→ After Yang looks like a very promising movie, here’s an interview with the director Kogonada on crafting ‘organic’ sci-fi worlds and families of the future. “[O]ne of his big goals was to emphasize how the ‘exhaustion of being’ is still something everyone in this world is struggling with as society continues its long process of recovering from multiple calamitous events. … To me, it was like in a society that had some climate catastrophe that was really fatal and really kind of created some humility in society. We led with the idea that in order to survive now, these people had to change everything about the way they approach modern life and that they had to incorporate nature, and it had to be organic. To me, it was about a society that had been really humbled and had to remake the world in order to survive.”
→ Loved this talk that Nick Foster gave for IKEA’s Digital Days, Everyday Futures™. Great ideas, slides, and presentation. Plus, what a great studio setting! Btw, I think this framing/slides-on-the-side/distance from camera makes it look like having a coffee with him, which is way more pleasant to watch than if he’d been filmed on-stage.
→ Equal parts fear and wonder is a short article about a metaverse panel which included Liam Young. I haven’t watched it yet but these bits from the post are already good: “The metaverse is not necessarily going to be a late capitalist Zuckerbergian fever dream … the metaverse will be equal parts fear and wonder … it’ll be both of these things, because no technology has ever really been a solution to anything – it really just exaggerates the conditions that exist.”
- 🐋 💩 🤯 🇮🇳 The squit and the whale: can artificial faeces revive the ocean ecosystem?. “A scientific experiment hopes to restore vital nutrients to the ocean by using fake excrement that would once have been produced by the endangered mammal”
- 🇺🇸 🍎 👏🏼 I’ve been saying they should do THIS for 10 years. More laptops and phones should aspire for better battery life, not thinness. “Apple could have gone thinner, but it chose not to. Instead, it made a laptop that’s a little thicker but also one of the best laptops we’ve ever used, with battery life and cooling that no other computer on the market can touch.”
- 🔊 👀 👂🏼 Oooooohhh. I Heard It In A Magazine is “an online destination for sound culture and the listening-obsessed.” (Via Nicolas Nova.)
- 🤩 🇦🇪 🇬🇧 🇮🇳 Superflux debuts ‘The Library’ at Dubai’s Museum of the Future. “An interactive, varicoloured compendium of life on Earth, The Library manifests as a mammoth installation and an immersive ecological archive of our planet's biodiversity.”
- 🇨🇳 🍚 🐟 Modern study of the ancient practice of mixing rice and fish farming uncovers striking trends. “Inviting fish, crabs, and turtles into rice paddies reduces the need for fertilizers and pesticides, and even increases rice yields, a new study proves.”
- 🤔 💨 🌊 Wind turbines could help reverse some effects of climate change. “Placing wind turbines in deep water could be an important tool in the battle in saving ocean ecosystems from the worst impacts of climate change.”
- 🦠 ♳ Are Microbes the Future of Recycling? It’s Complicated. “They say that to curb the tide of plastic flooding landfills and the oceans, what’s most needed is not new recycling technologies but stronger regulations on plastic producers — and stronger incentives to make use of the recycling technologies that already exist.” (Via Nothing Here.)