Link About It: This Week’s Picks
The DeLorean reimagined, Google’s Blob Orchestra, quantum teleportation and more from around the web
Compose Your Own “Blob Opera” with Google Arts + Culture
The latest interactive offering from Google Arts & Culture, this time in conjunction with artist David Li, Blob Opera allows users—with the help of machine learning—to string together a song from a quartet of operatic colorful blobs. No musical training is necessary to bring the bass, mezzo-soprano, soprano and tenor blobs together—users simply select one (and access its corresponding vocal range) and pull forward and backward or up and down to change vowel sounds and pitch. Machine learning adjusts the harmonies. Read more at CNET and compose your own at Google Arts & Culture.
Screenshot from Google Arts & Culture
The Iconic DeLorean Reimagined for 2021
The Giorgetto Giugiaro-designed DMC DeLorean made it to production in 1981 (before an iconic appearance in 1985’s Back to The Future) and will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year. To mark the milestone, car designer Ángel Guerra has reimagined the vehicle for the future. The DeLorean 2021 (designed in Guerra’s spare time) maintains the essentials—the gull-wing doors, stainless steel body and retro-futuristic lines—but certainly looks new. “This is a thank you to an icon and a movie that marked my childhood,” Guerra says. “What has pushed me to get into this story has been—in addition to wanting to flee in a time machine of this damn 2020—that throughout all these years, I have never seen a single design proposal based on that original DeLorean… despite the fact that both the car and the film that made it world-famous are still present in the collective imagination of an entire generation.” See more at designboom.
Image courtesy of Ángel Guerra
3D Schröder Staircase Wins 2020 Illusion of the Year Contest
The 16th annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest, hosted by the Neural Correlate Society, crowned a 2020 first prize winner this week. Japanese mathematician Kokichi Sugihara’s 3D Schröder Staircase wowed judges with its ingenuity. The Schröder Staircase (aka Schröder’s Stairs) is typically done in 2D on paper with ink or pencil, but Sugihara deciphered a way to render the illusion in real life and debuted the final product in a YouTube video that accompanied his contest submission. The 2020 contest called for video entries “featuring novel illusions (unpublished, or published no earlier than 2019) of all sensory modalities (visual, auditory, etc) and/or cognitive nature.” See more at Core77.
Image courtesy of Kokichi Sugihara
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Achieves First Long-Distance Quantum Teleportation
Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—and partners at Fermilab, AT&T, Caltech, Harvard University and the University of Calgary—have achieved sustained, high-fidelity, long-distance “quantum teleportation,” which is defined as the “disembodied” instant transfer of “qubits” (the basic unit of quantum information). Qubits of photons were teleported 27 miles through a fiber-optic network—using off-the-shelf equipment. Such a technological advancement could pave the way for quantum internet service and change the future of computing and data storage. Read more at The Independent.
Image courtesy of Fermilab
Link About It is our filtered look at the web, shared daily in Link and on social media, and rounded up every Saturday morning. Hero image courtesy of Ángel Guerra
