|||

Sunday Reads

Feels like a light bunch of reads this fortnight. Maybe because of the new job I haven’t been deep-diving so much, but maybe this is a good thing. Enjoy some word-snacks.

How Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will become President

A few years ago, possibly when Trump was running for, but hadn’t yet become, president, I read an article following Mr Rock around his daily life which posited he might be president one day. I looked for it today but there are now hundreds of the things, which either means he will be, or he definitely won’t be. This is not that article - this is short story in the form of an emailed proposal by Robert Sloan that declares President Rock to be an inevitability that needs to be programmed by a book that will become a film staring The Rock who, when he becomes president, will use his memory of the film as a template for policy, just as Reagan did with his movies, so it needs to be a good book.

Continuing to Dangle

I am endlessly impressed at how Andrew Rilstone writes so eloquently, making serious and lucid points about the human condition, while exploring the minutiae of 1960s Spider-man comics, of all things. This sort of nerd-heavy writing should not transcend its nerdery, but it does.

Will Terrence Malick Ever Really Finish The Tree of Life?

I’m a sucker for artists who never finish their work, always coming back to fix it. Eddie Campbell’s endless edits of his Alec comics has begotten a complete reworking of From Hell and all those Directors Cuts can’t just be for financial reasons. (Let’s not mention George Lucas though…) So news that Terrence Malick is reworking his magnum opus is entertaining if nothing else. I wasn’t that fussed with the original but maybe I’ll revisit it now it’s 50 minutes longer.

The New Science of Seeing Around Corners

This is a nice short overview of the state of what we might call “extreme imaging”, using faint echoes and shadows to build a pretty coherent record of the world beyond our senses.

In their first paper , Freeman and Torralba showed that the changing light on the wall of a room, filmed with nothing fancier than an iPhone, can be processed to reveal the scene outside the window. Last fall, they and their collaborators reported that they can spot someone moving on the other side of a corner by filming the ground near the corner. This summer, they demonstrated that they can film a houseplant and then reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the rest of the room from the disparate shadows cast by the plant’s leaves. Or they can turn the leaves into a “visual microphone,” magnifying their vibrations to listen to what’s being said.

That visual microphone stuff is amazing, recording a crisp packet with a high-speed camera and then playing the vibrations back like the grooves on a record vibrating the stylus. Your food packaging is always listening.

The Beautiful, Ugly, & Possessive Hearts of Star Wars

If you only read one article about how Star Wars fandom has become a cess-pool of awfulness, then this one will do. Seriously, it’s 12,000 words long and I read it one sitting.

Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape

I have a theory that most developments in computers over the last few decades will, in the long term, be shown to be dead ends and by the middle of the century we’ll be using fundamentally the same technology as powered the moon landings, only way more powerful. It’s amazing that the same technology used to load Hungry Horace onto my ZX Spectrum is now storing terabytes of data on tracks 50 nanometres wide, and there’s still ways to go.

Is NASA’s Opportunity Mars Rover Doomed?

I hope not, though it’s had a good ride.