Descending into WH Davenport Adams' 1876 book, Beneath the surface; or, the wonders of the underground world.
“In an age of masonry construction, architecture and geology were natural cousins, lending themselves to mutual comparison far more easily than in today's time of glass and steel construction. To put this another way, many streets in Manhattan are often quite appropriately described as canyons, not only due to their perceived depth—that is, given the towering buildings on either side, as if pedestrians merely wander at the bottom of artificial slot canyons—but also due to the geological materials those buildings were made from. However, following widespread transformations in global building construction, our buildings today are now more likely to be reflective—even dangerously so—or partially transparent, whether this is due to the use of glass curtain walls or shadow-annihilating polished titanium, with the effect that our urban environment is no longer particularly well-served by geological analogy.”
“I was fascinated by this idea of hidden variables – when scientists and mathematicians take into account forces at work that they have no idea about … at its highest level, quantum physics is the equivalent of that riddle: ‘If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a noise?’ I became really fascinated by that – so I started making art then hiding it in some ways, to push this idea that if people couldn’t see it, was it still a piece of art? That led to the start of the hidden paintings.”
One of the most valuable lessons we can learn from Star Wars, via Ryan Britt's Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: and Other Geeky Truths.
“It seems like all the characters in Star Wars learn how to do is punch certain buttons to make their machines do what they need to do, and everything else is left up to droids. In our own culture, pictograms have rapidly replaced words on traffic signs, restrooms, etc. The buttons being pressed by the Death Star control room workers might not even be letters. They might be pictograms representing different functions; functions like death ray blast and trash compact. … It seems like this society has slipped into a kind of highly functional illiteracy. Surely, for these cultures to progress and become spacefaring entities, they needed written language at some point. But now, the necessity to actually learn reading and writing is fading away. Those who know how to build and repair droids and computers probably have better jobs than those who can’t. This is why there seems to be so much poverty in Star Wars: widespread ignorance.”
I thought I was alone in experiencing sleepy Tetris visions, but apparently it's a thing.
“Harvard psychiatrist Robert Stickgold wanted to know why, after a day of mountain climbing, he kept having the sensation of feeling rocks under his hand when he was falling asleep at night, even when he tried thinking about something else. To study the phenomenon in a lab, he turned to Tetris. He found that students who were made to play Tetris reported, quite consistently, that they saw Tetris pieces floating down in front of their eyes as they were going to sleep. Stickgold also included five amnesiacs in the experiment who could play Tetris just fine, but due to a specific brain damage, couldn't later recall playing it. But they, too, said that they saw blocks floating or turning on their side—even though they couldn't explain the origin of those shapes. This result helped narrow down the underlying mechanism behind the Tetris effect. The brain has two main memory systems: the hippocampus deep in the brain registers the explicit memories of actual life events, or episodic memories, while the cortex holds onto implicit memories—the stuff we learn but don't necessarily have conscious access to. The amnesiacs had damage to their hippocampus, so their Tetris dreaming suggested the effect doesn't rely on the explicit memory system, and that unbeknownst to the patients, their brains were still extracting critical information from the day's events.”
The twentieth century dies on film – classic Paris Review interview with Don DeLillo from 1993.
“Kennedy was shot on film, Oswald was shot on TV. Does this mean anything? Maybe only that Oswald’s death became instantly repeatable. It belonged to everyone. The Zapruder film, the film of Kennedy’s death, was sold and hoarded and doled out very selectively. It was exclusive footage. So that the social differences continued to pertain, the hierarchy held fast—you could watch Oswald die while you ate a TV dinner, and he was still dying by the time you went to bed, but if you wanted to see the Zapruder film you had to be very important or you had to wait until the 1970s when I believe it was shown once on television, or you had to pay somebody thirty thousand dollars to look at it—I think that’s the going rate. … There’s an element of dream-terror. And one of the terrible dreams is that our most photogenic president is murdered on film. But there’s something inevitable about the Zapruder film. It had to happen this way. The moment belongs to the twentieth century, which means it had to be captured on film.”
That is all.