I am super happy to announce that my friend Flore’s album RITUALS is finally around the corner. It will be released April 7th on POLAAR in digital and vinyl. Thanks to numerous supporters, the crowfunding for its vinyl release has met the funding goal in just a few hours. At time of writing, it is funded at 175%. The album has received a large number of positive reviews from press and radio. A terrific remix EP in on its track as well, with features from artists we would only have dreamt of working with just a few years back.

RITUALS is the culmination of more than 6 years of artistic work for Flore. It is also the culmination of 6 years of hard work on POLAAR. It is impossible to dissociate these two endeavors. During all these years, Flore has relentlessly poured her energy in both – after all, the labels’ inaugural release was her own RITUAL Part. 1. As a friend, I am so proud of what she achieves, and the consistency she boast since 20 years.

Her album is a treat and I am so glad we release it on our own imprint.

Hey there,

No introduction is the best kind of introduction, especially when I feel lazy.

1. Want to see what automated state surveillance is? Go watch & read this interactive reporting on the New York Times: How China Turned a City into a Prison.
2. South Korea hotel guests were secretly filmed and the footage were livrestreamed online.
3. Operation Bernhard was an exercise by Nazi Germany to forge British bank notes. The initial plan was to drop the notes over Britain to bring about a collapse of the British economy during the Second World War.
4. Spatial is a neat AR collaboration tool using Microsoft’s Hololens2. It looks like a killer app for distributed teams.
5. Mark Burgess (the author of Promise Theory) released his new book Smart Spacetime. I insta-added it in my anti-library.
6. Thanks to Benoit Jacquemont, I now understand better what is HTTP/3.
   

Cheers,

Marc

Hey there. What’s up? Doing good? I’ve been on a hiatus but hope to be back regularly posting links.

1. We can now 3D print mathematically designed shapes that block sounds.
2. Open-Privacy‘s researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis discovered a cryptographic trap door in the Swiss e-voting system.
3. Is willpower an antiquated idea that we should throw away? Carl Erik Fisher thinks so
4. We released a new EP on POLAAR. It’s all about UK bass this time.
5. The sonification of the US Yield Curve is a great example of data sonification.
6. Twotone is a new Open-Source software created to facilitate the data sonification. Could this be used for infrastructure monitoring?
   

Enjoy,

Marc

Image Credit & Copyright: Data – Steve Milne & Barry Wilson, Processing – Steve Milne

Une des personnes travaillant à l’épicerie Satsuki à Lyon m’a gentiment traduit la recette de la sauce Tosazu. Je la poste ici pour ne pas la perdre.

Ingrédients, pour 220ml de sauce:

• 90ml d’eau
• 110ml de vinaigre (de riz ou de céréales)
• 1 cuillère à soupe de sauce soja
• 1 pincée de sel
• 25g de sucre
• Une feuille d’algue Kombu de 5x10cm
• 3g de bonite séchée

Préparation:

1. Mettre tous les ingrédients sauf la bonite séchée dans une casserole, à feu moyen.
2. Juste avant l’ébullition, retirer l’algue kombu et ajouter la bonite séchée.
3. Laisser bouillir 30 secondes, éteindre le feu. Laisser la bonite tomber au fond de la casserole, puis filtrer.

Hey,

In his Whiskey’n’Weed interview (which you should listen to, by the way), Elon Musk said something that struck me:

“A company is essentially a cybernetic collective made of people and machines.”

It’s a very particular way to look at the world. Of course it’s possible that we’re already merging with the machine. Of course we might already be cyborgs. We might just not be conscious of it. One question is of importance: By merging with the machine and creating a cybernetic collective, what happens to our individuality?

1. 🔑 A very well designed article by ABC News on China’s Social Scoring.
2. 🔑 Apple gives people ‘trust scores’ based on their iPhone data.
3. 🔑 People working on Brain-Computer Interfaces are now able to make one person controls a drone swarm.
4. ℹ️ A good twitter thread on why cryptocurrencies might face the same fate as RSS if the base UX is not dramatically improved. The concept might stay, but might be successful in a different way.
5. 👩‍🎨 A VR adaptation of Dragon Ball Z? Yes please!
6. 🍴 I’m quite fond of Mezcal, and this article explains very well how it is done: Oaxaca’s Potent Secret, Mezcal Is Born of Time, Tradition and a Slow-Growing Plant.

Cheers,

Marc

Image Credit: The Blue Horsehead Nebula in Infrared by WISE, IRSA, NASA; Processing & Copyright : Francesco Antonucci

Hey,

Bitcoin is a rabbit-hole. It’s impossible not to fall into it once you start getting interested in this technology. Medium is the message, and trying to understand the impact of Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies at large) in the world is daunting. What is money? What is privacy? What are states? Why should we organize this way when we have this kind of tech? Can we be sure that it’s a good thing for us? Well, we don’t know, and we can’t for sure. It took telephone 75 years to reach 50 million users. Radio took 38 years, TV 13, Internet 4, Facebook 2, and Pokemon Go 19 days. Social experiments gets distributed to the public quicker, especially now that we don’t rely on custom-made devices to access them. Will hyper-bitcoinization happen, like maximalists predict?

1. 📖 I finished reading The Sovereign Individual. It’s been an interesting read. Back in 99, the authors made a few predictions on how microprocessing and asymmetric cryptography would impact the world. They compare our current political landscape with the downfall of the catholic church in the XVI century. They also talk in great lengths about how the Logic Of Violence changes during the transition to the Information Age and what will happen to our democratic industrial societies (Trumpism, etc…). They are off a few bets and sometimes are redundant or develop extreme and contradictory ideas but it is still a good book to understand why politics as we know it might cease to exist.
2. 📖 I started reading The Bitcoin Standard. I already learned about Rai Stones in how an Irish-Americans named O’Keefe crashed a micronesia island’s economy. Informative!
3. 🔐 Sarah Jamie Lewis on her favorite (and hilarious) vulnerability discovery: The Blowjob Injection Attack.
4. 🛠 The Raspiblitz is a DIY bitcoin and lightning network full node on a RaspberryPi. One can now access a global payment network and transact with the entire world for around 150 euros. How mind-boggling is that?
5. ⚡️ Could we create a new banking system on top of the Lightning Network? Nik Bathia thinks so and I’m clearly not in a position to have any valuable opinion on the question, but it’s inspiring.
6. 🔐 The best privacy-respecting browser, TOR, gets a new release and hits 8.0.
7. 👩‍🎨 A sub-reddit dedicated to empty and dead malls. It’s fascinating to take a look at these empty concrete buildings, and it’s impossible for me not to think of them as witness of the past. Will these buildings one day get a new life?
8. 🎧 Sou Kono – Midnight Ravers. Sou Kono is a French-Malian band. They produce a music mixing electronic and traditional vibes, but without ever being a cliché.

Happy reading,
Marc

Image Credit & Copyright: The Pencil Nebula in Red and Blue by José Joaquín Perez.

Humanity. What a weird bunch of biological individuals. We are able to travel space and time through electricity. We have so much medical knowledge that we can open our skull, remove a tumor attached to the brain, and still continue a healthy life. We are creative and dumb enough to fix our problems while creating unexpected new ones. We work hard to go to space, where it is one of the most hostile environments for our bodies. Why do we do that, when we can’t even agree collectively on what’s important? Well, I got no clue, but it’s fascinating to witness so much chaos.

1. 📺 Sacha Baron Cohen is back with a new series called WHO IS AMERICA?. I can’t recommend this show highly enough!
2. 📺 Simone Giertz, the queen of shitty robots, is back from brain surgery. Things I learn in this video: It costs more than 200K$ to have this kind of surgery in the US, you can hear air and fluids in your skull, and Simone can joke just after waking up from anesthesia.
3. 🔑 Amy Hoy reminisces on the good old days of personal homepages. She even states that the blog broke the web. I kinda agree with some of her points. Sometimes I also think that PageRank broke the web, but that’s another story.
4. 🛠 A cool DIY guide on how to create a portable boombox from a bookshelf speaker.
5. 🔐 Researchers have found a way to produce images of people’s faces from their genomes. It’s just a start as the algorithm has a 50% to 80% rate of success. Crime shows are going to get very boring.
6. 🚀 Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has successfully landed both booster and crew capsule after test launch. I hope to be able to see our planet from above with my own eyes one day.

Peace,

Marc

Image Credit: Rings Around the Ring Nebula by Hubble, Large Binocular Telescope, Subaru Telescope; Composition & Copyright: Robert Gendler.