alxblk
Curated thinking on art and science
Latest
Art
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Excuse me...
A street vox pop asks strangers which artwork they’d own if money were no object, and the dull answers, the ones that sell it on, say a lot about art’s transformation into an asset class.
Software
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Rubbish AI
Six bins and an unhelpful leaflet: how AI helped me build a personal bin widget in 35 minutes.
Committed to Looking
Photographic contests are an uncomfortable beauty parade built on other people's worst days, yet they remain a vital counterweight to censorship and billionaire media control.
Twice as Long - Marilyn at the NPG
A visit to the National Portrait Gallery's Marilyn Monroe exhibition, read through the parallel history of photography.
Music
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The Day Dolly Died
Dolly Parton was a broad church. She found me as a boy reading on a Harare verandah while my father played 'Jolene' on vinyl, and she never really left.
Apple
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A bite out of your wallet
Apple's 'unified memory' is just 'soldered on so you can't upgrade' in a nicer suit. And for £12,500 you still don't get a screen or a keyboard.
International Colander Liberation Day
The eclipse saw colanders liberated from kitchen drawers across the country.
Going Wild Over Wildfire and Rewilding
The Dunwich Heath fire is being used to attack rewilding. Yet climate change, not rewilding, drives UK wildfires. Rewilding and fire safety aren't opposing goals - resilient landscapes take time, so active management and firebreaks remain essential in the meantime.
Wildfire
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Wildfires & Heatwaves
Things will be quiet here for a little while - 8,500 papers don't filter themselves. Elsewhere: Mazowe convalesces under his own fan, the garden is being kept alive by bucket, and a wildfire visualisation is quietly taking shape.
Wildfire
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Pyrocumulonimbus and a Full English
A conference on wildfires, a terrier on bed rest, and Europe's first pyrocumulonimbus — the week refused to rank them. Fire, convalescence, and a full English.
The longest week
Mazowe, our indomitable Welsh Terrier, turned 14 in May. He earned the moniker 'table shark' when he was younger — partly for his habit of circling a meal table, partly for his slightly recurved tail, evoking a shark's dorsal fin.