Simon Ings's Blog, page 43

Interview: Neil Denny of Little Atoms meets Stalin’s scientists

Click the picture to listen.

 

“Some only appear crazy. Others are as mad as a bag of cats.”

“In her old age, Olga Lepeshinskaya became entranced by the mystical concept of the ‘vital substance’, and recruited her extended family to work in her ‘laboratory’, pounding beetroot seeds in a pestle to demonstrate that any part of the seed could germinate.”

Stalin’s more eccentric scientists are the subject of this blogpost for Faber & Faber.

 

Achievement, naivety and dread

“A modest biography that should have taken me a bit less than a year became a five-year behemoth that burned through three editors and which takes in more or less every major scientific advance and controversy in the Soviet Union from Russia’s failed liberal revolution of 1905 to Khrushchev’s removal in a bloodless coup in 1964. A book that nearly killed me. A book that — since by then I had actually got myself an honest job — I had to write on the bus. (The 521, to be exact.)”

Talking Stalinist science with Tom Hunter of the Arthur C Clarke Award

Fitbitters of the world, unite!

Drunk as we are on the illusion of personal control, we should remember that data trickles uphill toward the powerful, because they are the ones who can afford to exploit it. Today, for every worried-yet-well twentysomething fiddling with his Fitbit, there is a worker being cajoled by their employer into taking a medical test.

for The Guardian, 2 November 2016

Making a complete shambles of Robin Ince and Josie Long’s excellent podcast

An enormous shape-shifting artwork – run by bacteria

Visitors to Philippe Parreno’s vast installation at London’s Tate Modern, Anywhen, get a carpet to lie on while the vast Turbine Hall shimmies and pulses around them. And they’re going to need it: Parreno’s grey machine is triumphally futuristic, an interior so smart it has outgrown any need for occupants. Anywhen is thunderous, sulphurous, awful in its full archaic sense.

for New Scientist, 19 October 2016

Natural laws, or not

One big complaint about science – that it kills wonder – is the same criticism Amitav Ghosh levels at the novel: that it bequeaths us “a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all”

for New Scientist, 15 October 2016

Wednesday 2 November at Pushkin House

Marcel Theroux and I are chatting about Soviet science and Stalinism at Pushkin House. This is where I first lectured (long before I had earned my licence) and without this opportunity to talk my ideas through, Stalin and the Scientists would never have got written. So it’s their fault.

It’s a ticketed event: details here

A visit to the circus

When art and technology pull each other to bits

In a disused mail sorting office in Linz, Austria, an industrial robot twice my height has got hold of Serbian-born artist Dragan Ilic and is wiping him over a canvas-covered wall.

for New Scientist, 21 September 2016