Sam Redlark

  image generated by ChatGTP In July 1945, the chief architect of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, pondering on the success of the recent nuclear test at White Sands, recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” One hundred-and-forty-three years earlier, and approximately five-thousand miles to the east, another man of science, this one a “rattle-brained” naturalist by the name of Edward Caton, had also earned himself the moniker 'destroyer of worlds.' On this occasion the title was not self-appointed, but was bestowed upon him by his peers at The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Knowledge of the Natural Sciences (later it was renamed The Royal Society of the Natural Sciences by men with more common sense than its founders). Caton's grand folly, which was to earn himself a toehold in the footnotes of history, was the careless placement of a perfectly spherical gharial egg (a gharial is a narrow-jawed, fish-eat...

image by Grok A.I. Additional processing by GIMP The framework of the Crystal Palace was made from an iron alloy known as Mittene, which was patented in 1812 by Jean-Louis Fouré. The following year, Fouré was knocked down by a horse in the streets of Paris and only partially regained consciousness. He died in 1814 while in the care of the nuns at Petit Gethsémani in Montmartre. Eleven years later, a nephew of Fouré named Laurent Vigier, who worked in the naval shipyards at Brest, pushed for the use of his uncle’s alloy in the construction of the early ironclad warships. The weight of the material and the additional expense involved in its production meant that it was never a serious consideration. Only three vessels incorporating Mittene parts alongside conventional iron plate ever took to water. Mittene exists in a constant state of rapid chemical reaction and it is these processes that give the material its stability and high tolerance to external loads. The heat generated is around ...

image generated by Grok A.I. The Norwegian writer and commentator, Harald Bɵrja, is regarded as the founding-father of the mikro-estetisk (micro-aesthetic) school of art criticism. He has vigorously distanced himself from the movement. In interviews he defines himself as a scientist, for whom visual beauty is incidental and subservient to underlying physical processes that are invisible to the human eye and all but the most powerful microscopes and scanners. He regards the universe as deterministic and therefore void of any true creativity or spontaneity, which he demotes to a byproduct of artistic vanity. I will not delve any further into Bɵrja's complex opinions on this subject, mainly because all attempts to accurately translate his 2700 page treatise from its original Norwegian, in a manner that conveys its true meaning, have failed. Regrettably I do not speak the language well enough to make my own attempt. For Bɵrja, a masterpiece is defined by details that exist beyond the s...

image generated by Grok Nobody would dispute that the impression Harald Bɵrja has made upon the global art scene has been largely through force of personality. In the past he has been criticised for his use of intimidation and aggressive behaviour to draw attention away from his selective approach to the hard scientific data which underpins his methodology. I have been on the receiving end of one of Bɵrja's flem-flecked tirades, which was delivered three inches from my face in bellowed Norwegian, while an accompanying interpreter calmly listed an inventory of diseased farm animals (including many non-native species) that my mother apparently had congress with in order to bring me into the world. I was once a passenger on a cross-channel ferry, during a force 10 gale, and came away from that experience rather less rattled than I did following the five minutes that I spent in the rabid company of Harald Bɵrja. The source of our disagreement (as far as I can tell) was the beauty, or l...

image generated by Grok To get down to the fundamentals of this question we must be prepared to probe the human brain; we need to really dig our fingers in there and pry it apart. It is for these reasons that I do not advise readers to attempt any such study at home, or on a living subject. Hoph's Vesicle is a diminutive region of the brain that occupies the space between the amygdala and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. It is unique in that certain external stimulus focusing around low level aggression, such as one might witness during an argument, cause it to become engorged and expand to as much as five-times its normal size. Possibly for these reasons, it is referred to by French neurobiologists as the “pénis du cerveau” (penis of the brain). The term was coined by Dufour (of course) and while one admires its lewd poetry, it is a rather fanciful description. In fact sexual arousal has been shown to have no effect upon this area of the human cerebrum. As Hoph's Vesicle enla...

  Recently I self-published a book – my second - a themed collection of short stories, titled Boiled Branches, Green Wood: A Book of Trespassers. After I finished writing it, I edited it, which took absolutely ages. I laid it out three times. OpenOffice corrupted the formatting twice; the first time in a manner that was so random that it gave me pause to wonder whether I was watching an emerging artificial intelligence failing to fully grasp its responsibilities. The second time was more comprehensive, in line with the application of some disruptive algorithmic principle, to which I had not been made privy. Apparently I was not the first to have experienced this unexpected reorganisation of the furniture in a saved OpenOffice document. The responses on the support forums were, at their most helpful and polite, along the lines of ‘Yeah, it’ll do that’. I have reached a peculiar point in my life where setbacks of this kind no longer fill me with self-righteous anger directed at an u...