The ingenious sampling techniques of Daft Punk
3 September 2022
Fans of defunct French electronic music act Daft Punk will love this… Sample Breakdown, by Tracklib, shows how Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo composed some of their signature tracks.
Oh to have a job that required listening to just about every recorded musical composition since the 1970s (it seems) in order to compose original material. And then to hone on just the right samples from a song, and create something else from it: amazing.
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Why didn’t the Roman Empire spawn the Industrial Revolution?
3 September 2022
The Roman Empire — which dominated the then known world for near on five centuries — gave us its trademark roads, plumbing, floor heating, a postal service, concrete, and surgical tools.
Had the empire — as a whole, rather than the partitioned east, west, entity it later became — remained at its peak a lot longer, we can only speculate as to what other innovations may have been spawned.
An Industrial Revolution perhaps? Possibly. But prior to the fifth century, Common Era? Not likely, says Bret C. Devereaux, an ancient and military historian at the University of North Carolina.
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history, Roman Empire, technology
Australian Signals Directorate 50 cent coin with coded message
3 September 2022
Image courtesy of Royal Australian Mint.
I’d never heard of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) until now, but in short they’re a government intelligence agency.
To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of their establishment, the Directorate, in association with the Royal Australian Mint, have issued a commemorative fifty-cent coin. But not any fifty-cent coin… this one comes with a hidden, coded, message:
Designed in collaboration with staff from ASD and the Royal Australian Mint, the commemorative coin pays tribute to the evolution of signals intelligence with multiple layers of cryptographic code included in the design. A hidden message will be revealed as each layer of code is cracked; all that is needed is a pen, paper, Wikipedia and brainpower.
Anyone who thinks they’ve cracked the code is invited to submit their answer to the ASD, who will reveal the correct message at the end of September 2022.
Update: well that was quick… ABC News reports a fourteen year old Tasmanian boy cracked the code in about an hour, on the day of the coin’s release.
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Electric vehicle charge stations coming to suburban streets in Sydney
3 September 2022
Presently, general use charging stations for electric vehicles (EV) are relatively scarce in Australia, with the majority being located mainly in car parking buildings. While not a problem for EV owners who have a garage with a charger at home, or drivers with access to one in their workplace parking area, recharging the battery of an EV can be tricky for many others. Limited numbers of public charging stations may even be putting off those wishing to switch to EVs.
Even though a Transport NSW map of publicly available charge stations shows them to be seemingly abundant, most EV owners want the option to recharge their vehicles at home. But a trial being introduced by several municipal councils in and around the greater Sydney area, may prove to be a game changer. In the near future, EV owners will be able to plug into chargers connected to power poles.
The scheme could eventually result in almost two-hundred-thousand EV charging stations appearing on suburban streets, says Jason Carter, writing for TechAU:
There will be a total of 50 street-side locations selected for the EV Streetside Charging Project, with each EV charging station to be connected directly to the overhead electricity supply and energy use matched with 100% GreenPower. There is potential for 190,000 EV chargers that could be connected to street-side power poles across Australia.
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electric vehicles, technology, travel
The winners of the 2022 Davitt Awards for crime writing
3 September 2022
Somehow I missed this earlier in the week, but the winners of the 2022 Davitt Awards for crime writing by Australian women, were announced last week, on Saturday 27 August.
Charlotte McConaghy’s environmental thriller, Once There Were Wolves (Penguin Random House Australia), won the award for Best Adult Novel. The Best Young Adult Novel prize went to Leanne Hall for The Gaps (Text Publishing) while the Best Children’s Novel Award was won by Nicki Greenberg (Melbourne, Victoria) for The Detective’s Guide to Ocean Travel (Affirm Press).
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Australian literature, awards, literary awards
A trailer for Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey by Rhys Waterfield
2 September 2022
Christopher Robin was one of the main characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, originally written by British author A. A. Milne, nearly one hundred years ago. Together with a posse of friends — based on soft toys — including a teddy-bear called Winnie-the-Pooh, they lived in an imaginary forest called the Hundred Acre Wood. Readers of the books and poems written by Milne, will recall Christopher Robin one day left the forest to go to boarding school.
The parting of ways appeared to be quite amicable. Christopher Robin’s soft toy friends, including Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger, held a farewell party before he left. But it seems the geniality didn’t last, with Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet later becoming resentful of Christopher Robin’s departure. So much so, that when the boy returns to Hundred Acre Wood as an adult with his girlfriend, they are intent on murdering their one time friend, and those close to him.
That’s the situation at least in Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey, trailer, by Rhys Waterfield. Never return to your past, what else is there to say? Think I’ll be sleeping with the lights on tonight though…
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film, Rhys Waterfield, trailer, video
Exquisite Gucci ad by Alessandro Michele a Stanley Kubrick homage
31 August 2022
Alessandro Michele, creative director of Gucci, shows off the Italian luxury fashion house’s latest designs and accessories in an advert blending numerous Stanley Kubrick films, as a homage to the late American filmmaker.
2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut, are among Kubrick’s work that Michele decided to re-inhabit:
As an act of love, I decided to reinhabit Kubrick’s films, pushing to the core this incendiary approach. I took the liberty of disassembling, blending, grafting and reassembling them. Sticking to my creative praxis, I seized those movies, resemanticizing them, populating them with my clothes.
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fashion, film, Stanley Kubrick, video
Greenland ice cap melt inevitable sea levels may rise 27cm
31 August 2022
We’re passed the time for warnings… a significant increase in sea levels is unavoidable, with the melting of the Greenland ice cap expected to add twenty-seven centimetres to global ocean tidemarks. It could be a whole lot more if (or when) other ice masses melt:
Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight. The research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm (10.6in) from Greenland alone as 110tn tonnes of ice melt. With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean, a multi-metre sea-level rise appears likely.
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climate change, environment, nature
Video of a solar eclipse on Mars, Phobos occults the Sun
30 August 2022
Footage of a solar eclipse on Mars, filmed by NASA roving probe Curiosity. Eclipses on Mars are a little different to those we are treated to on Earth though, with the speed of the red planet’s “moontatoes” making the phenomenon more of a blink and you’ll miss it occasion.
Mars’ moons Phobos (“fear” in Ancient Greek) and Deimos (“dread”) circle Mars every 7.65 and 30.35 hours respectively, a relative blink compared to the 27-day orbit of Earth’s moon. They’re also a lot smaller than the Moon, and considerably more lumpy – little moontatoes, rather than the nice round disk we see shining so argently in our night sky.
It makes me think. If Pluto doesn’t make the grade as a “proper” planet, why should the so-called satellites of Mars be regarded as moons? Surely “captured objects” would be a more apt classification.
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astronomy, Mars, science, video
Albertina Museum makes thousands of digitised artworks available
30 August 2022
The Albertina Museum, in Vienna, capital of Austria, has released some 150,000 digitised images into the public domain. This will be a boon for anyone with an interest in European history and art, or both. Some of the images now freely available include works by Edvard Munch, featured above, who is best known for his painting The Scream, along with Albrecht Dürer, and Gustav Klimt, among others.
Nearly 4,000 of these images date between the 12th and 15th centuries, with another 23,000 dating to the 16th century. The Albertina has a large collection of works by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), a German artist who was famous for his woodcut prints and a variety of other works.
Via Medievalists.net.
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