Hear the Trippy Mystical Sounds of Giant Gongs

in Music | December 23rd, 2019

Grow­ing up I thought there were only two uses for gongs. One was for mak­ing one large bonnnnnnng sound for some­thing impor­tant, like the announce­ment of a roy­al ban­quet or the begin­ning of a J. Arthur Rank pro­duc­tion. The oth­er was as a weapon against car­toon animals–it would make a fun­ny sound and their heads would be turned into a pan­cake. How was I to know there was so much more to gongs, espe­cial­ly 80-inch wide gongs that cost around $27,000? Thank good­ness for YouTube, then.

The above video fea­tures Sven aka Gong Mas­ter Sven aka Paiste Gong Mas­ter Sven (it’s not very clear in the descrip­tion) very gin­ger­ly play­ing this mon­ster sym­phon­ic gong, coax­ing out of it men­ac­ing, echo­ing groans and wails straight out of a hor­ror movie.

Just a gen­tle stroke can cause the met­al to vibrate and feed back onto itself. Using a small­er mal­let pro­duces sounds like whale songs. That some­thing so large can make such a stun­ning array of tones, and react to such del­i­ca­cy is fas­ci­nat­ing. (Watch with head­phones on or a good sound sys­tem, by the way).

If that whets your whis­tle, here’s more gong action with musi­cian Bear Love, who man­ages to make his gong sound like some­thing out of sci­ence fic­tion, incred­i­bly creepy. If there’s a ghost sto­ry movie out there with a one-gong sound­track, I’d believe it.

Michael Bet­tine plays the same Paiste gong in a more famil­iar way, by whack­ing it with a big mal­let. It’s impres­sive, and he doesn’t real­ly hit it that hard. “You can feel your inter­nal organs being mas­saged by the vibra­tions,” he says.

Final­ly, Tom Soltron Czarto­rys­ki, slims it down to a 62 inch “earth gong” with its array of inden­ta­tions, and cre­ates a near­ly 10 minute ambi­ent work, which is one expan­sive dose of space music. Groovy and some­times stress­ful, fas­ci­nat­ing and all-encom­pass­ing. Enjoy!

(Note to self: Resolve to find a local giant gong and have a go.)

via Kottke.org

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Mod­ern Drum­mer Plays a Rock Gong, a Per­cus­sion Instru­ment from Pre­his­toric Times

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

Punk Dul­cimer: The Ramones’ “I Wan­na Be Sedat­ed” Played on the Dul­cimer

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Teaches Scientific Thinking and Communication in a New Online Course

in Online Courses, Science | December 20th, 2019

One does­n’t nor­mal­ly get into astro­physics for the fame. But some­times one gets famous any­way, as has astro­physi­cist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Direc­tor of the Hay­den Plan­e­tar­i­um at the Rose Cen­ter for Earth and Space. But that title does­n’t even hint at the scope of his pub­lic-fac­ing ven­tures, from the columns he’s writ­ten in mag­a­zines like Nat­ur­al His­to­ry and Star­Date to his host­ing of tele­vi­sion shows like NOVA and the sequel to Carl Sagan’s Cos­mos to his pod­cast StarTalk and his high-pro­file social media pres­ence. Has any oth­er fig­ure in the annals of sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion been as pro­lif­ic, as out­spo­ken, and as will­ing to talk to any­one and do any­thing?

Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve fea­tured Tyson rec­om­mend­ing books, giv­ing a brief his­to­ry of every­thing, deliv­er­ing “the great­est sci­ence ser­mon ever,” chat­ting about NASA’s fly­by of Plu­to with Stephen Col­bert, “per­form­ing” in a Sym­pho­ny of Sci­ence video, invent­ing a physics-based wrestling move in high school, look­ing hip in grad school, defend­ing sci­ence in 272 words, break­ing down the genius of Isaac New­ton, talk­ing non-New­ton­ian solids with a nine-year-old, dis­cussing the his­to­ry of video games, cre­at­ing a video game with Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Mar­tin, select­ing the most astound­ing fact about the uni­verse, explain­ing the impor­tance of arts edu­ca­tion along­side David Byrne, pon­der­ing whether the uni­verse has a pur­pose, debat­ing whether or not we live in a sim­u­la­tion, remem­ber­ing when first he met Carl Sagan, inter­view­ing Stephen Hawk­ing just days before the lat­ter’s death, and of course, moon­walk­ing.

Now comes Tyson’s lat­est media ven­ture: a course from Mas­ter­class, the online edu­ca­tion com­pa­ny that spe­cial­izes in bring­ing big names from var­i­ous fields in front of the cam­era and get­ting them to tell us what they know. (Oth­er teach­ers include Mal­colm Glad­well, Steve Mar­tin, and Wern­er Her­zog.) “Neil DeGrasse Tyson Teach­es Sci­en­tif­ic Think­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” whose trail­er you can watch above, gets into sub­jects like the sci­en­tif­ic method, the nature of skep­ti­cism, cog­ni­tive and cul­tur­al bias, com­mu­ni­ca­tion tac­tics, and the inspi­ra­tion of curios­i­ty. “There’s, like, a gazil­lion hours of me on the inter­net,” admits Tyson, and though none of those may cost $90 USD (or $180 for an all-access pass to all of Mas­ter­class’ offer­ings), in none of them has he tak­en on quite the goal he does in his Mas­ter­class: to teach how to “not only find objec­tive truth, but then com­mu­ni­cate to oth­ers how to get there. It’s not good enough to be right. You also have to be effec­tive.” You can sign up Tyson’s course here.

If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mas­ter­class Is Run­ning a “Buy One, Give One Free” Deal

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents a Brief His­to­ry of Every­thing in an 8.5 Minute Ani­ma­tion

An Ani­mat­ed Neil deGrasse Tyson Gives an Elo­quent Defense of Sci­ence in 272 Words, the Same Length as The Get­tys­burg Address

Neil deGrasse Tyson Says This Short Film on Sci­ence in Amer­i­ca Con­tains Per­haps the Most Impor­tant Words He’s Ever Spo­ken

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.

The Prado Museum Digitally Alters Four Masterpieces to Strikingly Illustrate the Impact of Climate Change

in Art, Current Affairs, Education, Environment, Science | December 16th, 2019

Accord­ing to the Unit­ed Nations’ Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change, glob­al warm­ing is like­ly to reach 1.5°C above pre-indus­tri­al lev­els between 2030 and 2052 should it con­tin­ue to increase at its cur­rent rate.

What does this mean, exact­ly?

A cat­a­stroph­ic series of chain reac­tions, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to:

–Sea lev­el rise
–Change in land and ocean ecosys­tems
–Increased inten­si­ty and fre­quen­cy of weath­er extremes
–Tem­per­a­ture extremes on land
–Drought due to pre­cip­i­ta­tion deficits
–Species loss and extinc­tion

Look to the IPCC’s 2018 Spe­cial Report: Glob­al Warm­ing of 1.5°C for more specifics, or have a gan­der at these dig­i­tal updates of mas­ter­pieces in Madrid’s Museo del Pra­do’s col­lec­tions.

The muse­um col­lab­o­rat­ed with the World Wildlife Fund, choos­ing four paint­ings to be altered in time for the recent­ly wrapped Madrid Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence.

Artist Julio Fala­gan brings extreme drought to bear on El Paso de la Lagu­na Esti­gia (Charon Cross­ing the Styx) by Joachim Patinir, 1520 — 1524

Mar­ta Zafra rais­es the sea lev­el on Felipe IV a Cabal­lo (Philip the IV on Horse­back) by Velázquez, cir­ca 1635.

The Para­sol that sup­plies the title for Fran­cis­co de Goya’s El Quitasol of 1777 becomes a tat­tered umbrel­la bare­ly shel­ter­ing mis­er­able, crowd­ed refugees in the sod­den, makeshift camp of Pedro Veloso’s reimag­in­ing.

And the Niños en la Playa cap­tured relax­ing on the beach in 1909 by Joaquín Sorol­la now com­pete for space with dead fish, as observed by artist Con­spir­a­cy 110 years fur­ther along.

None of the orig­i­nal works are cur­rent­ly on dis­play.

It would be a pub­lic ser­vice if they were, along­side their dras­ti­cal­ly retouched twins and per­haps Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, to fur­ther unnerve view­ers about the sort of hell we’ll soon be fac­ing if we, too, don’t make some major alter­ations.

For now the works in the +1.5ºC Lo Cam­bia Todo (+1.5ºC Changes Every­thing) project are mak­ing an impact on giant bill­boards in Madrid, as well as online.

#LoCam­bi­aTo­do

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Per­pet­u­al Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visu­al­iza­tion of our Ocean Cur­rents

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 6 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domaincel­e­brates Cape-Cod­di­ties by Roger Liv­ingston Scaife (1920). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Neil Gaiman Talks Dreamily About Fountain Pens, Notebooks & His Writing Process in His Long Interview with Tim Ferriss

in Writing | December 15th, 2019

Last Feb­ru­ary, Neil Gaiman sat down for a 90-minute inter­view with author, entre­pre­neur and pod­cast­er Tim Fer­riss. At the 13:30 mark, the con­ver­sa­tion turns to Gaiman’s writ­ing process, and there begins a long and love­ly detour into the world of foun­tain pens (the Pilot 823, Vis­con­tis, and the New York Foun­tain Pen Hos­pi­tal in NYC), note­books (why he prefers Leucht­turm Ger­man note­books to Mole­sk­ines), and how he writes his nov­els out by hand. It’s all care­ful­ly thought out:

Tim Fer­riss: Are there any oth­er rules or prac­tices that you also hold sacred or impor­tant for your writ­ing process?

Neil Gaiman: Some of them are just things for me. For exam­ple, most of the time, not always, I will do my first draft in foun­tain pen, because I actu­al­ly enjoy the process of writ­ing with a foun­tain pen. I like the feel­ing of foun­tain pen. I like uncap­ping it. I like the weight of it in my hand. I like that thing, so I’ll have a note­book, I’ll have a foun­tain pen, and I’ll write. If I’m doing any­thing long, if I’m work­ing on a nov­el, for exam­ple, I will always have two foun­tain pens on the go, at least, with two dif­fer­ent col­ored inks, at least, because that way I can see at a glance, how much work I did that day. I can just look down and go, “Look at that! Five pages in brown. How about that? Half a page in black. That was not a good day. Nine pages in blue, cool, what a great day.”

You can just get a sense of are you work­ing, are you mak­ing for­ward progress? What’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing. I also love that because it empha­sizes for me that nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails, your first draft can absolute­ly go up in flames, it can — you can change the age, gen­der, num­ber of a char­ac­ter, you can bring some­body dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know any­thing that hap­pens in your first draft. It is you telling the sto­ry to your­self.

Then, I’ll sit down and type. I’ll put it onto a com­put­er, and as far as I’m con­cerned, the sec­ond draft is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along.

Tim Fer­riss: Do you edit, then, as you’re look­ing or trans­lat­ing from the first draft on the page to the com­put­er, or do you get it all down as is in the com­put­er and then edit —

Neil Gaiman: No, that’s my edit­ing process. I fig­ure that’s my sec­ond draft is typ­ing into the com­put­er. Also, I love — back­ing up a bit here. When I was, what was I? 27, 28? In the days when we were still in type­writ­ers and we were just a hand­ful of peo­ple with word proces­sors, which were clunky things with disks which didn’t hold very much and stuff, I edit­ed an anthol­o­gy and enjoyed edit­ing my anthol­o­gy.

Most of the sto­ries that came in were about 3,000 words long. Move for­ward in time, not much, five, six, sev­en years. Mid ‘90s, every­body is now on com­put­er, and I edit­ed anoth­er short sto­ry anthol­o­gy. The sto­ries that were com­ing in tend­ed to be some­where between six- and 9,000 words long. They didn’t real­ly have much more sto­ry than the 3,000 word ones, and I real­ized that what was hap­pen­ing is it’s a computer‑y thing, is if you’re typ­ing, putting stuff down is work. If you’ve got a com­put­er, adding stuff is not work. Choos­ing is work. It expands a bit, like a gas. If you have two things you could say, you say both of them. If you have the stuff you want to add, you add it, and I thought, “Okay, I have to not do that, because oth­er­wise my stuff is going to bal­loon and it will become gaseous and thin.”

What I love, if I’ve writ­ten some­thing on a com­put­er, and I decide to lose a chunk, it feels like I’ve lost work. I delete a page and a half, I feel like there’s a page and half that just went away. That was a page and a half’s worth of work I’ve just lost. If I’ve been writ­ing in a note­book and I’m typ­ing it up, I can look at some­thing and go, “Oh, I don’t need this page and a half.” I leave it out, I just saved myself work, and it feels like I’m treat­ing myself.

I’m just try­ing to always have in my head the idea that maybe I’m some­how, on some cos­mic lev­el, pay­ing some­body by the word in order to be allowed to write, but if they’re there, they should mat­ter, they should mean some­thing. It’s always impor­tant to me.

Tim Fer­riss: You men­tioned dis­trac­tion ear­li­er and your dan­ger­ous­ly adorable son, which I cer­tain­ly agree with. I had read some­where, actu­al­ly, before I get to that, this might seem like a very, very mun­dane ques­tion, but what type of note­books do you pre­fer? Are they large legal pads or are they leather bound? What type of note­books?

Neil Gaiman: When they came out, I real­ly liked — I’ve used a whole bunch of dif­fer­ent ones. I bought big draw­ing ones, which actu­al­ly turned out to be a bit too big, though I liked how much I could see on the page. Those are the ones I wrote Star­dust and Amer­i­can Gods in, big size, but they weren’t ter­ri­bly portable. I went over to the Mole­sk­ines, and I loved them when they first came out, and then they dropped their paper qual­i­ty. Drop­ping paper qual­i­ty doesn’t mat­ter, unless you’re writ­ing in foun­tain pen, because all of a sud­den it’s bleed­ing through, and all of a sud­den you’re writ­ing on one page, leav­ing a page blank because it’s bled through and then writ­ing on the next page.

Joe Hill, about six or sev­en years ago, Joe Hill, the won­der­ful hor­ror fan­ta­sy writer, sug­gest­ed the Leucht­turm to me. My usu­al note­book right now is a Leucht­turm, because I real­ly like the way you can pag­i­nate stuff in them and the thick­ness of the paper, and they’re just like Mole­sk­ines, but the Porsche of Mole­sk­ines. They’re just bet­ter.

I also have been writ­ing, I wrote The Grave­yard Book and I’m writ­ing the cur­rent nov­el in these beau­ti­ful books that I bought in a sta­tionery shop in Venice, built into a bridge. Some­where in Venice there’s a lit­tle sta­tionery shop on a bridge, and they have these beau­ti­ful leather-bound blank books that just look like hard­back books, but they’re blank pages. I wrote The Grave­yard Book in one of those. I bought four of them, and now I’m using the next one on the next nov­el, and it may well go into anoth­er one. I’m not sure.

Then, at home, I say at home, my house in Wis­con­sin, which is where my stuff is, I’ve got my — we live in Wood­stock, but I have an entire life’s worth of stuff still sit­ting in my house in Wis­con­sin, and it’s become archives. It’s actu­al­ly kind of fab­u­lous hav­ing a house that is an archive, but wait­ing for me in that house is a book that I bought for myself about 25 years ago, and before I die, I plan to write a nov­el in it. It’s an accounts book from the mid-19th cen­tu­ry. It’s 500 pages long. Every page is num­bered. It’s lined with accounts lines, but real­ly faint so it would be nice to write a book in it, and it is engi­neered so that every sin­gle page lies flat.

It’s huge and it’s heavy and it just looks like a book that Dick­ens or some­body would’ve writ­ten a nov­el in and I’ve just been wait­ing until I have an idea that is huge and weird and Dick­en­sian enough, and whether or not I actu­al­ly get to write it in dip pen, I’m not sure, but I def­i­nite­ly want to write it in an old Vic­to­ri­an, some­thing slight­ly cop­per plat­ing. One of those old flex nib pens that they stopped mak­ing when car­bon paper came in, just so I can get that spi­dery Vic­to­ri­an hand­writ­ing.

Tim Fer­riss: I’m just imag­in­ing you putting pen to the first page. When you fin­ish the first page and what that will feel like. That’s going to be a good day.

Neil Gaiman: It will be either a good day or an incred­i­bly bad day. When you get to the end of the first page, it’s “Oh no! I had this pris­tine — ” it is the thing that I tell young writ­ers, and by young writ­ers, a young writer can be any age. You just have to be start­ing out, which is any­thing you do can be fixed. What you can­not fix is the per­fec­tion of a blank page. What you can­not fix is that pris­tine, unsul­lied white­ness of a screen or a page with noth­ing on it, because there’s noth­ing there to fix.

Tim Fer­riss: You men­tioned a word, and it might be that I’m a lit­tle slow mov­ing because I’m from Long Island, but Leucht­turm? What is that word?

Neil Gaiman: L‑E-I-C‑H, I think it’s T‑U-R‑M, and then 1917, I think is — their Twit­ter han­dle is def­i­nite­ly Leuchtturm1917.

Tim Fer­riss: Leucht­turm, and I’ll put that in the show notes for folks, so you’ll be able to find it. Since you gave me — I’m not intend­ing to turn this episode into a shop­ping list, but I’ve nev­er used foun­tain pens.

Neil Gaiman: Real­ly?

Tim Fer­riss: I have not. My assis­tant, my dear assis­tant does. She loves using foun­tain pens. She enjoys the act. I’ve had a few slop­py false starts and then been rather impa­tient, but if I want­ed to give it a shot, are there any par­tic­u­lar foun­tain pens or cri­te­ria that you would use in pick­ing a good pen?

Neil Gaiman: The biggest cri­te­ria I would use in pick­ing, if you have the choice, is go some­where like New York’s Foun­tain Pen Hos­pi­tal.

Tim Fer­riss: Is that a real place?

Neil Gaiman: It’s a real place. It’s called The Foun­tain Pen Hos­pi­tal. They sell lots of new pens, they recon­di­tion old pens, they look after pens for you. And try them out, because the love­ly thing about foun­tain pens is they are per­son­al. You go, “No, no, no.” And then you find the one. I tend to sug­gest to peo­ple who are just ner­vous­ly — “I’ve nev­er used a foun­tain pen, what should I do?” I will point them at Lamy, L‑A-M‑Y, who have some fab­u­lous starter pens, and they’re not very expen­sive, and they’re good. They do a pen called The Safari, but they have a bunch of good starter pens, and they’re just nice to get into the idea of, “Do I like doing this?”

Let’s see, what am I using right now? What have I got in here? This one here is a Pilot. It’s a Nami­ki, and it’s a flex­ing nib ever so slight­ly when you put down weight on it, the nib will spread. It’s a beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful pen. That one’s a Pilot. I think this one here is the Nami­ki. It’s real­ly weird because Nami­ki is Pilot, so I don’t quite under­stand that.

Tim Fer­riss: Maybe it’s a Toyota/Lexus thing?

Neil Gaiman: I think it is. It’s that kin­da thing. This one here is called a Fal­con, and again, you put a lit­tle bit of weight on it, and the line will just spread and thick­en, which is part of the fun of foun­tain pens. I’ll go and play. There’s a love­ly Ital­ian one. I’ve got my agent, I did a thing some years ago when I real­ized that I was los­ing a lot of actu­al writ­ing time to sign­ing for­eign con­tracts.

Tim Fer­riss: This is for books?

Neil Gaiman: This is for books, or occa­sion­al­ly for sto­ries or things being reprint­ed around the world. The con­tracts would come in and there would be big sheaves of them because they get print­ed all around the world, and for­eign con­tracts, a lot of them you have to sign a lot. You have to do a lot of ini­tial­ing and I would sit there going, “I have just spent 90 min­utes sign­ing a pile of con­tracts, and I love that I got to sign it, but —” I con­tact­ed my agent. I said, “Can I give you pow­er of attor­ney? Would you mind? Would you just sign these things for me?”

She was like, “Absolute­ly!” Great. I got her — she’d nev­er used a foun­tain pen and I got her a foun­tain pen. I actu­al­ly went to The New York Foun­tain Pen Hos­pi­tal with her, and did the thing of show­ing her pens, “What do you like?” I got her a Vis­con­ti, which are just these love­ly Ital­ian pens. Most­ly I love, there’s a slight­ly fetishis­tic bit of hav­ing bot­tles of beau­ti­ful­ly col­ored ink. When you start talk­ing to foun­tain pen peo­ple, they real­ly — they pre­tend to be inter­est­ed in what pen you like, but they don’t care, because they’ve found their own pens that they love.

They say, “What do you use?”

I use Pilot 823s for sign­ing. Actu­al­ly now, I’ve got a Pilot 823, ’cause it’s just a fan­tas­tic sign­ing pen. It’s a work­horse, it keeps going, and I got one in 2012 and it was my sign­ing pen. I signed through Ocean at the End of the Lane. Before the book had come out, I had already pre-signed, writ­ten my sig­na­ture 20,000 times with this pen.

Tim Fer­riss: I have some footage of you icing your hand after said sign­ings.

Neil Gaiman: That was a sign­ing tour that I real­ly got into icing my hand and wrist and arm. I did the num­bers, and as far as I can tell, I’ve signed about one and a half mil­lion sig­na­tures with that pen, which remained, and I had to send it off to Pilot at one point, not because the nib was in trou­ble, because the plunger mech­a­nism was start­ing to stick, and they fixed it for me and sent it back. Then my three-year-old son found a place behind a cast iron fire­place in our house in Wood­stock where if you just insert your father’s Pilot 823 pen, which you have found on the table, just to see if it would go in there, you can actu­al­ly guar­an­tee that with­out dis­as­sem­bling the house, we actu­al­ly have to take the entire house apart to unin­stall a cast iron fire­place from 1913 to get at the pen. That pen now has been giv­en as a sac­ri­fice to the house gods, so I need to get a new one.

Tim Fer­riss: Its strikes me, at least it seems as we’re talk­ing that many of the deci­sions you’ve made, the tools you’ve found and enlist­ed, act to make not writ­ing unap­peal­ing, or at least bor­ing after five min­utes, and to enhance the act of writ­ing to make it some­thing that is enjoy­able. I don’t know if that’s true.

Neil Gaiman: That is true, but they also exist for anoth­er rea­son, which is kind of weird, which is to try and triv­i­al­ize what I’m doing and not make it impor­tant and freight­ed down with weight, because that par­a­lyzes me. When I start­ed writ­ing I had a type­writer. It was a man­u­al type­writer. When I sold my first book, I had the mon­ey to buy an elec­tric type­writer.

Tim Fer­riss: What was that first book?

Neil Gaiman: Gosh. I actu­al­ly don’t remem­ber whether I bought the elec­tric type­writer with the mon­ey from a book called Ghast­ly Beyond Belief, a book of sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy quo­ta­tions I did with Kim New­man, or whether it was for the Duran Duran biog­ra­phy that I did. Either way, I was just 23. What I would do back then is I would do my rough draft on scrap paper, sin­gle spaced so that it couldn’t be used, and also so that I could get as many words on. Paper was expen­sive. I could always do that. I remem­ber the joy of get­ting my first com­put­er, and just the idea that I wasn’t mak­ing paper dirty. Noth­ing mat­tered until I pressed print, and that was absolute­ly and utter­ly lib­er­at­ing.

And then, a decade on, pick­ing up a note­book, it was for Star­dust, which I’d decid­ed that I want­ed the rhythms of Star­dust to be very anti­quat­ed rhythms, and I thought there’s prob­a­bly a dif­fer­ence to the way that one writes with a foun­tain pen. 17 cen­tu­ry writ­ing, 17th, 18th cen­tu­ry writ­ing, you notice tends to go in very, very long sen­tences and long para­graphs. My the­o­ry about this is that one rea­son why you get this is because you’’re using dip pens, and if you pause, they dry up. You just have to keep going. It forces you to do a kind of writ­ing where you’re going for a very long sen­tence and you’re going to go for a long para­graph and you’re going to keep mov­ing in this thing, and you’re think­ing ahead.

If you’re writ­ing on a com­put­er, you’ll think of the sort of thing that you mean, and then write that down and look at it and then fid­dle with it and get it to be the thing that you mean. If you’re writ­ing in foun­tain pen, if you do that, you just wind up with a page cov­ered with cross­ings out, so it’s actu­al­ly so much eas­i­er to just think a lit­tle bit more. You slow up a bit, but you’re think­ing the sen­tence through to the end, and then you start writ­ing.

You write that, and then you pause and then you write the next one. At least that was the way that I hypoth­e­sized that I might be writ­ing, and I want­ed Star­dust to feel like it had been writ­ten in the late 1920s. I thought to do that I should prob­a­bly get myself a foun­tain pen and a book, so that was how I start­ed writ­ing that. Again, what I loved was sud­den­ly feel­ing lib­er­at­ed. Say­ing, “Ah, I’m not actu­al­ly mak­ing words that are not going down in phos­phor on a com­put­er screen.”

Watch the full inter­view above. Stream it as a pod­cast. Or read the com­plete tran­script here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

18 Sto­ries & Nov­els by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Read­ings by Neil Him­self

Neil Gaiman Reads His Man­i­festo on Mak­ing Art: Fea­tures the 10 Things He Wish He Knew As a Young Artist

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

Neil Gaiman Teach­es the Art of Sto­ry­telling in His New Online Course

Aman­da Palmer Ani­mates & Nar­rates Hus­band Neil Gaiman’s Uncon­scious Mus­ings

Plants Emit High-Pitched Sounds When They Get Cut, or Stressed by Drought, a New Study Shows

in Biology, Science | December 10th, 2019

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Are plants sen­tient? We know they sense their envi­ron­ments to a sig­nif­i­cant degree; like ani­mals, they can “see” light, as a New Sci­en­tist fea­ture explains. They “live in a very tac­tile world,” have a sense of smell, respond to sound, and use taste to “sense dan­ger and drought and even to rec­og­nize rel­a­tives.” We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly high­light­ed research here on how trees talk to each oth­er with chem­i­cal sig­nals and form social bonds and fam­i­lies. The idea sets the imag­i­na­tion run­ning and might even cause a lit­tle para­noia. What are they say­ing? Are they talk­ing about us?

Maybe we deserve to feel a lit­tle uneasy around plant life, giv­en how ruth­less­ly our con­sumer economies exploit the nat­ur­al world. Now imag­ine we could hear the sounds plants make when they’re stressed out. In addi­tion to releas­ing volatile chem­i­cals and show­ing “altered phe­no­types, includ­ing changes in col­or, smell, and shape,” write the authors of a new study pub­lished at bioRx­iv, it’s pos­si­ble that plants “emit air­borne sounds [their empha­sis] when stressed—similarly to many ani­mals.”

The researchers who test­ed this hypoth­e­sis at Tel Aviv Uni­ver­si­ty “found that toma­to and tobac­co plants made sounds at fre­quen­cies humans can­not hear,” New Sci­en­tist reports. “Micro­phones placed 10 cen­time­tres from the plants picked up sounds in the ultra­son­ic range of 20 to 100 kilo­hertz, which the team say insects and some mam­mals would be capa­ble of hear­ing and respond­ing to from as far as 5 metres away.”

The plants made these sounds when stressed by lack of water or when their stems were cut. Toma­to plants stressed by drought made an aver­age of 35 sounds per hour. Tobac­co plants, on aver­age, made 11. Unstressed plants, by con­trast, “pro­duced few­er than one sound per hour.” The sci­en­tists used machine learn­ing to dis­tin­guish between dif­fer­ent kinds of dis­tress calls, as it were, and dif­fer­ent kinds of plants, “cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fy­ing in most cas­es whether the stress was caused by dry­ness or a cut,” and they con­duct­ed the exper­i­ments in both closed acoustic cham­bers and a green­house.

Plants do not, of course, have vocal cords or audi­to­ry sys­tems. But they do expe­ri­ence a process known as “cav­i­ta­tion,” in which “air bub­bles form, expand and explode in the xylem, caus­ing vibra­tions,” the paper explains. These vibra­tions have been record­ed in the past by direct, con­tact-based meth­ods. This new study, which has yet to pass peer review, might be the first to show how plants might use sound to com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er and with oth­er liv­ing organ­isms, sug­gest­ing “a new modal­i­ty of sig­nal­ing.”

The pos­si­bil­i­ties for future research are fas­ci­nat­ing. We might learn, for exam­ple, that “if plants emit sounds in response to a cater­pil­lar attack, preda­tors such as bats could use these sounds to detect attacked plants and prey on the her­bi­vores, thus assist­ing the plant.” And just as trees are able to respond to each oth­er’s dis­tress when they’re con­nect­ed in a for­est, “plants could poten­tial­ly hear their drought stressed or injured neigh­bors and react accordingly”—however that might be.

Much remains to be learned about the sen­so­ry lives of plants. Whether their active calls and respons­es to the stim­uli around them are indica­tive of a kind of con­scious­ness seems like a philo­soph­i­cal as much as a bio­log­i­cal ques­tion. But “even if the emis­sion of the sounds is entire­ly invol­un­tary,” the researchers write (seem­ing to leave room for plant voli­tion), it’s a phe­nom­e­non that counts as a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion: maybe even what we might some­day call plant lan­guage, dif­fer­ent from species to species and, per­haps, between indi­vid­ual plants them­selves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Secret Lan­guage of Trees: A Charm­ing Ani­mat­ed Les­son Explains How Trees Share Infor­ma­tion with Each Oth­er

The Social Lives of Trees: Sci­ence Reveals How Trees Mys­te­ri­ous­ly Talk to Each Oth­er, Work Togeth­er & Form Nur­tur­ing Fam­i­lies

Graph­ic Shows the House Plants That Nat­u­ral­ly Clean the Air in Your Home, Accord­ing to a NASA Study

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch a Hand-Drawn Animation of Neil Gaiman’s Poem “The Mushroom Hunters,” Narrated by Amanda Palmer

in Animation, Poetry, Science | December 2nd, 2019

The arrival of a new­born son has inspired no few poets to com­pose works pre­serv­ing the occa­sion. When Neil Gaiman wrote such a poem, he used its words to pay trib­ute to not just the cre­ation of new life but to the sci­en­tif­ic method as well. “Sci­ence, as you know, my lit­tle one, is the study / of the nature and behav­ior of the uni­verse,” begins Gaiman’s “The Mush­room Hunters.” An impor­tant thing for a child to know, cer­tain­ly, but Gaiman does­n’t hes­i­tate to get into even more detail: “It’s based on obser­va­tion, on exper­i­ment, and mea­sure­ment / and the for­mu­la­tion of laws to describe the facts revealed.” Go slight­ly over the head of a new­born as all this may, any par­ent of an old­er but still young child knows what ques­tion nat­u­ral­ly comes next: “Why?”

As if in antic­i­pa­tion of that inevitable expres­sion of curios­i­ty, Gaiman harks back to “the old times,” when “men came already fit­ted with brains / designed to fol­low flesh-beasts at a run,” and with any luck to come back with a slain ante­lope for din­ner. The women, “who did not need to run down prey / had brains that spot­ted land­marks and made paths between them,” tak­ing spe­cial note of the spots where they could find mush­rooms. It was these mush­room hunters who used “the first tool of all,” a sling to hold the baby but also to “put the berries and the mush­rooms in / the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers. / Then a flint pes­tle to smash, to crush, to grind or break.” But how to know which of the mush­rooms — to say noth­ing of the berries, roots, and leaves — will kill you, which will “show you gods,” and which will “feed the hunger in our bel­lies?”

“Observe every­thing.” That’s what Gaiman’s poem rec­om­mends, and what it memo­ri­al­izes these mush­room hunters for hav­ing done: observ­ing the con­di­tions under which mush­rooms aren’t dead­ly to eat, observ­ing child­birth to “dis­cov­er how to bring babies safe­ly into the world,” observ­ing every­thing around them in order to cre­ate “the tools we make to build our lives / our clothes, our food, our path home…” In Gaiman’s poet­ic view, the obser­va­tions and for­mu­la­tions made by these ear­ly mush­room-hunt­ing women to serve only the imper­a­tive of sur­vival lead straight (if over a long dis­tance), to the mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic enter­prise, with its con­tin­ued gath­er­ing of facts, as well as its con­stant pro­pos­al and revi­sion of laws to describe the pat­terns in those facts.

You can see “The Mush­room Hunters” brought to life in the video above, a hand-drawn ani­ma­tion by Cre­ative Con­nec­tion scored by the com­pos­er Jherek Bischoff (pre­vi­ous­ly heard in the David Bowie trib­ute Strung Out in Heav­en). You can read the poem at Brain Pick­ings, whose cre­ator Maria Popo­va hosts “The Uni­verse in Verse,” an annu­al “char­i­ta­ble cel­e­bra­tion of sci­ence through poet­ry” where “The Mush­room Hunters” made its debut in 2017. There it was read aloud by the musi­cian Aman­da Palmer, Gaiman’s wife and the moth­er of the afore­men­tioned son, and so it is in this more recent ani­mat­ed video. Young Ash will sure­ly grow up faced with few obsta­cles to the appre­ci­a­tion of sci­ence, and even less so to the kind of imag­i­na­tion that sci­ence requires. As for all the oth­er chil­dren in the world — well, it cer­tain­ly would­n’t hurt to show them the mush­room hunters at work.

This read­ing will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Neil Gaiman & Aman­da Palmer’s Haunt­ing, Ani­mat­ed Take on Leonard Cohen’s “Democ­ra­cy”

Hear Strung Out in Heav­en, a Gor­geous Trib­ute to David Bowie by Aman­da Palmer & Jherek Bischoff’s, Made with Help from Neil Gaiman

Aman­da Palmer Ani­mates & Nar­rates Hus­band Neil Gaiman’s Uncon­scious Mus­ings

Watch Love­birds Aman­da Palmer and Neil Gaiman Sing “Makin’ Whoopee!” Live

Neil Gaiman’s Dark Christ­mas Poem Ani­mat­ed

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

You Can Sleep in an Edward Hopper Painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Is This the Next New Museum Trend?

in Art, Design, Life, Museums, Travel | December 2nd, 2019

Let’s pre­tend our Fairy Art Moth­er is grant­i­ng one wish—to spend the night inside the paint­ing of your choice.

What paint­ing will we each choose, and why?

Will you sleep out in the open, undis­turbed by lions, a la Rousseau’s The Sleep­ing Gyp­sy?

Or expe­ri­ence the volup­tuous dreams of Fred­er­ic Leighton’s Flam­ing June?

Paul Gauguin’s por­trait of his son, Clo­vis presents a tan­ta­liz­ing prospect for those of us who haven’t slept like a baby in decades…

The Night­mare by Herny Fuseli should chime with Goth­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties…

And it’s a fair­ly safe bet that some of us will select Edward Hop­per’s West­ern Motel, at the top of this post, if only because we heard the Vir­ginia Muse­um of Fine Arts was accept­ing dou­ble occu­pan­cy book­ings for an extreme­ly faith­ful fac­sim­i­le, as part of its Edward Hop­per and the Amer­i­can Hotel exhi­bi­tion.

Alas, if unsur­pris­ing­ly, the Hop­per Hotel Expe­ri­ence, with mini golf and a curat­ed tour, sold out quick­ly, with prices rang­ing from $150 to $500 for an off-hours stay.

Tick­et-hold­ing vis­i­tors can still peer in at the room any time the exhib­it is open to the pub­lic, but it’s after hours when the Insta­gram­ming kicks into high gear.

What guest could resist the temp­ta­tion to strike a pose amid the vin­tage lug­gage and (blue­tooth-enabled) wood pan­eled radio, fill­ing in for the 1957 painting’s lone fig­ure, an icon­ic Hop­per woman in a bur­gundy dress?

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go notes that she is sin­gu­lar among Hopper’s sub­jects, in that she appears to be gaz­ing direct­ly at the view­er.

But as per the Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Art Gallery, from which West­ern Motel is on loan:

The woman star­ing across the room does not seem to see us; the pen­sive­ness of her stare and her tense pos­ture accen­tu­ate the sense of some impend­ing event. She appears to be wait­ing: the lug­gage is packed, the room is devoid of per­son­al objects, the bed is made, and a car is parked out­side the win­dow.

Hope­ful­ly, those lucky enough to have secured a book­ing will have per­fect­ed the pose in the mir­ror at home pri­or to arrival. This “motel” is a bit of a stage set, in that guests must leave the paint­ing to access the pub­lic bath­room that con­sti­tutes the facil­i­ties.

(No word on whether the theme extends to a paper “san­i­tized for your pro­tec­tion” band across the toi­let, but there’s no show­er and a secu­ri­ty offi­cer is sta­tioned out­side the room for the dura­tion of each stay.)

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of this once-in-a-life­time exhib­it tie-in may spark oth­er muse­ums to fol­low suit.

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go start­ed the trend in 2016 with a painstak­ing recre­ation of Vin­cent Van Gogh’s room at Arles, which it list­ed on Air BnB for $10/night.

Think of all the fun we could have if the bed­rooms of art his­to­ry opened to us…

Dog lovers could get cozy in Andrew Wyeth’s Mas­ter Bed­room.

Delacroix’s The Death of Sar­dana­palus (1827) would require some­thing more than dou­ble occu­pan­cy for prop­er Insta­gram­ming.

Piero del­la Francesca’s The Dream of Con­stan­tine might elic­it impres­sive mes­sages from the sub-con­science…

Tuber­cu­lo­sis noth­with­stand­ing, Aubrey Beardsley’s Self Por­trait in Bed is rife with pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Or skip the cul­tur­al fore­play and head straight for the NSFW plea­sures of The French Bed, a la Rembrandt’s etch­ing.

Edward Hop­per and the Amer­i­can Hotel will be trav­el­ing to the Indi­anapo­lis Muse­um of Art at New­fields in June 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Jour­ney Inside Vin­cent Van Gogh’s Paint­ings with a New Dig­i­tal Exhi­bi­tion

How Edward Hop­per “Sto­ry­board­ed” His Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks

60-Sec­ond Intro­duc­tions to 12 Ground­break­ing Artists: Matisse, Dalí, Duchamp, Hop­per, Pol­lock, Rothko & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Seven Road-Tested Habits of Effective Artists

in Art, Computer Science, How to Learn for Free, Life, Philosophy, Software | November 15th, 2019

Fif­teen years ago, a young con­struc­tion work­er named Andrew Price went in search of free 3d soft­ware to help him achieve his goal of ren­der­ing a 3D car.

He stum­bled onto Blender, a just-the-tick­et open source soft­ware that helps users with every aspect of 3D creation—modeling, rig­ging, ani­ma­tion, sim­u­la­tion, ren­der­ing, com­posit­ing, and motion track­ing.

Price describes his ear­ly learn­ing style as “play­ing it by ear,” sam­pling tuto­ri­als, some of which he couldn’t be both­ered to com­plete.

Desire for free­lance gigs led him to forge a new iden­ti­ty, that of a Blender Guru, whose tuto­ri­als, pod­casts, and arti­cles would help oth­er new users get the hang of the soft­ware.

But it wasn’t declar­ing him­self an expert that ulti­mate­ly improved his artis­tic skills. It was hold­ing his own feet over the fire by plac­ing a bet with his younger cousin, who stood to gain $1000 if Price failed to rack up 1,000 “likes” by post­ing 2D draw­ings to Art­Sta­tion with­in a 6‑month peri­od.

(If he succeeded—which he did, 3 days before his self-imposed deadline—his cousin owed him noth­ing. Loss aver­sion proved to be a more pow­er­ful moti­va­tor than any car­rot on a stick…)

In order to snag the req­ui­site likes, Price found that he need­ed to revise some habits and com­mit to a more robust dai­ly prac­tice, a jour­ney he detailed in a pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2016 Blender Con­fer­ence.

Price con­fess­es that the chal­lenge taught him much about draw­ing and paint­ing, but even more about hav­ing an effec­tive artis­tic prac­tice. His sev­en rules apply to any num­ber of cre­ative forms:

Andrew Price’s Rules for an Effec­tive Artist Prac­tice:

1. Prac­tice Dai­ly

A num­ber of pro­lif­ic artists have sub­scribed to this belief over the years, includ­ing nov­el­ist (and moth­er!) JK Rowl­ing, come­di­an Jer­ry Sein­feld, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal per­former Mike Bir­bli­gia, and mem­oirist David Sedaris.

If you feel too fried to uphold your end of the bar­gain, pre­tend to go easy on your­self with a lit­tle trick Price picked up from music pro­duc­er Rick Rubin: Do the absolute min­i­mum. You’ll like­ly find that per­form­ing the min­i­mum posi­tions you to do much more than that. Your resis­tance is not so much to the doing as it is to the embark­ing.

2. Quan­ti­ty over Per­fec­tion­ism Mas­querad­ing as Qual­i­ty

This harkens back to Rule Num­ber One. Who are we to say which of our works will be judged wor­thy. Just keep putting it out there—remember it’s all prac­tice, and law of aver­ages favors those whose out­put is, like Picasso’s, prodi­gious. Don’t stand in the way of progress by split­ting a sin­gle work’s end­less hairs.

3. Steal With­out Rip­ping Off

Immerse your­self in the cre­ative bril­liance of those you admire. Then prof­it off your own improved efforts, a prac­tice advo­cat­ed by the likes of musi­cian David Bowie, com­put­er vision­ary Steve Jobs, and artist/social com­men­ta­tor Banksy.

4. Edu­cate Your­self

As a stand-alone, that old chest­nut about prac­tice mak­ing per­fect is not suf­fi­cient to the task. Whether you seek out online tuto­ri­als, as Price did, enroll in a class, or des­ig­nate a men­tor, a con­sci­en­tious com­mit­ment to study your craft will help you to bet­ter mas­ter it.

5. Give your­self a break

Bang­ing your head against the wall is not good for your brain. Price cel­e­brates author Stephen King’s prac­tice of giv­ing the first draft of a new nov­el six weeks to mar­i­nate. Your break may be short­er. Three days may be ample to juice you up cre­ative­ly. Just make sure it’s in your cal­en­dar to get back to it.

6. Seek Feed­back

Film­mak­er Tai­ka Wait­i­ti, rap­per Kanye West, and the big goril­las at Pixar are not threat­ened by oth­ers’ opin­ions. Seek them out. You may learn some­thing.

7. Cre­ate What You Want To

Pas­sion projects are the key to cre­ative longevi­ty and plea­sur­able process. Don’t cater to a fick­le pub­lic, or the shift­ing sands of fash­ion. Pur­sue the sorts of things that inter­est you.

Implic­it in Price’s sev­en com­mand­ments is the notion that some­thing may have to budge—your night­ly cock­tails, the num­ber of hours spent on social media, that extra half hour in bed after the alarm goes off… Don’t neglect your famil­ial or civic oblig­a­tions, but nei­ther should you short­change your art. Life’s too short.

Read the tran­script of Andrew Price’s Blender Con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The First High-Resolution Map of America’s Food Supply Chain: How It All Really Gets from Farm to Table

in Food & Drink, Maps | November 14th, 2019

The phrase “farm to table” has enjoyed vogue sta­tus in Amer­i­can din­ing long enough to be fac­ing dis­place­ment by an even trendi­er suc­ces­sor, “farm to fork.” These labels reflect a new aware­ness — or an aspi­ra­tion to aware­ness — of where, exact­ly, the food Amer­i­cans eat comes from. A vast and fer­tile land, the Unit­ed States pro­duces a great deal of its own food, but giv­en the dis­tance of most of its pop­u­la­tion cen­ters from most of its agri­cul­tur­al cen­ters, it also has to move near­ly as great a deal of food over long domes­tic dis­tances. Here we have the very first high-res­o­lu­tion map of that food sup­ply chain, cre­at­ed by researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois study­ing “food flows between coun­ties in the Unit­ed States.”

“Our map is a com­pre­hen­sive snap­shot of all food flows between coun­ties in the U.S. – grains, fruits and veg­eta­bles, ani­mal feed, and processed food items,” writes Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Civ­il and Envi­ron­men­tal Engi­neer­ing Megan Konar in an explana­to­ry post at The Con­ver­sa­tion. (The top ver­sion shows the total tons of food moved, and the bot­tom one is bro­ken down to the coun­ty scale.)

“All Amer­i­cans, from urban to rur­al are con­nect­ed through the food sys­tem. Con­sumers all rely on dis­tant pro­duc­ers; agri­cul­tur­al pro­cess­ing plants; food stor­age like grain silos and gro­cery stores; and food trans­porta­tion sys­tems.” The map visu­al­izes such jour­neys as that of a ship­ment of corn, which “starts at a farm in Illi­nois, trav­els to a grain ele­va­tor in Iowa before head­ing to a feed­lot in Kansas, and then trav­els in ani­mal prod­ucts being sent to gro­cery stores in Chica­go.”

Konar and her col­lab­o­ra­tors’ research arrives at a few sur­pris­ing con­clu­sions, such as that Los Ange­les coun­ty is both the largest ship­per and receiv­er of food in the U.S. Not only that, but almost all of the nine coun­ties “most cen­tral to the over­all struc­ture of the food sup­ply net­work” are in Cal­i­for­nia. This may sur­prise any­one who has laid eyes on the sub­lime­ly huge agri­cul­tur­al land­scapes of the Mid­west “Corn­belt.” But as Konar notes, “Our esti­mates are for 2012, an extreme drought year in the Corn­belt. So, in anoth­er year, the net­work may look dif­fer­ent.” And of the grain pro­duced in the Mid­west, much “is trans­port­ed to the Port of New Orleans for export. This pri­mar­i­ly occurs via the water­ways of the Ohio and Mis­sis­sip­pi Rivers.”

Konar also warns of trou­bling frail­ties: “The infra­struc­ture along these waterways—such as locks 52 and 53—are crit­i­cal, but have not been over­hauled since their con­struc­tion in 1929,” and if they were to fail, “com­mod­i­ty trans­port and sup­ply chains would be com­plete­ly dis­rupt­ed.” The ana­lyt­i­cal minds at Hack­er News have been dis­cussing the impli­ca­tions of the research shown on this map, includ­ing whether the U.S. food sup­ply chain is real­ly, as one com­menter put it, “very brit­tle and con­tains many weak points.” The Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Civ­il Engi­neers, as Konar tells Food & Wine, has giv­en the coun­try’s civ­il engi­neer­ing infra­struc­ture a grade of D+, which at least implies con­sid­er­able room for improve­ment. But against what from some angles look like long odds, food keeps get­ting from Amer­i­can farms to Amer­i­can tables — and Amer­i­can forks, Amer­i­can mouths, Amer­i­can stom­achs, and so on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

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.

How to Find Silence in a Noisy World

in Life, Nature | November 1st, 2019

“Take a walk at night,” wrote avant-garde com­pos­er Pauline Oliv­eros in her 1974 “Son­ic Med­i­ta­tions,” a set of instruc­tions for what she called deep lis­ten­ing. “Walk so silent­ly that the bot­tom of your feet become ears.” Lis­ten­ing to silence opens up rich new worlds of sound. It can be a life-chang­ing expe­ri­ence.

“It’s hard to imag­ine that a sound can trans­form some­one’s life, but it hap­pened to me,” says acoustic ecol­o­gist Gor­don Hemp­ton in the short 360-degree doc­u­men­tary above, “How to Find Silence in a Noisy World.” Hemp­ton learned to walk silent­ly while car­ry­ing a micro­phone, doc­u­ment­ing his lis­ten­ing jour­ney through remote places like the Hoh Rain­for­est in Wash­ing­ton state, con­sid­ered one of the qui­etest places in North Amer­i­ca.

“By hold­ing a micro­phone, I became a bet­ter lis­ten­er. I learned that the micro­phone doesn’t lis­ten for what’s impor­tant, it doesn’t judge, it doesn’t inter­fere.” The micro­phone, that is, has no ego. Record­ed and ampli­fied, the silence of the Hoh becomes cacoph­o­ny, or a sym­pho­ny, depend­ing on how we describe it. Maybe any descrip­tion gets in the way of lis­ten­ing. “Just lis­ten,” says Hemp­ton. “Silence is the poet­ics of space. What it means to be in a place… Silence isn’t the absence of some­thing, but the pres­ence of every­thing

If silence is full of sound, why might we crave it when we’re stressed? Because we are bom­bard­ed by noise pol­lu­tion, “sounds that have noth­ing to do with the nat­ur­al acoustic sys­tem.” These sounds have been encroach­ing on places like the Hoh Rain­for­est for many decades, and Hemp­ton has doc­u­ment­ed their incur­sion over the past 30 years, build­ing a col­lec­tion of over 100 record­ings “equipped with a 3‑D micro­phone sys­tem that repli­cates human hear­ing,” notes Brain Pick­ings.

“Ema­nat­ing from his col­lec­tion… is the idea that ‘there is a fun­da­men­tal fre­quen­cy for each habitat’—a tonal qual­i­ty that shapes the sense of place and qual­i­ty of pres­ence.” Hempton’s work com­ple­ments the nature record­ings of Bernie Krause, for­mer musi­cian turned renowned expert on nat­ur­al sound, whose the­o­ry of bio­pho­ny describes how nat­ur­al sounds work togeth­er to fill in the spec­trum, each one estab­lish­ing its own spe­cif­ic band­width so as not to drown out the oth­ers.

Nat­ur­al sounds cre­ate a kind of self-reg­u­lat­ing har­mo­ny. In order to ful­ly inhab­it the space we’re in, we must be able to hear them. But as the record­ings made by Hemp­ton and Krause show us, humans have a unique abil­i­ty to feel our­selves deeply immersed in oth­er places, too, by lis­ten­ing to record­ings of their silences. Hemp­ton implies that record­ings may soon be all we have left.

“Silence,” he says, “is on the verge of extinc­tion. There is not one place left on plan­et Earth that is set aside and off lim­its to noise pol­lu­tion.” It inter­feres with the cycles of mat­ing ani­mals, dis­rupts call and response pat­terns ecosys­tems use to coor­di­nate them­selves. Silence is part of a glob­al biofeed­back sys­tem, telling us to qui­et down, slow down, and become part of all that’s hap­pen­ing around us. We ignore it to our great detri­ment.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Free: Down­load the Sub­lime Sights & Sounds of Yel­low­stone Nation­al Park

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness