All posts tagged: inferno

Boards of Canada: Inferno review – after 13 years away, their prodigal return is a big disappointment | Boards of Canada

Boards of Canada: Inferno review – after 13 years away, their prodigal return is a big disappointment | Boards of Canada

Published by Sam Flores

This is the first album in 13 years from Boards of Canada, and from the opening notes – an analogue synth rising and falling like a sound effect in a forgotten 1960s radio play – you’re thrust back into one of the most instantly recognisable worlds in electronic music. From 1995 debut EP Twoism onward, across four LPs and four more EPs, the Scottish duo – brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin – used the heavy gait of classic hip-hop beats to trudge through spectral ambient vistas, like spacemen sent through a time portal while still being tethered to the present. By grabbing samples from old public television and other vintage sources, they looked back at the utopian promise of the mid-20th century, while teasing out the latent kitsch and creepiness of these sounds. Their music became hugely influential on everything from the US cloud-rap scene to the “hauntological” music of the UK’s Ghost Box label; you wouldn’t be surprised to find BOC albums on the shelves of film-makers such as the history-sampling Adam Curtis …

The unexpected science hiding in Dante’s ‘Inferno’

The unexpected science hiding in Dante’s ‘Inferno’

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy is one of the most famous Italian literary works, if not the most famous. The medieval narrative poem is divided into three sections—Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise)—and chronicles Dante’s  fictional travels through the three regions. However, Marshall University English professor Timothy Burbery, says that Dante is more than just an author and character. He’s also an accidental geophysicist. Simply put, Burbery argues that Dante’s Inferno demonstrates an intuitive understanding of certain aspects of geophysics and geology long before they were formally discovered by scientists. Burbery points to two examples that particularly emphasize this idea of anticipated science: a flight on a strange creature and Satan’s fall from grace. The devil fell from space In the poem, Dante is guided through Hell, which the Roman poet Virgil described as a series of nine concentric circles. At one point, the duo fly on the back of a hybrid creature called Geryon to get from …

Dante’s Inferno suggests Hell and Purgatory mirror the physics of a massive asteroid impact

Dante’s Inferno suggests Hell and Purgatory mirror the physics of a massive asteroid impact

Published by Jenni Sidey

For centuries, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno has been read as a moral and spiritual descent, a journey into sin, punishment, and divine justice. Timothy Burbery of Marshall University now argues that the poem also carries something far more physical. In his reading, Dante did not simply imagine Satan falling from Heaven. He pictured that fall as a violent planetary impact. That idea changes the scale of the story at once. Instead of treating Satan’s plunge as a symbolic collapse, Burbery proposes that Dante envisioned him as a fast-moving body striking the Southern Hemisphere and boring all the way to Earth’s center. In that scenario, Hell is not just a spiritual realm beneath the surface. It is the crater left behind by the collision, formed from the ground up as matter is forced outward and downward. The image is startling because it makes Dante sound less like a poet working in allegory and more like someone running a thought experiment about impact physics centuries before modern meteoritics existed. Dante and Virgil reach the ninth and lowest circle …

Dantès’s Inferno | Michael Dirda

Dantès’s Inferno | Michael Dirda

Published by José Betancourt

More than half a century ago, on a sunny and breezy afternoon, I took the excursion boat from the Vieux Port in Marseille out to the small island that serves as the bare and rocky home of the forbidding Château d’If. I remember marveling that I should be about to visit the prison where Edmond Dantès had been incarcerated for fourteen years before seizing a dangerous opportunity to escape, wrapped in a sack as a dead man, then cast into the waters of the Mediterranean. To be certain that the body would never rise to the surface, guards attached a heavy cannonball to the sack. But as all the world knows, Edmond Dantès did rise again, transformed from an innocent young sailor into that courtly yet implacable avenger, the Count of Monte Cristo. For most readers Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is simply the classic novel of revenge. For me, however, it was an inspirational self-help manual. At the age of ten or eleven, I’d read a highly abridged children’s edition, a Golden …

We broke no safety rules, say ski bar owners after deadly inferno

We broke no safety rules, say ski bar owners after deadly inferno

Published by Sam Flores

The co-owner of the Swiss bar engulfed in a New Year’s Eve inferno has insisted that he and his wife did not break any safety rules. “Everything was done according to the rules,” Jacques Moretti, 49, who owns Le Constellation, in Crans-Montana, with his wife Jessica, told 24 Heures. He added that the bar in the ski resort town had been inspected “three times in 10 years” before ending the call with a reporter from the Swiss-French media outlet, saying he did not feel well. On Friday, the Morettis were interviewed by Swiss authorities over the fire, which killed at least 40 people, many of them feared to be children. More than 100 are still missing. Images of the moment when the fire started in the basement of Le Constellation show revellers waving sparkler-topped champagne bottles as the ceiling catches alight. The French co-owners also face questions about the venue’s fire escapes. A photo appears to show the moment champagne sparklers set fire to material on the ceiling of the bar The sparklers were lit …