Thom's Link Emporium - 6 February 2022
Links for the Week
AI plays NES Tetris. It’s interesting to see Tetris being played in a basically perfect way, and it’s also interesting to watch the edges of the program cracking as the AI unlocks further scores and levels that no-one expected to see:
Sometimes I take on challenges from random people on Twitter. It’s not my most productive trait, I’ll admit. Still, Dan Barker needed to know about this decommissioned Soviet rocket that’s in the lobby of Hiscox in York. After a bit of research, I found this link which appears to be from around the time it went on sale. Which means it has a sale link, of course. £38k not too bad if you too want some decommissioned weaponry in your entryway. However, one of those says ""Over the next 10 years, the Kholod was the world record holder for outright atmospheric speed and it is still the fastest machine to have traveled within Earth’s atmosphere." That doesn’t sound right to me since in the early 2000s, NASA developed the X-43 which travelled at Mach 9.6. But then I haven’t seen one of those for sale so this may well be the fastest machine to go up for sale to the public.
One of my many weird interests is in containerisation (just the fact that they only date back to the 1960s - it really wasn’t that long ago that ships were unpacked by hand). If you’re interested in learning about shipping containers (and I recommend it!) this is a good place to start.
Now Listening
A little different for this week. Here are my top albums from January 2022.
Dawn FM - The Weeknd (Another great pop album, perhaps his last? A lot of fun)
Antidawn EP - Burial (I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, it’s dark and intriguing)
Get Back The Rooftop Performance - The Beatles (It’s a bit of a cheat to include this, but it’s the first time the full rooftop concert has been officially released and it’s a wonderful companion to Get Back)
Fragments - Bonobo (Great, relaxing beats from Bonobo)
Caprisongs - FKA Twigs (FKA Twigs’s mixtape is not far off being a fully-fledged album, and it’s really pretty good).
I’ve also put together a list of some of my favourite tracks from January (Spotify, Apple Music)
Now Reading
I’m re-reading some Jane Austen at the moment. I am finding that I don’t like Sense and Sensibility anywhere near as much as Pride and Prejudice (or even Northanger Abbey, which I have a real soft spot for). It’ll be nice to have a bit of a comparison by reading them relatively close to each other though. I’ll let you know.
Now Watching
I tend to watch Groundhog Day every Groundhog Day. It feels appropriate to rewatch a film that’s about repetition, and it’s a film that rewards revisiting. There have been a lot of articles on why Groundhog Day is a Buddhist myth (in this, the stream of repetition matches the Buddhist notion of Samsara) but to me there’s something wonderfully simple in the journey the film takes you on. Phil starts out by someone who’s bored with his job, then he’s confused with us by why his day keeps repeating, but eventually, he finds satisfying things to spend his time on. Phil’s discoveries about life are not major revelations, they’re stuff that deep-down we know too.
Quote
Planning and building a great sacred space was the necessary trial run for urban civilization – or, as he strikingly put it, reversing the traditional sequence, ‘First came the temple, then came the city.’ In other words, we lived with the gods before we lived at close quarters with each other.
Living with the Gods, Neil MacGregor