chopin waltz unearthed after nearly 200 years (20241027)

links, etc

• Hear a Chopin Waltz Unearthed After Nearly 200 Years - The New York Times

  on the heels of the recent discovery of a string trio arrangement by mozart this is pretty neat news. we can only really have these “discoveries” if there’s a durable medium for preserving creative outputs. in this case paper and pen.

  with everything being hidden on personal hard drives and in proprietary software/file formats these days, i do find myself wondering what creative bits (no pun intended) we’re going to lose to the ravages of time and bit rot.

  i suspect at this rate we won’t be finding billie eilish’s thrown away demos in a couple of hundred years.

• Elon Musk, enemy of ‘open borders,’ launched his career working illegally - The Washington Post

  irony much? in light of recent activities and statements on the part of #spacekaren.

• How to research geoengineering ethically - Ars Technica

  we’re going to need to have some serious discussions about geoengineering. the over emphasis on carbon reduction was misplaced and has cost us dearly. if this is (and i think it is) the existential crisis we think it is, there should be no tool take off the table here. (yeah, this includes nuclear power.)

• ‘Stop Counting Votes, or We’re Going to Murder Your Children’ - The Atlantic

  yeah, this is where we’re at these days.

  post-election update: it’s interesting to see how decorum seemed to return when trump won the election.