Explore the World’s First 3D Replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Made with AI

in Architecture, History, Technology | November 20th, 2024

In the trailer below for the world’s first 3D replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Yves Ubelmann speaks of using “AI for Good,” which isn’t just an ideal, but also the name of a lab at Microsoft. Microsoft and Ubelman’s digital-preservation company Iconem were two of the participants in that ambitious project, along with the Vatican itself. Pope Francis, writes AP’s Nicole Winfield, “has called for the ethical use of AI and used his annual World Message of Peace this year to urge an international treaty to regulate it, arguing that technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness were too great.”

What better show of good faith in the technology than to allow AI to be used to bring the center of the faith Pope Francis represents to the world? In the nearly 400 years since its completion, of course, the world has always come to the current St. Peter’s Basilica, and will continue to do so.

The 3D-replica project “has been launched ahead of the Vatican’s 2025 Jubilee, a holy year in which more than 30 million pilgrims are expected to pass through the basilica’s Holy Door, on top of the 50,000 who visit on a normal day,” Winfield writes. But no matter where in the world you happen to be, you can virtually enter St. Peter’s Basilica right now, and spend as long as you like, admiring the basilica itself, the cupola, Bernini’s St. Peter’s Baldachin, and Michelangelo’s Pietà, among other features.

However important (and attention-drawing) artificial intelligence was as a tool in the creation of this ultra-precise “digital twin” of St. Peter’s Basilica, the four-week process of capturing every detail of the real structure that could be captured also necessitated the use of drones, lasers, and cameras taking more than 400,000 digital photos. The “AI for Good Lab contributed advanced tools that refined the digital twin with millimeter-level accuracy, and used AI to help detect and map structural vulnerabilities like cracks and missing mosaic tiles,” says Microsoft’s site. “The Vatican oversaw the collaboration, ensuring the preservation of the Basilica as a cultural, spiritual, and historically significant site for years to come.”

It makes a certain sense to apply the highest technology of our time for the benefit of a building known as the greatest architectural marvel of its time. But in order to better appreciate the kind of knowledge that will be revealed by the 22 petabytes of information that went into the digital model (which offers its own guided tour) we’d do well to immerse ourselves first in what was already known about St. Peter’s Basilica. For a brief introduction to the conception and evolution of this grand church as it stands today, we could do much worse than architecture-and-history YouTuber Manuel Bravo’s video “St Peter’s Basilica Explained.” If you watch it, don’t be surprised if you find yourself tempted to engage in prolonged exploration of the model — or indeed, to book a visit to the real thing. Enter the digital St. Peter’s here.

High-Resolution Walking Tours of Italy’s Most Historic Places: The Colosseum, Pompeii, St. Peter’s Basilica & More

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Download & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

The Vatican Library Goes Online and Digitizes Tens of Thousands of Manuscripts, Books, Coins, and More

Rome Reborn: A New 3D Virtual Model Lets You Fly Over the Great Monuments of Ancient Rome

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Victorian People Sounded Like: Hear Recordings of Florence Nightingale & Queen Victoria Herself

in History, Technology | November 15th, 2024

More than 120 years after the end of the Victorian era, we might assume that we retain a more or less accurate cultural memory of the Victorians themselves: of their social mores, their aesthetic sensibilities, their ambitions great and small, their many and varied hang-ups. Some of the most vivid representations of these qualities have come down to us through primary sources, which tend to be texts and works of visual art. Late in Queen Victoria’s reign came photographs, and at the very end, even the motion picture. But how can we be sure how her people really sounded?

Strictly speaking, the earliest process for mechanically recording the sound of the human voice dates back to 1860, not even halfway through the Victorian era. But the technology still had a long way to go at that time, and it wasn’t until the 1880s that Thomas Edison’s phonograph and the wax cylinders it played became commercially viable. So explains the King and Things video above, on the spread of audio recording and the earliest possibilities it opened for capturing the voices of what we now regard as the distant past. Those voices include that of a man introduced as “one of England’s most famous after-dinner speakers, Mr. Edmund Yates.”

That cylinder was recorded in 1888, at one of the London soirées held by an American Edison employee named George Gouraud. The son of French engineer François Gouraud, who had introduced daguerreotype photography to the United States in the 1830s, he took it upon himself to bring the phonograph to Britain. He did so in a top-down manner, inviting socially distinguished guests to his home for dinner so that they might thrill to the novelty of after-dinner speeches delivered by machine — and then record their own messages to Edison himself. “I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening’s experiments,” said one of Gouraud’s guests, the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan.

That astonishment aside, Sullivan also admitted that he was “terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever.” Many alive today would credit him with considerable prescience on that count. But he also understood that the phonograph would produce wonders, such as the recordings included in this video of such notables as four-time Prime Minister William Gladstone, Florence Nightingale, and Queen Victoria herself — at least according to the consensus of the scholars who’ve scrutinized the highly indistinct recording in question. Only long after Edison’s time would humanity develop a recording technology capable of being replayed again and again without degradation. But given our image of Victorians, perhaps it’s suitable that their voices should sound ghostly.

Optical Scanning Technology Lets Researchers Recover Lost Indigenous Languages from Old Wax Cylinder Recordings

Download 10,000 of the First Recordings of Music Ever Made, Thanks to the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive

Thomas Edison’s 1889 Recording of Otto von Bismarck‎ Discovered

The Oldest Voices That We Can Still Hear: Hear Audio Recordings of Ghostly Voices from the 1800s

Hear the First Recording of the Human Voice (1860)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years

in Film, Technology | November 7th, 2024

For many a classic action-movie enthusiast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bullitt. The narrator of the Insider video above describes it as “the scene that set the standard for all modern car chases,” one made “iconic partly because of the characters, but also because of their cars.” The pursuer drives a Dodge Charger, a muscle car that “exploded in popularity during the late sixties in the U.S.,” with a V‑8 engine and rear-wheel drive that made it “basically built for informal drag racing.” The pursued, Steve McQueen’s detective protagonist Frank Bullitt, drives an instantly recognizable Highland Green Ford Mustang, “the first major pony car, a more compact, sporty take on the muscle car.”

Bullitt could change the game, as they say, thanks not just to the cars but also the cameras available at the time, not least the Arriflex 35 II. “Smaller and more rugged” than the bulky rigs of earlier generations, it made it possible to shoot on actual city streets rather than just studio sets and rear-projection setups. (To get a sense of the difference in feel that resulted, simply compare the Bullitt chase to the one in Dr. No, the first James Bond picture, from six years before.)

This threw down the gauntlet before all action filmmakers, who over the subsequent decades would take advantage of every technological development that could possibly heighten the thrills of their own car chases.

The video also includes vehicular action movies from The French Connection and Vanishing Point to Ronin and Drive. But the most important development in recent decades actually owes to the horse-racing movie Seabiscuit, whose production necessitated a rig, now known as “the biscuit,” that “makes it look like an actor is doing the driving, while a stunt person actually steers from the driver’s pod.” Gone are the days when a star like Steve McQueen, a genuine racer of both motorcycles and cars, could handle some of the stunt driving himself; gone, too, is the era of the muscle car not programmed to shut down automatically when it goes into a drift. But for viewers in constant need of ever more spectacular, technically complex, and expensive car chases, it seems the Fast and the Furious series will always come through.

The Revolutionary Title Sequences and Trailers Created by Pablo Ferro: Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Stop Making Sense, Bullitt & Other Films

The Dark Knight: Anatomy of a Flawed Action Scene

Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defying Stunts Captured in Animated Gifs

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks

in History, Technology | October 22nd, 2024

A foreign traveler road-tripping across Europe might well feel a wave of trepidation before driving a fully loaded modern automobile over a more than 2,000-year-old bridge. But it might also be balanced out by the understanding that such a structure has, by definition, stood the test of time — and, for those with a grasp of the history of engineering, that its ancient designers would have ensured its capacity to bear a load far heavier than any that would have crossed it in reality. With no scientific means of modeling stresses, as classical-history Youtuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, they just had to build it tough.

Key to that toughness were arches, “made of heavy blocks laid over a falsework frame until the keystone was slotted into place.” From the late first century, stonework was supplemented or replaced by brick and Roman concrete, a substance much-featured here on Open Culture.

We’ve also covered the Roman bridges you can still cross today: Spain’s Puente de Alcántara (from the Arabic al-qanţarah, meaning “arch”), for example, which, though crossed by a quarter-million vehicles every year, “shows no signs of failing”; or France’s Pont des Marchands, which “has supported a neighborhood of multi-story shops and houses since the Middle Ages.”

But the arches of the nearly 1,000 wholly or partially surviving Roman bridges haven’t done all the work by geometry alone. “The load-bearing capacity of a bridge depended both on the solidity of its abutments and the strength — ‘shearing point’ — of its voussoirs,” or the stones of its arches between the keystone at the top and the springers at the bottom. “Since Roman builders carved voussoirs from the strongest readily available stone, their bridges tended to be impressively solid.” You wouldn’t want to run a freight train across the Puente de Alcántara, but 40-ton trucks are no problem — to say nothing of a car filled with luggage, a few kids, and even a dog or two.

The Mystery Finally Solved: Why Has Roman Concrete Been So Durable?

The Beauty & Ingenuity of the Pantheon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Preserved Monument: An Introduction

Why Hasn’t the Pantheon’s Dome Collapsed?: How the Romans Engineered the Dome to Last 19 Centuries and Counting

The Roads of Ancient Rome Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

Roman Architecture: A Free Online Course from Yale

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Thomas Edison’s Recordings of Leo Tolstoy: Hear the Voice of the Great Russian Novelist

in History, Literature, Technology | October 8th, 2024

Born 196 years ago, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s life (1828–1910) spanned a period of immense social, political, and technological change, paralleled in his own life by his radical shift from hedonistic nobleman to theologian, anarchist, and vegetarian pacifist. Though he did not live to see the Russian Revolution, the novelist did see Tsar Alexander II’s sweeping reforms, including the 1861 Emancipation order that changed the social character of the country. Near the end of his life, Tolstoy saw the coming of new recording technology that would revolutionize the direction of his own life’s work—telling stories.

In his later years Tolstoy appeared in the new medium of film, which captured his 80th birthday in 1908, and his funeral procession two years later. He was the subject of the first color photograph taken in Russia (top) also in 1908. And that same year, Tolstoy made several audio recordings of his voice, on a phonograph sent to him personally by Thomas Edison. You can hear one of those recordings, “The Power of Childhood,” made on April 19th, 1908, just above.

You’ll note, of course, that the great author reads in his native language. Most of the recordings he made, which he intended for the edification of his countrymen, are in Russian. Below, however, you can hear him read from his last book, Wise Thoughts For Every Day in English, German, French and Russian. The book collects Tolstoy’s favorite passages from thinkers as diverse as Lao-Tzu and Ralph Waldo Emerson. As Mike Springer wrote in a previous post on this recording, “Tolstoy rejected his great works of fiction” as an old man, “believing that it was more important to give moral and spiritual guidance to the common people.” To that end, he made a series of short recordings, which you can hear at this site, on such subjects as art, law, morality, poverty, nonviolence, and capital punishment.

The story of how Tolstoy came to make these recordings is a fascinating one. Interested in the new technology, Tolstoy made his first recording in 1895, when, writes The Moscow Times, “an Edison representative came to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate, to record the author’s voice. Those recordings were taken over the border to Berlin, where they lay in an archive until they were brought back to the Soviet Union after World War II.” When Stephen Bonsal, editor of the New York Times learned of Tolstoy’s interest in recording technology in 1907, he promised to send the novelist an Edison phonograph of his own. Edison himself, hearing of this, refused to accept any payment, and personally sent his own machine to Tolstoy’s estate with the engraved message “A Gift to Count Leo Tolstoy from Thomas Alva Edison.”

Edison asked Tolstoy for many multi-lingual recordings, requesting “short messages” in English and French, “conveying to the people of the world some thoughts that would tend to their moral and social advancement.” Tolstoy diligently made several recordings, some of which were then shipped to Edison in 1908. On February 21 of that year, the New York Times published an article on the exchange titled “Tolstoy’s Gift to Edison. Will Send Record of His Voice—Edison Gave Him a Phonograph.” The world eagerly awaited the world-famous author’s message to its “civilized peoples.” It seems however, that the message never arrived. According to Sputnik News, the fate of that legendary recording “has yet to be found out.” Nevertheless, thanks to Edison, we have several other recordings of Tolstoy’s very well-preserved voice, the record of a life lived to the end with fierce conviction and curiosity.

The Only Color Picture of Tolstoy, Taken by Photography Pioneer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1908)

Leo Tolstoy Reads From His Last Major Work in 4 Languages, 1909

Vintage Footage of Leo Tolstoy: Video Captures the Great Novelist During His Final Days

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Greatest Shot in Television: Science Historian James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

in Science, Technology, Television | October 4th, 2024

The 80-second clip above captures a rocket launch, something of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or another. What makes its viewers call it “the greatest shot in television” still today, 45 years after it first aired, may take more than one viewing to notice. In it, science historian James Burke speaks about how “certain gases ignite, and that the thermos flask permits you to store vast quantities of those gases safely, in their frozen liquid form, until you want to ignite them.” Use a sufficiently large flask filled with hydrogen and oxygen, design it to mix the gases and set light to them, and “you get that” — that is, you get the rocket that launches behind Burke just as soon as he points to it.

One can only admire Burke’s composure in discussing such technical matters in a shot that had to be perfectly timed on the first and only take. What you wouldn’t know unless you saw it in context is that it also comes as the final, culminating moment of a 50-minute explanatory journey that begins with credit cards, then makes its way through the invention of everything from a knight’s armor to canned food to air conditioning to the Saturn V rocket, which put man on the moon.

Formally speaking, this was a typical episode of Connections, Burke’s 1978 television series that traces the most important and surprising moves in the evolution of science and technology throughout human history.

Though not as widely remembered as Carl Sagan’s slightly later Cosmos, Connections bears repeat viewing here in the twenty-first century, not least for the intellectual and visual bravado typified by this “greatest shot in television,” now viewed nearly 18 million times on Youtube. Watch it enough times yourself, and you’ll notice that it also pulls off some minor sleight of hand by having Burke walk from a non-time-sensitive shot into another with the already-framed rocket ready for liftoff. But that hardly lessens the feeling of achievement when the launch comes off. “Destination: the moon, or Moscow,” says Burke, “the planets, or Peking” — a closing line that sounded considerably more dated a few years ago than it does today.

The 100 Most Memorable Shots in Cinema Over the Past 100 Years

The Most Beautiful Shots in Cinema History: Scenes from 100+ Films

125 Great Science Videos: From Astronomy to Physics & Psychology

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Artificial Intelligence & Drones Uncover 303 New Nazca Lines in Peru

in Art, History, Technology | October 2nd, 2024

If you visit one tourist site in Peru, it will almost certainly be the ruined Incan city of Machu Picchu. If you visit another, it’ll probably be the Nazca Desert, home to many large-scale geoglyphs made by pre-Inca peoples between 500 BC and 500 AD. Many of these “Nazca lines” are literally that, running across the desert floor in an abstract fashion, but others are figurative, depicting human beings, flora, fauna, and various less easily categorizable chimeras. The preservative effects of the climate kept many of these designs identifiable by the time moderns discovered them in 1927, and thanks to artificial-intelligence technology, researchers are finding new ones still today.

“A team from the Japanese University of Yamagata’s Nazca Institute, in collaboration with IBM Research, discovered 303 previously unknown geoglyphs of humans and animals, all smaller in size than the vast geometric patterns that date from AD 200–700 and stretch across more than 400 sq km of the Nazca plateau,” writes the Guardian’s Dan Collyns.

“The use of AI combined with low-flying drones revolutionized the speed and rate at which the geoglyphs were discovered, according to a research paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” and many more Nazca lines could remain to be identified with these methods.

The newly identified geoglyphs “include birds, plants, spiders, humanlike figures with headdresses, decapitated heads and an orca wielding a knife,” writes CNN’s Katie Hunt. She also cites hypotheses about why the original creators of these figures did the painstaking work of displacing stone after stone to create images mostly invisible to the human eye: it’s possible that “they formed a sacred space that was perhaps a place of pilgrimage. Other theories propose they played a part in calendars, astronomy, irrigation or for movement, such as running or dancing, or communication.” Some of them, surely, were meant only for the eyes of the gods, and so it may stand to reason that only our modern gods of artificial intelligence have been able to reveal them.

via Colossal

The Solar System Drawn Amazingly to Scale Across 7 Miles of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert

Peruvian Singer & Rapper, Renata Flores, Helps Preserve Quechua with Viral Hits on YouTube

Algerian Cave Paintings Suggest Humans Did Magic Mushrooms 9,000 Years Ago

A Mysterious Monolith Appears in the Utah Desert, Channeling Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse: Rick Beato Explains

in Music, Technology | September 16th, 2024

Earlier this month, a North Carolina man was charged with generating songs using an artificial-intelligence system and configuring bots to stream them automatically, thus racking up some $10 million in illegal royalties. Though that amount no doubt startles many of us, in this age when legitimate musicians publicly lament the pittance they earn through streaming platforms, such a case probably comes as no surprise to Rick Beato. This past June, the prominent music YouTuber put out a video dealing with just that intersection of culture and technology, with the highly clickable title “The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse.”

Consider the question of how we evoke one particular cultural era rather than another. We can use its fashions, its slang, or its interior decoration, to name just a few possibilities, but nothing works as powerfully or immediately as its music. Most of us grew up in a world where the sound of popular songs changed dramatically every decade or so. This happened for many reasons, practically all of them downstream of developments in technology. Bluesmen electrifying their guitars; Frank Sinatra singing into microphones sensitive enough to pick up his nuances; the Beatles creating complex, often strange miniature sound worlds in the studio; rappers telling their stories over looped fragments of disco records: all of it was made possible by feats of engineering.

Yet, in Beato’s view, technological progress has lately backfired on music, and both musicians and listeners are feeling it. The convergence of computers and music production is now complete, making any sound theoretically possible at virtually no cost. But “the creative dependence on technology limits the ability of people to innovate,” and “the overreliance on similar tools” brings about “a lack of diversity” and a persistence of formulaic trend-following. The ease of creation has caused “an oversaturation of music, making it harder to find really exceptional things.” This is taken to an extreme by the only-just-beginning avalanche of AI-generated songs (and the storm of lawsuits it has drawn).

Of course, if I’d known back when I was growing up in the nineteen-nineties that all the music I wanted to listen to would be made instantly available at little or no cost, I’d have regarded it as the imminent arrival of heaven on earth. Presumably, the prospect would also have excited the adolescent Beato, bagging groceries to save up the money to buy Led Zeppelin and Pat Metheny albums in the seventies. Today, by contrast, “music is not as valued by young people. There is no sweat equity put into obtaining it, having it be part of your collection, having it be a part of your identity, of who you are.”

Music, in short, has become both too easy to produce and too easy to consume. It would be easy for anyone under 30 to dismiss Beato’s argument as that of a middle-aged man reflexively insisting that things were better in his day, when we knew the value of an album. But even the youngest generation of music-lovers must, at times, feel a certain dissatisfaction amid this endless abundance. To them — and to all of us — Beato says this: “Vote with your attention” by trying to listen to music deliberately, without distraction. Personally, I recommend listening to not just full albums but complete discographies, which at the very least cultivates a certain discernment. And to cross the musical landscape ahead of us, we’ll need all the discernment we can get.

The Distortion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Created “a McDonald’s Generation of Music Consumers”

How Computers Ruined Rock Music

Brian Eno on the Loss of Humanity in Modern Music

The Surprisingly Long History of Auto-Tune, the Vocal-Processing Technology Music Critics Love to Hate

Nick Cave Answers the Hotly Debated Question: Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Explore the World’s First 3D Replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Made with AI

What Victorian People Sounded Like: Hear Recordings of Florence Nightingale & Queen Victoria Herself

How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks

Thomas Edison’s Recordings of Leo Tolstoy: Hear the Voice of the Great Russian Novelist

The Greatest Shot in Television: Science Historian James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

Artificial Intelligence & Drones Uncover 303 New Nazca Lines in Peru

The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse: Rick Beato Explains

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search