🔗 Space Oddity: the weird history of the Soviet ANS synthesizer - 5 Magazine:

Picture a soundwave which is generated by music software from a passage of music. Now imagine drawing the soundwave first and having the software “read” and “play” it. That was the concept of the ANS — Murzin’s synthesizer named after his inspiration, Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin.

(via The Tonearm)

I find stuff like this fascinating, not just because of the weird ingeniousness of the instrument/machine itself, but because of all the strange cultural and artistic connections that digging into this sort of thing tends to turn up.

As a thoroughly casual rider of bicycles, my probably uniformed, knee-jerk opinion is that most people do not need stuff like hydraulic/disc brakes and electronic shifters.

Unless you are a professional racing cyclist, I am super skeptical that any of the marginal gains theoretically offered by this sort of gear is anything that going is going to make a difference, aside from its impact on the cost of your bike and of repairs thereto. And tbh the same goes for carbon frames and suspensions.

At my in-laws’ house where we are staying this week, there is a hummingbird feeder just outside of the window over the kitchen sink. Each morning as I am grinding my coffee, I watch the hummingbirds come and go.

I am always amazed at what territorial jerks hummingbirds are.

If a hummingbird is at the feeder, it runs off literally anything else that comes near—other hummingbirds, other birds (all shapes and sizes), I even just watched one chase off a fly that came buzzing around.

Of the many, many problems I have with the whole notion of AI, one that particularly bugs me is the baked-in assumption that if we were to build an actual artificial intelligence, then all this magical shit would start happening.

You hear these assholes on about it all the time. “Just imagine! We’ll be able to cure all the diseases! Solve the climate crisis! Unlimited free energy!” But how , assholes? How would that happen?

I generally like to think of myself as someone who is not overly into tools and gear. I have my specific tastes when it comes to this stuff and I like nice things, but the specifics of those tastes aside, that feels not all that different from most people.

After several months spent working my way through a stack of Rhodia compositions books, however, I am back to using Seven Seas notebook from Nanami Paper for my journal and I just can’t help but notice how vast an improvement it is.