👂silence speaks volumes.

on the agenda this week: the sounds of extinction, suckerfish & how maps affect how we view the world around us.

sam mcallister

Nov 11, 2019

✨ good morning.

on the agenda this week: the sounds of extinction, suckerfish & how maps affect how we view the world around us.

⚡️ tag me on instagram or twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain!

👂 earworm:

“oh the only cardio we know is
running out of luck.”

maxime trippenbach, a.k.a. maxime., is an electronic-turned-indie-pop artist from ottawa, canada. max is soon self-releasing his debut album, whatevernowiscalled – an expansive project whose soundscapes perfectly capture max’s genre-blending appeal.

who is maxime (formerly known as maxd)? give us some short info about yourself.
i’m color blind, i like beer, my favourite color is yellow, i don’t quite know what i’m doing with my life just yet, and i’m ok with that.
pineapple on pizza! yay or nay?
if you don’t like pineapple on pizza it’s just because your taste buds haven’t fully developed yet. it’ll come. that being said, plain cheese pizza is by far the king of ‘zza.
where do you see yourself in ten years?
10 years from now? that’s a while. man, i can’t imagine i’d not still be doing music. i think the coolest thing in the world would be if i could do this stuff full-time. but whatever happens, i know i’m gonna keep making music no matter what.
- edm

stream now:
listen to maxime. on spotify or on apple music.

📚 word of the week:

“remora”.

an obstacle, hindrance, or obstruction.

the great remora to any improvement in our civil code, is the reduction that such reform must produce in the revenue.
- charles caleb colton, lacon; or, many things in few words, vol. 1, 1820

as an aside, remora are also fish that attach themselves symbiotically to sharks.

their front dorsal fins evolved over time into an organ that sits like a suction cup on the top of their heads. this organ allows the remora to attach to a passing shark, usually on the shark’s belly or underside. sometimes they even attach to whales, manta rays, and the occasional diver.

🤪 mildly humorous:

outtakes from the twitter-sphere.

Shay Spence🎅 @chezspence

feels like we're taking daylight savings harder than usual this year

reaghan @reaghhan

doctor: congrats on the baby! What are you going to name him Newt Gingrich’s mom: newt gingrich

adam @burgerkrang

13 killed in gender reveal drone strike

🧠 brain candy:

📈 the sounds of extinction.

a chilling sentence to hear from a man who has dedicated his life to recording nature:

“over 50% of my recorded habitats are now silent.”

soundscape ecologist bernie krause used to go into the wild to record the chorus of nature. now, he has become an expert in the sound of extinction. his term for the sounds of all living organisms in the world’s habitat is “biophony.”

you have recorded more than 5,000 hours of sounds from different habitats, both marine and land, and more than 15,000 animal species. what are the greatest changes you have noticed over these five decades?
sadly, the greatest change is the overwhelming loss of density and diversity of species almost everywhere i go these days. in some places, like northern california, where i and my wife, katherine, live, we experienced the first completely silent spring (2015) i can ever remember in the nearly 80 years of my life. there were many birds, but they weren’t singing; it was the fifth year of the historic drought that descended on our section of the continent.
what is our culture losing by distancing itself from natural sounds?
in the end, before the forest echoes die, we may want to listen very carefully to the diminished but remaining voices of our world. we’ll quickly discover that we humans are not separate. instead, we’re a vital part of one fragile biome.
what is our culture losing by distancing itself from natural sounds?
in the end, before the forest echoes die, we may want to listen very carefully to the diminished but remaining voices of our world. we’ll quickly discover that we humans are not separate. instead, we’re a vital part of one fragile biome.

🗺 misleading maps.

when ian wright launched the brilliant maps twitter account and website back in 2014, to share his favourite cartographic finds, he had little inkling that it would prove such a hit. five years later, with almost 100,000 social followers and millions of annual visitors, he is left in little doubt about the universal appeal of a good map.
the vast populations of china, india and indonesia are strikingly demonstrated in the map above. canadian-born wright believes the fascination with maps lies in their ability to “very quickly and simply convey a huge amount of information.”
but he warns that maps can easily be used to mislead. “for example, the mercator projection, which remains among the most popular choices for creating maps, makes northern countries (especially those in europe) look much bigger than they actually are, while africa looks much smaller,” he says. “this subtly feeds into the idea that the larger northern countries are somehow more important.”