"A place for the curious... Closed for now. We do not EXIST"

 "... But if you -"

 We'll never know. 

 I went for a walk in the afternoon past Highgate Cemetery and other spots. That morning I had attended my first online funeral. It was for my cousin Peter. Alternate pews on the screen were roped off in purple and – unseen and unheard – I rose, and sat, and bowed my head, and sang along, looking down at the backs of the heads of my extended family from a camera not that high above them. I was grateful to participate, and I'm trying to think when I last experienced sustained solemnity. It's not like going to church at Christmas: at a funeral, belief or otherwise in God seems a far more minor distinction. I didn't feel – I never feel – that those who believe in an afterlife receive particularly more comfort. 

 If anything, "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away" is even more horrible information to hear if you believe in Him. What kind of friend is that? But maybe that's what we atheists get so wrong. People don't love God because they're trapped in some abusive relationship, but because they love the World, even though the World can treat us terribly. Funerals are a show of strength, and I'm sorry you're gone, Peter. I've never known a funeral give closure, whatever that is, or in any way adequately celebrate a person's life, but what they can provide is a very powerful disincentive to die. You wouldn't want to put anyone through a funeral.

TIL There Was A "Blazing Saddles" Sitcom Except There Wasn't.

 To quote from this excellent little video:

"Mel (Brooks) and his crew always knew that the film would be a hit, so much so that they even suspected that Warner Brothers would seek to make a sequel with or without their involvement, so Mel got together with his lawyers and developed a contract clause that stated that Warner Brothers could not produce any sequels to Blazing Saddles unless they first made a TV adaptation within six months of the film's release... In 1977 Warner Brothers approached Mel Brooks and informed him of their intention to make not just a Blazing Saddles sequel but a whole series of Blazing Saddles films. Mel then informed them of the contract clause that prevented them from doing so. And that's when they dropped some surprising news on Mel: Warner Brothers had secretly been filming a Blazing Saddles sitcom for the past four years. Mel was taken into a projection room and shown three full episodes, later remarking 'My lawyers had never thought to put in language that said they had to air the damn thing, only that they had to make it'."

 Imagine that.

    And Warner Brothers didn't just Ring Worm it by, say, sticking a sheriff's hat on Louis Gossett Junior have him busk in front of a camera Andy-Warhol-style for eight hours – maybe they didn't have the imagination to realise they could – no, they wrote scripts, made costumes, put cameras on cranes, filmed wheels falling off wagons, added a polite laughter track, all the while knowing none of it would ever be seen. All those decisions. Let's give the Madeline Kahn character an eyepatch. Let's give the Gene Wilder character a confederate hat. None of it mattered. That's some serious Red-Headed League stuff. That's pretty Paul Auster.

 

UPDATE: Well, that video seems to have been removed, but someone's put up an actual episode, so here. Let me know how it goes: 

Video Of Rory McGrath Rubbing His Hands Together Before Tying A Woman's Thumbs To Her Toes and Lowering Her Into A Swimming Pool Probably Hasn't Aged Very Well.

Starts 14 minutes 58 seconds in.

 
 I mean, I worked a decade at the London Dungeon so I'm no judge, but I was surprised to see them just leave her there. This show was made in 2004, which somehow seems far too recent. I was surprised too to learn that self-appointed "Witchfinder General" Matthew Hopkins, portrayed here by Vincent Price, was... well, guess how old he was when he died.

 According to wikipedia, Hopkins's dates are c.1620 - 16271647, which means he was twenty-seven when he died. More "incel" than dirty old man. And he wasn't really a finder of anything either: like Amy Cooper no relation, the people of East Anglia simply set him on anyone they didn't like the look of and he'd torture confessions out of the accused in return for a healthy salary, despite the fact that all of this was in fact incredibly illegal. There was no parliamentary authority whatsoever for Hopkins' actions, but according to my go-to authority on such matters, Gemma Brockis, the Civil War meant nobody really knew what was going on which is how he got away with it. That's one theory.

Hopkins and friends (source). 

 This book was published the year of his death. Within a year of its publication witch trials would begin in New England.

Sometimes This Blog Will Just Be Yet Another Video of Lembit Öpik Recruiting Space MPs

 Apparently outer space still needs forty-to-eighty-one-year-old "Life Skills" graduates to stand for the Parliament of Asgardia, and Lembit Öpik's finally been allowed outdoors to issue a chilling warning of what will happen if they're not forthcoming: "We know it's a statistical certainty that, sooner or later, life will be extinguished unless we do something about it." He never tells us what "it" is, but bloody hell! I woke up at nine in the morning today, as opposed to seven in the evening, and I'd had absolutely no idea how normal things had got back to...

  Normal

Normal

Normal

 

Normal

 Chilling... So I might go back to taking night walks. And it really looks like we're going to need those Zero Gravity birth experiments soon, so get those forms in!
 Great to see Tim Curry on board as well.

Love and Maths and Mess (I know you've all seen Ok Go, but let's watch more Ok Go)

 Now let's have something wonderful and lots of it. In the following talk, Damian Kulash presents the beautiful calculation that an Ok Go video composed of a hundred and thirty interactions, each with a ninety percent probability of going right first time, still has only a one-in-ten-thousand chance of being successfully filmed in a single take...

 With that in mind, let's watch some of the band's best takes, opening with the video that closed the talk and whose slow-motion aesthetic means it had to be filmed in five seconds (and here's how):

 Since the slow-mo rabbit hole's adjacent to the Zero-G, here's the band hitting their marks in a cosmonaut's vomit comet (and here's record of their last day of filming):

 And speaking of hitting their marks, here's some fun with parralax (and a lot of quick changes):

 And here, far more simply, are the elegant workings of the WTF? video from the band's dollar store days: 

 All of which makes the video that first made the band famous look now a bit like the Lumières' film of the Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, but it serves them right for getting even better.

F*c*b**K News And Guhhh

 Not happy news, stupid news really. Following a friend posting on instagram that they'd been reprimanded by f*c*book for "hate speech" over the following, I thought I'd try it myself, and yes:

 .. which is very petty. The site's been suffering a fall in sponsorship for not coming down harder on hate speech, and this is how the snots and their bots have decided to play it it seems. Chiron suggested I take the experiment further, but I'd had enough, fortunately Gemma was up for it:

 As I understand it she's still waiting for her reprimand. Apologies to anyone who has sighed so much at this point that they've deflated into biltong with eyeballs but I thought this was news.

Further Slinky Physics

 It has been harder to find good videos on slinky physics than I'd imagined. A few experiments with one in zero gravity proved so disappointingly unsurprising that the only person who thought it worth putting online was some grumpy flat-Earther calling for an end to science funding. But the video below from Veritasium is a cracker. Not only did I not manage to predict what happens when a slinky is dropped at full stretch (in a situation with very few variables) but, having seen it, my explanation for why it happened turned out to be completely wrong. All in all then, a very satisfactory watch (and also, like all videos of plummeting objects, clearly a metaphor for something or other). Details after the vid.

 So: I didn't predict the bottom would remain hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote. And when it did, I decided what I was seeing was the bottom springing back up, but that it only looked stationary because the whole slinky was also falling at exactly the same rate in the opposite direction, although this seemed a remarkable coincidence. And that's because, of course, this is not what was happening at all. Nobody's done anything to the bottom of the slinky, so it's not "springing back up", it's simply staying put, held as before by the elasticity of the slinky above, although the tension is shrinking. Presumably therefore, if you simply lowered the slinky rather than let go, the bottom would still remain in place. But no, hang on, that can't be right... I guess it must be... Until the slackness passes through the slinky to the other end? I suppose... I need to get a slinky.... Oh, do you know what else there are surprisingly few videos of online? Mummenschanz.