This is particularly awesome if you’re familiar with chiptunes or just generally appreciate video game music. It’s actually not related to video games at all, but this guy Norman McLaren basically pioneered a very chiptunes sound in the 1950s by painting on analog film. As a side effect, it also allowed him to visualize the sounds he made.
This a series of 3 videos showing his amazing work. The first introduces his process. The second is an early example of his work. The third is a longer, more advanced piece he made in 1971. It has a sound very similar to early video game music that modern chiptunes artists try to recreate… only it was about 10 year before video games had any real music.
These photos from 100 years ago are really quite amazing, most obviously for being in color. Seeing color photos from so long ago just doesn’t feel right, especially at such high resolution. It’s probably the closest thing to time travel.
I’ve always liked the idea of US history framed as being about “the American experiment.” The few times I’ve heard it explicitly talked about as an experiment have usually been coupled with the topic of diversity. Although it’s still a work in progress, and we suffer from something I call the “white man bootstrap bias,” I think we’ve done as good a job as humanity allows for the time.
This is an instructional video that came out of the Department of Defense in 1944 to teach field technicians how to use simplex circuits and phantom circuits to get a crude form of multiplexing — allowing them to get more channels out of fewer communication wires.
They do a surprising job at explaining it, making use of great visuals. There is a Part 2 that explains how to debug these systems when broken, which of course was necessary since they were expected to break often in conditions of war.
Speaking of Tesla the other day, I now present to you a Drunk History of Nikola Tesla. This drunk story is reenacted by John C. Reilly and Crispin Glover.
Caution: there is brief vomiting.
Before Kevin Kelly got into his deep exploration of technology, he briefly took a step back to think about science. In this talk, he was tasked to think about the next 50 years of science. He starts quite reasonably by going back, and looking at the evolution and trends of science. This alone is fascinating, as you can imagine.
Then he says something interesting: Computation is leading a third way of science. Traditionally, science has been based on a cycle of hypothesis and measurement, as he says, the two pillars of science. As he references A New Kind of Science, he talks about a third pillar of science: synthesis, or simulation.
He describes simulation as an interactive theory, allowing you to easily explore much more of the possibility space. You can then measure, make predictions, and then test them in simulation, which may be tied to real world measurement and data. Another way to frame it is that it’s based on making things. He calls it the nerd way, but I like to think of it as the hacker way. It’s about learning by building things.
