Friday Ephemera
Replace your face. // Ceramics that look like inflatables. // Roger Corman’s unreleased 1994 “cult” film, Fantastic Four. // “Scientists at the National Ignition Facility are trying to create a miniature star on Earth.” // Scale revisited. // Make your own music box. // Another Tate Modern triumph. // Drawn with pastels. // Pet deli, Germany. // Geometric candies, 3D printed. // At last, autoluminescent plants. // Little girl meets father’s twin. // Vintage HiFi. (h/t, MeFi) // The future of exam invigilation. // 13 arguments for liberal capitalism. // Motorhomes of yore. (h/t, Things) // Textile creatures. // How stone cutting is done. // Subway timestretch. // And finally, an inevitable use of thermal imaging.
There is no link for 13 arguments
Oh yes there is. It’s just bigger now.
Another Tate Modern triumph. // Drawn with pastels.
I see what you did there.
Little girl meets father’s twin.
The double-take is priceless. “Cookie!”
As usual, reporters bungle science. The Atlantic says the the result of the NIF’s “recent laser experiment… [was] far short of being a self-sustaining reaction…”. Well duh.
Laser-pumped inertial confinement fusion can’t be self-sustaining by definition. The result is, and always will be, a brief moment of fusion before the fuel mass disperses. The developers hope that burst will release more usable energy than was needed for the laser pulse to trigger it, making the process “self-sustaining”.
A fission “chain reaction” can be self-sustaining because the fissions release neutrons which cause additional fissions. But fusion releases only energy. That energy can promote additional fusion only when the fuel mass is held in place by the surrounding mass of a star.
I’m sure the NIF staff explained this to Alan Taylor; obviously, he didn’t get it.
And finally, an inevitable use of thermal imaging.
So farts rise. I’m glad we’ve proved that with science.
It pleases me no end that these threads can encompass both nuclear physics and fart jokes.
It pleases me no end that these threads can encompass both nuclear physics and fart jokes.
It’s all educational.
Some people are confused by roadworks signs. https://twitter.com/OwainJames/status/423891766736326656
I don’t think I posted this here before, but:
Naked man attacked by cat (safe for work).
I do believe that’s the first time a naked dishwasher repair mishap has cropped up here. I try to keep track of these things.
Don’t you hate it when that happens to you, David?
“Some people are confused by roadworks signs”
In the future we will have robots to do that for us.
The “Last Supper” in the Tate is a potentially interesting idea–the Last Supper as a business meeting. But it was so inelegantly executed that there’s no way to tell that that table of mannequins with their backs to you is supposed to be the Last Supper–the mannequins are not arranged in any way resembling the composition of the painting. How is he “paradoxically enabling that sacralisation through a seeming desacralisation” if the piece doesn’t actually remind anyone of the other painting and their sacred feelings for it? I guess you have to read the description, but shouldn’t art be moving and profound without having to read an accompanying essay?
I guess you have to read the description, but shouldn’t art be moving and profound without having to read an accompanying essay?
Heresy!!! But on a more serious note, it’s profoundly obnoxious how much of contemporary art seems to follow this template:
Step 1: Remove an object from its everyday context.
Step 2: With sufficiently abstruse jargon, comment on how exquisitely strange and *challenging* it is to encounter said object outside of its everyday context.
Step 3: Use the denial of step 2’s thesis as proof of step 2’s thesis.
Step 4: Feel superior to the rest of society.
This scheme was already old by the time the film American Beauty wowed a generation of high schoolers with the mere sight of wind-swept trash.
I guess you have to read the description, but shouldn’t art be moving and profound without having to read an accompanying essay?
As I’ve probably said before, if an artist feels it necessary to tell you just how clever and “radical” his art is – as “Mr Gerbil” does, repeatedly – there’s a very good chance that what you’ll see is unattractive, vacuous and utterly conformist. And by ‘very good chance’ I mean ‘near certainty’.
shouldn’t art be moving and profound..
If they want to be really radical they should fill the turbine hall with a massive new turbine, supplied with gas from our nascent fracking industry and stream images of the machines providing cheap power and the burly men who would run them.
I could then watch the images on my smart phone whilst charging its’ battery with the output.
Obviously, I denounce myself for these wicked thoughts.
Obviously, I denounce myself for these wicked thoughts.
[ Wheels out the ideological realignment booth. ]
Give it a minute to charge then set it to level 3. Thirty minutes should do it. You may want to bite down on something.
I never knew Russell’s Teapot was so small.
Brilliant.
And then the parallels and corollaries:
Step 1: Remove a classical liberal/conservative/libertarian/small govt advocate from his everyday context.
Step 2: With sufficiently abstruse jargon, comment on how exquisitely strange and *challenging* said individual surely must be outside of a strictly contemporary, “progressive” context.
Step 3: Use the denial of step 2’s thesis as proof of step 2’s thesis.
Step 4: Feel superior to the rest of society.
and…
Step 1: Remove verifiability, classical principle, moral underpinning, or plain common sense from its historical and functional context.
Step 2: With sufficiently abstruse jargon, comment on how exquisitely strange and *challenging* it is to encounter said value or principle outside of the mentally disordered context.
Step 3: Use the denial of step 2’s thesis as proof of step 2’s thesis.
Step 4: Feel superior to the rest of society.
Once again we see the continuum: There are two kinds of people. How they manifest either reason or disorder knows no one sphere.
Secular Progressivism is such disorder. It is merely the collectivized death of meaning and Higher Purpose. It is the fundamentally mechanical nature of narcissism, a mind stripped of genuine, inherent humanity. This also explains why secproggs overcompensate their failures of principle with ersatz moralities, so to project them as smoke and mirrors.
“This scheme was already old by the time the film American Beauty wowed a generation of high schoolers with the mere sight of wind-swept trash”
Ah, I must step in here. American Beauty is a film that once again resonates for me (having a very short time ago come of an age ..er ..not far off that of Lester Burnham’s in the film).
So for me the plastic bag scene* still works, as does all the stuff about perceptions of normality, and 40-somethings going barmy in soul-destroying jobs where they have to kow-tow to halfwits. And it’s extremely funny for most of the first hour. And Thomas Newman’s score is … I don’t have a word good enough for it.
Anyway I guess a film either strikes a chord for you or it doesn’t.
* based on a similar revelatory moment experienced by writer Alan Ball
http://distractify.com/people/dad-dresses-up-daughter-for-famous-art-portraits/