Schrödinger’s Cat is one of the more famous thought experiments in modern physics, created by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger back in 1935. The Telegraph summarizes the gist of the experiment as follows:
In the hypothetical experiment … a cat is placed in a sealed box along with a radioactive sample, a Geiger counter and a bottle of poison.
If the Geiger counter detects that the radioactive material has decayed, it will trigger the smashing of the bottle of poison and the cat will be killed.
The experiment was designed to illustrate the flaws of the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, which states that a particle exists in all states at once until observed.
If the Copenhagen interpretation suggests the radioactive material can have simultaneously decayed and not decayed in the sealed environment, then it follows the cat too is both alive and dead until the box is opened.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site early last year.
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We know the origin story of hip hop as the product of an enterprising subculture of young, mostly African-American, West Indian, and Latino tastemakers in the Bronx (or first in Brooklyn, according to an alternate history). We’ve seen at least one of the dozens of documentaries and dramatizations centered on this pivotal moment in musical history in the late 70s/early 80s—when pioneers like DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash began using two turntables and a mixer to splice together bars of disco, soul, funk, and many other kinds of music to turn them into an entirely new form.
In time, sampling became the provenance of dedicated digital machines, which, in concert with drum machines and classic turntable techniques, formed the basis of the sound of hip hop, dance, and pop music as we know them today. From local NYC roots came a global phenomenon—which has taken “center stage on Netflix’s original music programming,” as Forbesnotes, with the streaming company investing millions in new hip hop-themed content. Still, even with the music’s mainstreaming and global reach, it’s a bit odd to see the pivotal role of sampling explained by English DJ and pop producer Mark Ronson, on a TED Talk Stage, through a remix of a few dozen other TED talks.
But Ronson turns this clever presentation into an immersive example of the ways that sampling allows creators to become part of a “shared event” and to make new narratives or alter the old ones. “That’s what the past 30 years of music has been,” he says, “that’s the major thread.” Sampling, he argues, is not about “hijacking nostalgia wholesale,” but about creating new tapestries of sound. “Albums like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boy’s Paul’s Boutique,” he notes, “looted from decades of recordings to create these sonic, layered masterpieces that were basically the Sgt. Pepper’s of their day.”
I think Ronson’s right—no these weren’t pioneering, experimental rock albums, as purists might point out, but the comparison is valid for the sheer variety, inventiveness, and sonic complexity of the arrangements. (And like The Beatles, these artists were involved in their share of lawsuits, though in their case for copyright infringement.) Artists making albums built primarily out of samples aren’t “too lazy to make their own music,” Ronson says, or “trying to cash in on the familiarity of the original stuff.” Most artists and producers, indeed, look for the most obscure samples they can find, with some pretty obvious exceptions.
Rather, Ronson argues, like the influence of the Delta blues on British invasion rockers, sampling is a way for artists to pay tribute to music that moves them and to take its distinctiveness and make it their own, “to co-opt that music for the tools of their day.” To put it in other terms, sampling is both a form of love and theft. Ronson follows his argument with some personal history of his own musical journey, then gets back behind his DJ rig for a demonstration of Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di,” the fifth most sampled song of all time, as re-appropriated by The Notorious B.I.G. and “cultural tour-de-force” (he says with tongue in cheek), Miley Cyrus.
Like it or not, sampling is here to stay, now the source of virtually every building block of many popular genres, from snare drums and cymbals to guitars and effects. But maybe this isn’t just a new phenomenon of the digital age or a specific artifact of the hip hop revolution, but just another example of Kirby Ferguson’s cultural theory of everything in his four part video essay series, Everything is a Remix.
The “seven wonders of the world”: all of us have all heard the phrase so many times, but can we name the specific wonders to which it refers? Though the list took its final form in the Renaissance, it originates all the way back with the ancient Greeks who wanted a sense of the most majestic man-made landmarks that lay within their territory. These were eventually narrowed down to the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (whether they really existed or not), the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
The GIFS, which trace the lines of the original structures over the ruins and then fill them in photorealistic detail, are the work of husband-wife team Maja Wrońska and Przemek Sobiecki.
“Despite their ‘ruinous’ condition, these structures have influenced many of history’s great architects, and continue to be an inspiration today,” writes Designboom’s Rob Reuland. “These sites have been depleted by time and by conquest, parts are reused, others just fall away with neglect. Seeing them restored is a bit like hopping in the Delorean and cranking the flux capacitor, and reversing their slow decay.” And as a commenter adds below, “the next thing would be this in combination with AR-glasses while visiting the site” — the ongoing collaboration, in other words, of the wonders of the ancient world and the wonders of the modern one. See all seven of the animated GIFs here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Last night I had dinner at a local restaurant that happened to have a playlist on of great songs from my high school years. As one after another came on I thought, “wow, I forgot how good these songs are.” But after a while I realized I couldn’t really separate the songs themselves from my memories of listening to them back in the old days. Nostalgia, as we know, plays a significant role in how we respond to recorded music. But as to the question of what makes a song great to begin with, what separates it from thousands of other songs released around the same time… this is much more difficult for many people to answer.
We might pull out one or two musical elements—“this beat is amazing” or “those heavy guitars are awesome” or “her voice is just so powerful”—before falling back on subjective criteria about how the song makes us feel and what we think of when we hear it. Most people can’t identify with precision how and why certain songs sound like they do because developing such an ear takes years of training. It’s a skill learned by studying theory, recording, and musical technique, and by listening critically to lots and lots of music. Ask a musician, producer, or engineer what makes a song great and you might get a seminar on its mixing, arrangement, chord progressions, and use of studio effects.
That’s what we get in the YouTube series What Makes This Song Great?, created by musician and producer Rick Beato. Here, as Metafilter writes, he “breaks down the musical structure and production techniques in popular songs. Working from the stems [pre-mixed groupings of drums, guitars, vocals, keys, etc] of each song, he discusses everything from Sting’s Lydian mode bassline, to the use of Neumann mics to capture the intensity of Chris Cornell’s vocals; from sidechain compression in an Ariana Grande song, to the use of a flat 6th to introduce a melancholy air into the vocal melody of a Tool song.”
Now, everyone’s entitled to their tastes, and you might find yourself looking over his choices and thinking of some of them, “this song’s not great!” And, well, fair enough. But give it a chance anyway. Because you can gain new levels of appreciation even for music you don’t subjectively enjoy, just by learning how that music was constructed. When I first began to learn about the skill and effort that goes into writing, recording, mixing, and mastering studio-quality music, the experience was quite humbling, and I found myself listening to songs I didn’t love, exactly, but could very much appreciate from a technical point of view.
I also found my tastes expanding, even to include some pop music I had dismissed as meaningless fluff. Because I could hear interesting uses of reverb, or stereo panning, or delay, or chord voicings. In short, with careful, informed, listening, you can learn to appreciate the architecture of recorded music, rather than just the choice of exterior paint colors or obvious decorative elements. And songs don’t always need to land emotionally to still tickle your interest. Does that mean that I’m now a fan of Blink 182’s “All the Small Things” (top)? Well, no. But instead of rolling my eyes when it comes on, I can hear the small things (see what I did?) Beato points out and think, okay, that is actually kinda cool.
The little hook in the intro, that one muted chord in the opening progression, a sus4 chord thrown in for a dissonant instant. Maybe it also helps that, with the vocals stripped out, this could be another three-chord punk song and not that song, but, hey, it’s a learning process. Many of the other songs in the series might be more universally acknowledged as “great” for their musicianship and songcraft. But that doesn’t mean we can’t glean something from all of Beato’s videos. Getting expert perspectives like his can expand our appreciation for any kind of music, and the best producers and musicians tend to have the most eclectic tastes.
Further up, see Beato’s videos on The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic,” Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne,” Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of,” and, just above, Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” And check out all of the videos on his channel here.
We’ve all seen that famous New Yorker cover satirizing a New Yorker’s distorted, self-centered view of the world: Manhattan occupies a good half of the image, relegating the rest of America (and indeed the world) to the status of outer-outer boroughs. What Saul Steinberg did with a drawing in 1976, pioneering Roman geographer Pomponius Mela had done, in a much less comedic but much more accurate way, with text nineteen centuries before. Writing from his perspective under the reign of the Emperor Gaius, Claudius, or both, Mela created nothing less than a worldview, which tells us now how the ancient Romans conceived of the world around them, its characteristics and its relationship to the territory of the mightiest empire going.
“Pomponius Mela is a puzzle, and so is his one known work, The Chorography,” writes Frank E. Romer in Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World. In that series of three books, which seems not to have contained any maps itself, Mela divides the Earth into two rough “hemispheres” and five zones, two of them cold, one of them hot, and two in between.
Pulling together what in his day constituted a wealth of geographical knowledge from a variety of previous sources, he painted a word-picture of the world more accurate, on the whole, than any written down before. Scholars since have also praised Mela’s clear, accessible prose style — clear and accessible, in any case, for a first-century text composed in Latin.
Various maps, including the 1898 reproduction pictured at the top of the post (see it in a larger format here), have attempted to visualize Mela’s worldview and make it legible at a glance. You can see more versions at Cartographic-images.net, and theDavid Rumsey Map Collection shows the world according to Mela placed alongside the world according to Ptolemy and the world according to Dionysius Periegetes. Though Mela showed greater insight into the integration of the various parts of the world known to the ancient Romans than did his predecessors, he also, of course, had his blind spots and rough areas, including the assumption that human beings could only live in the two most temperate of the climatic zones he defined. Even so, the maps derived from his work provide an informative glimpse of how, exactly, Romans saw their place in the world — or rather how, exactly, they saw their place in the center of it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The British photographer Alfred Buckham (1879–1956) came of age during the early history of flight and served, starting in 1917, as a reconnaissance photographer for the Royal Naval Air Service. Apparently a better photographer than pilot, Buckham “crashed nine times before he was discharged from the Royal Naval Air Service as a hundred per cent disabled,” writes the National Galleries Scotland website. (At the age of 39, he damaged his voice box and had to breathe out of a tracheotomy tube for the rest of his life.) But, nonetheless, his passion for aerial photography continued unabated.
In 1920, Buckham captured this rather splendid aerial photo of Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. It’s his chef d’oeuvre. About the photograph, the National Galleries writes:
Buckham’s aerial view of Edinburgh has become one of the most popular photographs in our collection. The view is taken from the west, with the castle in the foreground and the buildings of the Old Town along the Royal Mile gradually fading into a bank of mist with the rocky silhouette of Arthur’s Seat just visible in the distance. Buckham was always keen to capture strong contrasts of light and dark, often combining the skies and landscapes from separate photographs to achieve a theatrical effect. As he does here, he sometimes collaged or hand-painted the form of a tiny aircraft to enhance the vertiginous effect. Yet accuracy remained a concern; Buckham later professed a particular fondness for his view of Edinburgh, ‘because it presents, so nearly, the effect that I saw’.
I wish a had a better answer to the question “where were you when David Bowie died?” than, “sitting at my desk, staring dumbly at the computer screen.” While the ideal place to read every instant online tribute and RIP, it was hardly a memorable location to get the news that one of our era’s most brilliant creative lights had gone out, leaving in his wake millions of broken-hearted fans and a discography unequaled in modern music.
But, like millions of other Bowie lovers at their computers, I could meditate on his music videos—from the painfully ill-conceived to the harrowing and profound; contemplate his film work; and call up with a mouse click my favorite songs. It’s beyond cliché to point out Bowie’s exuberant embrace of change, but it bears repeating that his embrace of technology was a key component in the evolution of his many personae.
Bowie was as adaptable to the age of YouTube as he was to the analog days of glam. Several lesser albums notwithstanding, the major Bowie upgrades inspired adoration from new generations of fans in every decade of his career since the 70s. Always “willing to take risks and do something different,” writes Nicholas Pell at L.A. Weekly, “what he was not willing to do is become an oldies act.”
Pell also advances an “unpopular opinion” sure to irritate many a Bowie fan. Bowie, he argues, “wasn’t an innovator,” but “an early adopter of what the real vanguard artists were doing.” Skipping the strange, unsuccessful late 60s recordings and “standard, psychedelic-tinged folk” cribbed largely from Donovan, Pell begins by noting that Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane were basically variations on T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, “a pretty specific form of inspiration, not exactly imitation.”
The Thin White Duke period was a take on Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry, and Bowie recorded his most lauded work—the Berlin Trilogy—with Roxy Music’s keyboardist, Brian Eno, without whose sound and vision those albums could hardly have been made. In the nineties, he pulled from Nine Inch Nails and drum and bass; in his swan song Black Star, from Kendrick Lamar.
But so what? In each incarnation, “influence, not imitation” is the least one can say about what he did with others’ styles. The proper word, perhaps, is transmutation—Bowie turned glam rock into mesmerizing musical theater, combining Bolan’s flamboyant swagger with mime, dada, modern dance, and sci-fi absurdity.
He took Bryan Ferry’s art rock, smooth, romantic moves, and suits and turned them into dark, Teutonic, brooding soundscapes and haunting Cold War anthems like the utterly perfect “Heroes.” Into the frenetic clatter of drum and bass he injected paranoia, alienation, and unsettling narratives of personal fragmentation. If these aren’t innovations, I don’t know what the word means. Every artist copies; Bowie was at his best when he stole from the best.
The more forgettable albums show him in uncertain phases, lacking the right muses and collaborators to make him shine. But his catalog is enormous and still full of surprises, even in records critics pan or mostly ignore. In the 19-hour playlist above, you can follow it all from start to finish, “from glam to folk, dance to rock and roll,” as Stereogum’s Aaron Lariviere sums it up in his exhaustive ranking of Bowie albums from worst to best, “heavy metal, musical theater, art-rock, soul, electronica, industrial, ambient, all of it.”
Lean back in your desk chair, click play and “relive it all—album by album… turn by left-turn,” influence by influence. Bowie was a collector of sounds new and old who never let himself become a museum piece.
Magic is real—hear me out. No, you can’t solve life’s problems with a wand and made-up Latin. But there are academic departments of magic, only they go by different names now. A few hundred years ago the difference between chemistry and alchemy was nil. Witchcraft involved as much botany as spellwork. A lot of fun bits of magic got weeded out when gentlemen in powdered wigs purged weird sisters and gnostic heretics from the field. Did the old spells work? Maybe, maybe not. Science has become pretty reliable, I guess. Standardized classification systems and measurements are okay, but yawn… don’t we long for some witching and wizarding? A well-placed hex might work wonders.
Say no more, we’ve got you covered: you, yes you, can learn charms and potions, demonology and other assorted dark arts. How? For a onetime fee of absolutely nothing, you can enter magical books from the Early Modern Period.
The library’s Transcribing Faith initiative gives users a chance to connect with texts like The Book of Magical Charms(above), by transcribing and/or translating the contents therein. Like software engineer Joseph Peterson—founder of the Esoteric Archives, which contains a large collection of John Dee’s work—you can volunteer to help the Newberry’s project “Religious Change, 1450–1700.” The Newberry aims to educate the general public on a period of immense upheaval. “The Reformation and the Scientific Revolution are very big, capital letter concepts,” project coordinator Christopher Fletcher tells Smithsonian.com, “we lose sight of the fact that these were real events that happened to real people.”
By aiming to return these texts to “real people” on the internet, the Newberry hopes to demystify, so to speak, key moments in European history. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to transcribe,” Fletcher points out. Atlas Obscura describes the process as “much like updating a Wikipedia page,” only “anyone can start transcribing and translating and they don’t need to sign up to do so.” Check out some transcriptions of The Book of Magical Charms—written by various anonymous authors in the seventeenth century—here. The book, writes the Newberry, describes “everything from speaking with spirits to cheating at dice to curing a toothache.”
Need to call up a spirit for some dirty work? Just follow the instructions below:
Call their names Orimoth, Belmoth Limoc and Say thus. I conjure you by the neims of the Angels + Sator and Azamor that yee intend to me in this Aore, and Send unto me a Spirite called Sagrigid that doe fullfill my comandng and desire and that can also undarstand my words for one or 2 yuares; or as long as I will.
Seems simple enough, but of course this business did not sit well with some powerful people, including one Increase Mather, father of Cotton, president of Harvard, best known from his work on the Salem Witch Trials. Increase defended the prosecutions in a manuscript titled Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, a page from which you can see further up. The text reads, in part:
an Evidence Supposed to be in the Testimony which is throwly to be Weighed, & if it doe not infallibly prove the Crime against the person accused, it ought not to determine him Guilty of it for So righteous may be condemned unjustly.
Mather did not consider these to be show trials or “witchhunts” but rather the fair and judicious application of due process, for whatever that’s worth. Elsewhere in the text he famously wrote, “It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned.” Cold comfort to those condemned as guilty for likely practicing some mix of religion and early science.
These texts are written in English and concern themselves with magical and spiritual matters expressly. Other manuscripts in the project’s archive roam more broadly across topics and languages, and “shed light on the entwined practices of religion and reading.” One “commonplace book,” for example (above), from sometime between 1590 and 1620, contains sermons by John Donne as well as “religious, political, and practical texts, including a Middle English lyric,” all carefully written out by an English scribe named Henry Feilde in order to practice his calligraphy.
Another such text, largely in Latin, “may have been started as early as the 16th century, but continued to be used and added to well into the 19th century. Its compilers expressed interest in a wide range of topics, from religious and moral questions to the liberal arts to strange events.” Books like these “reflected the reading habits of early modern people, who tended not to read books from beginning to end, but instead to dip in and out of them,” extracting bits and bobs of wisdom, quotations, recipes, prayers, and even the odd spell or two.
The final work in need of transcription/translation is also the only printed text, or texts, rather, a collection of Italian religious broadsides, advertising “public celebrations and commemorations of Catholic feast days and other religious occasions.” Hardly summoning spirits, though some may beg to differ. If you’re so inclined to take part in opening the secrets of these rare books for lay readers everywhere, visit Transcribing Faith here and get to work.
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