Transmission #45: Raving as Folk-Art, Bad Days for Dinosaurs, Hostile Architecture and Spreadsheet Thank-yous
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
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This is Transmissions by me, Marty Brown.
What is Transmissions? It’s an ongoing, (usually) fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way.
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Design
The Billboard Article
Bob Lefsetz, Lefsetz Letter
Like many teenagers, I used to be really into new music. My second ever job was interviewing musicians and writing reviews for a music magazine. (My first job was at McDonald’s, but that’s another story.) And as I aged, I was always prepared for music to change into some weird form that I wouldn’t understand or appreciate, because that’s what happens when you get old and lose touch. But what I didn’t expect was the disintegration of the whole artifice of popular music.
This article sums up the general anarchy that is swirling around music these days. At the heart of it is this: no-one knows how to make a music star. Not record labels, not music media, not concert promoters, radio. Something hits a chord on social media and they just kind of happen. So we’re left with what we got before the door slammed shut.
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Some associated thoughts on this topic of cultural chaos: many of the previously ‘underground’, or ‘experimental’ musical forms have reached their nadir, have stopped innovating, and are now culturally bounded and safe – see: Raving as Folk Art.
And stepping out of the folk-art world, where there still is money to be made by the big players, we see an increasing homogenisation of culture, as the wins get analysed to death, and the commercial and cultural risks get smaller and smaller. See the always excellent Derek Thompson writing What Moneyball has done for American Culture.
Ideas
The Day the Dinosaurs Died
Douglas Preston, The New Yorker
Palaeontologist Robert DePalma has found the Pompeii of dinosaur bones: hundred of animals who died directly as result, and merely hours after, the chicxulub asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago. They are exceptionally well preserved, so much so that we can deduce the tumult of their final moments, as they were battered by shockwaves rippling through the riverbed, and surrounded by tiny droplets of red-hot obliterated asteroid falling from the sky.
It’s an incredible find: “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.”
For those more visually inclined, good friend of Transmissions, David Attenborough, has done a tv show on it too.
Quote of the Week
“‘We have to start worrying about what the AI is thinking — or rather, how it thinks. We have to develop what psychologists would call a “theory of mind” for the machine. And “it’s a very foreign intelligence, right?”’
— OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, The Psychological Weirdness of “Prompt Engineering”, Clive Thompson, Medium
Chart of the Week

Other
🦠 The latest in the lab-leak back and forth: a volley from Vanity Fair, claiming that buried deep in the ‘party-speak’ of memoranda at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a tacit admission of a ‘complex and grave situation’ erupting in November 2019. Cowinkydinks? Link
🧑💻 Working from home has freed up a lot of time for some people. What do they do with it? Amongst other things, they sleep more. Link
🤖 Thank you messages written by GTP-3. In a spreadsheet, thank you very much. Link
🏢 Dress right for hostile architecture. Link
🇷🇺 Documentary maker Adam Curtis at it again with a superlative 7 hour look at the lives of everyday Russians during the fall of Communism, and Democracy. Link