Elsewhat

By Neale Van Fleet on April 5th, 2024

My dog is a cartoon character.

By Neale Van Fleet on April 4th, 2024

By Neale Van Fleet on April 3rd, 2024

This video, cheekily titled ‘Is English just badly pronounced French?‘ (spoiler: it’s not) goes into depth into all the ways that French has impacted English. Particularly mind-blowing is the fact that ‘warranty’ and ‘guarantee’ originated from different pronunciations of the same French word.

By Neale Van Fleet on April 2nd, 2024

Reading through Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep, I ran across this bit about animals who sleep with one half of their brain at a time. This allows one side to be asleep (with the eye on its side closed), leaving the other side to be awake (with its eye open). Dolphins are known to sleep this way. But birds do it with an interesting wrinkle, taken from the book:

In some species, many of the birds in a flock will sleep with both halves of the brain at the same time. How do they remain safe from threat? The answer is truly ingenious. The flock will first line up in a row. With the exception of the birds at each end of the line, the rest of the group will allow both halves of the brain to indulge in sleep. Those at the far left and right ends of the row aren’t so lucky. They will enter deep sleep with just one half of the brain (opposing in each), leaving the corresponding left and right eye of each bird wide open. In doing so, they provide full panoramic threat detection for the entire group, maximizing the total number of brain halves that can sleep within the flock.

By Neale Van Fleet on March 27th, 2024

Wonderful transit-oriented YouTuber RM Transit has a short video on how stop distances impact overall transit speeds.

By Neale Van Fleet on March 26th, 2024

By Neale Van Fleet on March 22nd, 2024

This week I looked out my office window to see a merlin absolutely tearing into their catch.

By Neale Van Fleet on March 21st, 2024

This year I get a full solar eclipse on my birthday in the city where I live. The local libraries are giving out free eclipse glasses, and the school board is closing the schools for the day. Leave it to friend of Elsewhat Plateau Astro to give you a guide on everything you need to know for coming eclipse if you live in Montréal.

By Neale Van Fleet on March 20th, 2024

The New York Time’s Ezra Klein was on PJ Vogt’s podcast Search Engine this week. They discuss the ongoing slow-motion collapse of media and journalism. Within a couple minutes, Ezra jumps into one of the best takes I’ve heard on why local media is failing:

Newspapers practically had local monopolies and that gave them a business model. If you were an advertiser, who wanted to tell people about shoes, you advertised in the LA Times, and the LA Times took your money … the news business was selling was a local advertising monopoly, and that was very profitable, and crucially, that sustained a lot of different players who were not really in competition with each other. When I grew up in Southern California, the New York Times was probably net a better paper than the LA Times. I never read a New York Times… I barely ever saw one … Now, the New York Times is I think the biggest paper in California. The key thing happening right now is all of the general interest players are in competition with each other and that’s going to have a kind of natural effect of if you’re only going to subscribe to one large news bundle you’re going to subscribe to the largest news bundle. You went from a situation where the Baltimore Sun and the LA Times and the New York Times and like the Dallas Morning News were not competing with each other to a situation where they were.

There is a lot more there, which is worth listening to.

Listen Here →

By Neale Van Fleet on March 9th, 2024

Synesthesia is a phenomenon where some people experience their senses intermixing with each other. They might see sounds, or hear sights, or even physically feel words. It’s a mental condition apparently attributed to many great artists, from Vincent Van Gogh to Billie Eilish to allegedly even Beyonce.

I have always wanted to experience synesthesia myself, but I always assumed it would be impossible. Certain pieces of art can give me a fleeting sensation of it—Van Gogh’s paintings and Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak come to mind. Visuals at a concert, when done well, can give a feeling of seeing the music. But that’s a sort of inferred collective synesthesia, where I can sense the impact of it on the work, but I don’t really get to experience it as someone with the condition would.

It occurred to me recently that augmented reality headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro, along with generative AI, could provide the technology to do a reasonable real-time synesthesia simulator. I’m adding it to the list of projects I’d undertake if I had unlimited resources, but for now it’s just a thought experiment.

The Vision Pro, along with generative AI, would fail to reproduce all iterations of the condition, but it could hypothetically reproduce the following types of synesthesia:

• Grapheme Color Synesthesia, who see colours or shapes next to specific words or characters.
• Number Form, who see particular forms or shapes for some numbers.
• Chromesthesia, who sees sounds as colours or shapes.
• Ticker Tape, who see strings of words scroll underneath people as they talk.

Here are some art/tech projects which explore other aspects of synesthesia. Google’s Play a Kandinsky is beautiful, but is again an interpretation of an artist’s view.

The game Audiosurf matches audio to visuals in a synesthetic way. A seemingly defunct smartphone VR app seemingly tried to accomplish the same concept, though it glitches on my phone and hasn’t been updated in 6 years. There are some fascinating video visualizations of synesthesia, like this YouTube video of a violinist who sees notes as coloured shapes.

My version would be real time, and importantly, individualized. You would choose the type of synesthesia you wanted to recreate, or even the specific artist whose synesthesia you wanted to experience, and everything you saw and heard would be filtered to recreate the look and sound of that type.