I recently had the pleasure of attending a press preview of the new documentary Architecton, directed by Victor Kossakovsky and released last week by A24. The screening I attended was held inside a Cedars-Sinai medical imaging center in west Los Angeles; seeing this particular film, with its intensely granular focus on the geological underpinnings of … Continue reading "Mineral Hurricane"

A few weeks ago, The Economist looked at the growing problem of “ubiquitous technical surveillance” in the field of espionage. It describes the difficulty of maintaining a rigorous or believable cover story, for example, when genealogy websites might be consulted by adversarial border agents to verify that a potential spy is who she says she … Continue reading "Seer"

Slag heap debris on the English coast has apparently been fusing into a new kind of sedimentary rock. A team of geologists studying the beach recently “found a series of outcrops made from an unfamiliar type of sedimentary rock. The beach used to be sandy, so the rock must have been a recent addition. It … Continue reading "geo/acc"

You’ve likely already seen the large complex of buildings in Shanghai that was picked up as a single block and walked to an adjacent site by a phalanx of miniature robots. Then walked back into place again. The 432 individual machines used for the move were “actually omnidirectional modular hydraulic jacks that are capable of … Continue reading "Architectural Dressage"