More miscellaneous details

  • Louise Bourgeois spider to return to Tate Modern for gallery’s 25th birthday – Museums Association

    The 10 metre-high stainless-steel spider that greeted the first visitors to London’s Tate Modern in 2000 will return to the Turbine Hall next year in honour of the gallery’s 25th anniversary. Louise Bourgeois’ Maman – which the late French-American artist described as an exploration of the “ambiguities of motherhood” – was initially commissioned for the gallery’s opening, and was exhibited both in the Turbine Hall and outside the museum before its permanent acquisition by Tate in 2008.

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  • ‘New Dawn’ and the Parliamentary Archives – Parliamentary Archives: Inside the Act Room

    ‘New Dawn’ is a major new permanent contemporary artwork by artist Mary Branson, celebrating the ‘Votes for Women’ movement in Parliament. It consists of 168 individually hand-blown glass ‘scrolls’, in the colours of the various women’s suffrage organisations, individually backlit to ebb and flow with the tidal Thames. And they were inspired by the Original Acts in the Victoria Tower.

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  • Hacker laws

    90–90 Rule: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. … The Dunning-Kruger Effect: If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. … Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. … Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. … Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a dick.

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  • A deadly love affair with a chatbot – Der Spiegel

    In hindsight, one can say that Sewell’s parents tried everything. They spoke with their son. They tried to find out what was bothering him. What he was doing on his phone all those hours in his room. Nothing, Sewell told them. He showed them his Instagram and TikTok accounts. They found hardly any posts from him; he only watched a few videos now and then. They looked at his WhatsApp history but found nothing unsettling – and that in itself was unsettling, given that their son was becoming less and less reachable. They agreed that they would take his cell phone from him at bedtime.

    They had never heard of Character:AI, the app which, with the help of artificial intelligence and information provided by the user, creates digital personalities that speak and write like real people – chatbots, basically. And their son told them nothing of his secret world in which, he believed, a girl named Daenerys Targaryen was waiting for him to share her life with him.

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  • Modern magic unlocks Merlin’s medieval secrets – University of Cambridge

    Afragile 13th century manuscript fragment, hidden in plain sight as the binding of a 16th-century archival register, has been discovered in Cambridge and revealed to contain rare medieval stories of Merlin and King Arthur. The manuscript, first discovered at Cambridge University Library in 2019, has now been identified as part of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, a French-language sequel to the legend of King Arthur. The story was part of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, a medieval best seller but few now remain. There are less than 40 surviving manuscripts of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, with each one unique since they were individually handwritten by medieval scribes. This latest discovery has been identified as having been written between 1275 and 1315.

    The manuscript had survived the centuries after being recycled and repurposed in the 1500s as the cover for a property record from Huntingfield Manor in Suffolk, owned by the Vanneck family of Heveningham. It meant the remarkable discovery was folded, torn, and even stitched into the binding of the book – making it almost impossible for Cambridge experts to access it, read it, or confirm its origins. What followed the discovery has been a ground-breaking collaborative project, showcasing the work of the University Library’s Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory (CHIL) and combining historical scholarship with cutting-edge digital techniques, to unlock the manuscript’s long-held secrets – without damaging the unique document.

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  • Who you gonna believe, Hegseth or yYour lyin’ eyes? – The Bulwark

    Of course, it’s an open question how much “thinking” went into it at all. The Trump administration runs on pure id; its default media strategy is an exercise in raw narrative domination. It’s all there in the three rules Trump learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn: always attack, always deny everything, always declare victory. This isn’t just a strategy; it’s a habit of mind. After a decade of the party teaching itself to react to all stimuli like this, it’s unclear they know how to proceed in any other way.

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  • ‘Nowhere on earth is safe’: Trump imposes tariffs on uninhabited islands near Antarctica – The Guardian

    The export figures from Heard Island and McDonald Islands are even more perplexing. The territory does have a fishery but no buildings or human habitation whatsoever. Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.

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  • The stupidest chart you’ll see today – The Economist

    Calculating reciprocal tariffs is hard. It takes years of determined study to get a PhD in trade economics. And you need teams of these types of wonks to come up with policies that will work. Scratch that. All that’s needed is an idiot, an AI chatbot, or some combination of the two. It took no more than a couple of hours after President Donald Trump announced the United States’ new reciprocal tariff rates for the commentariat to work out how exactly they had been arrived at.

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  • European alternatives for popular services – European Alternatives

    We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

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  • Better images of AI

    Abstract, futuristic or science-fiction-inspired images of AI hinder the understanding of the technology’s already significant societal and environmental impacts. Images relating machine intelligence to human intelligence set unrealistic expectations and misstate the capabilities of AI. Images representing AI as sentient robots mask the accountability of the humans actually developing the technology, and can suggest the presence of robots where there are none. Such images potentially sow fear, and research shows they can be laden with historical assumptions about gender, ethnicity and religion. However, finding alternatives can be difficult! That’s why we, a non-profit collaboration, are researching, creating, curating and providing Better Images of AI.

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  • The ugly objectification behind the world’s first robot artist – Frieze

    With an evangelical gleam in his eye, Meller claims Ai-Da is ‘a new voice’ in art, ‘probing our world from a non-human perspective’. (There are a number of other artists exploring art and A.I. right now, including James Bridle, Ian Cheng, Agnieszka Kurant and Trevor Paglen.) He is justifiably fascinated and worried by the ways in which technology is changing the conditions of life on this planet. Invoking Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, he hopes Ai-Da will provide a way for humans to grasp what machines will bring in the coming decade. But he is the wizard behind the curtain. Ai-Da has no learning capabilities, and in the absence of any affective programming, it’s hard to believe that Ai-Da has a ‘voice’ – whatever philosophers agree that to be. Perhaps there is a flesh-and-blood artist who could use it for productive ends, but at this stage, Ai-Da seems like a research experiment that’s been brought into the world too early, too primitive to tell us much. Despite Meller’s claims – and no matter how many times Ai-Da is referred to in the third person, as if to will it into life – it is not innately creative. It needs electricity. It needs to be switched on and set into ‘drawing mode’ by humans. Ai-Da can’t choose or refuse its subjects, it can’t switch up styles, backtrack, discard work it considers a failure, ascribe meaning to what it makes. Ai-Da is a tool, not an artist.

    Pygmalion’s shadow lurks around the edges of the project. Meller refers to the robot as ‘she’, as if it has independent thought, but acknowledges it’s also an ‘it’ with no autonomy. The humanoid form encourages audiences to engage with what it makes, he argues, and is gendered female so as to amplify the voices of women who have been ignored throughout art history. It’s an act of ugly objectification for a man to think he can solve that problem by making a mechanized woman. Ai-Da could have taken the shape of a Perspex box with a bionic claw poking out of the side, or had long rubber tentacles, or been coated in yellow fur and named Blinky. It did not need to look like a waxwork of a twenty-something woman.

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  • Anthropic Economic Index: insights from Claude 3.7 Sonnet – Anthropic

    Briefly, our latest results are the following: Since the launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we’ve observed a rise in the share of usage for coding, as well as educational, science, and healthcare applications; People use Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s new “extended thinking” mode predominantly for technical tasks, including those associated with occupations like computer science researchers, software developers, multimedia animators, and video game designers; We’re releasing data on augmentation / automation breakdowns on a task- and occupation-level. For example, tasks associated with copywriters and editors show the highest amount of task iteration, where the human and model co-write something together. By contrast, tasks associated with translators and interpreters show among the highest amounts of directive behavior—where the model completes the task with minimal human involvement.

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  • Free tech eliminates the fear of public speaking – University of Cambridge

    As revealed in a recent publication from Macdonald – Director of the Immersive Technology Lab at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge – the platform increases levels of confidence and enjoyment for most users after a single 30-minute session. In the most recent trial with students from Cambridge and UCL, it was found that a week of self-guided use was beneficial to 100% of users. The platform helped participants feel more prepared, adaptable, resilient, confident, better able to manage anxiety. […]

    With the new VR platform, a user can experience the sensation of presenting to a wide range of photorealistic audiences. What makes Macdonald’s invention unique is that it uses what he calls ‘overexposure therapy’ where users can train in increasingly more challenging photorealistic situations – eventually leading to extreme scenarios that the user is unlikely to encounter in their lifetime. They might begin by presenting to a small and respectful audience but as they progress, the audience sizes increase and there are more distractions: spectators begin to look disinterested, they walk out, interrupt, take photos, and so on. A user can progress to the point where they can present in a hyper-distracting stadium environment with loud noises, panning stadium lights and 10,000 animated spectators.

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  • If Anthropic succeeds, a nation of benevolent AI geniuses could be born – WIRED

    It would seem an irresolvable dilemma: Either hold back and lose or jump in and put humanity at risk. Amodei believes that his Race to the Top solves the problem. It’s remarkably idealistic. Be a role model of what trustworthy models might look like, and figure that others will copy you. “If you do something good, you can inspire employees at other companies,” he explains, “or cause them to criticize their companies.” Government regulation would also help, in the company’s view. … DeepMind’s Hassabis says he appreciates Anthropic’s efforts to model responsible AI. “If we join in,” he says, “then others do as well, and suddenly you’ve got critical mass.” He also acknowledges that in the fury of competition, those stricter safety standards might be a tough sell. “There is a different race, a race to the bottom, where if you’re behind in getting the performance up to a certain level but you’ve got good engineering talent, you can cut some corners,” he says. “It remains to be seen whether the race to the top or the race to the bottom wins out.” […]

    Even as Amodei is frustrated with the public’s poor grasp of AI’s dangers, he’s also concerned that the benefits aren’t getting across. Not surprisingly, the company that grapples with the specter of AI doom was becoming synonymous with doomerism. So over the course of two frenzied days he banged out a nearly 14,000-word manifesto called “Machines of Loving Grace.” Now he’s ready to share it. He’ll soon release it on the web and even bind it into an elegant booklet. It’s the flip side of an AI Pearl Harbor—a bonanza that, if realized, would make the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI seem like an epochal bargain. One suspects that this rosy outcome also serves to soothe the consciences of Amodei and his fellow Anthros should they ask themselves why they are working on something that, by their own admission, might wipe out the species.

    The vision he spins makes Shangri-La look like a slum. Not long from now, maybe even in 2026, Anthropic or someone else will reach AGI. Models will outsmart Nobel Prize winners. These models will control objects in the real world and may even design their own custom computers. Millions of copies of the models will work together—imagine an entire nation of geniuses in a data center! Bye-bye cancer, infectious diseases, depression; hello lifespans of up to 1,200 years.

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  • Traverse Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ with Smarthistory – Colossal

    Turning over the panels, as if opening the cover of a book, we enter an otherworldly realm where humans and beasts mingle with oversized animals, fruit, and surreal structures. On the left, Adam and Eve are introduced by a young God, before Eve was tempted to eat the forbidden fruit hanging in the Garden of Eden. In the center, dozens of nude figures frolic, eat, engage in sexual activities, forage, swim, and fly. On the right is hell. “One of the most compelling theories is that the central panel is an alternate story,” Zucker says. “What if the Temptation had not taken place? What if Adam and Eve had remained innocent and had populated the world? And so is it possible that what we’re seeing is that reality played out in Bosch’s imagination?”

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  • The first trial of generative AI therapy shows it might help with depression – MIT Technology Review

    Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon, an assistant professor of health ethics at Simon Fraser University who has written about AI therapy bots but was not involved in the research, says the results are impressive but notes that just like any other clinical trial, this one doesn’t necessarily represent how the treatment would act in the real world. “We remain far from a ‘greenlight’ for widespread clinical deployment,” he wrote in an email.

    One issue is the supervision that wider deployment might require. During the beginning of the trial, Jacobson says, he personally oversaw all the messages coming in from participants (who consented to the arrangement) to watch out for problematic responses from the bot. If therapy bots needed this oversight, they wouldn’t be able to reach as many people.

    I asked Jacobson if he thinks the results validate the burgeoning industry of AI therapy sites. “Quite the opposite,” he says, cautioning that most don’t appear to train their models on evidence-based practices like cognitive behavioral therapy, and they likely don’t employ a team of trained researchers to monitor interactions. “I have a lot of concerns about the industry and how fast we’re moving without really kind of evaluating this,” he adds.

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  • Well, that’s not good – Futurism

    In a new joint study, researchers with OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab found that this small subset of ChatGPT users engaged in more “problematic use,” defined in the paper as “indicators of addiction… including preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control, and mood modification.” … Though the vast majority of people surveyed didn’t engage emotionally with ChatGPT, those who used the chatbot for longer periods of time seemed to start considering it to be a “friend.” The survey participants who chatted with ChatGPT the longest tended to be lonelier and get more stressed out over subtle changes in the model’s behavior, too.

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  • OpenAI halts Studio Ghibli-style images trend, citing ‘important questions and concerns’ by the creative community – eWeek

    If you’ve been wondering why your social media feeds have been awash with Studio Ghibli-style images this week, OpenAI’s new image generator is the answer. On Tuesday, the company embedded the multimodal tool into GPT-4o, and users have been transforming their photos into vibrant, whimsical scenes reminiscent of the Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro.” … However, the fun didn’t last long. The system card for GPT-4o’s native image generator now states that OpenAI “added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist.” OpenAI acknowledged that the fact its tool can emulate named artists’ styles “has raised important questions and concerns within the creative community.”

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  • Filtered for the rise of the well-dressed robots – Interconnected

    The way I understand it, there have been three major challenges with robots in the real world: mechanical engineering, perception, and instruction following. Engineering has been solved for a while; perception mostly works, though not understanding. Instruction following, including contextual awareness, task sequencing, and safety… that was a work in progress. Solved at a stroke by gen-AI. So, as of a couple years ago, there is clear line of sight to humanoid robots in the market. Research done, development phase: go.

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  • No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation – One Useful Thing

    Yet it is clear that what has happened to text will happen to images, and eventually video and 3D environments. These multimodal systems are reshaping the landscape of visual creation, offering powerful new capabilities while raising legitimate questions about creative ownership and authenticity. The line between human and AI creation will continue to blur, pushing us to reconsider what constitutes originality in a world where anyone can generate sophisticated visuals with a few prompts. Some creative professions will adapt; others may be unchanged, and still others may transform entirely. As with any significant technological shift, we’ll need well-considered frameworks to navigate the complex terrain ahead. The question isn’t whether these tools will change visual media, but whether we’ll be thoughtful enough to shape that change intentionally.

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  • Angelina Jolie was right about computers – WIRED

    Here’s where I confess something awkward, something I didn’t intend to confess in this story, but why not: ChatGPT made me do it. Write this story, I mean. Months ago, I asked it for a big hardware scoop that no other publication had. RISC-V, it suggested. And look at that—the international RISC-V summit was coming up in Santa Clara the very next month. And every major RISC and RISC-V inventor lived down the street from me in Berkeley. It was perfect. Some would say too perfect. If you believe the marketing hype, everyone wants RISC-V chips to accelerate their AI. So I started to think: Maybe ChatGPT wants this for … itself. Maybe it manipulated me into evangelizing for RISC-V as one tiny part of a long-term scheme to open-source its own soul and/or achieve superintelligence!

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  • No rise in private school closures in England since Labour’s VAT proposal, data shows – The Guardian

    More than 75 private schools closed every year in England on average over the last decade, official data has shown, with no apparent increase in the trend since Labour announced it was imposing VAT on fees. A number of media reports have highlighted the closure of some private schools as supposedly being caused by the policy, which is intended to raise money for more teachers in state schools. […]

    But data from a government register of private schools in England, collated in response to a parliamentary question tabled by the shadow education secretary, Damian Hinds, indicated that a churn in individual institutions is a longstanding trend. Since 1987, when data started to be collected, 2,583 schools have opened and 2,674 have shut. In the years from 2013 to 2023, 847 schools closed – an average of 77 a year. The 2024 data, which goes up to 6 October, shows that 46 schools have closed, slightly below the average trend, with 77 opening.

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  • Private senior school closes due to soaring costs – BBC News

    A private school in Lancashire is no longer financially viable and is having to close at short notice, its head teacher has confirmed. Jonathan Harrison, who is also proprietor of the Moorland School in Clitheroe, wrote to parents and carers on Wednesday to say the senior school would shut its doors on Friday. He explained Moorland could no longer operate because of factors including the imposition of VAT on school fees, falling numbers of full-fee paying students, uncollected fees, and higher operating costs.

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  • Aspect, photo organization redefined – Bildhuus

    For twenty years we have been using star ratings and color labels to organize our photos. We think it’s time for something better. Novel collection based organization approach; peer-to-peer synchronization across devices; transparent and automated photo storage; standard metadata and open formats; no subscriptions, no cloud.

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  • Napster to become a music-marketing metaverse firm after being sold for $207M – Ars Technica

    After that, the Napster brand changed hands multiple times, including with Roxio, which made Napster an iTunes rival in 2003. The early 2000s saw Napster try various business ventures, including a Flash-based site that let you stream for free but without playlists and a subscription model. Best Buy owned Napster for a bit in 2008 but eventually sold it to Rhapsody, which relaunched the Napster brand as a streaming service in 2016. UK-based MelodyVR paid $70 million for the brand founded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning in 2020 before selling it in 2022 to the blockchain firms.

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  • The media platforms that just won’t die – Axios

    Infinite Reality’s plan is to reimagine Napster as “a social music platform” that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening. Similar to companies like Spotify, it says the new platform will allow artists to “connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans.” The company will introduce features like 3D virtual concert spaces, merchandise and event commerce as well as AI-powered customer service and sales tools.

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  • Napster pioneered music sharing over 25 years ago. It just got bought for $207 million – CNBC

    Since 2016, Napster has been a music streaming service offering on-demand streaming of licensed tracks, currently for $11 per month. It’s a small player in a world dominated by Spotify and Apple Music. In 2022, Napster was bought by blockchain company Algorand, whose investors brought in Vlassopulos.

    Napster holds official licenses to stream millions of tracks, agreements that were attractive to Infinite Reality, which says that its version of Napster will “disrupt legally.” And Algorand’s background in blockchain technology was intriguing to Infinite Reality, which also develops Web3 technology, Acunto said.

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  • Chaos bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI – The Public Domain Review

    Each of these seemed to me “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly”. And indeed of any of them I might be tempted to cry out something along the lines of, “It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale!” or, “It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements!” Or perhaps even, “It’s a Hyperborean winter scene! It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time!” Further iteration was called for. The middle version possessed, to my eye, a dark central form of peculiarly leviathanic nebulosity. Onward!

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  • MIS market churn spring 2025 – WhichMIS?

    Looking across the January census figures from 2021 to this year, we see that the SIMS school numbers have fallen dramatically, from a healthy 15,753 schools using their MIS in January 2021 to just 8,818 this year. That is a loss of some 6,935 schools in just four years! This means that some 44% of their schools have moved away from SIMS in that time. It reduces their market share from 67% in 2021 to just 40% now. Looking further back, SIMS was the dominant player for many years, with around 85% of the market in England only ten years ago…

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  • The leaked Signal chat, annotated – The New York Times

    Excerpts of a Signal chat published Monday by The Atlantic provide a rare and revealing look at the private conversations of top Trump administration officials as they weighed plans for U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. … President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the apparently accidental inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, in the chat, claiming that officials did not share classified information. However, Mr. Goldberg reported that highly sensitive military operational information was posted in the channel. The Atlantic did not publish those details.

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  • The Microsoft Excel World Champion isn’t worried about Copilot beating him (yet) – PCMag

    In the US, you can catch the championships on sports channels like ESPN. “The fact I’ve been televised from a sports channel is just really funny,” Jarman says. “It’s awesome. All my friends at uni were rugby and football players, much sportier than me. And now it’s like, ‘Who’s a televised sportsman now?’ It’s just very entertaining.” …

    “I don’t think Copilot is anywhere near [being] able to beat me or Andrew or anything like that,” Jarman says. Before each round at the championship, Microsoft advertised Copilot by showing videos of people solving questions with it. The competitors, who are a tight-knit bunch, found this “amusing, because it was all the easy questions Copilot was answering,” Jarman says. “I was out there going, ‘Well, yeah, but I could have done that in three seconds.’ But at some point, if it continues getting better, which I think it will, and it can beat me or Andrew, then we’re all out of a job,” Jarman says.

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  • ByteDance’s InfiniteYou lets users generate unlimited variations of portrait photos – The Decoder

    ByteDance has developed a new approach to AI portrait generation that tackles common problems like inconsistent facial features and poor prompt following. Unlike previous solutions such as PuLID-FLUX that directly modify AI model attention, InfuseNet processes facial features as a parallel information layer. This keeps the core AI model intact while improving portrait generation quality.

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  • Powerful A.I. is coming. We’re not ready. – The New York Times

    Maybe A.I. progress will hit a bottleneck we weren’t expecting — an energy shortage that prevents A.I. companies from building bigger data centers, or limited access to the powerful chips used to train A.I. models. Maybe today’s model architectures and training techniques can’t take us all the way to A.G.I., and more breakthroughs are needed. But even if A.G.I. arrives a decade later than I expect — in 2036, rather than 2026 — I believe we should start preparing for it now.

    Most of the advice I’ve heard for how institutions should prepare for A.G.I. boils down to things we should be doing anyway: modernizing our energy infrastructure, hardening our cybersecurity defenses, speeding up the approval pipeline for A.I.-designed drugs, writing regulations to prevent the most serious A.I. harms, teaching A.I. literacy in schools and prioritizing social and emotional development over soon-to-be-obsolete technical skills. These are all sensible ideas, with or without A.G.I.

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  • Shock as Fulneck School, Pudsey, announces closure – Bradford Telegraph and Argus

    “This decision was not taken lightly, with trustees considering all available and viable options to ensure the school could continue. However, after careful consideration and no offers materialising, the difficult decision to plan to close the school was taken. Parents and employees have been informed, and we have now entered into a formal consultation process with Fulneck School employees whose roles may be affected. Our priority is now to work with all affected staff, pupils and parents to minimise the impact on them and support them throughout this process.”

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  • Fulneck School: Leeds private school announces shock closure with ‘deep regret’ after opening in 1753 – Yorkshire Evening Post

    The school statement read: “Despite the dedicated efforts of the school and the Fulneck Trustees to sustain pupil numbers, a continued decline in enrolment, combined with rising operational costs, has made it increasingly challenging to maintain financial viability. … The Trustees, Board of Governors and the school are “committed to ensuring that the school year finishes as planned”, with all teaching continuing until the end of the school year and pupils completing public and internal examinations as intended. In order to help students and families secure alternative schooling from September 2025 onwards, the school will be hosting a School Fair on April 2 at 2pm, with representatives from other independent schools set to be present.

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  • Improved Relative Time

    2025AD? Wah? 3000BC? Who?? I know that I live in 18AiP (after iPhone)(as of 43AL (after laptop)) and that makes it much easier because its talking about things that I KNOW. I don’t know an anno domini, i dont know a christ, let alone trying to comprehend what came before them??

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  • “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson – The New Yorker

    The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

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  • Steve Reich: ‘We all wish art could counter the direction of US politics. But it can’t’ – The Guardian

    How did it feel to play with Philip Glass again in 2014 after such a very long time? Was it significant that the first work you performed that evening was Four Organs?
    Phil and I had been at Juilliard together, but much later [in 1967] he came to my concert at the Park Place art gallery in New York and said: “I really like what you’re doing. Would you like to come over and see what I’m doing?” The following year, he wrote Two Pages for Steve Reich, basically taking a set of patterns, repeating them and making them longer, which was the breakthrough for him in the way phasing was for me. After that, we travelled and toured together, shared an ensemble – and then at some point it got a little close for comfort and suddenly my best friend became somebody I didn’t talk to.

    That persisted from the early 1970s until 2014, when Nonesuch Records’ Bob Hurwitz wanted to do something where we shared the evening. He took us out for dinner and I said [to Glass]: “Hi. How are you?” The deal was I’d play a piece of Phil’s and he’d play one of mine. He played Four Organs, which we’d both played on in 1970, and I played Music in 12 Parts, one of the early pieces I’d played in his ensemble. The whole thing went very well and we … we don’t hang out, but it broke the ice and just made things a lot more humane.

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  • Rembrandt to Picasso: Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece – BBC Culture

    In authenticating the painting in the Burlington Magazine, one expert insisted “in no other picture by the great Master of Delft do we find such sentiment, such a profound understanding of the Bible story – a sentiment so nobly human expressed through the medium of the highest art”. But it was all a lie. In a remarkable twist, Van Meegeren eventually chose to expose himself as a fraudster shortly after the end of World War Two, after being charged by Dutch authorities with the crime of selling a Vermeer – therefore a national treasure – to the Nazi official Hermann Göring. To prove his innocence, if innocence it might be called, and demonstrate that he had merely sold a worthless fake of his own forging, not a real Old Master, Van Meegeren performed the extraordinary feat of whisking up a fresh masterpiece from thin air before the experts’ astonished eyes. Voilà, Vermeer.

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  • ‘Technofossils’: how humanity’s eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones – The Guardian

    “Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.” […]

    Gabbott says: “The big message here is that the amount of stuff that we are now making is eye-watering – it’s off the scale.” All of the stuff made by humans by 1950 was a small fraction of the mass of all the living matter on Earth. But today it outweighs all plants, animals and microbes and is set to triple by 2040. This stuff is going to last millions of years, some releasing its toxins and chemicals into the natural world,” she says, raising serious questions for us all: “Do you need that? Do you really need to buy more?”

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  • The inside story of Blenheim’s gold toilet heist – BBC News

    It was the night before, Blenheim chief executive Dominic Hare was at a glamorous exhibition launch party being held at the palace, hosted by Cattelan himself. It was America’s first time on display outside of New York and the artwork’s presence was creating a buzz. He remembers slipping away from the festivities, hoping for a turn on the fully usable toilet. But when confronted with a line, he told himself “that’s okay, there’s no point queuing. You can come back tomorrow and have a look”.

    But just a few hours later, his colleague Ms Paice was witnessing the final moments as the 98kg (216lbs) artwork was being heaved into a boot. She recalls a confusing and fast-moving scene: “It was just shadows and quick movement. I just saw them move towards the car, get in the car….and then the car just sped straight off.” From the burglars entering and exiting the courtyard, the audacious heist had taken just five minutes. Police arrived shortly after, and it was only when staff searched the palace they realised what had been stolen.

    “That was when… I felt my stomach drop,” Ms Paice says. “And I thought, this is big.” … The stolen gold has never been recovered.

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  • Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s microscopic delights (1759–63) – The Public Domain Review

    For all of their scientific verisimilitude, microscopes were first and foremost instruments of wonder, and Ledermüller (1718–1769) — a German polymath, physician, and keeper of the Margrave of Brandenburg’s natural history collection — extolls their virtues in illustrating the marvels of God’s Creation and also as pure entertainment. Along with the vermin, Ledermüller gave state-of-the-art descriptions of plant, animal, and human organs, fungi, plankton, and crystals that accompany more than 150 attractive colored plates, produced by Nuremberg publisher, artist, and engraver Adam Wolfgang Winterschmidt.

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  • The Robot Watch – Los Angeles Apparel

    One of a kind deadstock Vintage watch. A timeless collectible that will never be developed like this ever again. The nature of vintage on our Ridiculous Collection watches may come with minor discoloration or slight scratches. The Ridiculous Collection watches are all brand new and have never been worn. The perfect accessory for those who want a truly genuine 1980s-1990s gem.

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  • Interview With Raketa CEO David Henderson-Stewart — An Englishman Abroad – Fratello Watches

    RN: Is there anything from the Swiss, or German, or even Japanese philosophies that you have adopted or might consider adopting for Raketa? DHS: Not really. We want to keep Raketa’s authentic Russian flavor: in terms of values, designs, and in-house manufacturing. This is one of the reasons why you will not find “classic” watch designs in Raketa’s collection. Raketa watches have a Big Zero on the dial (instead of the conventional “12”), they have 24-hour movements, they go counter-clockwise, they have triangular and round hands on the dial, etc. Every single Raketa watch has its own strong identity and tells a very Russian story, whether it’s about the conquest of space, avant-garde art, or the exploits of the country’s famous submariners. The world of watches would be sadder if there were just Swiss and German watches.

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  • Raketa, the beating heart of Russian watchmaking – Europa Star

    Founded in 1961 in honour of the space exploits of Yuri Gargarin (Raketa means “space rocket” in Russian), the large watchmaking factory from the period of Soviet centralisation, which produced millions of timepieces a year and employed thousands of workers, had shrunk to a tiny brand producing $100 souvenir watches for Western tourists in search of Soviet “memorabilia”. But in actual fact, its history dates back much further than the Soviet era. It is the heir to the former Imperial Peterhof Factory, founded in 1721 by the Czar Peter the Great.

    David Henderson-Stewart, a young Franco-British entrepreneur (with Russian origins) living in Moscow, knew nothing about watchmaking, but was convinced his project – to relaunch an important, truly Russian luxury brand for a market that buys mainly foreign high-end goods – was valid. It was rather by chance that he chose Raketa to realise his idea of a Russian luxury brand: browsing watch blogs, he noticed that Soviet watches had an international audience of enthusiasts. It seemed like a good starting point.

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  • It is as if you were on your phone: Why – Pippin Barr

    So what if we had an application on our phone that allowed us to seem to be on our phone, to go through those reassuring motions, to know what to do, to appear 100% like a human on their phone, but without having to actually be on our phone an exposed to the direness of the news, the panic of dating, the shitpile of social media, the emptiness of online video, the timesuck of games? A kind of contentless experience. For the win!

    That’s the underlying speculative but also totally honest motivation behind this particular game. I’m making it because I think it’s legitimately something people might use and find helpful and because it is fundamentally funny that that is a possible design goal. To me it’s both a piece of comedy and a piece of truth and I can’t tell which is more important or if they’re even distinct. (And I like that.)

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  • Legendary photographer Martin Parr on the secret to a good picture – Esquire

    You’ve got to have a story. You’ve got to say something in photography. Unless you do that, it’s not going to work. So that’s the priority. What are you trying to say with your photographs? Stories are the backbone of good photography. You look at the world, it’s a funny old weird place. So inevitably, if I’m doing my interpretation of what’s out there, then humour will be part of it. Because the world makes me laugh, and cry at the same time. … When starting out, copy other people. Look at the history of photography. And when you’ve got the right subject matter, dive into that. Once you get engrossed in it, that’s when it’s likely that your own style will start to emerge. … I take a lot of shots, because to get that good one, you need to have some momentum behind you. You have to keep shooting. Wait for that perfect shot to emerge, or it may not emerge. You just don’t know until you start shooting it.

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  • Unauthorised school absence widening ‘disadvantage gap’ in England – The Guardian

    School leaders endorsed the EPI’s analysis. Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “Too often, the burden of ensuring children attend school falls entirely on teachers and leaders, who are then held accountable for absences beyond their control. “Without a broader system of support, it is extremely difficult for schools to drive meaningful change in attendance rates.” Di’Iasio said that “for some families, school seems to have become – at least in part – optional”, and said fines for taking unauthorised termtime holidays were failing to halt that trend. “Far from solving the problem, fines often deepen tensions between schools and parents. Schools, simply enforcing the rules, are left looking like the villains,” Di’Iasio told the ASCL’s annual conference on Saturday.

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  • The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach – Scott Smitelli

    Whatever this job has given you—and to be crystal clear it has given you most of the down payment on a house—it is not enough to offset this sense of constant dread. Whatever you have given to this job, certainly things that cannot ever be quantified on a bank statement, there are now pieces of yourself that are missing. Pieces you didn’t even realize were being given away. Pieces that, in this moment, you worry you might never get back.

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  • EBacc may ‘constrain choices’, curriculum review chair says – Schools Week

    The EBacc “may constrain” pupils’ choices and “limit access to” vocational and arts subjects, Professor Becky Francis has said as she outlined areas the curriculum and assessment review panel believe “need further attention”. Francis, who is leading the government’s curriculum and assessment review, also stated that “the current construction and balance” of some subjects “appears to be “inhibiting mastery, hindering progress and undermining standards”.

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