May 2013
3 posts
“To whatever degree Radiolab represents change, we didn’t plan it. I don’t think change can be planned — I think it’s only something that can be recognized after the fact.”
—
Science, storytelling, and “gut churn”: Jad Abumrad on the secrets of creative success
I thank @bertbertie for this one.
April 2013
2 posts
America's Test Kitchen: How Much Food Can Five Dollars Get You Around the World?: What do 3... →
americastestkitchen.tumblr.com
How Much Food Can Five Dollars Get You Around the World?: What do 3 pounds of bananas in Australia, 5 pounds of bananas in France, 8.5 pounds of bananas in the USA, and 25 pounds of bananas in Ethiopia have in common? Besides that fact that they’re all bananas, these are the amounts that five…
“Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.”
—
The Hidden Biases in Big Data. By @Kate Crawford at Harvard Business Review
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Magnificent. Thank you.
March 2013
3 posts
the roller coaster convention →
iaapa.org
HT John Wardley, whom I interviewed for the Analog Lessons project
Once upon a time, my best friend Alex said he wanted to become a roller coaster designer. That piqued my interest. I had no idea such a delightful thing was possible, that it could be done!
Alex - whom I’ll see for the first time in a decade later this week - didn’t become a roller coaster designer. I don’t hold it against him. But after listening to what John said in our interview, he’d’ve made a damn fine one.
The Waft That Woos →
rsc.org.uk
use your nose to get through the maze of mirrors. another inspired installation from jellymongers Bompas and Parr, this time at the RSC in Stratford.
From the B&P website:
The Waft that Woos is a mirror maze, navigable by nose and inspired by the Merry Wives of Windsor and Shakespearian comedy. Follow the scent of the only aphrodisiac known to mankind (which is absorbed via your lungs and eyeballs) to the heart of the maze.
Bompas & Parr’s installation is geared to give visitors a tangible Shakespearian experience, exploding narratives, characterisation and criticism to an architectural and inhabitable scale. Come explore the maze and sniff the Shakespearean love oil our atmospheric aphrodisiac.
The maze develops and expands the visual trickery found in The Merry Wives of Windsor to an explorable narrative environment. As with the best Shakespearian comedies increasing confusion is resolved in the delights of the wedding bower.
“how do we know our world is broken in exactly the same way that Silicon Valley claims it is? What if the engineers are wrong and frustration, inconsistency, forgetting, perhaps even partisanship, are the very features that allow us to morph into the complex social actors that we are?”
—The Perils of Perfection, by Evgeny Morozov. NYT 3 March 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/the-perils-of-perfection.html
February 2013
2 posts
A "Perfume Concert" Soon to Be Given Here -- Symphonies in Odors to Transport New York Audiences to Japan. →
query.nytimes.com
a description of the forthcoming “newest public amusement”, A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes, from 14 September 1902, in the New York Times.
All lovers of good smells are expected to patronize the convert, which will be given by Mr. Sadakachi Hartmann, an aesthete and odorist, or smell expert of no mean standing. This olfactory enthusiast will in a way feed the various smells into his machine, and by a series of stops and vales, vert much after the manner of an automatic piano player, will, he says, play upon the senses of his audience much as a great musician sways the listeners with tonal melodies.”
also, delightfully,
The smell soloist may strike the low C by diffusing a strong smell of patchouli, then the high F with a piercing note of burning horsehair.” A female Japanese dancer and “soft Japanese airs” accompany the recital to aid the public in their appreciation of this olfactory concert.
“In Poland, American shows aren’t dubbed by actors mimicking the original, English-speaking actors. A lektor, the Polish term for voice-over artist, simply reads all the dialogue in Polish. While the lektor drones on, viewers hear the original English soundtrack faintly in the background. The approach is popular in Poland, where viewers still feel comfortable with a style deeply rooted in the country’s communist past. Lektors, traditionally men with husky voices, pride themselves on their utterly emotionless delivery, a craft honed through thousands of hours in recording studios.”
—
On Polish TV, Desperate Wives Sound Like Guys
From WSJ in October 2007.
I remember this style of delivery fondly. Always reminds me of visiting Poland as a kid.
But somehow I don’t think it’s a technique that’d go down with the the Digital Human production team.
January 2013
1 post
“Such faith in technology in the absence of critical analysis or empirical support is an example of “techno-fundamentalism,” the belief that we can, should, and will invent a machine that will fix the problems the last machine caused.”
—
Vaidhyanathan, S. (2006, Sept). Introduction: Rewiring the “Nation”: The Place of Technology in American Studies. American Quarterly, 58(3): 555-567.
[abstract only]
More:
Techno-fundamentalism assumes not only the means and will to triumph over adversity through gadgets and schemes, but the sense that invention is the best of all possible methods of confronting problems.
All very good.
November 2012
6 posts
“Now an entirely new organ has been developed, which …translates music into corresponding odors”
—The Dead media Project:Working Notes: 06.9
“most odor-cued memories were located to the first decade of life (”
—
Willander, J. & Larsson, M. (2006). Smell your way back to childhood: Autobiograhical odor memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Vol13(2): 240-244.
abstract only:
This study addressed age distributions and experiential qualities of autobiographical memories evoked by different sensory cues. Ninety-three older adults were presented with one of three cue types (word, picture, or odor) and were asked to relate any autobiographical event for the given cue. The main aims were to explore whether (1) the age distribution of olfactory-evoked memories differs from memories cued by words and pictures and (2) the experiential qualities of the evoked memories vary over the different cues. The results showed that autobiographical memories triggered by olfactory information were older than memories associated with verbal and visual information. Specifically, most odor-cued memories were located to the first decade of life (<10 years), whereas memories associated with verbal and visual cues peaked in early adulthood (11–20 years). Also, odor-evoked memories were associated with stronger feelings of being brought back in time and had been thought of less often than memories evoked by verbal and visual information. This pattern of findings suggests that odor-evoked memories may be different from other memory experiences. nt|mis|This work was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council
“[The Anti-Camera] coerces our mind into recollecting the essence of a moment – something less tangible than an image can capture.”
—
An interesting idea:
The device is designed to tag a moment in time with a unique olfactory identifier code – a bespoke smell. Then, when wishing to recall the moment at their leisure, the user of such a device could recreate the unique smell.
The thrill engineers (on the science of roller coasters) →
sciencefocus.com
Scientists from the University of Nottingham recently turned the Alton Towers amusement park, in Staffordshire, into an open-air lab. They rigged up over 100 volunteers with equipment that measured everything from their heart rate to the minute muscle movements in their faces as they rode on the park’s rides. The data produced is now being sifted to uncover what riders really do, or don’t, enjoy.
also:
the illusion of danger is vital
From Focus Magazine. By Andy Ridgway. No publication date.
“an accessible laboratory for scent innovation” in Los Angeles, opening in March 2013. How convenient.”
—
The Institute for Art & Olfaction
Aha!
We hope to create innovative, edgy, multi-disciplinary programs that highlight the value of scent.
“ode is a wellbeing product [for people with dementia] that creates the link between…scent & its effect on our relationship with food.”
—
“funded and supported through the Living well with dementia Design Challenge, a competition being run by the Design Council and the Department of Health to rethink life with dementia”
October 2012
4 posts
Dough Globe →
foundry2012.mintdigital.com
It was Foundry’s last few days together at Mint last week, and it was a very busy time, finishing things off and waiting for prototypes to arrive back. But it was also full of excitement because we got to show everyone what we have been up to over the last 3 months.
So without further ado…
Scratch & Sniff NYC →
ediblegeography.com
there’s a lovely section here about the relationship between smells & maps. Here Nicola Twilly describes the theory behind her installation, Scratch N’ Sniff NYC:
Scratch ‘N Sniff NYC consists of two maps, twelve smells, thousands of scratch ‘n sniff stickers and a variable number of linguistic descriptors. A “majority preference” map on the left-hand side extrapolates from Vosshall’s “olfactory demography” to show the dominant odour perception framework in each neighbourhood. Next to it on the right, a crowd-sourced “personal favourite” map will ask each exhibition visitor to position their own smell biases and understanding within the city. It’s hardly a scientific study, but I can’t wait to see the different patterns that emerge over the course of the exhibition.
With links to the Smell Lab at Rockefeller University.
HT @kthread
