No.174 Asides

🇯🇵 😍 The master craftsman. “The unassuming Shimada Gama workshop in Gotsu doubles up as an open-air museum of traditional stoneware pottery. It specialises in creating large pieces that are burnt in a sloped wood-fired kiln. We talk to the 73-year-old master Shimada Takayuki about the challenges of passing the rare skill and aesthetic sensibility down to his son and grandson.”
🇫🇮 🇳🇴 🇸🇪 Lovely concept and execution. Nordic Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale is a co-housing model. “Norwegian architecture studio Helen & Hard has built a 1:1 cross-section of a co-housing project made from spruce wood in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale [with the hope that] it will also demonstrate how co-living can be used to help tackle various environmental issues, increase residential security and combat loneliness.”
🤯 🎥 👾 Technical video but the first part is a demo with GTA and it’s incredible. Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement. “We present an approach to enhancing the realism of synthetic images. The images are enhanced by a convolutional network that leverages intermediate representations produced by conventional rendering pipelines.”
🇪🇸 🤯 🧲 🤖 Smart magnetic soft materials to develop artificial muscles and therapeutic robots. “The so-called magneto-active polymers are revolutionizing the fields of solid mechanics and materials science. These composites consist of a polymeric matrix (i.e., an elastomer) that contains magnetic particles (i.e., iron) that react mechanically by changing their shape and volume. “The idea is that the application of an external magnetic field leads to internal forces in the material. ”
🤩 📊 Back in No.156 I already had Dr. Neil Cohn’s work, then on Calvin and Hobbes. More on his research in this 🧵. My lab is currently working on an extensive @ERC_Research project about how comics around the world differ in their structures, and how these structures might connect to those of spoken languages. So, here’s a thread on our “TINTIN project”
🇸🇾 ☀️ Syria’s Surprising Solar Boom: Sunlight Powers the Night in Rebel Idlib. “An unlikely solar revolution of sorts has taken off in an embattled, rebel-controlled pocket of northwestern Syria, where large numbers of people whose lives have been upended by the country’s 10-year-old civil war have embraced the sun’s energy simply because it is the cheapest source of electricity around.”
🇪🇸 👍🏼 🛢 Adiós, oil and gas drilling. “The legislation, which aims to bring the country in line with the European Union’s target of carbon neutrality by 2050, also bans the sale of carbon-emitting vehicles by 2040 and requires that renewable sources account for 74 percent of the country’s electricity production by 2030.”
🇺🇸 💩 🕵🏼 Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen. “One in 10 US police departments can now access videos from millions of privately owned home security cameras without a warrant”