Category: Technica Aquarius

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Benn Jordan was flattered when he scanned his inbox.

Jordan is a musician who records and performs under various pseudonyms, most famously as The Flashbulb. His music is best described as electronica with occasional hints of modern jazz, and while he has become pretty successful, he hasn’t headlined any big festivals yet. So when a fawning email from a New York Times reporter arrived, he took note.

“An odd question from a newspaper reporter,” the subject read. It was addressed to Jordan’s booking agent, who had forwarded it to him. “My name is Ian Urbina, and I work for The New York Times,” Urbina wrote. “I’m contacting you not for an interview per se but because I want to run an idea by you that I think might be of great interest. I’ve been a fan of Benn’s for a while. My idea concerns using music to empower storytelling.”

Enlarge / Young Stan, the star of Apollo 10 ½, is voiced by newcomer Milo Coy. As an adult, Stan is voiced by Jack Black. After School of Rock and Bernie, this is Black’s third film with Linklater, making him an unlikely, late-career avatar for the Houston-born filmmaker. He’s the DiCaprio to Linklater’s Scorsese. (credit: Netflix)

The new Netflix film Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is a magic trick. It has no stakes, no conflict, no villain, no love interest, no money problems, and no one learns anything. Yet, by some miracle, it’s engaging throughout. I hesitate to describe it as the story of a boy named Stan (newcomer Milo Coy) who grew up next to the Manned Spacecraft Center during the Apollo program. Why? Because “story” implies actions leading to other actions, and that’s not what Apollo 10 ½ is about. To quote Homer Simpson, “It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.”

The movie is the work of filmmaker Richard Linklater, who, like Stan, was born and raised in Houston. Apollo 10 ½ is Linklater’s Roma or Belfast: a semi-autobiographical love letter to the time and place that formed him. (He could have called it Clear Lake.) Perhaps its closest analog is The Tree of Life by fellow Texan Terrence Malick. Both films involve children playing in mists of DDT amid “long summer days of play and idleness” while cosmic things they don’t fully comprehend happen nearby.

Air Bud, meet space Stan

An unlikely space mission. Quite unlikely, based on the unreliable narrator in Apollo 10 ½.

Apollo 10 ½ is narrated by an adult Stan (Jack Black, Jumanji) in the present day, and the result is like a better version of something you might hear in a bar. Adult Stan tells things out of order, goes on about extraneous details, and introduces characters but forgets to do anything with them. All the while, in the background, humans are about to land on the Moon. Imagine a Linklater classic like Slacker or Dazed and Confused, then add the Texas space race and a sprinkle of rotoscoped psychedelia, and you get the idea.

Enlarge / Buried fiber-optic cables at Etna’s summit pick up subtle volcanic activity, potentially improving early warning systems. (credit: M.A. Gutscher)

Towering 11,000 feet above a million humans, Mount Etna is one of the most thoroughly monitored volcanoes on Earth. Hundreds of sensors dot its flanks, and for good reason: it’s Europe’s most active volcano, periodically spewing lava and huge plumes of debris that ground planes and generally make life miserable for those living in its shadow.

But now scientists have been spying on Etna with an unlikely new surveillance device: fiber-optic cables, like the ones that bring you the Internet. Writing last week in the journal Nature Communications, researchers described how they used a technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, to pick up seismic signals that conventional sensors missed. This could help improve the early warning system that people in the surrounding parts of Italy rely on. Millions more around the world are also at the mercy of active volcanoes, which create chaos whether they are large or small.