• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: Chill Space is a hub for chillout music, music to relax & chill your mind and body and to take you on faraway musical journeys. There’s something for everyone: Ambient, Chillout, Psychill, Dub, Downtempo, Psybient, Ambient House, Dub Techno, Drone, Downbeat Electronica & more.
Ed. I’m getting lost in this one. I like being this kind of lost; lost without thought.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Harnessing the Dystopian Dread of the Brutalist Tower Block
The real-life British buildings behind J.G. Ballard’s harrowing “High-Rise.”
Housing and buildings in North Kensington, London, in 1975, with Trellick Tower in the background. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
HOUSING IN POSTWAR BRITAIN WAS anything but romantic. The necessity of building, and quickly, shelter to replace the 100,000 houses destroyed by the Blitz in London alone, meant there was little room for romance. Coming to England as a teenager in 1946, after having been raised in the Shanghai International Settlement and spending two years in a Japanese internment camp, novelist J.G. Ballard described it as “a terribly shabby place.” It was, he said, “locked into the past and absolutely exhausted by the war.”
In that aftermath, some architectural and planning theorists saw a clean slate on which to begin anew with modern ideas and advances in technology and ways to create new towns and solutions to urban and suburban housing. “Utopian modernists,” such as Le Corbusier, believed that advances in technology and engineering could produce forward-looking architecture that would promote essentially socialist ideals of offering beneficial housing to all. This attitude, combined with the need for high-density housing, resulted in the construction of what are now called tower blocks in Britain: apartment buildings of multiple stories that might also include other amenities, such as common space at different levels, with shared walkways and stairs dubbed “streets in the sky.” Packing many more people into a smaller footprint and offering all the modern conveniences, these models had great appeal for housing chiefs and a tremendous impact on postwar building. The first tower block was built in London in 1954, and by the end of the 1950s half a million new flats had been built, many of which were in new “mixed” developments that included multistory blocks.
Swiss-born French architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret assumed name Le Corbusier, and was a proponent of utopian modernist architecture.
In 1975, Ballard published a novel that focused on these London developments, marrying consumerist ideals of luxury housing with the social problems caused by crowded urban environments. High-Risebegins with 2,000 hopeful residents entering a 40-story apartment tower with smooth, modern design and high-end conveniences, feeling that they have bought into a life of domestic ease. However, the novel ends with the dwellings, halls, shops, and corridors being devastated by a brutalism that has less to do with architectural design than with the human malevolence it has somehow inspired.
Ballard makes clear his antipathy for the development. The apartments are described as “cells” in the cliff face. Rather than being a beneficent “machine for living in” (in Le Corbusier’s words), the building is “a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.” Its array of services—air-conditioning, garbage chutes, electrically operated features—were all things that “a century earlier” would have required “an army of tireless servants” to provide. It is a pointed irony, then, that the architect who dresses largely in white and lives in the penthouse at the top of the building, like some “fallen angel,” is married to a woman who grew up in a country house and is at first uncomfortable in the building’s automated and cloistered lifestyle. …
PODCAST: Mafra Palace Library Bats
Join us for a daily celebration of the world’s most wondrous, unexpected, even strange places.
IN THIS EPISODE OF THE ATLAS OBSCURA PODCAST, we visit a grand library in Portugal has some unexpected nighttime caretakers—tiny bats. …
RELATED: The Collectors Who Hunt Down Radioactive Glassware
Their tools are black lights and Geiger counters.
A small uranium-glass pitcher (left) and uranium glass plates (right). WEmbiggenable.
IN JANUARY OF 2021, A New Jersey teenager brought a piece of an antique Fiestaware plate to a high-school science class. The student had received a Geiger counter, an instrument used to measure radiation, for Christmas, and wanted to do an experiment. When the plate registered as radioactive, someone at the school panicked and called in a hazmat team. The entire school was evacuated, and those in the nuclear science field were aghast.
But thousands of similarly radioactive plates and cups can be found in antique stores, thrift shops, and possibly your own kitchen cabinets. Radioactive antiques have a long history, as well as a certain glow that is highly desired by some collectors today.
The scientists dismayed by the events at Haddon Township High School were not upset that someone had brought in a radioactive plate. They thought school administrators had overreacted. When it comes to radiological hazards, says health physicist Phil Broughton, “There is a world of difference between detectable and dangerous.”
Uranium glass is also known as canary glass due to this common canary-yellow color.
Prior to World War II, and well before its potential for energy or weaponry was recognized, uranium was commonly used as a coloring agent in everything from plates, glasses, and punch bowls to vases, candlesticks, and beads. Uranium glass mosaics existed as early as 79 AD. …
RELATED: Scientific Publishing Is a Joke
An XKCD comic—and its many remixes—perfectly captures the absurdity of academic research.
A real scientific advance, like a successful date, needs both preparation and serendipity. As a tired, single medical student, I used to feel lucky when I managed two good dates in a row. But career scientists must continually create this kind of magic. Universities judge their research faculty not so much by the quality of their discoveries as by the number of papers they’ve placed in scholarly journals, and how prestigious those journals happen to be. Scientists joke (and complain) that this relentless pressure to pad their résumés often leads to flawed or unoriginal publications. So when Randall Munroe, the creator of the long-running webcomic XKCD, laid out this problem in a perfect cartoon last week, it captured the attention of scientists—and inspired many to create versions specific to their own disciplines. Together, these became a global, interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of modern research practices.
The cartoon is, like most XKCD comics, a simple back-and-white line drawing with a nerdy punch line. It depicts a taxonomy of the 12 “Types of Scientific Paper,” presented in a grid. “The immune system is at it again,” one paper’s title reads. “My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it,” declares another. The gag reveals how research literature, when stripped of its jargon, is just as susceptible to repetition, triviality, pandering, and pettiness as other forms of communication. The cartoon’s childlike simplicity, though, seemed to offer cover for scientists to critique and celebrate their work at the same time.
The concept was intuitive—and infinitely remixable. Within a couple of days, the sociologist Kieran Healy had created a version of the grid for his field; its entries included “This seems very weird and bad but it’s perfectly rational when you’re poor,” and “I take a SOCIOLOGICAL approach, unlike SOME people.” Epidemiologists got on board too—“We don’t really have a clue what we’re doing: but here are some models!” Statisticians, perhaps unsurprisingly, also geeked out: “A new robust variance estimator that nobody needs.” (I don’t get it either.) You couldn’t keep the biologists away from the fun (“New microscope!! Yours is now obsolete”), and—in their usual fashion—the science journalists soon followed (“Readers love animals”). A doctoral student cobbled together a website to help users generate their own versions. We reached Peak Meme with the creation of a meta-meme outlining a taxonomy of academic-paper memes. At that point, the writer and internet activist Cory Doctorow lauded the collective project of producing these jokes as “an act of wry, insightful auto-ethnography—self-criticism wrapped in humor that tells a story.”
Put another way: The joke was on target. “The meme hits the right nerve,” says Vinay Prasad, an associate epidemiology professor and a prominent critic of medical research. “Many papers serve no purpose, advance no agenda, may not be correct, make no sense, and are poorly read. But they are required for promotion.” The scholarly literature in many fields is riddled with extraneous work; indeed, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that this sorry outcome was more or less inevitable, given the incentives at play. Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review … and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce more interesting results, and conclusions become exaggerated. The most prolific authors have found a way to publish more than one scientific paper a week. Those who can’t keep up might hire a paper mill to do (or fake) the work on their behalf. …
Types of Scientific Paper https://t.co/crpSNv9Er5 pic.twitter.com/ZOJYH6xyhF
— Randall Munroe (@xkcd) April 28, 2021
RELATED: Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop sued as man claims vagina-scented candle ‘exploded’
A Texas resident has sued the company after burning the candle for three hours before it became ‘engulfed in high flames’
This Smells Like My Vagina candle that Gwyneth Paltrow was selling on Goop, and Gwyneth (made from goop, perhaps).
Another day, another close call for Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candle. Texas resident Colby Watson is seeking a jury trial and damages of $5m (£3.5m) after an incident in which he claims one of Goop’s This Smells Like My Vagina candles exploded on his bedside table.
Watson alleges he burned it for around three hours before the candle “exploded” and became “engulfed in high flames”, according to court documents. The table was left with a “black burn ring”, and the candle jar was “charred and black”.
No injuries were reported, but representatives for Watson are seeking compensation for their client and others who “through no fault of their own, bought defective and dangerous vagina-scented candles”.
Goop have rejected the claim, calling it “frivolous” and “an attempt to secure an outsized payout from a press-heavy product”.
“We stand behind the brands we carry and the safety of the products we sell,” a Goop spokesperson told NBC News.
“Here, Heretic – the brand that supplies the candle – has substantiated the product’s performance and safety through industry standard testing.” …
Wonder Bread Turns 100 pic.twitter.com/DjzA0vtCWN
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 18, 2021
7 (Nearly) Lost Wonders of the World Wide Web
Defying all odds, the original Space Jam, a silly romp about a super-star athlete playing basketball with cartoon characters, became a cultural artifact. The theme song by Quad City DJs is instantly recognizable and imminently memeable. The nonsensical story also proved to be fertile ground for creativity, giving the world Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, which creates a whole dystopian future where basketball is banned in the wake of the movie’s events.
For nostalgic reasons, I have long enjoyed periodically visiting the outdated yet earnest web design of the original spacejam dot com. A landing page with unique icons arranged in a circle, a navigation bar on the left-hand side, low-resolution cast and crew pictures included as a bonus. Red and yellow text on a repeated background that may well be some old clip art, loud, noisy backgrounds, and unpretentious copy. Even as a modern visitor, you could almost hear the beeps and hisses of a dial-up modem just by looking at it …
your Starter jacket
… that is until the release of the new movie led Warner Brothers to modernize the domain into a link for the new movie, “treating” you to a trailer which shows off all the other media properties beyond Looney Tunes they plan to shoehorn in, as though Ready Player One hadn’t just made us see the Iron Giant in a context entirely contrary to the messaging and storytelling that made people actually like the character.
The new site is slick. On brand. Utterly boring.
from social media.
Fortunately, somebody realized what a cultural touchstone the old site was, and you can still find the original by either clicking on the movie logo or bypassing it entirely and visiting SpaceJam.com/1996/.
This sort of a consideration is all too rare in a world where the internet is constantly changing and ever more concentrated. Google is where more than 90% of all internet searches happen, and the modern internet is drastically different from what children of the ’90s grew up with. …
Texas Moves To Ban Words ‘Beef,’ ‘Meat’ From Plant-Based Food Labels #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/OWKwVAGR3C pic.twitter.com/IGr3EGenAd
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 19, 2021
UNRELATED: The Wizard Of Oz Was Fueled By Meth And Everybody Hating “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”
Jordan Breeding of Cracked and Karl Smallwood of Fact Fiend discuss the utter insanity that was Wizard of Oz behind-the-scenes. It had everything from meth to forcing children to smoke cigarettes to poison to people getting set on fire to a legitimately brilliant workaround to create one of the greatest practical effects of all time.
ADHD Prescription Label Stapled Into Baby Book https://t.co/cdQ29I9hCe pic.twitter.com/MtavQwGMVd
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 18, 2021
RELATED: Scientists identify gut bacteria linked to neurodegenerative conditions
In a study of the worm C. elegans, the team found bacteria species linked to the development of the conditions, and others that can counteract the effect.
Researchers have identified gut bacteria species that appear to play a role in the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease.
Previous research has shown a link between the conditions and changes in the gut microbiome, but among the thousands of species that live there, it wasn’t easy to identify which ones have an effect. Now, a team based at the University of Florida, USA, have not only identified the harmful bacteria, but have also shown that certain other bacteria species can produce compounds that counteract the effect.
“Looking at the microbiome is a relatively new approach to investigating what causes neurodegenerative diseases. In this study, we were able to show that specific species of bacteria play a role in the development of these conditions,” said Dr Daniel Czyz, assistant professor at the University of Florida.
“We also showed that some other bacteria produce compounds that counteract these ‘bad’ bacteria. Recent studies have shown that patients with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease are deficient in these ‘good’ bacteria, so our findings may help explain that connection and open up an area of future study,” he said.
Neurodegenerative disorders result from proteins building up in tissue in the body. These accumulations of proteins can interfere with cell functioning. …
RELATED: High traces of Viagra in Seoul’s sewers, research shows
Around 23 percent of South Korean males aged 30 to 39 are suffering from erectile dysfunction.
High traces of Viagra and other drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction were found in Seoul’s wastewaters, and their presence in the urban area is expected to increase, South Korean researchers say.
The presence of the chemicals used in the drugs – Phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors (PDE-51) – were high on weekends and in sewage treatment facilities in Gangnam, which is home to nightclubs, bars and red-light spots, a new research showed.
“We estimated that the amount of PDE-5i consumption was 31 per cent higher than in areas with fewer nightlife spots,” the researchers said in the research paper carried by the Scientific Reports earlier this month.
Experts studied the presence of the chemicals in the influent and effluent of two sewage treatment plants (STPs) in the South Korean capital as well as the receiving water bodies.
Their investigation indicated that the existing sewage treatment plants were “unable to handle” the amounts of the residual chemicals. …
EVERYBODY PANIC: THE WATER’S GONNA GIVE YOU BONERS!!!
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Restaurants struggle to re-staff post-pandemic, and while Republican pundits posit that more generous unemployment benefits are to blame, workers are taking a stand and demanding jobs that provide more than just enough pay – or often not enough pay – to make ends meet.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Republicans from Washington D.C. to Maricopa County to the ranks of retired military leaders would like Americans to forget about the insurrection on January 6th, and focus instead on a tired list of debunked election conspiracy theories.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Yeah nah dodgy planet.
お転婆みり！ みりが木に登っている間は下で待機していますが、今のところ救助したことはありません。降りるときはちょっとひやひやしますが、降り方もだんだん上手になってきている感じ。Miri is a tomboy! I am waiting under the tree while Miri is climbing the tree. But until now, she has never needed my help.
FINALLY . . .
RELATED: The Body’s Most Embarrassing Organ Is an Evolutionary Marvel
And yet we have very little idea where anuses come from.
Embiggenable.
TO PEER INTO THE SOUL OF A sea cucumber, don’t look to its face; it doesn’t have one. Gently turn that blobby body around, and gaze deep into its marvelous, multifunctional anus.
The sea cucumber’s posterior is so much more than an exit hole for digestive waste. It is also a makeshift mouth that gobbles up bits of algae; a faux lung, latticed with tubes that exchange gas with the surrounding water; and a weapon that, in the presence of danger, can launch a sticky, stringy web of internal organs to entangle predators. It can even, on occasion, be a home for shimmering pearlfish, which wriggle inside the bum when it billows open to breathe. It would not be inaccurate to describe a sea cucumber as an extraordinary anus that just so happens to have a body around it. As Rebecca Helm, a jellyfish biologist at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, told me, “It is just a really great butt.”
But the sea cucumber’s anus does not receive the recognition it deserves. “The moment you say ‘anus,’ you can hear a pin drop in the room,” Helm said. Bodily taboos have turned anuses across the tree of life into cultural underdogs, and scientific ones too: Not many researchers vocally count themselves among the world’s anus enthusiasts, which, according to the proud few, creates a bit of a blind spot—one that keeps us from understanding a fundamental aspect of our own biology.
The appearance of the anus was momentous in animal evolution, turning a one-hole digestive sac into an open-ended tunnel. Creatures with an anus could physically segregate the acts of eating and defecating, reducing the risk of sullying a snack with scat; they no longer had to finish processing one meal before ingesting another, allowing their tubelike body to harvest more energy and balloon in size. Nowadays, anuses take many forms. Several animals, such as the sea cucumber, have morphed their out-hole into a Swiss Army knife of versatility; others thought that gastrointestinal back doors were so nice, they sprouted them at least twice. “There’s been a lot of evolutionary freedom to play around with that part of the body plan,” Armita Manafzadeh, a vertebrate morphology expert at Brown University, told me.
But anuses are also shrouded in scientific intrigue, and a fair bit of squabbling. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
katie porter has done it again pic.twitter.com/WnNwos7T2v
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) May 18, 2021
