John Sinclair, The World's Fastest Camera, The Luna Luna, etc.
In which I serve up some midweek links to get you through 'til Sunday.
😢 Yesterday we lost John Sinclair. Stephen Erlewine said it better than I could: “Sinclair was a rock & roll radical and pro-marijuana activist who was a pivotal figure in the creation of the Michigan counterculture that gave birth to the MC5 and Iggy Pop & the Stooges.”
🪩 If you live in my neck of the woods, come out this Saturday at 7pm to AMP’d, which my company RetroDuck is sponsoring, and dance to everybody’s favorite ‘80s cover band, Starfarm. All proceeds go to the Greater Lansing Care Foundation. Tickets on sale here.
📽 We are also sponsoring this year’s Capital City Film Festival, April 10-20th.
🎡 One of the first links I ever shared here was about the Luna Luna, a carnival designed by some of the 20th century’s most famous artists, back in 1987. Well, it’s back.
🚰 I guess I’ll just keep standing here while you fix the sink. “So, yeah, I guess I have no idea why I’m still standing here, but for some reason it feels like it would be ruder to leave, especially now that I’ve already stayed here for what feels like between six seconds and an hour.”
🌝 The moon is not made of green cheese. Where did this idea come from? “There was never an actual historical popular belief that the Moon is made of green cheese (cf. Flat Earth and the myth of the flat Earth). It was typically used as an example of extreme credulity, a meaning that was clear and commonly understood as early as 1638.”
🦖 The Godzilla films ranked. Minus One ruled, but justice for Godzilla (1998).
🏀 Sportsball teams named after technologies: Pistons, Supersonics, Lansing Lugnuts, etc.
🌳 A look at homes with living trees growing inside. “Biophilic design is an innovative approach that seeks to incorporate elements of nature into architectural and interior design. Its goal is to reconnect people with the natural world by integrating natural materials, plants, light, and outdoor views into their surrounding environment.”
🦈 Shark skin generates thrust. “The discovery explains the speed that sharks can reach and suggests how marine engineers can copy them.”
🧠 Apparently human brains have gotten pretty big the last 75 years. From Popular Mechanics: “However, new research from University of California Davis suggests that on smaller timescales—that is, biological changes between generations—the brain’s volume has actually increased by 6.6 percent. While that may not seem like a lot (the brain is essentially the size of two clenched fists, after all), it could be a useful biological bulwark against dementia.”
☢️ A nuclear power station in Michigan will be the first in the United States to reopen after being fully closed.
📱 Blackberry-like “Clicks” keyboard. Why am I interested in this? Am I nostalgic for everything?
📸 The world’s fastest camera shoots at 156.3 trillion frames per second. “The best slow-mo cameras in phones are usually working with a few hundred fps. Professional cinematic cameras might use a few thousand, to achieve a smoother effect. But if you want to see what’s going on at the nanoscale, you’ll need to slow things way down, to the billions or even trillions of frames per second.”
🏆 Speaking of cameras, see the winners of the Smithsonian’s 21st Annual Photography Contest, “which drew 30,728 submissions from 5,324 photographers in 128 countries around the globe.”
🌶️ Despite the fact that heat-seekers are in constant search of spice— Carolina reapers, scorpions, ghosts, Guatemalan insanity peppers, etc.— jalapeños are actually getting less spicy. “And the long-term ‘de-spicification’ of the jalapeño is a deliberate choice, not the product of a bad season of weather.”
✌️ That’s all for now. Enjoy the rest of your week, and remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
