So You’re Saying There’s A Chance

Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered several weeks ago.

Between 100 to 300 feet across, it has something like a 1.5% chance of striking earth in 2032. Anything larger than 150 feet with a 1% chance of impact gets put on the watch list of the International Asteroid Warning Network.

An asteroid that size could easily cause something as significant as the Tunguska Event in Siberia in 1908, estimated at 1000X the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb.

And still not remotely close to the Chicxulub impactor at the end of the Cretaceous. When it struck the Yucatan, the 10 – 15 kilometer meteor caused a rim of mountains higher than the Himalayas to form around the impact zone, blasted debris that achieved escape velocity and left the atmosphere, and brought instantaneous extinction as far away as what is now North Dakota and New Jersey.

NASA (funding pending) and Jet Propulsion Labs, among others, will follow YR4’s progress. If they upgrade this current threat, presumably some half-baked plan ensues to mitigate damage. I have personally volunteered Makerbot – the youngest, spryest, least whiny bastard – to lead Space Force on that dangerous mission.

This Guy

My first post on the originale blogge was David Lynch. It seems fitting that I should comment on how he affected me, the central character of the universe.

I’ll spare you.

Someone asked me what Lynch I would be staying up late watching. I thought “probably none; his work is always spinning in my head anyway; it’s easy to call scenes to mind simply by thinking about them.”

[partial view of the home Lynch shelf]

Please note Lynch on Lynch on the far left, too worn to be legible anymore. I love his intuition and his thinking, the dream logic, the credit he seems to give to his audience for being as artistic as he is. And Alan Splet (sound engineer) and Angelo Badalementi. The struggle to find expression in images and sound when words just won’t do. An endless source of inspiration, fascination, humor, and wonder for me. A lot of great tributes out there, including Kyle MacLachlan and Defector.

Where My Sound Snobs At?

The monolithic speakers of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2 look like a cross between a gigantic honeycomb and the front of a “Jetsons” spaceship. The system, built by audiophile designer Devon Turnbull, sounds like nothing most people have ever heard before — you feel like you’re seated in the front row at an orchestra, or on a bar stool at a smokey jazz club, or inside Aphex Twin’s brain.

The 2,500-square-foot listening room on the seventh floor of the museum is just one part of the Art of Noise exhibit, which also includes a treasure trove of concert posters and vintage stereos (it opened in May and is slated to close this Sunday). The room is kept dark except for spotlights on the turntables and speakers, with the folding seats scattered on the ground. DJs play in either four-hour or seven-hour shifts that are intended to be nonperformative, with the talent billed as “operators,” who are instructed to take off their shoes (and reminded to wear clean socks). There are two turntables, but the system is designed without a crossfader, so there’s no way to smoothly transition between records, or beat-match like a DJ would in a club setting. One record ends, there’s a moment of silence, and then the next record begins, such that technique doesn’t distract from the pure sonic power of the music.

When I interviewed Turnbull, he spoke for about 20 minutes about the philosophy behind the system, which is based on high-efficiency speakers and low-power triode tube amps. He went on to describe multicell horns, Class D subwoofer amplifiers and how he had hauled transformers from Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district home in a suitcase. However, unless you breathe the rarified air of the audiophile sect, those words likely mean nothing to you — they certainly don’t to me, and I’m a professional DJ and music producer. But the bottom line is that the system has as few components as possible, each is absurdly high quality, and Turnbull said some took hundreds of hours to design.

“It’s unlike any other thing that I’ve experienced,” one DJ said. “I’ve played shows in stadiums, huge trestle stages, other hi-fi rooms. This was like a holy experience. It’s almost like the church of sound.”

Why does a speaker horn with 15 directional cells create more intense emotions than a pair of cheap earbuds? And in a broader sense, why does one collection of musical notes sound better than any other? What is music for, after all? This is what I like to call a DJ existential crisis.

When I asked Turnbull about this, he wasn’t surprised; he rattled off some facts about acoustic physics — how octaves in music are doubling in the frequency of sound waves, a cosmic coincidence that translates to goose bumps.

“Sound is just vibrations traveling through the air, and then when they hit our eardrum, we perceive them,” Turnbull said. “Our brain processes them initially as a way of forming a reactive response — a safety mechanism. Like, something dangerous is happening and we need to avoid it. Like a lot of our senses, they’re to help us navigate the world. But there are certain frequencies that give us a sensation of pleasure when the brain processes them.”

“If I had one wish,” another DJ said, “it would be that everyone once in their lifetime can get a record of theirs, a song, a cassette, just to be able to hear it on a system like that and just have it imprinted, tattooed in their heart.”

More here.

Snow Shows

A Murder at the End of the World was superb.

Fargo is excellent.

I’m one episode into True Detective: Night Country. It seems can’t miss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnPl4PuNb5U

The Other Other German Composer

John Groves, born in Hamburg to English parents.

I came to appreciate his genius when a vintage Mentos commercial recently appeared on one of my devices.

At the time it came out (1992) I had the same reaction as everyone, i.e.
WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS. But this being in the before times, prior to Makerbot inventing the internets, I had to simply wonder how the abomination arose, and wallow in ignorance.

But now…
Enter Bastard Research Division.

The candies, in various formats, have been around since the 1930’s, and are owned by the Perfetti Van Melle, an Italian-Dutch corporation. Van Melle hired the ad agency Pahnke & Partners out of Hamburg, to come up with the ad spots. Groves composed the theme, which is available in extended format!!

The bulk of commercials were shot in South Africa, and aimed squarely at the US and Canada.

Viewers who spotted the ads when they premiered in July 1992 were driven to distraction by one intangible: The ads seemed disconnected from actual human behavior, and the song itself was critiqued for appearing to be an English translation that didn’t get the lyrics quite right.  

When Van Melle was asked “what the actual fuck?” they responded coyly, realizing they had a phenomenon on their hands. The less they answered, the more interest there was. Sales went from $20M in 1991 to $140M in 1996, worldwide. In the late 90’s, Altoids caught fire and were blamed for a decrease in Mentos market share.

The singer is allegedly Richard Ryan Graves (aka Frank Ryan), who takes zero credit for it on wikipedia or elsewhere. He was in Hamburg at the time, so he remains a likely suspect.