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Tuesday, April 27th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Scientists at Purdue University Create the “Whitest White” Paint Ever Seen: It Reflects 98% of the Sun’s Light
Xiulin Ruan, a Purdue University professor of mechanical engineering, holds up his lab’s sample of the whitest paint on record. Purdue University/Jared Pike Surely, you’ve heard of Vantablack, the high-tech coating invented by UK company Surrey NanoSystems that absorbs over 99 percent of light and makes three-dimensional objects look like black holes? Aside from its controversially exclusive use by artist Anish Kapoor, the blackest of black paints has so far proven to be most effective in space. “You can imagine up in space people think of it as being really black and dark,” Surrey NanoSystems chief technical officer Ben Jensen explains. “But actually it’s incredibly bright up there because the Sun’s like a huge arc lamp and you’ve got light reflecting off the Earth and moon.” All that sunlight can make certain parts of the world unbearably hot for humans, a rapidly worsening phenomenon thanks to climate change, which has itself been worsened by climate control systems used to cool homes, offices, stores, etc. Since the 1970s scientists have attempted to break the vicious cycle with white paints that can cool buildings by reflecting sunlight from their surfaces. “Painting buildings white to reflect sunlight and make them cooler is common in Greece and other countries,” notes The Washington Post. “Cities like New and Chicago have programs to paint roofs white to combat urban heat.” The problem is “commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler,” writes Purdue University. “Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80%-90% of sunlight and can’t make surfaces cooler than their surroundings,” since they absorb ultraviolet light. That may well change soon, with the invention by a team of Purdue engineers of an as-yet unnamed, patent-pending ultra-white paint that has “pushed the limits on how white paint can be.” Those limits now fall just slightly short of Vantablack on the other side of the spectrum (or grayscale).
An infrared camera shows how a sample of the whitest white paint (the dark purple square in the middle) actually cools the board below ambient temperature, something that not even commercial “heat rejecting” paints do. Purdue University/Joseph Peoples Purdue describes the properties of the revolutionary compound.
This formula “reflects up to 98.1% of sunlight — compared with the 95.5%,” of light reflected by a previous compound that used calcium carbonate instead of barium sulfite. The less than 3% difference is more significant than it might seem. Xiulin Ruan, professor of mechanical engineering, describes the potential of the new reflective coating: “If you were to use this paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet, we estimate that you could get a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. That’s more powerful than the central air conditioners used by most houses… If you look at the energy [savings] and cooling power this paint can provide, it’s really exciting.” Will there be a proprietary war between major players in the art world to control it? “Ideally,” Kait Sanchez writes at The Verge, “anything that could be used to improve people’s lives while reducing the energy they use should be free and widely available.” Ideally. Learn more about the whitest white paint here and, if you have access, at the researchers’ publication in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. via Smithsonian Related Content: YInMn Blue, the First Shade of Blue Discovered in 200 Years, Is Now Available for Artists Discover Harvard’s Collection of 2,500 Pigments: Preserving the World’s Rare, Wonderful Colors Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Scientists at Purdue University Create the “Whitest White” Paint Ever Seen: It Reflects 98% of the Sun’s Light is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 2:00p | The Rolling Stones Jam with Muddy Waters for the First and Only Time at Chicago’s Legendary Checkerboard Lounge (1981)
Whatever marketing materials may claim, the Rolling Stones did not just happen upon Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge on Chicago’s South Side (before it closed, reopened in Hyde Park, then closed again for good) on a night when Muddy Waters happened to be there in 1981. And they did not spontaneously get invited to jam, as it seems, when they “climbed over tables” to get onstage with their hero and blues legends Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. A chance meeting, of course, would have been magical, but the truth is the event was probably “planned and coordinated,” writes W. Scott Poole at Popmatters. These were the biggest names in the blues and rock and roll, after all. “Why,” before the Stones and their entourage arrive, “is there an empty table on the night Muddy Waters came back to Southside?” And why did the Rolling Stones’ manager claim he “approached the Checkerboard higher-ups a week in advance,” Ted Scheinman writes at Slant, “proposing a surprise concert and proffering $500 as proof-of earnest”?
Was it a cynical ploy to re-establish the band’s blues cred during what would turn out to be the largest grossing tour of the year — one featuring what Jagger called “enormous images of a guitar, a car and a record — an Americana idea.” In some sense, Muddy Waters was also an “Americana idea,” but how could he be otherwise to the Stones, given that they’d grown up listening to him from across the Atlantic, associating him with experiences they had never known firsthand? And so what if the historic meeting at the Checkerboard Lounge was stage-managed behind the scenes? That’s what managers do — they arrange things behind the scenes and let performers create the illusion of spontaneity, as though they hadn’t spent an entire tour, or decades of tours, making the same songs seem fresh on any given night. When it comes to the blues, playing the same songs over again is a key part of the game, seeing how much attitude and style one can wring out of a few chords, doggedly persistent themes of sex, love, death, betrayal, and maybe a bottleneck slide.
It’s a lesson the Stones learned well, and their adoration and respect for Muddy Waters is nothing less than genuine, even if it took some backstage negotiation to bring them together this one and only time. Muddy is spectacular. “Even as one of the aging elder statesmen of the Chicago blues in 1981,” writes Poole, “he exudes an aura of sex and power, showing off every attribute that so inspired Mick and Keith and that became an ineffable part of their own music and their persona.” Meanwhile, the absolutely boyish glee on the faces of Jagger, Richards, Ronnie Wood, and Stones’ pianist Ian Stewart as they perform onstage with an artist who had given them so much more than just their name speaks for itself. The concert video and live album “began appearing as bootleg and unofficial releases almost immediately,” Allmusic notes, “from LP and CD to VHS and DVD.” Here, you can see them jam out three songs from the night: “Baby Please Don’t Go” (on which Waters brings Jagger onstage at 5:30 for an extended version and Keith joins at 6:50), “Mannish Boy,” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.” Related Content: 10-Story High Mural of Muddy Waters Goes Up in Chicago A Visual History of The Rolling Stones Documented in a Beautiful, 450-Page Photo Book by Taschen The Rolling Stones Release a Long Lost Track Featuring Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Rolling Stones Jam with Muddy Waters for the First and Only Time at Chicago’s Legendary Checkerboard Lounge (1981) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 7:03p | Behold the 1940s Typewriter That Could Type in English, Chinese & Japanese: Watch More Than a Thousand Different Characters in Action
There was a time, not long after the widespread adoption of telegraphy in the 19th century, when the written Chinese language looked doomed. Or at least it did to certain thinkers considering the implications of that instant global communication-enabling technology having been developed for the relatively simple Latin alphabet. And as unsuited as the Chinese writing system must have seemed to the world of the telegraph, it would have presented a seemingly even heavier burden in the world of the typewriter. Only in 1916, thanks to the efforts of a U.S.-educated Shanghai engineer named Hou-Kun Chow, did the Chinese typewriter debut, built around a large, revolving cylinder that could print 4,000 ideographic (that is to say, each one representing a different word or sound) characters. From that point the evolution of the Chinese typewriter was rather quick, by the standards of the day. And it didn’t only happen in China: Japan, whose own written language incorporates many ideographic Chinese characters, had been subject to more intense technological influence from the West since opening to foreign trade in the 1860s. The very year after its founding in 1939, electronics-giant-to-be Toshiba (the product of a merger involving Japan’s first maker of telegraph equipment) produced the first Japanese cylindrical typewriter. “Mostly used by the Japanese military during World War II,” says the Vintage Typewriter Museum, it incorporated 630 characters. After the war “Toshiba introduced a new model, the 1200 A, featuring 1172 Japanese and Chinese characters.” In the video above, from Youtuber by the name of Typewriter Collector, you can see a slightly later model in action. Produced before the introduction of “Western-style” keyboards, the Toshiba BW-2112 has the same interface as its predecessors: “The character is selected by rotating the cylinder and shifting it horizontally, so that the necessary character is selected with the index pointer,” according to the Vintage Typewriter Museum. “When the print key is depressed, the type strip is pushed upwards from the cylinder, and the type hammer swings to the center to print the character onto the paper.” These vintage Japanese typewriters still today strike their viewers as marvels of engineering, though their then-vast store of characters (which included not just Chinese-derived kanji but phonetic kana and even the Latin alphabet) have long since been surpassed by digital technology. Now that every student’s smartphone puts all 50,000 or extant Chinese characters in their command — to say nothing of the world’s other written languages — it’s safe to say they’re not about to fall into disuse any time soon. Related content: The Enduring Analog Underworld of Gramercy Typewriter Discover Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curious Typewriter, the “Malling-Hansen Writing Ball” (Circa 1881) When IBM Created a Typewriter to Record Dance Movements (1973) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Behold the 1940s Typewriter That Could Type in English, Chinese & Japanese: Watch More Than a Thousand Different Characters in Action is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 10:58p | A Relaxing 3-Hour Tour of Venice’s Canals
Experience Venice in this boat tour through 17 miles (27 km) of canals. “You will see the full Grand Canal going in both directions, navigate through the small canals and under bridges and see sites that you cannot see by walking.” It’s quiet, meditative, a mental escape from the tedium of quarantine life. Right below, you can find a list of the stops along the way… 1:32? Constitution Bridge 2:02? The Grand Canal (Full Tour) 3:23? Santa Lucia Train Station 13:33? Rialto Bridge 23:28? Ponte dell’Accademia 30:38? Piazza San Marco 36:08? Small Inside Canals & Bridges 41:05? Libreria Acqua Alta 44:08? Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo 47:16? Open Water – Skip ahead to the next section 57:25? Canal of Saint Peter 58:18? Building Bridges Sculpture 1:09:55? Bridge of Sighs 1:16:15? Rialto Bridge & Grand Canal 1:18:39? Small Inside Canals & Bridges 1:23:04? The Grand Canal 1:27:14? Pont dell’Accademia 1:34:44? Rialto Bridge 1:43:34? Ponte delle Guglie 1:46:04? Tre Archi Bridge 1:48:38? Liberty Bridge (Ponte della Libertà) 1:54:18? Constitution Bridge 1:58:38? Close Call! 2:04:43? Squero di San Trovaso (gondola boatyard) 2:07:23? Grand Canal (short section) 2:10:44? Small Canals and Bridges 2:17:14? Grand Canal (short section) 2:20:14? Magister Canova 2:22:04? Open Water 2:26:14? Small Inside Canals & Bridges 2:30:44? Piazza San Marco 2:33:04? The Grand Canal (Full Tour) Related Content: How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges A Relaxing 3-Hour Tour of Venice’s Canals is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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