By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
Renovation
In the ancient Roman city of Londinium, in a neighborhood on the south shore of the Tamesis river, the Romans built a luxury dwelling between AD 43 and 150, dedicated by a team of painters. Several years later, someone taking possession of the domus thought that it looked like crap and renovated the joint. They demolished the building and dumped thousands of scraps of plaster into a pit, as was the style at the time. Years later, that city is London, that river is the Thames and that pit was discovered in Southwark at a site just near the Shard tower. The contents — 120 boxes of broken plaster — were shipped over to the Museum of London Archaeology, where they are being reconstructed, jigsaw-style. The coolest part so far is a chunk of plaster that says “fecit,” meaning “made by.” If they can just find the other adjacent piece of plaster with the name, they can find out who actually made the image.
Maev Kennedy, The Art Newspaper
Hello Again!
In June of last year, the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder arrangement of 36 radiotelescopes detected a signal from within our galaxy, which was incredibly exciting as it could be a cool pulsar or something. They then found that not only was it within our galaxy, but, to mild dismay, it was right next to Earth. This unlocked a new mystery as to what made the 30-nanosecond radio pulse that outshone everything else in the sky. Tracking the signal, they determined the pulse came from the Relay 2 satellite, which is weird because that satellite’s been dead for 60 years! Either these scientists were in an astronomical Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark situation, or the signal was the result of a freak micrometeorite or random spark. They’re leaning towards the latter possibilities. The satellite was originally launched in 1964 as an experimental communications device, with the electronics going dead by 1967. In a way, its mission never ended, as it’s clearly still pulling off communications experiments to this day. Except, these experiments are “How can meteorites be used to communicate with Australians?”
Computer Science
Students of computer science have been so successful at what they do that they are obviating the need for computer science students. Okay, it isn’t exactly that simple. Computer science remains an incredibly popular major given the generally high incomes its practitioners enjoy, but the field’s prospects have been leveling off. Enrollment in computer science quadrupled from 2005 to 2023, but that growth came to a standstill this year, with enrollment up just 0.2 percent nationally. Many programs are actually entering decline. For instance, the number of Duke students taking intro compsci courses dropped 20 percent in the past year, and the cohort of compsci grads at Princeton will be 25 percent smaller in two years than it is today. The reason is that language learning models are especially proficient at replacing one job in particular: entry-level coder. This has caused a job market that was once so appealing to many CS grads to dry up. It’s understandable that, John Henry-style, a machine might beat a human at the most common task of fresh-out-of-college coding. After all, it includes checking Stack Overflow until you find a guy who solved your problem four years ago.
Rice
Isbell Farms in Arkansas is a leading American producer of Japanese sake rice and one of just two farms in the U.S. that grows Yamada Nishiki, considered to be among the best sake rices in the world. The farm is supplying the raw material for an emerging sake boom in the United States. Domestic breweries have increased from only five facilities a decade ago to about two dozen now. It’s a small family farm, all things considered — 3,600 acres in a state responsible for 40 percent of total American rice output — but it plays a very valuable part in the business. While Yamada Nishiki has half the yield per acre and twice the work of production (and only 10 to 20 acres can be harvested per day compared to 120 to 180 acres of table rice), it’s three or four times as profitable, and about 30 percent of the farm is set aside for the crop.
Dragons
How To Train Your Dragon handily held on to the top spot at the domestic box office with $37 million, edging out the sequel 28 Years Later ($30 million) and Pixar’s new movie Elio (missing expectations at $21 million). As for Danny Boyle’s 28 Years, the thinking goes that the horror space might be a smidge oversaturated. Final Destinations: Bloodlines legged out a bit earlier this year, echoing concerns that there’s probably just so many horror movies on the calendar that they can’t all be surprising fan sensations. As for Elio, for the first time in ages, there’s a surfeit of kid cinema, including not just Dragon but also Disney’s other movie, Lilo & Stitch. Even so, Pixar movies have a way of going the distance. When Elemental opened to a paltry $29.6 million in 2023, it was initially seen as a catastrophe. However, the movie eventually earned $500 million globally because kids did end up seeing it, even if it wasn’t on opening weekend.
Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter
Birkin
Hermès Birkin bags have seen prices rise while Chanel’s rival bag, Classic Flap Medium, has stalled out. This is in part thanks to Hermès’ ruthless dedication to capping production and fearlessness in the face of import taxes. In 2021, Chanel’s bag cost $8,800 while the Hermès option went for $9,850; today, a Hermès Birkin 25 goes for $12,700 while the Classic Flap Medium can be had for $10,800. The price gap between the two has approximately doubled. Even more, Hermès doles out Birkins judiciously — only to customers who have already spent a small fortune on other goods from Hermès. The secondhand value for a Birkin is also often higher, even double the list price for precisely this reason. However, a secondhand Chanel fetched 77 percent of its sticker, down from 83 percent in 2019.
Carol Ryan, The Wall Street Journal
Flags
YouTube and Deezer have developed internal systems to flag uploaded AI audio, and other platforms are expanding moderation there as well. The legal ramifications of AI music are not yet well defined, even if there are some pretty gnarly copyright suits coming down the pipeline. Vermillio is developing a system that can scan finished tracks for synthetic elements and tag them automatically in metadata, which will allow rights holders to identify borrowed tunes. While the tech is certainly interesting on some level, the business side is pretty clear. The authenticated licensing industry — $75 million in 2023 — is projected to rise to $10 billion by 2025. So even if it is successful, it still sounds like people who actually create music are getting bled dry just to find out who is ripping them off.
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