Cultrface – a blog dedicated to culture and how it enriches our lives.

Was Spock bad at logic?

Julia Galef appeared in Episode 462 of Wired’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast to call out Spock’s flawed logic.

[…] Not only does Spock have a terrible track record—events he describes as “impossible” happen 83 percent of the time—but his confidence level is actually anti-correlated with reality. “The more confident he says he is that something will happen—that the ship will crash, or that they will find survivors—the less likely it is to happen, and the less confident he is in something, the more likely it is to happen,” Galef says.

Still better than Nostradamus, probably.

Star Trek related: the last 10 seconds of every episode from Star Trek: TNG (Season 1), some kind of Star Trek: The Next Generation supercut, and a site dedicated to collected Star Trek memorabilia

Reagan Ray's Marvel superhero letterings

I love these Marvel 3D-letter designs by Reagan Ray which he explained in a recent post:

I just started getting into comic books for the first time a few years ago. My son was interested as well, so we started making regular trips to the comic book store (pre-covid, of course). We loved looking at the artwork and lettering of the older comics. And like most lettering, right around the late 90s, it all went to shit. The hand-lettering masterpieces were abandoned for fonts and photoshop effects. With that said, I limited this post to the pre-’00s. I wanted to do something more vintage, but there are just too many from the 80s and 90s that I love. My absolute favorite was seeing all the interpretations of 3D type.

They’re all amazing and I’d wear each and every one of them on a t-shirt.

Cool word oddities and miscellany

I love interesting words and facts about them. Jeff Miller has 20 pages dedicated to them and they’re a joy to read if you’re an etymology fan. Here are a few of my favourites:

  • The Hungarian words újjáépítéséről (“about its reconstruction”) and újjáválaszthatóságáról (“about his/her re-electability”) have seven accent marks. Also in Hungarian alelölülő means “deputy chairperson” (lit.: “deputy fore-sitter”), although this is a made-up word that is not in use.
  • The name MUAMMAR KHADAFI has 32 variants according to the Library of Congress.
  • TWERK was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015. Research by the OED has found the term was first used in 1820 as a noun spelled twirk, meaning “a twisting jerking movement” or “twitch.” It then emerged as a verb by 1848 and the modern spelling was adopted by 1901.
  • An entire book that does not use the letter e, a novel titled Gadsby, was published in 1939.

Read the other 20 pages from here.

The history of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

DefunctTV: The History of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

I LOVED ‘Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?‘ and I’m happy that Defunctland made an in-depth video about it. The show had an a cappella vocal group, taught kids geography and problem solving, and a cool cartoon to boot. It also had interesting—and thematically relevant—ways of funding:

The show was primarily funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the annual financial support from the viewers/stations of PBS (1991–1995). Toyota funded the show for its first three seasons with Holiday Inn co-funded for the second half of the first season and all of season two. Delta Air Lines provided funding for the show’s final two seasons (1994–95).

Another funny video about Daniel Day-Lewis's acting

Living With Daniel Day-Lewis

There is/was(?) something so intriguing about DDL’s acting, allowing for some very funny parodies. This one imagines Daniel Day-Lewis as a frustrating roommate, involving his portrayals of:

Goddamn it, Daniel Day-Lewis.

Hilarious video from The Onion picking holes in Daniel Day-Lewis's acting in Phantom Thread

'Phantom Thread' Producer Points Out All The Times Daniel Day-Lewis Fucks Up At Acting

We stayed wide for this entire scene so we could avoid drawing too much of the audience’s attention to Daniel’s lifeless embodiment of his character.

More on DDL: Another funny video about Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting, and the origin of the milkshake line in ‘There Will Be Blood’

Flying fish doing what they do best

Flying Fish Picked Off From Above And Below | The Hunt | BBC Earth

Although I’ve eaten flying fish before, I’d never actually seen them “fly” until recently (easily accessible to me but not something I’ve ever gone out of my way to find). The above video, filmed for BBC Earth, shows a glide of flying fish soaring through the air. Truly majestic.

They’re also a significant part of Bajan culture (I ate them in Barbados while visiting my dad’s family):

Many aspects of Barbadian culture center (sic) around the flying fish; it is depicted on coins, as sculptures in fountains, in artwork, and as part of the official logo of the Barbados Tourism Authority. Additionally, the Barbadian coat of arms features a pelican and dolphinfish on either side of the shield, but the dolphinfish resembles a flying fish. Furthermore, actual artistic renditions and holograms of the flying fish are also present within the Barbadian passport.

Fish related: How a clownfish earns their stripes, a Japanese study that classified fish-shaped soy sauce containers into species, and the ‘vantafish’ that absorbs nearly all light that hits it.

Distorted sculptures by Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford

Garden Gipsoteca: Hercules

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford is a visual artist and Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Indiana University Northwest. His series of glitched classical sculptures reimagine works of art as a representation of modernism vs. classicism.

Throughout the underpinning of modernist design, aspirations of efficiency and comfort have galvanized visions of what might be possible in the future. Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford revisits these foundations, seeking fractures, little failures on the surface that reveal the invisible workflow and the breakdown of functionalism. Inspired by the history of the 1927 architectural competition in Geneva, which asked architects to submit plans for the creation of the Palace of Nations, Hulsebos-Spofford points to the unsettled quandaries and contradictions between classical design, and modernist functionalism.

via City of Chicago

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford’s ‘League of Nations’ exhibit is on display at the Chicago Cultural Center until 29th August.

(via Colossal)

Artsy explored the objects that defined 80s youth culture

I was born in November 1989 so I missed all but a month of the 80s and everything about its culture so this was cool to read from Artsy:

At the moment, our pop culture finds itself at peak ’80s nostalgia, as news outlets rush to publish their own guides to the decade’s easter eggs hidden in the third season of Stranger Things (2016–present). Those who came of age in the 1980s are now in their mid-forties, so perhaps it just makes sense that the kids who grew up are now showrunners, casting viewers in the nostalgic glow of their own youth.

One could also argue that ’80s nostalgia is on the rise due to some meritocracy of the decades—the eighties were just a cooler, quirkier, and kitschier time to be alive. My own recollections of the time are a murky haze of fleeting passions, both joyous and totally embarrassing. There are, for instance, the Garbage Pail Kids cards, which hit young male culture hard in 1985—pimply teens sneakily trading Boozin’ Bruce for Adam Bomb or Smelly Sally. I’ll never fully wash off the trauma of the humanoid animals residing in Zoobilee Zoo (1986–87). I’ll never live down listening to the Christian hair-metal albums by Stryper that my mom gently forced on me as an antidote to the more “satanic” alternatives. I’ll never forget the uncomfortable prominence of David Bowie’s codpiece in Labyrinth (1986).

More on the 80’s: Catch some retro 80s and 90s vibes with Retrogeist, Fumi Ishino’s ‘Index of Fillers’ chronicling Japanese culture in the 80s and 90s, and what if Game of Thrones was aired in the 80s?

Black Archives: a multimedia showcase of the Black experience

Archiving is so important in an information era that favours the new and quickly discards the old when it’s deemed surplus to requirements (read: it’s not making profit). This is especially true for Black cultures and Black Archives works to change that.

[…] Through an evolving visual exploration, Black Archives provides a dynamic accessibility to a Black past, present, and future.

Going beyond the norm, its lens examines the nuance of Black life: alive and ever-vibrant to both the everyday and iconic — providing insight and inspiration to those seeking to understand the legacies that preceded their own.

Besides archiving, Black Archives also offers:

  • Content creation and visual curation
  • Archival research and licensing
  • Social strategy and creative direction

For more, check out the Black Archives website.

When Matt Damon met Prince: a lesson in small talk

This is classic Prince and I love it.

Julia Stiles: After The Bourne Ultimatum came out, there was a premiere in London. Prince actually came to it, then got tickets for the cast to come see him [perform]. We were summoned into a room to meet him [after the show]. Matt said, “So you live in Minnesota? I hear you live in Minnesota.”

Damon: Prince said, “I live inside my own heart, Matt Damon.”

I’d like to take a moment to praise the title of the piece I quoted:

Prince Had No Time for Matt Damon’s Pedestrian Small Talk

And that, my friends, is why I don’t do small talk.

(via bnq.tumblr.com via Vanity Fair)

The celebratory art of Aurélia Durand

Aurélia Durand is a French illustrator with a penchant for vibrant designs depicting Black people in joyful, proud, and empowered poses.

Her client list is a who’s who of major brands, including:

With so much bleakness in the world at the moment and heightened Black trauma, vivid celebratory images like Aurélia’s are a welcome relief and a reminder that Blackness is multifaceted and joyous.

'The Page 69 Test' tests a Marshall McLuhan addage on choosing books

According to Marshall McLuhan, if you turn to page 69 of any book, read it and like the page, you should buy the book. The Page 69 Test has been testing that theory for the past 14 years with thousands of books analysed. I might have to try this out the next time I’m in a bookshop (sometime in 2022 no doubt).

See also: The Page 99 Test, following a similar Ford Madox Ford saying—”open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”