| I'm adding a little feature to the bottom of 5IT. Every week, I find strange bits of historical footage on YouTube that don't fit neatly into the newsletter format, but that I think you'd all love. So, beginning today, you'll find a link to one of these videos at the end of the email with the tag, YOY, Yesterday on YouTube. 1. Turns out the stumps of ancient redwoods were actually zombies, from which DNA could be extracted to clone the trees. "Today, giant stumps of ancient redwoods dot the landscape from Oregon to northern California, reminders of the old-growth forest that used to stretch across the Pacific Northwest. Many arborists assumed these stumps were dead, but Milarch and his son, Jake, discovered living tissue growing from the trees’ roots, material known as baseless or stump sprouts. The Milarchs collected DNA from stumps of five giant coast redwoods, all larger than the largest tree living today. These included a giant sequoia known as General Sherman with a 25-foot diameter.They then used this genetic material to grow dozens of saplings, clones of the ancient trees, a process that takes approximately two-and-a-half-years. The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive has already planted nearly 100 of these saplings in the Eden Project garden in Cornwall, England, a couple hundred in Oregon, and is organizing further groves of saplings in nine other countries." 2. "China as a service." "This network of design, manufacturing services, financing, and software development, together with a growing recognition of the quality of Chinese products, is enabling Shenzhen companies to reach further into global markets. One example is the electric scooters that have appeared in cities around the world. The scooters themselves are all made in China, but the companies that brand and distribute them might be in Barcelona (Joyor), Mexico City (Grin), or California (Bird and Lime). In some cases competing distributors even use the same physical scooters, just with different branding and apps. SZOIL founder David Li calls this the expression of “China as a service.” Instead of having to learn to build electric scooters, Joyor, Grin, Bird, and Lime can focus on the work that requires local knowledge, like distribution and getting permits from city governments." 3. Kim Stanley Robinson on a flooded New York and our catastrophic (not apocalyptic) future. "“I went to Venice to see how the city works when the streets are canals. And I went to New York often, including to places tourists don’t usually go, like the Cloisters, at the very north end of Manhattan Island – that’s a hill that’s 240 feet above sea level. In a Venetian New York, that would become incredibly valuable real estate. It might be a place for gigantic new skyscrapers. I also went to Hell Gate and Coney Island, places that would be drowned, and to other sections of the Bronx and Brooklyn, checking out what they might be like if they were submerged. Then also, the old Met Life Tower on Madison Square is an architectural imitation of the Campanile in Venice, but about ten times as big. It’s a nice visual joke – you’ve got a Venetian building in New York already, so that was clearly where I needed my characters to live." 4. This is so beautiful. "The Embroidered Computer is an exploration into using historic gold embroidery materials and knowledge to craft a programmable 8 bit computer.
Solely built from a variety of metal threads, magnetic, glas and metal beads, and being inspired by traditional crafting routines and patterns, the piece questions the appearance of current digital and electronic technologies surrounding us, as well as our interaction with them. Technically, the piece consists of (textile) relays, similar to early computers before the invention of semiconductors. Visually, the gold materials, here used for their conductive properties, arranged into specific patterns to fulfill electronic functions, dominate the work." 5. Bad things happen when your house is listed as a default location in a GPS database. "The visits came in waves, sometimes as many as seven a month, and often at night. The strangers would lurk outside or bang on the automatic fence at the driveway. Many of them, accompanied by police officers, would accuse John and Ann of stealing their phones and laptops. Three teenagers showed up one day looking for someone writing nasty comments on their Instagram posts. A family came in search of a missing relative. An officer from the State Department appeared seeking a wanted fugitive. Once, a team of police commandos stormed the property, pointing a huge gun through the door at Ann, who was sitting on the couch in her living room eating dinner. The armed commandos said they were looking for two iPads." +1: I wrote about what happens to Amazon returns, and the culture and business that has sprung up around palettes full of assorted products sold by liquidation sites. "Every box is like this: a core sample drilled through the digital crust of platform capitalism. On Amazon’s website, sophisticated sorting algorithms relentlessly rank and organize these products before they go out into the world, but once the goods return to the warehouse, they shake free of the database and become random objects thrown together into a box by fate. Most likely, never again will this precise box of shit ever exist again in the world. " YOY: Sneaking into a Forgotten Disney World Ride (Epcot - Horizons) This is like a 99 Percent Invisible episode. Except stranger. [here used for their conductive properties] | 