Thom Beckett

Morning all. I’ve been enjoying a week off and have used at least some of it tackling the garden. For a small garden, I’ve done a lot of work for very little impact so far, but I guess the point of gardening is that it’s a long-term project, and I’ve enjoyed being outside in some lovely weather. The cats have even got involved, moving some of the seeds I planted through their own digging.

Anyway, onto the links.

Links

A work colleague of mine, Terence Eden, has trained an AI on 25,000 pictures of benches to produce pictures of non-existent benches. There's something particularly satisfying seeing the animated pictures of what the AI "thinks" a bench is.
Music historian Ted Gioia asks, did the blues originate in New Orleans? There's so much in this article from a man who has about as broad a knowledge about this era as you're likely to find.
A fully-working five-speed (with reverse) gearbox made out of Lego
A wonderfully surreal corporate event. Surely this is what the end of pandemic restrictions really means. One day, the people dressed as, I dunno, grapefruit? will be allowed into the room.
The man who stopped the WannaCry ransom cyber attack is arrested in the US, this article (from 2020) works back through his fascinating career. “Janet Hutchins had the day off from her job as a nurse at a local hospital. She had been in town catching up with friends and had just gotten home and started making dinner. So she had only the slightest sense of the crisis that her colleagues had been dealing with across the NHS. That's when her son came upstairs and told her, a little uncertainly, that he seemed to have stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen. “Well done, sweetheart,” Janet Hutchins said. Then she went back to chopping onions.”
“How I Experience The Web Today” - seems pretty accurate
Ian Leslie responds to a Jonathan Haidt piece in the Atlantic which claims social media as the source of a lot of our ills. Leslie finds it's more complicated than that, and - as I think feels right to most of us - that social media is both a blessing and a curse.
There’s No Need To Wear A Mask On This Flight—We’re Not Scared! Now Take Off Your Shoes In Case There’s A Bomb In Your Socks
Asking the question we all want an answer to - whose wang is it on the wikipedia 'Penis' page? If nothing else, this is a good insight into how information ends up on Wikipedia with the many, many fights that go on behind the scenes.
And finally, here's a comfort for you (if you don't live near a military site), nuclear weapons are not as destructive as you think (basically, there aren't as many as there used to be and the largest ones that have been tested have been retired). How's this for a comforting statement? "To put this another way, each bomb can destroy an area of 34.2 square miles, and the maximum total area destroyed by our nuclear apocalypse is about 137,000 square miles, approximately the size of Montana, Bangladesh or Greece."

Listening

I’ll admit that Father John Misty can be a an acquired taste. He matches beautiful melodies with dark, sarcastic and arch lyrics which can make you smile but can also make listening to a lot of his music a little dispiriting. The new album, Chloë and the Next Twentieth Century (Spotify,  Music) is very much in the same camp as his previous albums, but is also the most tuneful and beautiful. A good example is the track Q4 (Spotify,  Music, YouTube) which is a darkly funny look at the production of content in a consumerist society, but also has a great, singalong chorus. The line "This ironic distance kept her sane" sounds a little like Father John Misty’s own approach to the world and it’s one I have a certain understanding of.

Reading

I finished off a Lee Child book this week (doesn’t matter which one, they’re all basically the same. Some day I’ll write about Jack Reacher, but this is not that day.) Instead, I’ve started a book about HandMade Films called Very Naughty Boys by Robert Sellers. HandMade films came about when The Life of Brian was being made. EMI was going to release it, but pulled out just prior to production. George Harrison, and his business manager, Denis O’Brien put up the cash for the whole production themselves (in part, at least, as a tax dodge) and HandMade films was made. It went on to fund and release many of the best British films of the 1980s (e.g. The Long Good Friday, Time Bandits and Withnail and I). It’s a great story well-told.

Watching

As I mentioned, I had this week off so I went to an almost-deserted cinema to see Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. The good news is that it’s probably the best of the three Fantastic Beasts films. Mads Mikkelsen is a much better Grindelwald than Johnny Depp’s attempt at a menacing Keith Richards, and the film almost has a plot that you can follow. Less good is that it lacks much believable character development, and I’m not fond of David Yates’s visual style (YMMV, it’s very much in keeping with the later Potter films). Basically, it’s fine. It’ll probably be the last one that’s made, judging on the box office trajectory.

Which is particularly frustrating since it doesn’t cover the biggest secret of Dumbledore, which is why he looked like Jude Law in 1933, but by Michael Gambon in 1938.

Fun fact: Dumbledore was born in 1881, meaning he’s the same age as Picasso, PG Wodehouse and Alexander Fleming.

Quote

[T]he primitive agonies of our childhoods live on into adulthood. Many of my patients, conditioned by Western psychology, feel that once they have some understanding of where their feelings come from, they should be finished with them. But we are not built that way. Primitive feelings continue to be stirred up throughout adult life. Understanding them does not turn them off. They are our history, our emotional memories; part of the people we have become.
Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life