In the middle of the Mojave Desert, Google has created a high-tech tribute to Margaret Hamilton, the lead software engineer of the Apollo space program. Google writes: “The tribute was created by positioning over 107,000 mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun, like the mirrors normally do. The result is a 1.4‑square-mile portrait of Margaret, bigger than New York’s Central Park.” You can learn more about Hamilton and her contributions to the 1960s space program here.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
We may not see warp drives any time soon, but another piece of Star Trek tech, the universal translator, may become a reality in our lifetime, if it hasn’t already. Machine learning “has proven to be very competent” when it comes to translation, “so much so that the CEO of one of the world’s largest employers of human translators has warned that many of them should be facing up the stark reality of losing their job to a machine,” writes Bernard Marr at Forbes.
But the fact that AI can do things humans can doesn’t mean that it does those things well. One Google researcher put the case plainly in an interview with Wired: “People naively believe that if you take deep learning and… 1,000 times more data, a neural net will be able to do anything a human being can do, but that’s just not true.” AI translators have advanced significantly in the past few years, with Google’s Translatotron prototype (yes, that’s its real name), promising to interpret “tone and cadence.” Still, AI translations are often stilted, awkward, and occasionally incomprehensible approximations that no human would come up with.
Does AI’s limitations with living language hinder its ability to decipher very long dead ones, whose orthography, grammar, and syntax have been completely lost? Yuan Cao from Google’s AI lab and Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT put machine learning to the test when they developed a “system capable of deciphering lost languages.” They took a very different approach “from the standard machine translation techniques,” reports the MIT Technology Review, using less data instead of more, a technique they call “minimum-cost flow.”
The researchers tested their translation machine on both the 3500-year-old Linear B and Ugaritic, an ancient form of Hebrew, both of which have already been deciphered by people. Still, the AI was “able to translate both languages with remarkable accuracy,” with a rate of 67.3% in the translation of cognates in Linear B. The far older Bronze Age Minoan script Linear A, however (see it at the top), “one of the earliest forms of writing ever discovered… is conspicuous for its absence.” No human has yet been able to decipher it.
A lost language translator machine that only works on languages that have already been translated (it needs preexisting data on the progenitor language to function) may not seem particularly useful. Then again, it could be one step in the direction of what the authors call the “automatic decipherment of lost languages,” those that humans can’t already work out on their own. Read the paper “Neural Decipherment via Minimum-Cost Flow: From Ugaritic to Linear B” at arXiv.
Some enjoy free jazz as soon as they first hear it; others think it sounds like music from an alien civilization, a listening experience fit only for a jazz fan as high as a kite. But how about as high as a space probe? Outerhelios, a 24/7 stream of artificial intelligence-generated free jazz, comes designed for broadcast into outer space by Dadabots, a collaboration between musicians-turned-programmers CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski (or, according to their about page, “a cross between a band, a hackathon team, and an ephemeral research lab”). Having previously built an AI-generated death metal stream (about whose creation you can read in this computer science paper), they’ve looked to the skies and trained their neural network on John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space.
“These duets between Coltrane on tenor (and bells) and Rashied Ali on drums sound like an annoyance until you concentrate on them,” writes Robert Christgau in his original review of the 1974 album, “at which point the interactions take on pace and shape.” The neural network “listened to the album 16 times,” says the official Databots description on the Outerhelios stream, “then continued to make music in the style.”
The project draws inspiration from NASA’s probes Voyager 1 and 2, which “launched in 1977 carrying a mixtape Carl Sagan made called The Sounds of Earth. It featured Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, recordings of laughter, Beethoven, Bach, Stravinsky, along with diagrams of human reproductive organs,” all “intended for an audience of intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms.”
Whereas The Sounds of Earth “used a static music format previously recorded by people,” Outerhelios follows on Brian Eno’s ideas about generative music by inventing a Coltrane album that never sounds the same twice. “For a few minutes, it’ll produce plausible-sounding free jazz,” writes Futurism.com’s Jon Christian. “Then the drums will segue into an inhuman trill, or the horns will disintegrate into a cacophonous wash of sound. Let’s just say that it’s not your dad’s jazz” — even if your dad happens to be John Coltrane, or indeed Brian Eno. But perhaps it will give NASA just the inspiration it needs to get the next Voyager launched. The sound of the original Interstellar Space got Christgau thinking beyond nations: “European, Oriental, African — I don’t know. But amazing.” Could the likes of Outerhelios get us thinking beyond the solar sytem?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Do you remember your first Walkman? If you grew up after the cassette era, of course, you might have owned a CD-playing Discman instead, or maybe — just maybe — even a Minidisc Walkman. Nowadays you probably have an iPod or iPod-like digital audio player as well as a cellphone equipped to serve the same purpose. But all the ways in which you’ve ever taken your tunes on the go evolved from a common technological ancestor: Sony’s TPS-L2, which debuted on the market 40 years ago this month. First marketed in the United States as the Soundabout and the United Kingdom as the Stowaway, it didn’t take long to achieve worldwide success under the Japanese-English brand name that long ago became a byword for the personal stereo.
It also includes a wall “featuring around 230 versions of the Walkman throughout its 40-year history. From the nostalgic older models, all the way up to the latest models, the exhibit allows visitors to take in the changes in designs, specifications, and media formats over the years.” You can see all the representative Walkman models from throughout the device’s four decades of history in the minute-long official video above.
The Walkman defined an era of personal technology, but its brand hasn’t weathered so well in the 21st century. “The beautifully designed, easy-to-use TPS-L2 was the device that liberated the cassette from living room hi-fis and car tape decks to truly make music portable,” writes Quartz’s Mike Murphy. But “a great many of the products that Sony once dominated with have been replaced, or have been consolidated into other devices. Over the years, Sony has made fantastic camcorders, stereo components, cameras, portable media players, and phones. Relatively few people buy most of these products anymore, with the smartphone usurping many of these devices’ functions.” Today’s Walkman devices don’t reflect “the influential (and often experimental) Sony of yesterday. And with Apple grappling with its own existential questions about its future, who is left to take up the mantle of the king of consumer electronics?”
Still, when we put on our headphones or pop in our earbuds on the morning commute and see that everyone else around us has done the same, we have to admit that we live in the world the Walkman created. This has its downsides, as Amanda Petrusich acknowledges in a New Yorker piece on public headphone-wearing: these include “the disconnection they facilitate” (and the hand-wringing about that disconnection they encourage) as well as the engineering of music itself to accommodate low-quality audio reproduction. But then, “ambling down a city street with headphones on — you know, maybe it’s dusk, maybe it’s midsummer, maybe you had a really nice day — is, without a doubt, one of life’s simplest and most perfect joys.” Sony’s music-loving co-founder Masaru Ibuka, commissioner of the original Walkman’s design, must have known similar joys himself. But what would he make of podcasts?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Kraftwerk put out their eighth studio album in 1981, and they titled it presciently: Computer World was released into what humanity had only just begun to realize would become a world of computers. But back then, most people either had never used a computer at all, or had used no computer more advanced than a pocket calculator. But the boys from Düsseldorf had a song for them too: the album’s first single “Pocket Calculator.” And it wasn’t just a name: the Casio fx-501P programmable calculator appeared on the list of “instruments” used in its recording.
Kraftwerk had become world-famous by the early 1980s, and on the international music scene they parodied the stiff, precision-obsessed German stereotype to perfection. You’d think that they would thus demonstrate allegiance to the formidable Dieter Rams-designed Braun ET55 calculator, but by the time Computer Lovecame out, Japanese companies like Casio had come to dominate the personal-electronics market. Kraftwerk even recorded a Japanese version of “Pocket Calulator,” “Dentaku,” along with ones in German (“Taschenrechner”), French (“Mini Calculateur”), and Italian (“Mini Calcolatore”).
“I’m the operator with my pocket calculator,” go the song’s English lyrics. “I am adding and subtracting. I’m controlling and composing.” And whichever language you listen to it in, it has a line equivalent to, “By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody.”
Kraftwerk actually commissioned as a promotional item a special calculator from Casio that could do just that, a version of the company’s VL-80 model that was also a musical synthesizer. You can see and hear the basic, non-Kraftwerk model demonstrated in the video above. Casio, a name that in the music world would become a byword for simple, inexpensive synthesizers, had already brought to market in 1979 the VL‑1, the first commercial digital synthesizer (which itself included a calculator function).
With a Kraftwerk taschenrechner, even those without technical or musical knowledge, let alone a full-fledged synthesizer, could make music. “Kraftwerk was eager for fans to play Kraftwerk hits on their own calculators,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Martin Schneider, “so they issued these special instructions — OK, let’s call it ‘sheet music’ — to play not just the new material but also classics like ‘Trans Europa Express’ and ‘Schaufensterpuppen.’ ” Today, Kraftwerk continues to perform all over the computer world in which we now live. With the 40th anniversary of Computer Worldapproaching, perhaps the time has come to bring the calculators back on stage.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
A robot created by MIT students Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo managed to solve a Rubik’s Cube in a record-breaking, lightning-fast 0.38 seconds. The video above shows it happening in real time, then in progressively slower times. By comparison, Yusheng Du, a Chinese speedcuber, holds the [human] record for solving a 3x3x3 cube in 3.47 seconds.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
More than 350 years after he painted them, the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn still look real enough to step right into. Now, thanks to a new augmented reality app from the Mauritshuis museum, you can do just that through the screen of your phone, starting with Rembrandt’s famed early canvas The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. “The augmented reality experience, a first for a museum, allows the user to experience the anatomical theatre of 1632 digitally,” says the Mauritshuis’ press release, “and to observe Dr. Tulp and his fellow physicians, as well as the subject of their examination, the corpse of Aris Kindt.”
“I entered it and was surrounded by its enveloping darkness, its piecemeal illuminations,” writes Hyperallergic’s Seph Rodney on his augmented-reality experience of The Anatomy Lesson. “I walked in front of and sometimes faced each of the characters arrayed around a central figure, a corpse, with its left arm missing its skin below the elbow. One man, rather overdressed in a black doublet with a white shirt collar and white sleeves accenting his head and hands uses a pair of forceps to hold the corpse’s exposed arm muscles and tendons stretched away from the bones beneath.”
As Rodney approaches the figure, “a small text box pops out telling me precisely this: that he is gazing at the book to make sense of what the body beneath him is saying in all its vascular and muscular complexity.”
Sans text boxes, the scene will sound familiar to Rembrandt enthusiasts, but not even the most enthusiastic of them will have seen it in quite this way before. To build an augmented-reality version of the scene Rembrandt painted 387 years ago, “lookalikes of the main figures in the painting dressed up in seventeenth-century outfits and were then scanned with a 3D scanner made up of 600 reflex cameras. The original theatre in the Waag where Dr. Tulp gave his anatomy lesson in 1632 was then captured with the 3D scanner. These scans were then combined, after which 3D modelers gave the figures and the space the correct colors, textures and light.”
You can get a glimpse of the process in the short video at the top of the post, then download the Rembrandt Reality app in either its Google or Apple version and step into The Anatomy Lesson yourself. It may feel somewhat odd at first to simply stroll around the scene of an ongoing dissection of a human body, but in a way, the Mauritshuis’ digital opening of this immortal lesson to the world re-emphasizes the true nature of the original scene. When a physician of Tulp’s stature dissected a corpse, people from all around — medical professionals and otherwise — would come to watch the spectacle that could last for days. But could even Tulp, then Amsterdam’s city anatomist and later the city’s mayor, have imagined that this particular spectacle would last 387 years and counting?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
