James Wood appreciation of W.G. is still well worth reading. Wood does want to make sure you know that he has met the man himself, but stick around for the out-of-nowhere Middlemarch allusion at the end!
A lot of noteworthy criticism in the Times this past week. Zachary Woolfe acknowledging one uncomfortable truth of criticism: "live performance is more complex and changeable than any single snapshot". "25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far" is the best kind of best-of list: an excuse to read talented critics celebrate works they love. Depressing that the Times is served so well by having a TV critic frequently cover White House optics. Not quite criticism, but also not quite not criticism: on the El Capitan free-solo climb.
"The choreography of the 14 Person Poem activates potentials that ordinary readings tend to neglect: combinatorial poetics, à la Raymond Queneau, reorganizing a poem on the fly; the pathos of the fragment, the poem scattered like a Sappho lyric, recovered only in pieces; the private circulation of samizdat; and perhaps the peculiar, up-close intimacy of the ancient mariner, with something unforgettable to share with you, only you, and now. On that particular Sunday, watching the room from outside was like watching a text diffusing through a culture in real time."
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Relaxation mechanisms this week have been on dual tracks: season two of Master of None, and two more episodes of Ways of Seeing. In the latter, Berger argues European oil painting is fundamentally "a celebration of private possessions", and that female nudes wear a costume of passivity and compliance for the slavering male viewer, rather than provide a window into the model's "true self". It's interesting how in each case, Berger still carves out exceptions for masterpieces that form a "countertradition".
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"Cosmic Latte is a name assigned to the average color of the universe, given by a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University."
"During the collection of in situ data on 21 January 2009, a significant number of the hydrometeors observed exhibited a characteristic shape not widely seem in any previous studies with the exception of one isolated example reported by Korolev et al. [2004]. The hydrometeors in question appear to be a combination of single columnar pristine ice crystals (needle or column) with a single drizzle-sized water droplet (typically 300 μm diameter). We call these hydrometeors “drizzle-rimed columnar ice” or “ice lollies” due to their similarities in shape."
"A schematic representation of the processes that occurred for the ice-lolly formation."
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Issue #2 callback.
Trying out a tweak to the structure,
—Adam