Godzilla, Radiohead, War, Imagine, Robot
Godzilla - The Soul Of Japan
kaptainkristian | YouTube | 1st December 2016
Gojira (1954) is more than a creature feature – it's a raw, complex political cypher. "Godzilla doesn't have scales like a normal reptile would; that grooved hide was meant to evoke the keloid scarring of the survivors of the nuclear blast. And the blast itself was represented in Godzilla's mushroom-cloud-shaped head." The more widely known American version discarded the subtlety of the original (7m 34s)
Radiohead's Masterpiece In Orchestration
Listening In | YouTube | 7th January 2020
Analysis of one of Radiohead's most haunting tracks, "How to Disappear Completely". (I recommend listening to the song itself first.) "We hear a new cascading, seemingly random firing of notes in electronics; again, another independent line, another musical cell that exists beyond the confines of the song, in its own self-contained world" (9m 29s)
The Democratization of War Memorials
J. Draper | YouTube | 11th January 2020
Brief bio of the Duke of Wellington, then musings on how war memorials have become more democratic. "If you look at Wellington's memorial, you'd think he was the only person who fought in that battle." Now, soldiers are often listed alphabetically, rather than by rank, and memorials have veered away from literal depiction (5m 42s, recommended start here)
What Would Your Imagination Look Like?
Solar Sands | YouTube | 12th January 2020
If you could project your imagination onto a screen, how well-rendered would it be? FMRI brain decoding results in images like the one below, but they're far from perfect. When researchers tried to analyze the brain of a person playing a first-person-shooter game, "all they could decode was the intention to move around" – everything else was overwhelmed by the distress of being fired at (20m 20s)
Bizarre Video Of The Week
Boston Dynamics' troupe of dancing robots proves to be more unnerving than cute
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