Links are at the end, including to our writing music for this post.
The bottom deck gets crowded when the weather turns.
Satellite of Love
NASA launched a new satellite earlier this week. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT). Nicknamed “KaRIn,” the device intends to measure the depth and other characteristics of water on a majority of the earth’s surface.
It is designed to take exact measurements of the height of water in Earth's freshwater and ocean bodies. Information will be gathered on rivers wider than 330 feet (100 meters) and lakes and reservoirs larger than 15 acres (62,500 square meters).
To collect data along a 30-mile (50-kilometer) broad swath on either side of the satellite, KaRIn will bounce radar pulses off the Earth's surface and the water and pick up the signals with both antennas.
The information SWOT offers, NASA explains, will aid communities' preparation for a warmer world and assist researchers and decision-makers in addressing some of today's most urgent climate-related challenges.
KaRIn is going to report climate change to the manager.1
Just set it by the curb when you’re done
Universal Studios in Osaka set a new Guinness world record with more than 600,000 lights on their Christmas tree, which also boasts a record-setting 12-foot tree topper on their 100-foot tree which we assume is not a tree.2
Come evening, you don’t want to miss the dynamic projection mapping show that incorporates the illuminated tree and uses the surrounding shop fronts as a canvas. The spectacle is synchronised to music and takes place every ten minutes from sunset until the park closes.
You’ll find the tree at Gramercy Park located within Universal Studios Japan’s New York area until January 9 2023. For more information, see the website (in Japanese only).
Still time to get there; watching them take it down would be something.
A Journey With a Gun and No Money
Also from Japan, a photographer and a mountaineer walk into a bar and enjoy a snort before heading into Japan’s mountain wildernesses for two months with cameras, a gun, camping equipment and not much else.3
On October 9, 2021, Bunsho Hattori and Ryuichi Ishikawa set out on a journey. Arriving in Kikonai, a tiny village with a population of 4,000 on the gray, desolate coast of Hokkaido, the professional mountaineer and photographer duo left their money and cell phones behind. They armed themselves with hunting rifles, a small amount of rice, and Hattori’s trusty canine companion. Then, they embarked on a journey into the Hokkaido wilderness.
“Mountaineering is a form of art like dancing, where the mountains are your stage,” says Hattori. For the large-scale art festival Aichi Triennale, which took place this past summer, Hattori and Ishikawa decided to make an exhibit out of a journey to prove this bold statement.
After making their way down to Cape Shirakami, the southernmost tip of Hokkaido, they turned north, ascending high into the mountains through scarcely trekked territory: Mt. Daisengen, Mt. Kariba, Mt. Oshamanbedake. This isn’t Hakone or ski country—it’s wild territory, as the two survived by procuring food with their guns and their own hands and sweat.
The two documented their trip with photographs and audio recordings, and displayed the results at this year’s Aichi Triennale.4 (Other participating artists included John Cage and Laurie Andersen.)
Worthless NFTs are no longer worthless
Non-fungible tokens, the digital records of art (not the actual art, mind you) were a hot commodity earlier this year, with people paying millions for a series of digits certifying that they had fallen for a Ponzi scheme, or perhaps a digital pump-and-dump.5
Now – alongside the broader crypto market – the appetite for NFTs is so diminished that a specialized market has sprung up for collectors looking to sell off their once-valuable “digital collectibles” as tax losses to offset their income tax bills.
A recently launched service, Unsellable, aims to help collectors do exactly that. Think of it as a distressed asset fire sale.
“While every investment class has its losers, many of the NFTs we invested in were not only down big; they were now totally worthless … illiquid … unsellable,” the service says on its website.
Unsellable – which says it is “building the world’s largest collection of worthless NFTs” – buys the underlying tokens for a fraction of their original price and provides an official receipt for tax purposes.
This is a brand new tax dodge; nobody knows if it’ll pass muster with the tax examiners, but it must look good to somebody who dumped millions into one of the ‘pieces’ in the Bored Ape collection, for instance (Justin Bieber), or to the unknown buyer who paid $70 million for “a digital collage NFT by the artist Beeple.” (Beeple thinks the market will rebound from zero; he can certainly afford to be optimistic.)
High-visibility quantum interference between two independent semiconductor quantum dots achieved
In case you’ve been waiting for that.6
Waffle House fight videos are now a genre
In case you’ve been waiting for that.7
Music to Write By
Finishing “Rock It to the Moon” by Electrelane from the previous post, where you can find a link to their music; Nadine Shah, “Kitchen Sink,” which suggests what Patti Smith might have sounded like as an electronica artist;8 Jane Weaver, "Flock."9
Played Out
That, comrades, is all we got. Give your country the gift of Socialism, and if you’ve not already subscribed to yr. genial hosts, please consider doing so. Subscriptions are free unless you want to play. We also appreciate sharing our work across the seven seas.