Triple pendulums (pendula?) with slightly different starting conditions.

From this tweet.

My colleagues Briony Banks, Louise Connell and I recently submitted a paper reporting research we’ve been doing at Lancaster University over the last year.

Needless to say, the Covid-19 lockdowns in the UK have been a substantial impediment to this work, so it’s really good to see it finally complete.

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Just look at this. A cutting edge communications device from an alternative 1950. But designed and fabricated by a person on their workbench, like the raddest cyberpunk street tech.

The creator, Justine Haupt, actually sells them in kit form. But watching her guided build instruction video makes me think it’s a little beyond my skill level with a soldering iron.

Actually, this (hour long!) build video is really worth watching. Not only does it detail the creator’s design philosophy, she’s also really good at explaining the history of her design and the reasons behind many decisions.

I was sad to hear of the death of Ed Brayton a few days ago. He was a humanist and secular community leader, blogger, journalist and board member for the Center for Inquiry, Michigan. Following a long battle with illness, he checked himself into hospice care, and died comfortably a few days later.

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Check out this amazing video of Bob Hoskins clowning around on a blue-screen stage to do the Toon Town scene of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Early blue-screen cinema, I guess, so he doesn’t even really have props or sight guides to play off against.

I can’t remember where I saw this, possibly Important If True, back when that was a thing.

Speaking of Mario:

Thanks to Art House Politics for making me lol.

Note: video contains immediate profanity.

This obviously isn’t mine, and my guess is it wasn’t made by this person either. (If you know the providence, please comment or contact!)

Geoff Manaugh’s speculative landscape and architecture blog BLDG BLOG has reopened its doors. Always worth reading.

I invite you to watch this highly instructional film on dating from 1949.

The Internet Archive is a real treasure trove.

I have recently submitted a paper based on some work I have been doing at my job at the Embodied Cognition Lab at Lancaster University. In it, we look at a large set of linguistic distributional models commonly used in cognitive psychology, evaluating each on a benchmark behavioural dataset.

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