The Flairdrum, A Robot That Sniffs Whiskey, And What It’s Like To Be “12% Machine”

I find you the finest reading material in my weekly Linkfest

Clive Thompson

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“Nababeep Mine — 302,500 tonnes of copper” by Dillon Marsh

Monday came and went.

You’re still here!

Reward yourself with my weekly Linkfest — straining at the seams with the best reading findable from the endless bazaar of the Internet.

Let’s begin …

1) ⛏️ CGI spheres that show the scale of mining

Dillon Marsh is an artist who takes photos of the locations of major South African mines, then adds a CGI image of the metal that’s mined at that location. The massive spheres loom over the landscape like ominous spaceships, come in for a landing.

Marsh calculates the size of each sphere to represent how much metal has come out of each mine. That one above? Copper.

Given how badly these mines have toxified their local environments, the clean and spare lines of the spheres feel like a crisp metaphor for how we in the industrial world abstract away the ghastly environmental externalities of mining. As Marsh puts it on his site …

Whether they are active or long dormant, mines speak of a combination of sacrifice and gain. Their features are…

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Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net