[A tremendously good 1987 essay on hundreds of years of attempts to control the Mississippi River, and where those attempts stand now. -egg]

When Rabalais was a child, there was no navigation lock to lower ships from the Mississippi. The water just poured out—boats with it—and flowed on into a distributary waterscape known as Atchafalaya. In each decade since about 1860, the Atchafalaya River had drawn off more water from the Mississippi than it had in the decade before. By the late nineteen-forties, when Rabalais was in his teens, the volume approached one-third. As the Atchafalaya widened and deepened, eroding headward, offering the Mississippi an increasingly attractive alternative, it was preparing for nothing less than an absolute capture: before long, it would take all of the Mississippi, and itself become the master stream. Rabalais said, “They used to teach us in high school that one day there was going to be structures up here to control the flow of that water, but I never dreamed I was going to be on one. Somebody way back yonder—which is dead and gone now—visualized it. We had some pretty sharp teachers.”

The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi’s main channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi. Along Bayou Teche, on the high ground of ancient natural levees, are Jeanerette, Breaux Bridge, Broussard, Olivier—arcuate strings of Cajun towns. Eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a thousand years. In the second century a.d., it was captured again, and taken south, by the now unprepossessing Bayou Lafourche, which, by the year 1000, was losing its hegemony to the river’s present course, through the region that would be known as Plaquemines. By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it. By the route of the Atchafalaya, the distance across the delta plain was a hundred and forty-five miles—well under half the length of the route of the master stream.

Source: Atchafalaya – The New Yorker

The Japanese don’t sleep. They don’t nap. They do ‘inemuri’. Dr Brigitte Steger explains.

Source: The Japanese art of (not) sleeping

Source: Figures In the Daydream Spaces of Scott Radke | Dirge Magazine

A few months ago, Chief Medicine Crow, one of the last remaining links to the Native American tribes of the Wild West died at age 102. He had grown up hearing stories about George Armstrong Custer from his grandfather, who’d been a scout for the doomed general at Little Bighorn in 1876. A soldier himself in the Second World War, Medicine Crow was one of the last Crow people to ever accomplish the four deeds required to be considering a war chief (command a war party, steal an enemy horse, touch an enemy without killing him and taking an enemy’s weapon).

He was a fascinating man, not just for what he did but also for what he represents to us now. He was, to use a phrase coined by Jason Kottke, a “human wormhole.” His unusual and long live is a reminder to how connected the past and present really are.

A curator at the Smithsonian described meeting Medicine Crow as “you’re shaking hands with the 19th century.” Which an amazing concept. A few intrepid historians on reddit recently discovered an even more amazing one, calculating that it would take a chain of just six individuals who shook hands with one another to connect Barack Obama to George Washington across the centuries (Obama ->Queen Elizabeth II -> Herbert Hoover -> William H. Taft -> Benjamin Harrison -> William Henry Harrison -> Benjamin Harrison V -> George Washington).

I’ve become fascinated with discovering and tracking some of these reminders. For some time now, I’ve kept a file of them on 4×6 notecards in my house. My friends and I email these moments to each other as we find them — some absurd (Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman may have hooked up), coincidental (Orson Welles claimed to have been in the Biograph Theater in Chicago where John Dillinger was killed by the FBI) and some that are so unbelievable that they might just blow your mind (there’s a video from a 1956 CBS game show, “I’ve Got a Secret,” with a very old guest whose secret was that he was in Ford’s Theatre when Lincoln was assassinated. Appearing with him on the show? Lucille Ball.)

Source: The fascinating and ego-killing existence of human wormholes / Boing Boing

[Pairs well with that Monbiot article. -egg]

Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and other luminaries have issued pan­icked warnings about the coming age of humanity-hating computerized overlords. We dote on the party tricks of modern AIs, sending half-admiring/half-dreading laurels to the Watson team when it manages to win at Jeopardy or randomwalk its way into a new recipe.

The fear of AIs is way out of proportion to their performance. The Big Data-trawling systems that are supposed to find terrorists or figure out what ads to show you have been a consistent flop. Facebook’s new growth model is sending a lot of Web traffic to businesses whose Facebook followers are increasing, waiting for them to shift their major commercial strategies over to Facebook marketing, then turning off the traffic and demanding recur­ring payments to send it back – a far cry from using all the facts of your life to figure out that you’re about to buy a car before even you know it.

[…]

What does the fear of futuristic AI tell us about the parameters of our present-day fears and hopes?

Source: Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Skynet Ascendant

[Just a fantastic history and primer on the belief system that’s destroying our world. -egg]

It’s as if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007-8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Source: The Zombie Doctrine | George Monbiot

[This is pretty damn amazing. -egg]

This three minute dance performance was created by Method Studios for this year’s AICP Awardsas a way to promote different sponsors. Each sponsor is imagined briefly as a dancing avatar rendered with the help of motion capture, procedural animation and dynamic simulations. The wild costumes seem to draw inspiration from artists like Nick Cave, Wrecking Crew Orchestra, and even Kohei Nawa. To be sure, there’s a lot going on here, but all of it adds up to something pretty amazing, a killer dance performance that merges cutting edge animation techniques. (via Vimeo)

Source: An In-Your-Face Motion Capture Dance Performance Amidst a Flurry of Feathers, Fur, and Particles | Colossal

Recently I have seen numerous images of smallholder farmers standing helplessly next to wilted crops, dying cattle, and sun-scorched earth.

Having grown up on a small farm in rural Zimbabwe, I know full well how mother nature can destroy livelihoods for one of the world’s most vulnerable populations – smallholder farmers. I also recognise the look on many of those farmers’ faces: helplessness.

Yet, the narrative does not always have to end badly. Plant breeders, working through publicly funded research institutes, are developing new crop varieties with traits that allow them to withstand extreme weather – and not just drought, but also flooding, and frost.

Source: Climate change and ‘smart seeds’ in Africa

In instrumental music education, the very first thing you do is teach ear training and keyboard skills. And you do that with students who are, frankly, terrible. But anyone can learn perfect pitch (or something close to it, at least). You couple those ears with an understanding of theory, and you’re able to navigate common musical practice.

Yet in audio, I’ll bet the vast majority of people making music and working in sound have never had an equivalent training. And yet the essentials of sound, and tools like compression and EQ, are just as dependent on training your ears. You need to couple that training with a sense of theory.

Right in your browser, listen to equalization by band and amount with actual recordings.

And music software developers are starting to realize that the more you know, the more you’re likely to use their tools.

iZotope had already added extensive education to their offerings – teaching you how mastering works being a great way of getting more mastering customers. But now, they’re doing something much further-reaching, which they call Pro Audio Essentials.

And it’s not just lessons – it’s also a game.

Source: Learn audio skills as a game, free, with your ears as guide – cdm createdigitalmusic

Guy Ben-Ary has spent 4 years collaborating with scientists and other artists to develop a musical instrument controlled by a neural network bio-engineered from his own skin cells.

The “brain” of cellF is a biological neural network that started its life on the artist’s arm. Skin cells taken with a biopsy were converted into neural stem cells using Induced Pluripotent Stem cell technology. These neural stem cells were then fully differentiated into neural networks over a Multi-Electrode Array dish.

The neural network is now able to play live sessions with human musicians by controlling custom-built synthesizers. The music of the human performer is fed to the neurons as stimulation, and the neurons respond by controlling the analogue synthesizers. Both the human musician and Ben-Ary’s extended brain are thus fully interacting with each other to create improvised sound pieces.

Source: cellF, the world’s first neural synthesiser – We Make Money Not Art