LCD Soundsystem track of the quarter
For a moment there, Things appeared quarterly, and it just so happened I got particularly into one single LCD Soundsystem track each quarter: Q1 was New Body Rhumba, Q2 the music video for Oh Baby, and this then continued, but Things did not.
My 2024 Q3 LCD Soundsystem obsession was “How Do You Sleep”, which is widely read as an authentically emotional lament for a friend and business partner that went rather dramatically off the rails. After a sparse percussion-heavy intro, this incredible airy synth bass hits at 3’38” ultimately carrying the lyrics to the dramatic denoument signalled up-front by the track’s name. I recommend listening to it once without really concentrating too much, then reading the high-level story behind the lyrics, then later listening more carefully to the lyrics with the story in mind for maximum effect.
Then in Q4, out of nowhere Kottke recommended this 2011 manual mashup of “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down” with a Miles Davis improvisation. Many mashups rely on a baseline familiarity with one or ideally both tracks, but this fully stands alone and is worth a listen (and watch, to see the combining at work on two Youtube instances, no longer possible due to a copyright strike against the Miles Davis track).
Repetition Legitimises
While we’re jazz-adjacent, this two-word phrase captures a brilliant nugget of human nature: repetition legitimises! If you hear a strange collection of notes it might not seem like music, but if they then repeat it legitimises it as a piece of music in the mind. Here’s where I first saw the phrase:
You get this even more dramatically with Steve Reich tracks like “It Ain’t Gonna Rain” in which the repetition of a spoken-word sample transforms the way you perceive it into something with a rhythm and a melody. Repetition legitimises!
Of course, this doesn’t just go for music. A lot of people are wearing masks for COVID, so people feel like they should too. A lot of people stop wearing masks for COVID, so people feel weird about wearing a mask again and stop. Repetition legitimises!
Your newspaper / social-media algorithm of choice keeps showing you stories about Outgroup X doing bad things. Wow, sure seems like Outgroup X just does bad things all the time! Better elect someone who says they will clamp down on Outgroup X. Repetition legitimises!
Meanwhile in my algorithmic feed
Given enough of your viewing data, Youtube – like a lot of short-form online content services – gets pretty good at recommending stuff you would like. One side-effect is that you might see something you think is really great and share it with friends – who are then not that interested, because it was actually algorithmically perfect for you and not many others. For example, I linked to a bunch of Youtube videos above that I love, but you probably only clicked on one at most and found it merely slightly interesting!
My other source of algorithmically supplied content is Reddit, which by now is fairly well-tuned at showing me things I’m either interested in or can’t help but pause to look at because they’re awful.
So, here are some fairly random things that turned up there that I think are pretty great. I’m curious how much your mileage may vary:
But, we can go deeper! Here’s some things that I also think are pretty great, based on the way they build on another weird thing I’m already familiar with. If you’re not familiar with the original thing these probably only half make sense, but you can probably decode what’s going on anyway? I’ll give some pointers after each image if you want to check.
Meteorite size vs. Recency
Meteors hit the earth all the time, and those that make it to the surface without burning up are called meteorites. Their size follows a power-law distribution (tiny ones are common, rather large ones are very rare), and as a result we get a roughly log-line plot between how often we get hit by meteors of exponentially larger sizes:
Brought to my attention by Chris Impey’s book “How It Ends” (page 136) is a cute corollary: we can expect to find craters on earth of different sizes, and larger craters will usually be from meteors that hit longer ago (more on that later).
Here’s a few notable examples.
The Tunguska Event happened about 126 years ago, in which a 30m object exploded 6-10km above the earth causing widespread devastation in a remote area and shattering windows hundreds of kilometers away.
Barringer Crater (aka “Meteor Crater”) in Arizona is estimated to be 50,000 years old and caused by a 50m meteorite, leaving a 1.2km diameter crater.
The Manicouagan Reservoir is an annular lake formed in the remains of a 100km diameter impact crater formed 214 million years ago by a 5km meteorite.
Finally, the Chicxulub crater is not as pleasingly obvious on a map, but was inferred from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission STS-99. The diameter is 200km, the age is only 66 million years, and the asteroid causing it estimated to be about 10km. You may note the age aligns with the extinction of the dinosaurs and indeed this is thought to be the origin of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
So, I took these and a few other notable craters and made a chart of size vs recency:
The power-law axes are doing a lot of work to squash these points towards a line, but you get the general idea.
But, as Things readers, I know what you’re thinking: this doesn’t quite add up. In particular, there are some other factors at work:
- The upper right of the chart pretty much can’t be populated or you wouldn’t be reading this right now (you probably don’t get to reading-Things-level biology even 1m* years after a 10k meteorite crater event)
- The bottom left ‘should’ be more populated as those smaller meteorites are more common – but we lose the ability to see those over 1m+ years due to natural erosion and tectonic plate shifting
- Even accounting for the above point, this is not at all a complete sampling. I just picked the top obvious craters I could find. In particular, there will also have been many large meteorites that landed in the sea (or on land that is now undersea). See this nice map for reference.
- Perhaps over a billion years the solar system is in general calming down, with fewer giant impact events in general (Josie pointed this out).
*Speculation by me
All told, just based on my chart of obvious craters and age, it’s tempting to think we’re kind of “safe” and that big meteorites are a thing of the past, and maybe we are a bit, but with all the above caveats that seems unlikely.
As some nice context, at the time of writing a 90m meteor has an estimated 2.3% of hitting the earth in 2032, with an impact similar to the Tunguska event.
Sauropod Giganticism
Dinosaurs ruled the earth for a very long time indeed, and many of them were enormous. Since the most recent giant meteorite helped put an end to them, we haven’t seen such giganticism on land. Why is that?
Making that question even tougher to answer is this great study, helped by recent decades of substantially more fossil finds, that shows Sauropod giganticism evolved repeatedly over millions of years. The full articles is here, but this is the lovely visualisation of that pattern – each coloured line is an example of giganticism emerging:
The direction of causality means in this case we can’t really say repetition legitimises. The article sketches out a few factors that push Sauropods towards growth, but the question begged by the above chart remains, ultimately, unanswered.
My Album of the Year 2024
Inspired by a tree (specifically Tāne Mahuta), this Jon Metcalfe album fills me with wonder and hope even in the face of probable cosmic annihilation, especially when it gets into Night.
- Transmission ends