Musical Miscellany - Symphonic Planets, Dark Cells, Synthesizing Mushroom, Novel Virus, Volatile Market, Noisy Colors

 

 

 

The Symphonies of the Planets

NASA Voyager Recordings

via The Internet Archive

"Soaring to the depths of our universe, gallant spacecraft roam the cosmos, snapping images of celestial wonders. Some spacecraft have instruments capable of capturing radio emissions. When scientists convert these to sound waves, the results are eerie to hear. The probes picked up the interaction of solar wind on the planets magnetospheres, which releases ionic particles with an audible vibration frequency."

 

 

 

 

The Dark Side of the Cell

Anne Niemetz and Andrew Pelling

the dark side of the cell

"Professor James Gimzewski and Andrew Pelling at UCLA first made the discovery that yeast cells oscillate at the nanoscale in 2002. Amplifying this oscillation results in a sound that lies within the human audible range. The tool with which the cell sounds are extracted - the atomic force microscope - can be regarded as a new type of musical instrument. The AFM 'touches' a cell with its small tip, comparable to a record needle 'feeling' the bumps in a groove on a record. With this interface, the AFM 'feels' oscillations taking place at the membrane of a cell. These electrical signals can then be amplified and distributed by speakers."

 

 

 

Pink Oyster Mushroom Playing Modular Synthesizer

Myco Loco

via YouTube

"Electrical resistance is measure by passing a small current through the mushrooms similar to a lie detector test. The changes in resistance are then converted into control signals which determine the rhythm, pitch, timbre and effects parameters of the modular synthesizer."

 

 

 

Markus J. Buehler · Protein Counterpoint Sonification

 

Protein Counterpoint Sonification

Markus J Beuhler

via MIT News

"The proteins that make up all living things are alive with music. Markus Buehler, musician and MIT professor develops artificial intelligence models to design new proteins, sometimes by translating them into sound. The Covid-19 outbreak was surging in the United States, and Buehler turned his attention to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the appendage that makes the novel coronavirus so contagious. He and his colleagues are trying to unpack its vibrational properties through molecular-based sound spectra, which could hold one key to stopping the virus."

 

 

 

Sounds of a Volatile Market

Jordan Wirfs-Brock

via Medium

"With the craziness of the stock market lately, there have been some nice visualizations flitting around. I set out to sonify the stock market data with the goal of conveying both the recent precipitous drop and the crazy volatility. I focused on two metrics: the daily percent change (conveying volatility) and the daily closing price (conveying overall market movement)."

 
The Colors of Noise

Mark Frauenfelder

via Boing Boing

"White noise is a blend of random frequencies with a flat spectrum - any frequency band has the same amount of power as any other. I find white noise to be sharp and harsh. Most white noise generators don't actually play white noise - they play a 'colored noise' that's more soothing. Colored noises have a blend of random frequencies but some frequencies play at a higher volume than other frequencies. This gives the noise a 'color' or distinctive tone."

 

Miscellany - Songs for Ohio

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"Ohio" by Over the Rhine, Ohio

 

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"Carry Me Ohio" by Sun Kil Moon, Ghosts of the Great Highway

 

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"Ohio" by Modest Mouse, This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About

 

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"Ohio Light and Power" by The Albertans, Dangerous Anything

 

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"Teacup Woozy" by Holopaw, Holopaw

 

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"Ohio" performed by The Dandy Warhols, Come On Feel The Dandy Warhols

 

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Delicious Miscellany - Milk Cocktails, Elusive Salep, Dusty Spirits, Vintage Perfume, Mad Honey, Antique Opium

  

 

The Key to Crystal-Clear Cocktails? Milk

Camper English

Cook's Illustrated 

 

"After a 150-year absence, milk punch is back. The base recipe for milk punch includes citrus juice or another acidic ingredient. Hot milk is added to the mixed cocktail, curdling the milk, and then the punch is strained to remove the curds. The process removes most of the color and cloudiness from the drink, clarifying it, and it preserves the cocktail from spoilage for months or even years if kept cool. 

The concept of clarifying cocktails with milk might seem a bit odd today, but in the milk punch heyday - the 1700s through the mid-180ss - spirits would have been far rougher around the edges, and in addition to clarifying and preserving the drink, the process also softened the harsh flavor of the booze. The resulting drink is unctuous and silky, clear and only subtly milky, with softer, mellow flavors."

 

 

For Many US Turks, Salep is Beloved but Elusive

Amelia Nierenberg

New York Times

 

"In Turkey, winter is the season of salep. Peddlers pushing carts sell the hot, milky drink traditionally made from ground orchid tubers. Students warm their cold fingers around flimsy paper cups filled with steaming salep. Businessmen sip it with one hand and check their email with the other.

But in the United States, the Turkish drink is almost impossible to find or make. Decades of strain from habitat loss, climate change and over-harvesting have taken their toll on orchids, a main ingredient. Export is difficult, as orchids are included in an appendix to an international agreement meant to protect different species from trade.

Still, homesick Turks dream of real salep, which is something like a cross between hot chocolate and rice pudding. The drink is a beloved street food. Many learn to make it only after they immigrate."

 

 

  

Chasing 'Dusties' with America's Top Spirit Hunter

Aaron Goldfarb

Punch

 

"As late as the early 2010s, savvy collectors were able to pull amazing finds by simply going 'dusty hunting.' By now, paeans have been written to those who’ve best pulled off the task, like the so-called 'Bourbon Turtle,' who absolutely cleared northeastern liquor stores of bottles that had been gathering dust since the day they were stocked.

But you’re no longer going to find any Stitzel-Weller Old Fitzgerald by heading to some convenience mart on the other side of the tracks; nor does one have decades to build a collection if demanding restaurateurs want their whiskey bar stocked with the old stuff ASAP. Thus, a new breed of vintage spirits buyer, has emerged - one that’s forced to be more resourceful."

 

 

 

Confessions of a Vintage Perfume Addict

Barbara Herman

Jezebel 

 

"Trying to be discreet in the middle of an open office, I'd pop open a vial of perfume and dab it on my wrist. In a ritual that has become as common as having a meal or reading a book, I'd lift my wrist to my nose, close my eyes, and sniff, like a deranged junky getting her fix. In that work environment, it would have been appropriate for me to wear perfume in a style that has been popular since the 1990s: the office scent. It is institutional and conformist. 

 

As I became bored with office life, my rebellion took an invisible turn. I didn't want to blend in. My perfume tastes began to wander over to the wrong side of the tracks, looking for the rude, the louche, and the difficult. I wanted an anti-office scent. I found myself drawn to vintage perfumes that took me to distant lands and told me stories about fur-clad, misbehaving women who smoked; erotic perfumes that smelled like unwashed bodies; and perfumes that deliberately overturned trite and outdated gender conventions in perfume. 

Take Bandit. Its composer - former model, reputed lesbian, and legendary iconoclast of scent - was the rare female perfumer, celebrated for her daring overdoses of extreme perfume notes. Her masterpiece Bandit, a bitter green leather perfume for women, was said to have been inspired by the scent of female models changing their undergarments backstage during fashions shows."

 

 

 

The Strange History of 'Mad Honey'

Emma Bryce

Modern Farmer

 

"The dark, reddish, 'mad honey,' known as deli bal in Turkey, contains an ingredient from rhododendron nectar called grayanotoxin - a natural neurotoxin that brings on light-headedness and hallucinations. In the 1700s, the Black Sea region traded this potent produce with Europe, where the honey was infused with drinks to give boozers a greater high than alcohol could deliver. 

Rhododendron flowers occur all over the world, and yet mad honey is most common in the region fringing the Black Sea. In Turkey, not only do the poisonous rhododendrons abound, but the humid, mountainous slopes around the Black Sea provide the perfect habitat for these flowers to grow in monocrop-like swaths. When bees make honey in these fields, no other nectars get mixed in - and the result is deli bal, potent and pure.

The honey is taken in small amounts, sometimes boiled in milk, and consumed typically just before breakfast. And yet, finding it still amounts to something of a treasure hunt. The honey’s potency seems to have turned it into a treat reserved for those in the know. The responsible shop keepers know they shouldn’t be selling it to strangers. They are a bit wary of marketing it."

 

 

 

How Collecting Opium Antiques Turned Me into an Opium Addict
Lisa Hix
Collector's Weekly

 

"You really have to work hard to get hooked on smoking opium. The Victorian-era form of the drug is rare, and the people who know how to use it aren’t exactly forthcoming. But leave it to an obsessive antiques collector to figure out how to get to addicted to a 19th-century drug.

He started out collecting innocuous things; at first, it was seashells and stones, then it was currency and Asian antiques like textiles. Eventually he also discovered the beauty of antique opium pipes, bowls, and lamps, as well as opium trays and the hundreds of little implements that went with the ritual. Because opium smoking had been so thoroughly eradicated around the globe in the early 20th century, very little had been written about these objects. After years of intense research, he produced the first opium-smoking antiques guide.

Research wasn’t limited to mining Victorian medical books or hunting down authentic pieces on eBay. As he came across various pipes and tools, he sought out the last of the Laotian opium dens to learn how these accoutrements were used and, yes, to try them himself. Before long, he and a friend had created their own private opium den in rural Southeast Asia, but when another smoking buddy died, possibly from withdrawal symptoms, he had to quit before it was too late for him, too. His latest book details how his obsessive collectors’ bug led to his opium addiction."

 

Intercultural Miscellany - World in Motion, First Contact, Cultural Appropriation, Indian House, Migration Museum

A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion
Jason Farago
New York Times

"During Hokusai’s lifetime, Japanese were barred from leaving the country, on pain of death. But the country was not totally closed. Some foreign goods could come in. And some foreign techniques, too. Do you see, here, how the traveler in the back is so much smaller than the woman who’s lost her papers? And how sharply the landscape slopes up? A hallmark of Renaissance image-making. Hokusai was among the first Japanese artists to employ Western perspective, though he used it playfully. Hokusai would have picked up this perspectival technique from Dutch prints circulating in Edo, even as elsewhere, in the same image, Hokusai employs a perspectival technique common in Asian painting, with similarly sized figures positioned along diagonal sightlines. That, too, was imported knowledge, absorbed from Chinese examples into earlier Japanese painting."

"In 1867, the World’s Fair took place in Paris. Japan participated for the first time, and displayed coats of armor, swords, statues - and woodblock prints. The French went wild. A critic at the fair singled out Hokusai. What these young moderns loved were the prints. Hokusai’s example would soon influence the work of Paris’s modern artists. Mary Cassatt, for instance. She learned from Japanese printmakers to create spaces of blocky color, with hard transitions from tone to tone. Or her friend Edgar Degas, whose flat and asymmetrical spaces channel the Japanese model into the opera house and the ballet studio. These Parisians understood the prints they were looking at only in part. They made foolish, patronizing generalizations."

"Like most fantasies, 'Japonisme' said more about the fantasizer than the fantasized. These Parisians, defeated in war and rocketing through industrialization, saw themselves in landscapes that were both ageless and adrift. And Hokusai, who’d already metabolized Western technique into his images of Japan, was the perfect vessel for their dreaming."

First Contact
David Olusoga
BBC

"In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. Art was always on the frontline. Each cultural contact at this time left a mark on both sides: the magnificent Benin bronzes record the meeting of an ancient West African kingdom and Portuguese voyagers in a spirit of mutual respect and exchange. By contrast we think Spain's conquest of Central America in the 16th century as decimating the Aztecs and eviscerating their culture. But even in Mexico rare surviving Aztec artworks recall a more nuanced story."

"The Tokugawa Shogunate, after an initial embrace, became so wary of outside interference that they sought to cut ties with the outside world. But in their art, as in their trade, they could never truly isolate themselves from foreign influences. By contrast the Protestant Dutch Republic was itself an entirely new kind of creature: a market driven nation-state. It was a system that created new freedoms and opportunities. The British in India: at first the British were as open to foreign influence as the Dutch. But by the 1800s they became more aggressive and the era of encounters gave way to the era of muscular empire, that was dismissive of India's arts and cultures."

How to Change Your Conversations about Cultural Appropriation
James Mendez Hodes
Mndz

"A cultural practice or cultural expression is a mode of behavior, communication, or self-assertion with origins or close associations with a certain culture. Either internal factors or external factors may form those associations. Cultural exchange is one culture’s adoption of cultural practices or expressions originating with another culture. We’ll call the former culture the adopters, the latter the originators. Cultural appropriation is an instance of cultural exchange which aggravates, entrenches, trivializes, or mocks a power imbalance between an enfranchised adopter and a systemically oppressed originator. An instance of cultural appropriation may also have positive or benign effects - for the originator, the adopter, or third parties - which exist in parallel to the appropriative dynamic."

"What’s the context? What does it look like without that context? What power dynamics differentiate adopters and originators? What’s the connection between adopter and originator? What’s the tone? Who feels hurt, and why? Where I hope this analytical strategy takes us is the complicated places. Where expressions are simultaneously racist and anti-racist. Where different subaltern groups borrow from each other along intersectional gradients of power that leave each group empowered over the other in a different way. Where there’s contradiction, harm and help given and taken simultaneously, or long histories of borrowed expressions becoming the adopter’s cultural signifiers. The most complex, challenging questions of cultural appropriation concern marginalized groups exchanging culture with one another."

This is an Indian House, According to One Architect
Aatish Taseer
New York Times

"Indian architecture was effortlessly palimpsestic, a place on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. India's oldest stone buildings are stupas and rock-cut caves of Buddhist origin. These were preceded by an older tradition of building in wood. When Buddhism declined in India, and resurgent Hindu faith rose, it was the ghost of Buddhist architecture, visible in both the apsidal shape of certain temples and in the use of stone-latticed windows, that was resurrected in a new tradition of Hindu temple architecture."

"With the coming of Islam, many features of Indian building, such as screens, carved brackets, corbeled arches and deep eaves projecting hard black shadows, became part of Indo-Islamic architecture. Dynasties rose and fell, the religious makeup of India changed, but Indian architecture, like Indian food, music and literature, was able to absorb the new influences."

"The English writer Robert Byron makes an important distinction between what he describes as 'fusion' and 'allusion'. The first is the use of diverse architectural inventions and ornamental themes, whatever their dates or racial origins, simply for their practical value in creating and artistic unity and in giving effect to the values of mass, space, line and coherence in the whole design. The second is the use of these same inventions and themes in a mood of reminiscence regardless of their relevance to mass, space, line and coherence."
  
  

 
A New Type of Museum for an Age of Migration
Jason Farago
New York Times

"A whole new order is proposed, one that does not care about an artwork’s uniqueness, a dress’s elegance, or an artifact’s fine condition. What matters here is movement - how objects and forms circulate through time and across the globe."

"Here’s an example: Two pieces of blue-and-white pottery are on display - a vase ringed with Persian script and a porcelain dish decorated with Chinese characters. They both date from around the late 16th century. But it turns out that the 'Persian' one was made in China, while the 'Chinese' one comes from Iran, and on both of them the characters are nonsense. Their meaning lies not in the gobbledygook written on their surfaces, but on the trade routes they map and the relationships they signify."

Decadent Miscellany - American Mesmerism, Gothic Marxism, Haunted Mansion, Wedding Ruins, Rich Warehouses

When Mesmerism Came to America
Max Nelson
New York Review of Books

"Control is a coveted possession. The mesmerists and skeptics all seem to want it; at any rate, they want to consider themselves rational and self-possessed enough not to fall under anyone else’s. During this brief, strange moment, mesmerizing another person - or seeing someone get mesmerized, or denouncing mesmerists as charlatans - became a way of stockpiling control for one's own use. At whose expense? Unidentified, enslaved West Indian laborers planters tried to mesmerize; female factory workers."

"Mesmerists made gains in America not by denying that they exploited credulous subjects but by advertising that they had found a new technique for doing precisely that. Once calling people 'credulous' emerged as a way to justify singling them out as test subjects, mesmerists could compete over experimenting with, and hoping to control, the credulity of others. They became businesslike experts in the profitable arts of human manipulation. Two of mesmerism’s early adopters were plantation owners and factory managers."

A Thousand Lost Worlds: Notes on Gothic Marxism
Adam Turl
Red Wedge Magazine

"The valorization of the realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled. The valorization of a culture’s detritus and trivia as well as its strange and marginal practices."

"A general Gothic dialectic is born of a series of cultural contradictions that echo the structural contradictions of capitalist relations and production. These contradictions find expression in the mediated cultural superstructure. The material convulsions of capital constantly create new spaces for semi-autonomous social and cultural relations - only to tear them asunder. Each of these is a trauma to the social unconscious."

"The initial impetus for the Gothic in art and literature stemmed from the marginalization of medieval forms by bourgeois relations and industrialization. The Gothic castle and the abbey stood in ruins, projecting both a nostalgia and fear of the past - things that were lost but also alien and threatening to modern life. This dynamic is the cultural echo of combined and uneven development. The hard fought autonomy of the small businessman is destroyed as capital is consolidated in larger units. 'Self-made men' are proletarianized - as far fewer proletarians become 'self-made men.' In the process thousands of little gothic worlds are created. In the shells of factories, in the empty union halls, in the empty mansions of declassed small capitalists, in the photographs of failed revolutions and in the broadsheets of all but forgotten sects."

The Heiress to a Gun Empire Built a Mansion Forever Haunted by the Blood Money that Built It
Pamela Haag
Smithsonian

"Sarah Winchester had inherited a vast fortune off of guns. She built her house with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922. Winchester wove and unwove eternally. She built, demolished and rebuilt. Winchester hastily sketched designs on napkins or brown paper for carpenters to build additions, towers, cupolas or rooms that made no sense and had no purpose, sometimes only to be plastered over the next day."

"Her building is a ghost story of the American gun. Winchester became terrified that her misfortunes, especially the death of her husband and one-month old daughter, were cosmic retribution from all the spirits killed by Winchester rifles. A medium told her that she would be haunted by the ghosts of Winchester rifle victims unless she built, non-stop - perhaps at ghosts' direction, for their pleasure, or perhaps as a way to elude them. Haunted by conscience over her gun blood fortune and seeking either protection or absolution, Winchester lived in almost complete solitude, in a mansion designed to be haunted."

Wedding Photography Collides with Ruin Porn
Michael T Luogno
New York Times

"About half of all marriages end up in ruins. A few start out that way. For some couples, abandoned buildings - train stations, warehouses and century-old churches, often found in declining or deindustrialized cities - are proving the perfect haunting aesthetic for their weddings."

"Logistically one of the biggest issues is that a lot of these buildings don’t really have addresses anymore. Ruins also change or sometimes disappear altogether."

"This method of gazing at such areas of a city doesn’t always examine the larger social and economic forces taking place in cities. Still, the forlorn sense of isolation sparks curiosity for some couples, along with a desire to bring former functions back to abandoned structures, even temporarily, as a way to honor them."

 
Uber-Warehouses for the Ultra-Rich
The Economist

"The world’s rich are increasingly investing in expensive stuff, and 'freeports' are becoming their repositories of choice. Their attractions are similar to those offered by offshore financial centres: security and confidentiality, not much scrutiny, the ability for owners to hide behind nominees, and an array of tax advantages. Because of the confidentiality, the value of goods stashed in freeports is unknowable. Though much of what lies within is perfectly legitimate, the protection offered from prying eyes ensures that they appeal to kleptocrats and tax-dodgers as well as plutocrats. The goods they stash in the freeports range from paintings, fine wine and precious metals to tapestries and even classic cars."

"The early freeports were drab warehouses. But as the contents have grown glitzier, so have the premises themselves. The idea is to turn freeports into places the end-customer wants to be seen in, the best alternative to owning your own museum. The newest facilities are dotted with private showrooms, where art can be shown to potential buyers. The wealthy are increasingly using freeports as a place where they can rub shoulders and trade fine objects with each other. It is not uncommon for a painting to be swapped for, say, a sculpture and some cases of wine, with all the goods remaining in the freeport after the deal and merely being shifted between the storage rooms of the buyer’s and seller’s handling agents."

Map & Miniature Miscellany - Model Cities, Panoramic Maps, Polymath Maps, Fantasy Buildings, Faraway Lands, Maze City, Papa's Maze

Enormous Scale Models of Cities are Mind-Blowing and Gorgeous
Vincze Miklos
Gizmodo

"Sometimes the only thing more awe-inspiring than a city is a massive model of the city, rendered down to the finest detail. And of course, they're to scale. Which is itself amazing."

Gorgeous Panoramic Maps Drawn Long Before Satellites Even Existed
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghen
Gizmodo

"There was once a time when we had to imagine what our towns and cities looked like from the sky. There were famous artists who specialized in creating these panoramic views of Earth, though today, it's a lost art. They were called panoramic or aero views, each drawn by hand without help from a plane or satellite."

"The makers of these maps took the accuracy of their creations very seriously. The artist would walk through the streets of his subject, noting every detail available, from the location of trees to how many windows each building had. They would create a kind of proxy map using their notes, and only start drawing once they had a complete survey."
 
 

The Maps of an Ottoman Polymath
Public Domain Review

"The Bosnian-born polymath and all-round genius Matrakçı Nasuh is best known for his exquisite miniatures depicting various landscapes and urban centres of 16th-century Persia."

"The name Matrakci was not, in fact, his name by birth but rather a nickname referring to his invention of a kind of military lawn game called matrak, a word which means 'cudgel' or 'mace', the main weapon at the heart of the game. The name stuck, and later would come to label its very own genre in Ottoman miniature art, the 'Matrakci style', describing works echoing his penchant for detail and precision of execution."

Building Fantasy
Lucas Adams
New York Review of Books

Fantastical Cityscapes of Cardboard and Glue
Roberta Smith
New York Times

"Out of modest ingredients Kingelez creates a whole world, entirely his own. The sprawling, glittering future city is one example of an electrifying alternate civic space, a city made up of glittering skyscrapers that could easily have been crafted from stained glass. In addition to entire imaginary cities, Kingelez’s work offers an assemblage of eye-popping additions to any fantasy skyline. Each piece is riddled with decoration and ornamentation, bright pink foliage, circles and stars, and a color palette that always leans toward the bold and the vivid."

"Peering down at Kingelez’s array of visions like some benevolent Godzilla, it’s an easy leap to imagine the lives of those living and working in a cityspace that instantly feels so exuberant, and so generous. None of Kingelez’s designs feature private residences. What would it be like to live and work in a place that knows abundance and love the way Kingelez depicts it?"

Incredible Dream-Like Models of Faraway Lands
Alice Yoo
My Modern Met

Amazing Bonsai Tree Castles are Miniature Living Worlds
Lori Zimmer
Inhabitat

"All my creation comes from my early experiences of bonsai making and maze illustration. I always got inspired from the question 'if I could be a Lilliput…' Maybe such small objects could be transformed to become a huge scale of buildings, castles, and the world itself."

"I built my career as a maze illustrator in my twenties. I got fully immersed in pushing a strong conceptual maze. From my thirties, I shifted my career from being a maze illustrator to being a concept maker for the catering trade that creates a fusion between food and entertainment. I applied my method of giving surprise and joy to people for which I cultivated in my career as a maze illustrator."

I’ve Been Developing This Maze City For 5 Years While Travelling Around The World
Marval
Bored Panda

"Rabath Jany is an ancient city in Babaria, built across the fiords of both Silvenaos and Yellow seas. It is better known as Maze city due to its complex architectural structure. I developed this painting traveling around the world during five years. The mix of different people, cultures and natural landscapes I met during my trip has deep influenced the development of the maze city. Rabath Jany is the result of such mix of cultures I met during my trips."

"Maze city is a mixture of modern and ancient technologies. Maze city’s inhabitants always used sailing ships. Otherwise, they also have a very sophisticated sky metro infrastructure with hundreds of sky lines running through all the districts."

Dad Spends 7 Years on Incredibly Detailed Maze
Johnny
Spoon & Tamago

"Some people have hobbies. Other people are obsessive. But when the two cross paths, this is what you get. A Japanese twitter user recently unearthed an incredibly detailed maze that her father created almost 30 years ago. When pressed for details, the father explained that he spent 7 years creating the map."

Miniature Miscellany Redux - Fairy Castle, Nutshell Studies, Miniature Offices, Model Trains, Replica Studio, Antique Furniture, Bookcase Nooks, Atalier Dollhouse

Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle
Museum of Science + Industry

"One of the most popular film actresses of her time, Colleen Moore assembled a legion of her industry colleagues to help craft this miniature home of fantastic proportions. She shared it during the Great Depression, touring the country to raise funds for children's charities."

"From the chapel's floor-to-ceiling stained glass to the flickering of the tiniest lights, every inch on display is a study in artistry and craftsmanship. The Fairy Castle is virtually a museum within our Museum, a collection of miniature treasures in every room, from inch-square books signed by the world's greatest authors to statues nearly two thousand years old. Though the Castle's magical residents are never seen, we know for certain they have exquisite taste."

 

Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
Smithsonian American Art Museum

"Frances Glessner Lee crafted her exquisitely detailed miniature crime scenes to train homicide investigators. These dollhouse-sized dioramas of true crimes, created in the first half of the 20th century and still used in forensic training today, helped to revolutionize the emerging field of homicide investigation."

"Lee is considered the mother of forensic science and helped to found the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University. At the time, there was very little training for investigators, meaning that they often overlooked or mishandled key evidence, or irrevocably tampered with crime scenes. Lee and her colleagues at Harvard worked to change this. Lee was a talented artist as well as criminologist, and used the craft of miniature-making that she had learned as a young girl to solve this problem. She constructed the Nutshells beginning in the 1940s to teach investigators to properly canvass a crime scene to effectively uncover and understand evidence."

"The equivalent to virtual reality in their time, her masterfully crafted dioramas feature handmade objects to render scenes with exacting accuracy and meticulous detail. Every element of the dioramas - from the angle of miniscule bullet holes, the placement of latches on widows, the patterns of blood splatters, and the discoloration of painstakingly painted miniature corpses - challenges trainees’ powers of observation and deduction."

I Turn Work Frustrations into Mini Magic in My Office
Derrick Lin
Bored Panda

Agency Life Told in Miniature Figures
Derrick Lin
Bored Panda

"Sometimes work can be really hectic and frustrating and as grownups, we are expected to be cool about it and keep the whining to ourselves. I work in advertising and my workday is often very chaotic and unpredictable."

"With my iPhone, a reading lamp, and miniature figures, I recreate the imaginary scenes of my honest thoughts in work situations right on my work desk. Pairing each photo with corresponding caption, I post them on my Instagram and Tumblr feeds as a way to document my eventful career. My tiny people are always there making sure I don’t hide my feelings."

How Model Trains Transformed from Cutting-Edge to Quaint
Ben Marks
Collector's Weekly

"In the 19th century, the railroad was the Internet of its day, connecting people with one another and moving merchandise and raw materials across great distances at unprecedented speeds. As railroad tycoons laid more and more miles of track throughout the growing nation, increasing numbers of citizens were able to witness the spectacle of a steam-engine locomotive roaring through their once-remote towns. In an age when few people traveled farther than 20 miles from their homes in their entire lifetimes, the effect must have been thrilling."

"Naturally, children were eager to play with pint-size versions of this new technology, and 19th-century toymakers obliged, cranking out model trains in wood, cast iron, and tin. By the first half of the 20th century, millions of little boys dreamed of waking up on Christmas morning to find a model train tooting around the tree."

"The problem with model trains in the 21st century: technology. Trains haven’t thrilled us for decades. For most of us, our experience with trains ranges from being packed into a crowded commuter train at rush hour to being stuck behind the wheel of a car at a railroad crossing as miles of groaning gondolas and rattling tanker cars rumble by. For the 21st-century kids stuck in the back seat of that car, trains are noisy, antiquated, and irredeemably boring."

Artist Constructs Intricately Detailed Miniature Replica of 1900s Photo Studio
Kristine Mitchell
My Modern Met

"Ali Alamedy has an eye for detail. The Turkish artist creates delightful miniature dioramas that are filled to the brim with hand-crafted items and absolutely ooze with charm. His newest piece is an adorable recreation of a photo studio from the 1900’s. The tiny photo studio took 9 months to complete, and was built using an assortment of materials such as wood, plastic, copper, and paper. Filled with over 100 tiny, period objects, Alamedy constructed each and every component of the studio from scratch. His time-intensive work manages to stay true to the spirit of vintage photo studios, and overflows with small-scale details that show true appreciation for the craft."

Japanese Artist Crafts Miniature Antique Dollhouse Furniture by Hand
Emma Taggert
My Modern Met

"Japanese artist Kiyomi brings some interior design chic to the world of dollhouses, with a range of handmade miniature antique furniture and accessories. Made from various materials including paper, wire, and perspex, her incredibly detailed, tiny creations include everything you would find in an 18th century world. There’s antique, industrial style cabinets and chairs; haberdashery items, such as spools of thread, sewing scissors, and a vintage sewing machine; as well as little shoes and hats, laid out in a tiny clothes store. There’s even a miniature bakery complete with teeny-tiny pastries."

Book Nook Shelf Inserts are Really Cool, and Everyone Should Know They Exist
Christopher Hudspurth
Buzzfeed

If you haven't seen or heard of a book nook before, it's a little shelf insert that goes between books and looks like a tiny door leading to an incredible place, or depicting unique sights.



My Atelier Dollhouse
Hanabira
YouTube


Notes: My previous miniature miscellany got really positive feedback, and several people suggested additional links to check out. I also realized I'd forgotten my friend Derrick Lin's miniature work. Big thanks to astralbath and bombasticus for their recommendations especially.

Spiritualist Miscellany - Daring Mediums, Occult Television, Mysterious Oujia, Ghost Photography, Spirit Radio

The Devices and Daring Mediums that Spoke for the Dead
Lisa Hix
Collector's Weekly

"In the earliest days, you would sit down with a medium at a table, and you would start asking questions out to the ether. And these raps would signal 'yes' or 'no' in a simple binary code. In the emerging Spiritualist movement, new mediums started calling out the alphabet, letter by letter, to the rapping ghosts and thereby, spelling out words and sentences from beyond in an excruciatingly slow manner. But ingenious Victorians quickly started looking for ways to get the message faster, coming up with all sorts of means and devices to chat with the dead.

Laypeople experimented with these devices at home, others turned to Spiritualist mediums, a job that eventually gave young women - who were thought to be so receptive to the divine they would come to embody the spirits themselves - power they couldn’t have dreamed of before. For a working-class woman who becomes a medium and ends up hanging out in wealthy people’s living rooms her entire career, it was an opportunity for another kind of life.

It was also an opportunity for women to speak in fora that they usually didn’t have the opportunity to speak in. These mediums were able to flagrantly violate strict Victorian social taboos and speak unpopular or radical opinions. Saying their ideas came from a higher power gave mediums substantial influence over social and political beliefs: They could inject ideas about poverty, women’s suffrage, domestic violence, or the abolition of slavery into the public consciousness."

An Occult History of the Television Set
Geoff Manaugh
Gizmodo

"The origin of the television set was heavily shrouded in both spiritualism and the occult. The television was first conceived as a technical device for seeing at a distance: like the telephone (speaking at a distance) and telescope (viewing at a distance), the television was intended as an almost magical box through which we could watch distant events unfold, a kind of technological crystal ball.

TV in a long line of other optical media go back at least as far as weird Renaissance experiments involving technologically-induced illusions, such as concave mirrors, magic lanterns, disorienting walls of smoke, and other ghostly apparitions and phantasmagoric projections created by speciality devices.

These devices included instruments specifically designed for pursuing supernatural research - for visualizing the invisible and showing the subtle forces at work in everyday life. So, while the television itself might not be a supernatural mechanism, it nonetheless descends from a strange and convoluted line of esoteric experimentation, including early attempts at controlling electromagnetic transmissions, radio waves, and even experiencing various forms of so-called remote viewing."
 
 

The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board
Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
Smithsonian

The Mysterious Origins of Ouija Boards
Lisa Hix
Collector's Weekly

"The Ouija board came straight out of the American 19th century obsession with spiritualism, the belief that the dead are able to communicate with the living. Spiritualism reached millions of adherents at its peak in the second half of the 19th century. It was compatible with Christian dogma, meaning one could hold a séance on Saturday night and have no qualms about going to church the next day. It was an acceptable, even wholesome activity to contact spirits at séances, through automatic writing, or table turning parties, in which participants would place their hands on a small table and watch it begin shake and rattle, while they all declared that they weren’t moving it.

As spiritualism had grown in American culture, so too did frustration with how long it took to get any meaningful message out of the spirits. Calling out the alphabet and waiting for a knock at the right letter was deeply boring. After all, rapid communication with breathing humans at far distances was a possibility - the telegraph had been around for decades - why shouldn’t spirits be as easy to reach? People were desperate for methods of communication that would be quicker - and while several entrepreneurs realized that, it was the Kennard Novelty Company that really nailed it."

When Cameras Took Pictures of Ghosts
Megan Garber
Atlantic

"For Mumler photo manipulation was also good business. While he was ultimately selling nostalgia and comfort, what was he technically selling were portraits of clients posed alongside the "spirits" of their deceased loved ones. He sold those for between $5 and $10 apiece, a huge fee at the time. He grew wealthy producing spirit photos for grief-stricken clients who had lost relatives in the Civil War.

Which was ingenious and cruel at the same time. Visual memories, even those of loved ones, fade. Images blur. Lines soften. Mumler took advantage of this. If a customer shared enough information with the photographer, and if the selected face was faint and blurry enough, the resulting 'spirit' could convince a person who wanted to be convinced.

The mid-19th century in the U.S. coincided with the rise of Spiritualism, the religious movement that posited, among other things, the possibility that a soul could exist without a body to contain it. Technologies like the telegraph and the camera gave cultural aid to the Spiritualist movement by effectively separating messages from the bodies of their senders. Images were disentangled from their subjects; information was disentangled from its sources. Ghosts were, in their way, everywhere."

Build the Spirit Radio that Creeped Out Tesla Himself
Sean Fallon
Gizmodo

Spooky Tesla Spirit Radio
mrfixitrick
Instructables

"My first observations positively terrified me as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night.

The sounds I am listening to every night at first appear to be human voices conversing back and forth in a language I cannot understand. I find it difficult to imagine that I am actually hearing real voices from people not of this planet. There must be a more simple explanation that has so far eluded me."

Miniature Miscellany - Thorne Rooms, Doll Houses, Small Worlds, Lonely Deaths, Urban Grime, Gritty Architecture

Thorne Miniature Rooms
Art Institute of Chicago

"The 68 Thorne Miniature Rooms enable one to glimpse elements of European interiors from the late 13th century to the 1930s and American furnishings from the 17th century to the 1930s. Painstakingly constructed on a scale of one inch to one foot, these fascinating models were conceived by Mrs. James Ward Thorne of Chicago and constructed between 1932 and 1940 by master craftsmen according to her specifications."

The Doll Houses of Instagram
Ronda Kaysen
New York Times

"A growing community of artisans have turned the craft of dollhouse making into an exercise in aspirational home design on an itty-bitty scale, with their tiny rooms and furnishings displayed on well-curated Instagram accounts with glossy photographs and videos set to music reminiscent of HGTV. 

Scroll too quickly, or miss the photograph with a human-scale hand surreally poking into the scene, and a viewer might confuse the image for a real-life one, the type of image that leaves you feeling equally amazed by and envious of the enormous kitchen island with a soapstone countertop.

Social media has turned what was once a niche hobby into a decidedly trendy and increasingly profitable business, making it easier for artisans to find each other and potential customers online. Before, miniatures were only publicized through miniature magazines. Social media put it in everybody’s face."

Miniacs Live in a Small, Small World
Abby Ellin
New York Times

"So many 'miniacs' came to the modern mini movement by way of a childhood love of dollhouses. For some, there is a voyeuristic appeal commingled with the universal desire to inhabit and experience multiple environments at the same time. It’s a way to explore worlds you can’t explore, and tiny fake worlds are easier to make, and less destructive, than secret real ones. We spend a tremendous amount of time in fantasy worlds: watching TV, reading books, playing videos. Miniatures provide a way to practice things that we can’t practice in reality.

For a very long time, miniaturists have had this very 'Grandpa in the basement working on model railroad' vibe to it, or 'Grandma with her dollhouse.' But the miniature is most certainly a growing trend in contemporary art."

Rooms Where Time Stops: Miyu Kojima’s Miniature Replicas of Lonely Deaths
Spoon & Tamago

"Miyu Kojima works for a company that cleans up afterlonely deaths: a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time. Part art therapy and part public service campaign, Kojima spends a large portion of her free time creating detailed, miniature replicas of the rooms she has cleaned.

Kojima has been working for the clean-up company for about 5 years and explains that she cleans on average 300 rooms per year. The replicas are meant to capture the sadness of these lonely deaths. One point that Kojima emphasizes is that it’s not the dying alone that is the issue but rather the duration of time that elapses before the bodies are discovered. These individuals were so cut-off from friends, family and society that weeks or sometimes months had elapsed before they were found."

Artist Creates Miniature Worlds Mimicking the Grit and Grime of Urban Architecture
Jessica Stewart
My Modern Met

"Artist Joshua Smith is a former stencil artist and gallerist turned miniaturist. For the past two years, Smith has focused his attention on creating miniature urban landscapes replete with detail. From graffitied walls to discarded cigarette butts, he uses everyday materials to bring his scale models to life.

Smith primarily uses MDF, cardboard, and plastic for the framing and base. Layers of paint and chalk pastels give the architecture its realistic feel prior to wiring and lighting. The artist’s newest work is a four-storey replica of a building in Kowloon."

Sculptor Creates Detailed Miniatures of Philadelphia and New Orleans’ Gritty Architecture
Jessica Stewart
My Modern Met

"Philadelphia-based rtist Drew Leshko is creating a sculptural archive of the city’s most at-risk architecture with his detailed scale models. Leshko produces these miniatures in order to preserve the history of Philadelphia’s grittiest neighborhoods. From local dive bars to pawn shops and convenience stores, each commercial space is transformed into an artistic sculpture that is filled with nostalgia.

Leshko prefers to prioritize his attention and skill on rapidly changing, or gentrifying, neighborhoods. He selects the most vulnerable pieces of architecture as his focus, as these historic storefronts will soon transition over to slick corporations that push out the individual merchants who had once defined the area. In this way, Leshko’s work is a push to ponder the history of buildings and how they inform our lives."

Linguistic Miscellany - Anti Language, Thieves Cant, Efficient Language, Repressed Script, Untranslated Words, Dialect

The Secret Anti-Languages You're not Supposed to Know
David Robson
BBC

"Since at least Tudor times, secret argots have been used in the underworld of prisoners, escaped slaves and criminal gangs as a way of confusing and befuddling the authorities. A modern anti-language could very well be spoken on the street outside your house. Unless you yourself are a member of the 'anti-society,' the strange terms would sound like nonsense."

" 'Anti-language' describe the words spoken on the fringes of society. All borrow the grammar of the mother language but replace words with another, elliptical term. Often, the anti-language may employ dozens of terms that have blossomed from a single concept. The strange, nonsensical words render a sentence almost impossible to comprehend for outsiders, and the more terms you have, the harder it is for an outsider to learn the code."

"Secrecy was the only motive for building an anti-language. It also helps define a hierarchy within the 'anti-society.' Refusing to speak the lingo could denigrate you to the lowest possible rung of the social ladder."

Why Did "Thieves' Cant" Carry an Unshakable Allure?
Amelia Soth
JSTOR Daily

"Bourgeois readers saw a lively, colorful parody of their own world. The authors of canting pamphlets spun out elaborate fantasies about a kind of anti-society of the ignominious, an upside-down mirror image of their bourgeois world. Just as polite society was populated with lawyers and doctors and merchants, the underworld had its own disreputable cast of 'professionals.' "

"Was this fantasy of an anti-society of rogues and beggars a reflection of a failure of imagination on the part of the bourgeoisie? An inability to conceive of any way of life besides their familiar one, with its orderly ranks of professionals distributed in hierarchical guilds? Or was it a moral failure, an attempt to portray the disenfranchised in their society as cunning tricksters, who only pretended to be jobless, homeless, and starving?"

"Rogue literature imagined the itinerant poor as a nation within a nation, complete with its own language. They were no longer members of the same society as the middle-class gawkers who read about them. There was no need to feel any guilt or obligation towards people who, after all, had their own society, were employed (in a fashion), and only affected illness or disaster to beg."

The World's Most Efficient Languages
John McWhorter
The Atlantic

"If there were a prize for the busiest language, then a language like Kabardian would win. In the simple sentence 'The men saw me,' the word for 'saw,' other than the part meaning 'see,' there is a bit that reiterates that it's me who was seen, even though the sentence would include a separate word for 'me' elsewhere. Then there are other bits that show that the seeing was most significant to 'me' rather than to the men or anyone else; that the seeing was done by more than one person (despite the sentence spelling out elsewhere that it was plural 'men' who did the seeing); that this event did not happen in the present; that on top of this, the event happened specifically in the past rather than the future; and finally a bit indicating that the speaker really means what he’s saying."

"When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself. Because all languages, are, to some extent, busier than they need to be, this streamlining leaves the language thoroughly complex and nuanced, just lighter on the bric-a-brac that so many languages pant under. Only a few languages have been taken up as vehicles of empire and imposed on millions of unsuspecting and underqualified adults."

The Return of the Repressed
Kaya Genç
Los Angeles Review of Books

"Here is an alternate history of American English: For whatever reason, circa 1920, a revolutionary leader wants to change the English alphabet for the Cyrillic one, and somehow he manages to achieve this. Fresh generations of Americans start writing the old language using the newly learned script. Literacy rates drop first, but then increase greatly, while the volume of readable texts decrease."

"Older generations of Americans, for whom the Latin script becomes a vague childhood memory, struggle to keep up and even take writing classes to be able to write in their own language. In the eight decades that follow, American writers produce great works using Cyrillic, far outweighing the Latin script books in volume. Then, one fine day, a daring American leader proposes to make it mandatory for students to learn, apart from the customary Cyrillic script, the Latin one as well."

"Arabic is one of the six most spoken languages in the world today. Unlike English, it has not exactly become the language of globalization, but it certainly has a global reach. In the past, Arabic had a strong connection with the Turkish language. Turkey’s current alphabet, consisting of letters written in the Latin script, was introduced in 1928, as part of one of the boldest language reforms in history, replacing the Ottoman script, which was a variation of the Persian-Arabic alphabet. Today, Turkey’s education ministry wants this defunct language to be taught again, having announced plans for making Ottoman language classes mandatory for all school students in the country."

Why We Love Untranslatable Words
David Shariatmadari
Lit Hub

"There is something deeply seductive about the idea that other languages contain codes that are impossible to crack. adults should know better than to believe that other cultures speak in spells. The concept of 'untranslatable words' preserves the idea that the world can never be fully mapped out and expunged of mystery. That’s a comforting thought. It keeps alive the possibility of escape - of something surviving far beyond our everyday experiences."

"It is also an easy replacement for the hard tasks of em­pathy and understanding. It allows us to imagine that we don’t have very much in common. It puts them at one remove, which fits with the strange stories we hear about them. It also saves us having to learn what the circumstances of life might actually be like there. If all that seems fairly harmless, think about it this way: when you believe people are unfathomable because they speak a different language, you’re just as capable of thinking that they’re inferior or evil, instead of charming or other-worldly."

 
There's No Such Thing as a Language
John McWhorter
The Atlantic

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The very fact that 'language' and 'dialect' persist as separate concepts implies that linguists can make tidy distinctions for speech varieties worldwide. But in fact, there is no objective difference between the two: Any attempt you make to impose that kind of order on reality falls apart in the face of real evidence."

"English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on 'intelligibility': If you can understand it without training, it's a dialect of your own language; if you can't, it's a different language. But because of quirks of its history, English happens to lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn't apply consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as 'dialects' of one language, are actually treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate 'languages' are thought of locally as dialects."