Why Humans Are Obsessed with Cats

in Biology, History, K-12, Life, Nature, Science | December 4th, 2020

A house cat is not real­ly a fur baby, but it is some­thing rather more remark­able: a tiny con­quis­ta­dor with the whole plan­et at its feet —Abi­gail Tuck­er

As part of its Annals of Obses­sion video series, The New York­er invit­ed sci­ence jour­nal­ist Abi­gail Tuck­er, author of The Lion in the Liv­ing Room, to reflect on “how felines took over the Inter­net, our homes, and our lives.”

It goes with­out say­ing that cats and humans have co-exist­ed for a very long time.

Most of us are acquaint­ed with the high regard in which Ancient Egyp­tians held Felis catus.

And we may know some­thing of their sea­far­ing his­to­ry, begin­ning with the Vikings and con­tin­u­ing on through Unsink­able Sam and oth­er cel­e­brat­ed ship’s cats.

An over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of us have spent the last decade or so glued to online exam­ples of their antics—rid­ing robot vac­u­ums, react­ing with ter­ror to cucum­bers, and pounc­ing on humans, some of whom have had the temer­i­ty to write and record voiceovers that sug­gest they have insight as to what goes on inside a cat’s hat. (As if!)

It’s grat­i­fy­ing to hear Tuck­er echo what cat lovers have long sus­pect­ed (and embla­zoned on t‑shirts, cof­fee mugs, and dec­o­ra­tive pillows)—the cats, not the own­ers, are the ones run­ning the show.

For­give us. Dogs have own­ers. Cats have staff.

Cats took a com­men­sal path to domes­ti­ca­tion, moti­vat­ed, then as now, by the food they knew to be stored in our set­tle­ments.

Tuck­er describes it as a series of cat con­trolled takeovers—a process of arti­fi­cial selec­tion, under­tak­en on the cats’ own ini­tia­tive:

House cats are supreme­ly adapt­able. They can live any­where and, while they must have plen­ty of pro­tein, they eat prac­ti­cal­ly any­thing that moves, from pel­i­cans to crick­ets, and many things that don’t, like hot dogs. (Some of their imper­iled feline rel­a­tives, by con­trast, are adapt­ed to hunt only a rare species of chin­chilla.) House cats can tweak their sleep­ing sched­ules and social lives. They can breed like crazy.

In cer­tain ways the house cat’s rise is trag­ic, for the same forces that favor them have destroyed many oth­er crea­tures. House cats are car­pet­bag­gers, arriv­istes, and they’re among the most trans­for­ma­tive invaders the world has ever seen—except for Homo sapi­ens, of course. It’s no coin­ci­dence that when they show up in ecosys­tems, lions and oth­er megafau­na are usu­al­ly on their way out.

Aloof as many of their num­ber may be, cats have engi­neered things in such a way as to be phys­i­cal­ly irre­sistible to most humans:

Their big heads and big eyes are so cute!

Their fur is so soft!

We can car­ry them around!

Dress them in doll clothes (some­times)!

Their cries mim­ic the cries of hun­gry human babies, and elic­it a sim­i­lar response from their human care­givers.

We may not love lit­ter box duty, but with 1 in 3 humans infect­ed by Tox­o­plas­ma gondii, we’ll like­ly be teth­ered to them for all eter­ni­ty.

For bet­ter or worse, we love them. And so do dog lovers. They just don’t know it yet.

But do not ever imag­ine that the feel­ing is rec­i­p­ro­cal.

They’re arch­car­ni­vores who can­not open their own cans. As Tuck­er wry­ly observes:

I think it’s fair to say that we are obsessed and they are not.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

GPS Track­ing Reveals the Secret Lives of Out­door Cats

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

How Humans Domes­ti­cat­ed Cats (Twice)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She loves cats, but most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

One of the Greatest Dances Sequences Ever Captured on Film Gets Restored in Color by AI: Watch the Classic Scene from Stormy Weather

in Dance, Film, Music | December 4th, 2020

It real­ly is a won­der, know­ing what we know about the his­to­ry of racism and dis­crim­i­na­tion in Hol­ly­wood and Amer­i­ca in gen­er­al, that the musi­cal Stormy Weath­er even got made in 1943. Along with one oth­er sim­i­lar film Cab­in in the Sky, it’s one of the few Amer­i­can musi­cals of the 20th cen­tu­ry with an all-Black cast, top billing and all. And what a cast, just some of the most tal­ent­ed artists of their time: Bojan­gles Robin­son, Lena Horne, Fats Waller, Cab Cal­loway, and the Nicholas Broth­ers star. Kather­ine Dun­ham, the “queen moth­er of Black dance” per­forms and chore­o­graphs. Cole­man Hawkins, though uncred­it­ed, is there too, play­ing sax.

The film also gave you its money’s worth, with near­ly two dozen musi­cal num­bers in less than 80 min­utes. And the top per­for­mance is the one that clos­es the film, seen here remas­tered from a high qual­i­ty source (make sure your YouTube is set to 1080p) and col­orized with DeOld­ify, the machine-learn­ing col­oriza­tion tool. (Your mileage may vary with the col­oriza­tion, but hey, it’s a start. Check back in a year or so and we might have anoth­er ver­sion that looks like it was tru­ly shot in col­or.)

If you’ve nev­er seen the “Jumpin’ Jive” num­ber, or nev­er heard of the Nicholas Broth­ers, you will soon find out why Fred Astaire called it the great­est danc­ing he’d ever seen on film. Their jour­ney down the ris­ers, one leapfrog­ging over the oth­er and land­ing in the splits, has nev­er been matched. There’s moments where they just seem to float on air. The band leader, Cab Cal­loway, who knew how to slink and slide around a stage, wise­ly gives them the floor. And at the end, while applause bursts out, the entire club is invit­ed to flood the dance­floor. It’s pure joy on film.

Old­er broth­er Fayard Nicholas was 29 in the film, his younger broth­er Harold was 22. Eleven years before that they had moved to New York from Philadel­phia and wowed the audi­ences at the Cot­ton Club with their mix of tap, bal­let, and acro­bat­ics. It was when pro­duc­er Samuel Gold­wyn saw them at the Club that their career took off. But their sequences were always sep­a­rate in white musi­cals, so that racist cin­e­mas in the South could eas­i­ly edit them out. Not so in Stormy Weath­er, where they end the film.

It is often writ­ten that this sequence was shot in “one take” and impro­vised, but that is plain­ly not the case. There’s eleven cuts in the dance sequence where the cam­era repo­si­tions itself. That’s not to take away from the Nicholas Broth­ers’ mas­tery, and hey, maybe they zipped through the sequence, as danc­ing was like breath­ing to them. Let’s just cel­e­brate this for what it actu­al­ly is: the Nicholas Broth­ers at the height of their pow­ers, bring­ing the house down.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cab Calloway’s “Hep­ster Dic­tio­nary,” a 1939 Glos­sary of the Lin­go (the “Jive”) of the Harlem Renais­sance

Watch a Sur­re­al 1933 Ani­ma­tion of Snow White, Fea­tur­ing Cab Cal­loway & Bet­ty Boop: It’s Ranked as the 19th Great­est Car­toon of All Time

A 1932 Illus­trat­ed Map of Harlem’s Night Clubs: From the Cot­ton Club to the Savoy Ball­room

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

The Internet Archive is Saving Classic Flash Animations & Games from Extinction: Explore Them Online

in Animation, Archives, Internet Archive, Software, Technology | December 2nd, 2020

Flash is final­ly dead, and the world… does not mourn. Because the announce­ment of its end actu­al­ly came three years ago, “like a guil­lo­tine in a crowd­ed town square,” writes Rhett Jones at Giz­mo­do. It was a slow exe­cu­tion, but it was just. So use­ful in Web 1.0 days for mak­ing ani­ma­tions, games, and seri­ous pre­sen­ta­tions, Flash had become a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, a viral car­ri­er that couldn’t be patched fast enough to keep the hack­ers out. “Adobe’s Flash died many deaths, but we can tru­ly throw some dirt on its grave and say our final good­byes because it’s get­ting the preser­va­tion treat­ment.” Like the ani­mat­ed GIF, Flash ani­ma­tions have their own online library.

All those love­ly Flash memes—the danc­ing bad­gers and the snake, peanut but­ter and jel­ly time—will be saved for per­plexed future gen­er­a­tions, who will use them to deci­pher the runes of ear­ly 2000’s inter­net-speak. How­ev­er sil­ly they may seem now, there’s no deny­ing that these arti­facts were once cen­tral con­stituents of pop cul­ture.

Flash was much more than a dis­trac­tion or frus­trat­ing brows­er crash­er. It pro­vid­ed a “gate­way,” Jason Scott writes at the Inter­net Archive blog, “for many young cre­ators to fash­ion near-pro­fes­sion­al-lev­el games and ani­ma­tion, giv­ing them the first steps to a lat­er career.” (Even if it was a career mak­ing “advergames.”)

A sin­gle per­son work­ing in their home could hack togeth­er a con­vinc­ing pro­gram, upload it to a huge clear­ing­house like New­grounds, and get feed­back on their work. Some cre­ators even made entire series of games, each improv­ing on the last, until they became full pro­fes­sion­al releas­es on con­soles and PCs.

Always true to its pur­pose, the Inter­net Archive has devised a way to store and play Flash ani­ma­tions using emu­la­tors cre­at­ed by Ruf­fle and the Blue­Max­i­ma Flash­point Project, who have already archived tens of thou­sands of Flash games. All those adorable Home­s­tar Run­ner car­toons? Saved from extinc­tion, which would have been their fate, since “with­out a Flash play­er, flash ani­ma­tions don’t work.” This may seem obvi­ous, but it bears some expla­na­tion. Where image, sound, and video files can be con­vert­ed to oth­er for­mats to make them acces­si­ble to mod­ern play­ers, Flash ani­ma­tions can only exist in a world with Flash. They are like Edison’s wax cylin­ders, with­out the charm­ing three-dimen­sions.

Scott goes into more depth on the rise and fall of Flash, a his­to­ry that begins in 1993 with Flash’s pre­de­ces­sor, SmartS­ketch, which became Future­Wave, which became Flash when it was pur­chased by Macro­me­dia, then by Adobe. By 2005, it start­ed to become unsta­ble, and could­n’t evolve along with new pro­to­cols. HTML5 arrived in 2014 to issue the “final death-blow,” kind of.… Will Flash be missed? It’s doubt­ful. But “like any con­tain­er, Flash itself is not as much of a loss as all the art and cre­ativ­i­ty it held.” The Archive cur­rent­ly hosts over 1,500 Flash ani­ma­tions from those turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um inter­net days, and there are many more to come. Enter the Archive’s Flash col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The U.S. Nation­al Archives Launch­es an Ani­mat­ed GIF Archive: See Whit­man, Twain, Hem­ing­way & Oth­ers in Motion

36,000 Flash Games Have Been Archived and Saved Before Flash Goes Extinct: Play Them Offline

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

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

What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like & How We Know It

in History | December 2nd, 2020

If you’ve seen any Hol­ly­wood movie set in ancient Egypt, you already know how its lan­guage sound­ed: just like Eng­lish, but spo­ken with a more for­mal dic­tion and a range of broad­ly Mid­dle-East­ern accents. But then there are many com­pet­ing the­o­ries about life that long ago, and per­haps you’d pre­fer to believe the lin­guis­tic-his­tor­i­cal take pro­vid­ed in the video above. A pro­duc­tion of Joshua Rud­der’s NativLang, a Youtube chan­nel pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for its videos on ancient Latin and Chi­nese, it tells the sto­ry of “the many forms of the long-lived Egypt­ian lan­guages,” as well as its “ances­tors and rel­a­tives,” and how they’ve helped lin­guists deter­mine just how the ancient Egyp­tians real­ly spoke.

Rud­der begins with a cer­tain arti­fact called — per­haps you’ve heard of it — the Roset­ta Stone. Dis­cov­ered in 1799 dur­ing Napoleon’s cam­paign in Egypt, it “bore two Egypt­ian scripts and, aus­pi­cious­ly, a rough trans­la­tion in per­fect­ly read­able Greek.” Using this infor­ma­tion, the schol­ar Jean-François Cham­pol­lion became the first to deci­pher ancient Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs. But as to the ques­tion of what they sound­ed like when pro­nounced, the stone had no answers. Cham­pol­lion even­tu­al­ly became con­vinced that the still-liv­ing Cop­tic lan­guage was “the Egypt­ian lan­guage, the very same one that stretch­es back con­tin­u­ous­ly for thou­sands of years.”

Though Cop­tic sounds and gram­mar could pro­vide clues about spo­ken ancient Egypt­ian, it could­n’t get Cham­pol­lion all the way to accu­rate pro­nun­ci­a­tion. One press­ing goal was to fill in the lan­guage’s miss­ing vow­els, an essen­tial type of sound that nev­er­the­less went unrecord­ed by hiero­glyphs. To the archives, then, which in Egypt were espe­cial­ly vast and con­tained doc­u­ments dat­ing far back into his­to­ry. These enabled a process of “inter­nal recon­struc­tion,” which involved com­par­ing dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Egypt­ian lan­guage to each oth­er, and which ulti­mate­ly “result­ed in an explo­sion of hiero­glyph­ic knowl­edge.”

But the jour­ney to recon­struct the speak­ing of this “longest writ­ten lan­guage on Earth” does­n’t stop there: it there­after makes such side quests as one to a “pock­et of Ethiopia” where peo­ple speak “a clus­ter of lan­guages grouped togeth­er under the label Omot­ic.” Along with the Semit­ic, the Amazigh, the Chadic, and oth­ers, trace­able with Egypt­ian to a com­mon ances­tor, these lan­guages pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion essen­tial to the state of ancient Egypt­ian lin­guis­tic knowl­edge today. Giv­en the enor­mous amount of schol­ar­ship required to let us know what to call them, it’s enough to make you want ankhs to come back into fash­ion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Ancient Chi­nese Sound­ed Like — and How We Know It: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

What Did Etr­uscan Sound Like? An Ani­mat­ed Video Pro­nounces the Ancient Lan­guage That We Still Don’t Ful­ly Under­stand

What Did Old Eng­lish Sound Like? Hear Recon­struc­tions of Beowulf, The Bible, and Casu­al Con­ver­sa­tions

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Hear What the Lan­guage Spo­ken by Our Ances­tors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sound­ed Like: A Recon­struc­tion of the Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guage

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

Watch Digital Dancers Electrify the Streets of Istanbul

in Animation, Dance, Technology, Travel | November 30th, 2020

Are you open to the idea of oth­er­world­ly beings mov­ing amongst us, benign but unseen?

Direc­tor Gökalp Gönen seems to be in the above video for jazz inno­va­tor Ilhan Ersahin’s “Hur­ri-Mitan­ni” (Good News).

Things kick off in a decid­ed­ly low key manner—a young woman sets off for a night­time stroll through the streets of Istan­bul, her face delib­er­ate­ly obscured by a snug­ly tied black and white cloth.

Turn­ing a cor­ner, she pass­es an anony­mous fig­ure, wrapped head to toe in sim­i­lar stripes.

Does this unex­pect­ed sight elic­it any dis­cernible reac­tion?

Our guess is no, but we can’t say for sure, as the cam­era los­es inter­est in the young woman, opt­ing to linger with the svelte and exu­ber­ant mum­my, who’s danc­ing like no one is watch­ing.

Else­where, oth­er increas­ing­ly col­or­ful beings per­form vari­a­tions on the mum­my’s box step, alone or in groups.

As their out­fits become more fan­ci­ful, Gönen employs CGI and 3D ani­ma­tion to unhitch them from the laws of physics and famil­iar bound­aries of human anato­my.

They pixel­late, sprout extra legs, project rays rem­i­nis­cent of string art, appear more veg­etable than ani­mal.…

Some grow to Godzil­la-like pro­por­tions, shed­ding lit­tle humanoid forms and bound­ing across the Bosporus.

A small spiky ver­sion ignores the paws of a curi­ous kit­ten.

These fan­tas­ti­cal, face­less beings are invis­i­ble to passer­by. Only one, per­form­ing on an out­door stage, seems eager for inter­ac­tion. None of them seen to mean any harm.

They just wan­na boo­gie…

…or do they?

The director’s state­ment is not eas­i­ly parsed in trans­la­tion:

A group of anony­mous wan­der­ing the streets. Every­where is very crowd­ed but iden­ti­ties are very few. Try­ing to be some­one is as dif­fi­cult as writ­ing your name on the waves left by this fast-mov­ing giant ship. Every­one is every­one and every­one is nobody any­more. This silence could only exist through glow­ing screens, even if it found itself nooks. On those loud screens, they remind­ed who actu­al­ly had the pow­er by enter­ing the places that were said to be inac­ces­si­ble. But they did­n’t even care about this pow­er. The areas where we had pas­sion­ate con­ver­sa­tions about it for days were a “now like this” place for us, but they looked like this to say “no, it was actu­al­ly like that” but they did not speak much. They had the charm of a cat. When they said, “Look, it was like this,” they became part of every­thing that made it “like this” and became unno­tice­able like paving stones. They just want­ed to have a lit­tle fun, to be able to live a few years with­out wor­ry. In five min­utes, fif­teen sec­onds at most, they exist­ed and left.

A few crea­tures who got left on the cut­ting room floor can be seen danc­ing on Gönen’s Insta­gram pro­file.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Rare Grooves on Vinyl from Around the World: Hear Curat­ed Playlists of Ara­bic, Brazil­ian, Bol­ly­wood, Sovi­et & Turk­ish Music

The Dance The­atre of Harlem Dances Through the Streets of NYC: A Sight to Behold

Istan­bul Cap­tured in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Hagia Sophia, Top­ka­ki Palace’s Impe­r­i­al Gate & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Great Courses Offers Every Course for $40 Until Midnight Tonight

in Deals | November 27th, 2020

Here’s a hol­i­day sea­son deal worth men­tion­ing. The Great Cours­es (for­mer­ly The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny) is offer­ing every course for $40 in dig­i­tal for­mat (or $60 in DVD for­mat). The deal lasts through mid­night on Black Fri­day.

If you’re not famil­iar with it, the Great Cours­es pro­vides a very nice ser­vice. They trav­el across the U.S., record­ing great pro­fes­sors lec­tur­ing on great top­ics that will appeal to any life­long learn­er. They then make the cours­es avail­able to cus­tomers in dif­fer­ent for­mats (DVD, CD, Video & Audio Down­loads, etc.). The cours­es are very pol­ished and com­plete, and they can be quite rea­son­ably priced, espe­cial­ly when they’re on sale, as they are today. Click here to explore the offer.

Sep­a­rate­ly, it’s also worth men­tion­ing that the Great Cours­es Plus–which makes cours­es avail­able in stream­ing for­mat as part of a month­ly sub­scrip­tion service–is run­ning a Black Fri­day deal where you can get a free tri­al for the ser­vice, plus 20% of pop­u­lar plans.

Note: The Great Cours­es is a part­ner with Open Cul­ture. So if you pur­chase a course, it ben­e­fits not just you and Great Cours­es. It ben­e­fits Open Cul­ture too. So con­sid­er it win-win-win.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mas­ter­class Is Run­ning a “Buy One, Give One Free” Deal (Until Novem­ber 30)

Stevie Ray Vaughan Gives a Blistering Demonstration of His Guitar Technique

in Music | November 25th, 2020

What made Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an such a great gui­tarist? If you ask Metallica’s Kirk Ham­mett, a devot­ed stu­dent of the blues, it’s “his tim­ing, his tone, his feel, his vibra­to, his phrasing–everything. Some peo­ple are just born to play gui­tar, and Ste­vie was def­i­nite­ly one of them.” This may come as dis­ap­point­ing news to gui­tar play­ers who want to sound like SRV but weren’t born with his genes. Ham­mett assures them it’s pos­si­ble to approx­i­mate his style, to some degree, with the right gear and mas­tery of his sig­na­ture tech­niques. Ham­mett lays out the SRV reper­toire thor­ough­ly, but there is no sub­sti­tute for the source.

SRV’s dual edu­ca­tion in both the British blues and the Amer­i­can blues of his heroes gave him “less reser­va­tions and less rea­sons to be so-called a ‘purist,’” he says in the video above. He then pro­ceeds to blow us away with imi­ta­tions of the greats and his own par­tic­u­lar spin on their tech­niques.

You could call it a gui­tar les­son, but as his stu­dent, you had bet­ter have advanced blues chops and a very good ear. As he runs through the styles of his idols, Vaugh­an doesn’t slow down or pause to explain what he’s doing. If you can keep up, you prob­a­bly don’t need the lessons after all.

Although com­pared, favor­ably or oth­er­wise, to his idol Jimi Hen­drix dur­ing his life and after his trag­ic death at 35, Vaugh­an also “incor­po­rat­ed the jazz stylings of Djan­go Rein­hardt, Ken­ny Bur­rell and Wes Mont­gomery,” Gui­tar mag­a­zine notes, and was “a keen stu­dent of Mud­dy Waters, Albert King, Fred­die King, Chuck Berry, Lon­nie Mack and Otis Rush.” Mud­dy Waters, in turn, was a great admir­er of Vaugh­an. “Ste­vie could per­haps be the great­est gui­tar play­er that ever lived,” the blues leg­end remarked in 1979. But like his hero Hen­drix, Vaughan’s tal­ent could be over­shad­owed by his addic­tions. “He won’t live to get 40 years old if he doesn’t leave that white pow­der alone,” Waters went on.

The drugs and alco­hol near­ly killed him, but they didn’t seem to cramp his play­ing. The video above comes from a Jan­u­ary 1986 sound­check, the same year Vaughan’s sub­stance abuse hit its peak and he entered rehab after near­ly dying of dehy­dra­tion in Ger­many. He would get sober and sur­vive, only to die in a heli­copter crash four years lat­er. While his ear­ly death may have some­thing to do with the way he has been dei­fied, what comes through in his albums and per­for­mances thir­ty years after he left us is the brute fact of his orig­i­nal­i­ty as a blues play­er.

Per­haps the the most con­cise state­ment of this comes from John Mayer’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induc­tion speech:

There is an inten­si­ty about Stevie’s gui­tar play­ing that only he could achieve, still to this day. It’s a rage with­out anger, it’s devo­tion­al, it’s reli­gious. He seam­less­ly meld­ed the super­nat­ur­al vibe of Jimi Hen­drix, the inten­si­ty of Albert King, the best of British, Texas and Chica­go Blues and the class and sharp shoot­er pre­ci­sion of his old­er broth­er Jim­mie. Ste­vie is the ulti­mate gui­tar hero.

If you’ve ever had rea­son to doubt, see it for your­self above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How B.B. King & Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an Dealt With Break­ing Strings Onstage Mid-Song: A Mas­ter­class in Han­dling Onstage Mishaps

Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an Plays the Acoustic Gui­tar in Rare Footage, Let­ting Us See His Gui­tar Vir­tu­os­i­ty in Its Purest Form

What Hap­pens When a Musi­cian Plays Ste­vie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” on a $25 Kids’ Gui­tar at Wal­mart

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

The Eden Project Built a Rainforest Ecosystem Inside Buckminster Fuller-Inspired Geodesic Domes

in Creativity, Design, Environment, Life, Technology | November 24th, 2020

Buck­min­ster Fuller had a dif­fi­cult time as an inven­tor in his ear­ly years. “Hav­ing been expelled from Har­vard for irre­spon­si­ble con­duct,” notes The Guardian, “he strug­gled to find a job and pro­vide a liv­ing for his young fam­i­ly in his ear­ly 30s.” Despite lat­er suc­cess­es, and a lat­er rep­u­ta­tion as leg­endary as Niko­la Tesla’s, he was often, like Tes­la, seen by crit­ics as a utopi­an vision­ary, whose visions were too imprac­ti­cal to real­ly change the world.

But his body of work remains a tes­ta­ment to an imag­i­na­tion that ris­es above the trends of indus­tri­al design and engi­neer­ing. After a peri­od of decline, for exam­ple, Fuller’s geo­des­ic domes expe­ri­enced a revival in the ear­ly 2000’s when “aging baby-boomers across Amer­i­ca” began “build­ing dream homes in the shape of geo­des­ic domes.” Mean­while in Corn­wall, Eng­land, a few years ahead of the curve, Dutch-born busi­ness­man and archae­ol­o­gist-turned-suc­cess­ful-music-pro­duc­er Sir Tim­o­thy Smit broke ground on what would become a far more British use of Ful­lerist prin­ci­ples.

In the late 90s, Smit start­ed work on an enor­mous com­plex of geo­des­ic bio­mes called the Eden Project, a facil­i­ty “akin to a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Vic­to­ri­an cre­ation: the Eng­lish green­house,” which reached its apex in the famed “Crys­tal Palace” built for the Great Exhi­bi­tion in Hyde Park in 1851. These were build­ings “born out of a play­ful, deca­dent imagination—yet in their archi­tec­ture and design they often opened new path­ways for the future.” So too do Fuller’s designs, in an appli­ca­tion meld­ing Vic­to­ri­an and Ful­lerist ideas about cura­tor­ship and sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Look­ing like “clus­ters of soap bub­bles” the Eden Project slow­ly rose above an exhaust­ed clay pit and opened in 2001 (see a short time-lapse film of the con­struc­tion above). Each of the two huge cen­tral domes recre­ates an ecosys­tem. The Rain­for­est Bio­me allows vis­i­tors to get lost in near­ly 4 acres of trop­i­cal for­est and includes banana, cof­fee, and rub­ber plants. The Mediter­ranean Bio­me hous­es an acre and a half of olives and grape vines. Small­er adjoin­ing domes house thou­sands of addi­tion­al plant species. There is a per­for­mance space and a year­ly music fes­ti­val; sculp­tures and art exhi­bi­tions in both the indoor and out­door gar­dens. The facil­i­ty has host­ed well over a mil­lion vis­i­tors each year.

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 2016, the Eden Project began plant­i­ng red­woods, intro­duc­ing a for­est of the North Amer­i­can trees to Europe for the first time. Next year, it will begin drilling for a geot­her­mal ener­gy project to turn heat from the gran­ite under­ground into pow­er, an under­tak­ing that, unlike frack­ing, will not release con­t­a­m­i­nants into the water sup­ply or addi­tion­al fos­sil fuels into the air and could pow­er and heat the facil­i­ty and 5000 addi­tion­al homes. In 2018, the project began con­struc­tion on Eden Project North, in More­cambe, Lan­cashire, with build­ings designed to look like giant mus­sels and a focus on marine envi­ron­ments.

Eden Project Inter­na­tion­al aims to build unique facil­i­ties all around the world, “to cre­ate new attrac­tions with a mes­sage of envi­ron­men­tal, social and eco­nom­ic regen­er­a­tion” and “to pro­tect and reju­ve­nate nat­ur­al land­scapes.” None of these ambi­tious expan­sions use the geo­des­ic domes of the orig­i­nal Eden Project, but that is not a reflec­tion on the domes’ struc­tur­al sound­ness. Many oth­er trans­par­ent uses of Fuller’s design have encoun­tered dif­fi­cul­ties with water tight­ness and heat flow. The Eden Project’s domes use inno­v­a­tive inflat­able, tri­an­gu­lar pan­els instead of glass to solve those prob­lems. Fuller sure­ly would have approved.

The project also rep­re­sents a poignant per­son­al vin­di­ca­tion for the Fuller fam­i­ly. Fuller “vowed to ded­i­cate his life to improv­ing stan­dards of liv­ing through good design,” The Guardian writes, after his daugh­ter Alexan­dra died in 1922. In 2009, his only sur­viv­ing child, Alle­gra Fuller Sny­der, then 82 and Chair­woman of the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute, vis­it­ed the Eden Project. “Of all the projects relat­ed to my father’s work,” she remarked after­ward, “I would say that this is the one I am most aware of as being a pow­er­ful, com­pre­hen­sive project…. My father would have been just thrilled. He would feel that it is a mar­vel­lous appli­ca­tion of his think­ing.”

Learn more about the Eden Project, which reopens Decem­ber 3, here. And learn how to “cre­ate Eden wher­ev­er you are” with the project’s free resources for gar­den­ers at home.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Buck­min­ster Fuller Rails Against the “Non­sense of Earn­ing a Liv­ing”: Why Work Use­less Jobs When Tech­nol­o­gy & Automa­tion Can Let Us Live More Mean­ing­ful Lives

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

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

The Geometry of Sound: Watch Artist Kenichi Kanazawa Make Amazing Geometric Designs Out of Sand, Using Sound Waves Alone

in Art, Physics | November 23rd, 2020

Before our eyes, Japan­ese artist Kenichi Kanaza­wa cre­ates crisp shapes and geo­met­ric pat­terns with no spe­cial tools but sand and sound, the kind of work that at first looks express­ly designed to go viral on social media. But he’s been at it much longer than that: “Orig­i­nal­ly a sculp­tor by trade,” accord­ing to Spoon & Tam­ago’s John­ny Wald­man, “Kanaza­wa began work­ing with steel and sound in 1987 after col­lab­o­rat­ing with the late sound artist Hiroshi Yoshimu­ra. Today, his work pri­mar­i­ly involves ele­ments like sound, vibra­tion and heat: mak­ing the invis­i­ble, vis­i­ble.” Or in oth­er words, using what crit­ic and music Ted Gioia calls, in a tweet of one of Kanaza­wa’s short table­top per­for­mances, “the pow­er of sound to cre­ate order out of chaos.”

Kanaza­wa does­n’t use just any old tables, but spe­cial ones made of steel, the bet­ter to res­onate when he taps and strokes them with his vari­ety of mal­lets. Nor does he use just any old sand, opt­ing instead for either a pure white — for max­i­mum visu­al stark­ness against the black steel — or a set of bright col­ors, as in the video at the top of the post.

What­ev­er its place on the spec­trum, the stuff seems to rearrange itself across the sur­face in response to the tones cre­at­ed by the artist. The strik­ing pre­ci­sion of the effects pro­duced by this inter­ac­tion of sand, steel, and sound gets view­ers won­der­ing what, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, is going on here. The under­ly­ing set of phe­nom­e­na has a name: cymat­ics, coined in the 1960s by a Swiss doc­tor named Hans Jen­ny.

In his book Heal­ing Songs, Gioia calls Jen­ny’s study of cymat­ics “the most impres­sive and rig­or­ous inquiry yet made into the nature of vibra­tions and their impact on phys­i­cal objects of var­i­ous sorts.” In such a medi­um sen­si­tive to son­ic vibra­tions, Jen­ny him­self writes, “a pat­tern appears to take shape before the eye and, as long as the sound is spo­ken, to behave like some­thing alive.” This also fair­ly describes Kanaza­wa’s danc­ing sand, whether seen from up close or at a dis­tance. Phys­i­cal­ly speak­ing, sound is, of course, a form of vibra­tion, which is itself a form of motion. But for an observ­er like Jen­ny — an adher­ent of eso­teric philoso­pher Rudolf Stein­er’s anthro­pos­o­phy, a school of thought ori­ent­ed toward the obser­va­tion of the spir­i­tu­al world through sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence — Kanaza­wa’s work would sure­ly have, as it were, much deep­er res­o­nances.

via @Ted­Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Geom­e­try of Sound Waves Visu­al­ized

What Does Sound Look Like?: The Audi­ble Ren­dered Vis­i­ble Through Clever Tech­nol­o­gy

The Physics of Play­ing a Gui­tar Visu­al­ized: Metallica’s “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters” Viewed from Inside the Gui­tar

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

Behold One of the Earliest Known Color Charts: The Table of Physiological Colors (1686)

in Art, Science | November 20th, 2020

The peri­od called the Enlight­en­ment pro­duced a rev­o­lu­tion in which one sense, vision, became priv­i­leged above all oth­ers. As a result, Sachiko Kusukawa writes at The Roy­al Soci­ety Jour­nal of the His­to­ry of Sci­ence, “sci­ence is supreme­ly visu­al. Indeed, one might say, exces­sive­ly so.” Kusukawa sit­u­ates Eng­lish nat­u­ral­ist and illus­tra­tor Richard Waller at the begin­ning of her his­to­ry about how sight came to dom­i­nate, and Sarah Lowen­gard places Waller’s col­or chart, pre­sent­ed at the Roy­al Soci­ety in 1686, at a for­ma­tive moment in “the cre­ation of col­or in Eigh­teenth-Cen­tu­ry Europe.”

That’s not to say, of course, that col­or didn’t exist before charts like Waller’s, but it did­n’t exist in neat tax­onomies that divid­ed col­or dis­crete­ly, named and cat­e­go­rized it, and mapped the nat­ur­al world by means of col­or the­o­ry. Waller’s “‘Table of Phys­i­o­log­i­cal Col­ors Both Mixt and Sim­ple’ would per­mit unam­bigu­ous descrip­tions of the col­ors of nat­ur­al bod­ies. To describe a plant, for exam­ple, one could com­pare it to the chart and use the names found there to iden­ti­fy the col­ors of the bark, wood, leaves, etc. Sim­i­lar appli­ca­tions of the infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed in the chart might also extend to the arts and trades, he sug­gest­ed.”

The nat­u­ral­ist approach to col­or would inform the arti­fi­cial cre­ation of col­or, help­ing “man­u­fac­tur­ers to pro­duce con­sis­tent dyes and paints,” notes the Smith­son­ian Libraries. Waller’s sys­tem was not pre­cise enough for the task, but many oth­ers, includ­ing board game pio­neer Mil­ton Bradley, picked up his work and refined it, pro­duc­ing not only sci­en­tif­ic and indus­tri­al col­or guides, but also ped­a­go­gies like Bradley’s Ele­men­tary Col­or text­book for chil­dren. Kei­th Moore, Head of Library & Infor­ma­tion Ser­vices at the Roy­al Soci­ety, traces Waller’s col­or dots through the arts, “from the low art Ben-Day dots in the vin­tage com­ic books I used to read as a child to the high art pointil­lism and divi­sion­ism pio­neered by Georges Seu­rat.”

Dozens of col­or sys­tems, wheels, charts, and tables appeared over the next few hun­dred years, from the elab­o­rate to the very sim­ple. All of them have encoun­tered the same basic issue, name­ly the sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of visu­al per­cep­tion. “Waller’s visu­al sys­tem exhibits the same con­cep­tu­al prob­lem… that plagued near­ly all eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems. Which col­ors can be includ­ed and what is their ‘cor­rect’ order? The answer was always tem­pered by avail­able col­or­ing mate­ri­als and choice of media.” As more pig­ments became avail­able, so too did more col­ors in the col­or charts.

Is the mak­ing of col­or clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems more of a sci­ence or an art? It depends, per­haps, on what they’re used for, but “col­or remains elu­sive to sci­en­tists and col­or experts,” the Smith­son­ian points out, over 400 years after Waller’s chart. Since then, how­ev­er, the lan­guage of col­or has evolved, as he envi­sioned, into a prac­ti­cal and poet­ic syn­tax and vocab­u­lary.

See a larg­er ver­sion of the chart here and read about it in detail in Lowen­gard’s excel­lent arti­cle.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors: Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

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