You know the Tetris Effect, where after you play Tetris for a bit, everything even remotely square looks like a blo…

Atsuko Tanaka

## Sergei Brin being very Sergei Brin

From a letter to Alphabet stockholders in 2017.

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair …“

So begins Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” and what a great articulation it is of the transformative time we live in. We’re in an era of great inspiration and possibility, but with this opportunity comes the need for tremendous thoughtfulness and responsibility as technology is deeply and irrevocably interwoven into our societies.

Computation Explosion

The power and potential of computation to tackle important problems has never been greater. In the last few years, the cost of computation has continued to plummet. The Pentium IIs we used in the first year of Google performed about 100 million floating point operations per second. The GPUs we use today perform about 20 trillion such operations — a factor of about 200,000 difference — and our very own TPUs are now capable of 180 trillion (180,000,000,000,000) floating point operations per second.

Even these startling gains may look small if the promise of quantum computing comes to fruition. For a specialized class of problems, quantum computers can solve them exponentially faster. For instance, if we are successful with our 72 qubit prototype, it would take millions of conventional computers to be able to emulate it. A 333 qubit error-corrected quantum computer would live up to our name, offering a 10,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x speedup.

There are several factors at play in this boom of computing. First, of course, is the steady hum of Moore’s Law, although some of the traditional measures such as transistor counts, density, and clock frequencies have slowed. The second factor is greater demand, stemming from advanced graphics in gaming and, surprisingly, from the GPU-friendly proof-of-work algorithms found in some of today’s leading cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum. However, the third and most important factor is the profound revolution in machine learning that has been building over the past decade. It is both made possible by these increasingly powerful processors and is also the major impetus for developing them further.

The Spring of Hope

The new spring in artificial intelligence is the most significant development in computing in my lifetime. When we started the company, neural networks were a forgotten footnote in computer science; a remnant of the AI winter of the 1980’s. Yet today, this broad brush of technology has found an astounding number of applications. We now use it to:

• understand images in Google Photos;
• enable Waymo cars to recognize and distinguish objects safely;
• significantly improve sound and camera quality in our hardware;
• understand and produce speech for Google Home;
• translate over 100 languages in Google Translate;
• caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube;
• improve the efficiency of our data centers;
• suggest short replies to emails;
• help doctors diagnose diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy;
• discover new planetary systems;
• create better neural networks (AutoML);
… and much more.

Every month, there are stunning new applications and transformative new techniques. In this sense, we are truly in a technology renaissance, an exciting time where we can see applications across nearly every segment of modern society.

However, such powerful tools also bring with them new questions and responsibilities. How will they affect employment across different sectors? How can we understand what they are doing under the hood? What about measures of fairness? How might they manipulate people? Are they safe?

There is serious thought and research going into all of these issues. Most notably, safety spans a wide range of concerns from the fears of sci-fi style sentience to the more near-term questions such as validating the performance of self-driving cars. A few of our noteworthy initiatives on AI safety are as follows:

I expect machine learning technology to continue to evolve rapidly and for Alphabet to continue to be a leader — in both the technological and ethical evolution of the field.

Roughly three years ago, we restructured the company as Alphabet, with Google as a subsidiary (albeit far larger than the rest). As I write this, Google is in its 20th year of existence and continues to serve ever more people with information and technology products and services. Over one billion people now use Search, YouTube, Maps, Play, Gmail, Android, and Chrome every month.

This widespread adoption of technology creates new opportunities, but also new responsibilities as the social fabric of the world is increasingly intertwined.

Expectations about technology can differ significantly based on nationality, cultural background, and political affiliation. Therefore, Google must evolve its products with ever more care and thoughtfulness.

The purpose of Alphabet has been to allow new applications of technology to thrive with greater independence. While it is too early to declare the strategy a success, I am cautiously optimistic. Just a few months ago, the Onduo joint venture between Verily and Sanofi launched their first offering to help people with diabetes manage the disease. Waymo has begun operating fully self-driving cars on public roads and has crossed 5 million miles of testing. Sidewalk Labs has begun a large development project in Toronto. And Project Wing has performed some of the earliest drone deliveries in Australia.

There remains a high level of collaboration. Most notably, our two machine learning centers of excellence — Google Brain (an X graduate) and DeepMind — continue to bring their expertise to projects throughout Alphabet and the world. And the Nest subsidiary has now officially rejoined Google to form a more robust hardware group.

The Epoch of Belief and the Epoch of Incredulity

Technology companies have historically been wide- eyed and idealistic about the opportunities that their innovations create. And for the overwhelming part, the arc of history shows that these advances, including the Internet and mobile devices, have created opportunities and dramatically improved the quality of life for billions of people. However, there are very legitimate and pertinent issues being raised, across the globe, about the implications and impacts of these advances. This is an important discussion to have. While I am optimistic about the potential to bring technology to bear on the greatest problems in the world, we are on a path that we must tread with deep responsibility, care, and humility. That is Alphabet’s goal.

## “An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are by…

“An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are by definition images of which sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has its origin in the instability of attention that television is organised to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images. Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image. The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored. Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump started, again and again. Content is no more that one of these stimulants. A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness - just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling.”

Regarding The Pain of Others

Susan Sontag

Today a japanese magician explained the role of “prediction” in her culture to me: Predictions are to be avoided, a…

The New Urban Success: How Culture Pays Very interesting study by @desi_hristova & co, whi…

## [1804.03760] The New Urban Success: How Culture Pays

The New Urban Success: How Culture Pays Very interesting study by @desi_hristova & co, whi…

As soon as you give people a metric they’re judged by, they optimize for that metric rather than do quality work.…

#seethetree Rowan Tree growing out of a long gone building #RangerShaun

Here’s my experimental attempt to copy this habitat and planting with a bit of (recycled) styrofoam & capillary mat…

## “Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward…

“Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward things are barely discernible.”

— Hermann Oberth

## “She was a mysterious serial killer known as the “The Woman Without a Face” and detectives across Europe spent more than 15…

stml:

“She was a mysterious serial killer known as the “The Woman Without a Face” and detectives across Europe spent more than 15 years doing their utmost to bring her to justice for at least six brutal murders and a string of break-ins. Yesterday, however, they were forced to admit that she probably didn’t exist. The only clues that “The Woman Without a Face” left behind at 40 different crime scenes were DNA traces. These were collected on cotton swabs, supplied to the police in a number of European countries. Now police investigators have established that in all probability the DNA had not been left by their quarry but by a woman working for the German medical company supplying the swabs, who had inadvertently contaminated them. German police who had been leading the hunt said they had probably been involved in one of the longest and most perplexing wild goose chases in criminal history. “This is a very embarrassing story,” admitted police spokesman Josef Schneider.”

The curse of small scale is that prepping work for outsourcing is usually more work than doing it yourself because…

Chinese Crypto Slang Part 5: 大饼 Dà Bing, lit. big pancake. Bitcoin / BTC 小饼 Xiao Bing, lit. small pancake. Ether /…

In recent years, some 800 defunct robot dogs in Japan have been sent off to a centuries-old Buddhist temple for the…

## FALLWINDE I Mischtechnik auf Leinwand 100x70cm 2018 www.janherdlicka.com wwwinstagram.com/janherdlicka

FALLWINDE I
Mischtechnik auf Leinwand
100x70cm
2018

www.janherdlicka.com
wwwinstagram.com/janherdlicka

One of the most chilling abandoned places in the world is France’s Red Zone, or “Zone Rouge”. Over 100 years ago,…

## All the meaningful things Kim Jong-un will eat when he meets with South Korea’s president

When North Korean leader Kim Jong-un meets with his South Korean counterpart this week to talk peace on the peninsula, he’ll also be getting a history lesson in inter-Korean relations as told through gastronomy. As the leaders prepare to meet on April 27 at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), Seoul’s presidential Blue House today (April 24) released the menu for the post-summit dinner. The ingredients used represent meaning to those attending the summit, and also honor those who have worked to reunify the Koreas in some way, according to the Blue House

## On August 6, 2014, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft officially entered orbit around the comet 67/P…

On August 6, 2014, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft officially entered orbit around the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko (let’s call it ‘67P’ for short). For the next two years it moved around the comet, taking incredible images, sent down an ill-fated lander, and expanded our knowledge of these icy solar system visitors hugely.

Typically, ESA didn’t release much raw data from the spacecraft, so that scientists had a chance to look over the vast amount of information. However, they did recently open up some of the images taken by the OSIRIS instrument on board, which includes fantastic shots of the eerie landscape.

Twitter user landru79 saw an opportunity. They took some of the data, cleaned it up a bit, and then created a video that is as mind-blowing as it is jaw-dropping.

original post:

FYI that cliff is 1 Km tall

Of the big liberal policy initiatives (UBI, JG, minwage, universal health care, Social Wealth Fund, EITC), I think…

## mobile fm (AM) | farmersmanual

fm going mobile, new mini-package lifted from the archive

## One of the most worrisome predictions about climate change may be coming true

Excerpt:

Two years ago, former NASA climate scientist James Hansen and a number of colleagues laid out a dire scenario in which gigantic pulses of fresh water from melting glaciers could upend the circulation of the oceans, leading to a world of fast-rising seas and even superstorms.

Hansen’s scenario was based on a computer simulation, not hard data from the real world, and met with skepticism from a number of other climate scientists. But now, a new oceanographic study appears to have confirmed one aspect of this picture — in its early stages, at least.

The new research, based on ocean measurements off the coast of East Antarctica, shows that melting Antarctic glaciers are indeed freshening the ocean around them. And this, in turn, is blocking a process in which cold and salty ocean water sinks below the sea surface in winter, forming “the densest water on the Earth,” in the words of study lead author Alessandro Silvano, a researcher with the University of Tasmania in Hobart.

This Antarctic bottom water has stopped forming in two key regions of Antarctica, the research shows — the West Antarctic coast and the coast around the enormous Totten glacier in East Antarctica.

These are two of Antarctica’s fastest-melting regions, and no wonder: When cold surface water no longer sinks into the depths, a deeper layer of warm ocean water can travel across the continental shelf and reach the bases of glaciers, retaining its heat as the cold waters remain above. This warmer water then rapidly melts the glaciers and the large floating ice shelves connected to them.

In other words, the melting of Antarctica’s glaciers appears to be triggering a “feedback” loop in which that melting, through its effect on the oceans, triggers still more melting. The melting water stratifies the ocean column, with cold fresh water trapped at the surface and warmer water sitting below. Then, the lower layer melts glaciers and creates still more melt water — not to mention rising seas as glaciers lose mass.

Short video explaining this:

One of the most worrisome predictions about climate change may be coming true

## Vehicles await auction on a large lot in Manheim, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1945, this facility is the world’s largest wholesale…

Vehicles await auction on a large lot in Manheim, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1945, this facility is the world’s largest wholesale auto auction, handling around 8 million vehicles per year at more than 100 locations worldwide. The lot seen in this Overview is approximately 500 acres (200 hectares) in size.

Instagram: https://bit.ly/2Hrgs70

40°08'25.3"N, 76°23'48.4"W

Source imagery: Nearmap

## What Is Acoustic Ecology? We Have 5 Questions • The Revelator

Excerpt:

The sound of ants communicating with each other by scraping their legs on their bodies.

The echoes under the surface of a small freshwater pond.

The sound of a pine forest dying.

These are just a few of the sounds David Dunn has investigated in his decades as a composer, musician, acoustic ecologist and audio engineer. His compositions, soundscapes and other projects fuse art and science, inviting us to pay close attention to nonhuman activities and environments that usually pass beneath our notice.

Recently Dunn has applied his bioacoustical research to the problem of dying pine forests. For almost two decades, pine trees across the American west have been decimated by bark beetles, whose populations have exploded due to warming temperatures. The beetles have destroyed over 45 millions of acres of pine trees, disrupting ecosystems and altering landscapes — and they show no signs of stopping. Dunn and his collaborators have been awarded a patent for technology and protocol that uses sound to disrupt key behaviors and life stages of bark beetles to slow the devastation of pine forests.

UC Santa Cruz music professor David Dunn has received a patent to help fight bark beetles ravaging Western forests, killing millions of trees throughout the West. Here’s a video explaining his bioacoustic research in the context of bark beetles and Western forests.

What Is Acoustic Ecology? We Have 5 Questions • The Revelator

## How letting Mother Nature reclaim prime farmland produced results

Cuckoos, spotted flycatchers, fieldfares, hobbies, woodlarks, skylarks, lapwings, house sparrows, lesser spotted woodpeckers, yellowhammers, woodcock, red kites, sparrowhawks, peregrine falcons, all five types of British owl, the first ravens at Knepp in the past 100 years — the list goes on and on. The speed at which all these species — and many more — have appeared has astonished observers, particularly as our intensively farmed land was, biologically speaking, in dire condition in 2001, at the start of the project. The key to Knepp’s extraordinary success? It’s about surrendering all preconceptions, and simply observing what happens. By contrast, conventional conservation tends to be about targets and control, and often involves micro-managing a habitat for the perceived benefit of several chosen species.

## What Is Eating Away at the Greenland Ice Sheet?

Scientists are exploring changes underway in the Greenland Ice Sheet as a result of global warming. Algae, dust and soot, a short-lived climate pollutant also known as black carbon, are exacerbating melting. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Excerpt:

In the high-stakes race against sea level rise, understanding what’s causing the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt is critical. The problem isn’t just rising temperatures: soot from ships, wildfires and distant power plants, as well as dust and a living carpet of microbes on the surface of the ice, are all speeding up the melting.

Right now, predictions for sea level rise range from about 1 to 10 feet by 2100—a wide difference for coastal communities trying to plan seawalls and other protective measures.

The more we understand about how pollutants affect the ice, the more accurate those projections will be. So, let’s take a look at what’s happening on the ice sheet now—and the risks ahead.

First, temperatures are rising in the Arctic at about twice the global average. That causes melting around the edges of the ice sheet each year and reaches across more of the surface during summer heat waves.

In areas near the edge of the ice sheet, things get even more interesting: a carpet of microbes and algae mixed with dust and soot, a short-lived climate pollutant, is darkening the ice sheet, absorbing the sun’s rays and accelerating the melting of the ice. New research shows this dark zone is growing.

What Is Eating Away at the Greenland Ice Sheet?

## I can’t find a source for this image, but I am posting it here anyway.

I can’t find a source for this image, but I am posting it here anyway.

## “[in 1977] NASA launched Voyager 1, the second of two spacecraft on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of…

“[in 1977] NASA launched Voyager 1, the second of two spacecraft on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. Attached to each spacecraft is a Golden Record containing Earth’s greatest music, spoken greetings, “Sounds of Earth,” and more than 100 images encoded as audio signals, a technological feat at the time. Technical director Frank Drake had always planned to encode the photos in the audio spectrum for the record. The challenge was finding technology capable of the task. While flipping through an electronics catalog, Valentin Boriakoff, Drake’s colleague at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, stumbled upon Colorado Video, a small television equipment firm in Boulder that had built a unique device for encoding television images as audio signals that could be transmitted over telephone lines. Donating their time and expertise to the project, engineers at Colorado Video projected each Voyager slide onto a television camera lens, generating a signal that their machine converted into several seconds of sound per photo. A diagram on the aluminum cover of the Golden Record explains how to play it and decode the images. Four decades later, Ron Barry followed the instructions.”

## untitled 173120698077

Quite a bit of my current novel is written from something akin to this POV オンナノコズ："Onnanocos" × Micro Drone

## Here’s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers

One of our great errors in thinking — another aspect of that unfortunate idea of human exceptionalism that makes it so hard for us to be at home in this world — is that the natural and the man-made are distinct entities. Like all other parts of the branching experiment, we make and are made by the living environment, and we have done so since before we were us. Without the forests of the Santa Cruz mountains, there would be no Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley will make or unmake the forests of the future. No nature story, no account of environmental struggle would be complete without bringing on-stage all the human technologies that are to us what the invention of flowers and nuts and chlorophyll and mycorrhizal networks are to the forest superorganism. Just as the emergence of tree intelligence forever changed the planet, so the emergence of consciousness (which long predated humans) forever changed the nature of evolution. Cultural transmission is orders of magnitude faster than genetic transmission, and digital transmission has accelerated the speed of culture a hundredfold or more. We may soon seem, to our artificial intelligence offspring, as motionless and insentient as trees seem to us. And here we live, trying to make a home between our predecessors and our descendants.

## Ecological awareness just means being aware that things happen on a bewildering variety of scales all at once, and that what…

“Ecological awareness just means being aware that things happen on a bewildering variety of scales all at once, and that what that looks like on one scale is very different on another scale. What looks like a boiling kettle to my human eyes looks very different from an electron’s point of view: suddenly finding that you’ve teleported to a higher orbit isn’t the same as the smooth, chattery-sounding phenomenon we call boiling. And once you become aware of the idea that there are all these extra scales, you begin to notice that some scales are so big or so small (that also includes “long lasting” or “fleeting” too) that all we can mostly do is report and observe—or, if you like, undergo or endure.”

Timothy Morton,Will All Artists Please Come to a White Courtesy Telephone

Fly over

## “Shit can be traced back to the Old English verb scitan (which meant exactly what it does today), and further back to…

“Shit can be traced back to the Old English verb scitan (which meant exactly what it does today), and further back to Proto-Germanic skit (the Germans still say scheisse), and all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European word (c. 4000 BC) skhei, which meant to separate or divide, presumably on the basis that you separated yourself from your faeces. Shed (as in shed your skin) comes from the same root, and so does schism. An odd little aspect of this etymology is that when Proto-Indo-European arrived in the Italian peninsula they used skhei to mean separate or distinguish. If you could tell two things apart then you knew them, and so the Latin word for know became scire. From that you got the Latin word scientia, which meant knowledge, and from that we got the word science This means that science is, etymologically, shit. It also means that knowing your shit, etymologically, means that you’re good at physics and chemistry.”

— Mark Forsyth (The Inky Fool), The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (via wordsspentinvain)

The process of ingraining feet, so you can experience the feeling of being “rooted like a tree”. Experiments by Fel…

## measures of distance

measures of distance

## untitled 173056413592

flying car

interesting trivia: the term ‘uncanny valley’ appears to have originated in the inestimable Jasia Reichardt’s “Robo…

## A cluster of tetrapods is seen near the High Island Reservoir in Hong Kong. These concrete structures are used to reinforce…

A cluster of tetrapods is seen near the High Island Reservoir in Hong Kong. These concrete structures are used to reinforce shoreline defenses and prevent coastal erosion by breaking up incoming waves. The specific shape of the tetrapod allows water to flow around rather than against the concrete and reduces displacement by interlocking.

Instagram: https://bit.ly/2EOPhks

22°21'41.0"N, 114°22'31.5"E

Source imagery: A Sense of Huber

In which we experiment with the idea of Sortition, an ancient Athenian method of selecting officials based on rando…

What happens when you tell a computer to scan lines of poetry for their meter, except you sneak in lines of prose,…

One of the core motivations of my anarchism is that people suck at “being in charge” of other people and that we sh…

## Denmark’s last Phonebox. Her Stod Danmarks sidste Telefonbox 1934–2018

Denmark’s last Phonebox.Her Stod Danmarks sidste Telefonbox 1934-2018

## Cartographers Without Borders Indigenous communities are building drones to make their own maps—and using them to f… via…

Cartographers Without Borders Indigenous communities are building drones to make their own maps—and using them to f…

## It’s also part of the Small Pilgrim Places Network - a smattering of places across the country that allow "ponderin… via…

Small Pilgrim Places Network

It’s also part of the Small Pilgrim Places Network - a smattering of places across the country that allow “ponderin…

## There’s Still a Chance to Participate in this Insanely Large Polyglot

Afteryesterday’s piece on the 128 language Quine Relay, I had to follow up with this polyglot program on Stack Overflow’s Code Golf forum, which at the time of writing, works in 191 languages and is still actively updated.

This is the challenge, as described in the post:

The nth program to be submitted must run in n different languages; specifically, all the languages added in previous programs to be submitted, plus one more. The program must output 1 when run in the first language used in answers to this question, 2 when run in the second language, and so on.

A polyglot program is closely related to a quine relay; where a quine relay is run in one language to produce a program in another, a ployglot program is a single program which can be interpreted as-is in more than one language – often to produce different results.

It begins with a Python 3 program, that prints 1:

print(1)

To which a program in V (vim) was added, which prints 2, respecting the Python 3′s program:

print(1)#i2

This works because everything up to the # is ignored by V, and the i following the # is read as insert, inserting the value 2, while # marks a comment in Python 3.

From there, a string of 2D languages are added, which adds alternate program flows to the program, useful in that it’s easier to avoid problematic characters intended for other languages, but adding another complication to keep track of as the program evolves.

Many entries take advantage of symbols that denote comments in one language and not another, like with the Python example above. Others use differences in whether a value is treated as true or false:

In Python 2, ½ is 0, which is a falsy value, which makes Python print 5. In Python 3, ½ is 0.5, which is a truthy value, which makes Python print 1

The great feature of this thread is the detail given by many of the participants in their explanations of how and why their entry works. It is a great intro in how to write a polyglot. Also, it’s still an open contest, meaning there’s time to take part in expanding this monstrosity of code. It officially closes when there are 14 days of inactivity, at which point the second-to-last entry wins (to make sure people don’t intentionally post changes that make their entry imposible to follow).

As of the time of writing, it’s at 191 languages (over 9k of text!), the latest adding PHP, and it looks like this (good luck making sense of it):

<code>#16  "?63(o+?50;+'51;'  # #@ " /*"r"{\D-v e-'[fa5.q]PkPPX)$$9 '#CO"14"^ 92 7 222222222222222222222222 ##*/ #/*1&amp;7//" [&gt;.&gt;.] )[-'][(7 &gt;77*,68*,@'_ 7 )(22)S / \iiipsddpsdoh#####(#######?? #### ## ###### #### ###### # #### ####### #### ###### # #### ####### a5# \7aa*+42@n; 7 999993 1 7 3 1 8 1 1 55 EEEEEδΘΔΔΔΘΔΘλa k zzzzkf kf k zzzzzd kf k zzzzza kf bfz coding=utf8 p''53'S^' ! 1&gt;?7ДOq#t#&gt;2/Wr#t#t#q#68#r#t#t#68#q#63#r#t#t#6v#&gt;#&lt;/Wr#6}#y/===Wr#7ЯOq#&gt;J7Д/Wr#y&lt;Wr#&gt;5/Wr#t#t#6y#&gt;-=/Wr#6|#&gt;6/Wr122! 1退 #&gt;x#z#111#y#y#y#_#0111118&amp;1&amp; 111/"78"oo@ xxxxxxxxxxxx /112\ ##### ####### # # ##### h#115# o# ##### #### ### #### # # ##### # ##### #### ### #### # # ##### # # # 36!@D e ++++++::@ L R.----._ x-----x ########8=,_## ### ###### ######## #### ##### ####### ##### ### # # #### ### ##### ####### ##### ### # # #### ### ##### # #comment -[af] xxxxxxxxxxxx\#184O@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # ########## ### ## ##### ## #### ## # ##### ## ##### #### ##### ## # ## ## #### ## ##### #### ##### ## # ## ## #### #~==RtRtRtMbMbMbPSPSPS # ????!?!??!??!!!!???!?!??!!?!?!!!!!?!!!!?????!????????????????????! #[#[]]QhQhQhQrQrQrHnHnHnbqbqbqLzLzLzQtQtQtTcTcTcRQRQRQ # #&lt;&lt;&lt;#++R++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++U+++.._+++++++._ # ############################################################################## 4O6O@ #-]+-}}[.^x+;;+;;+;;+&lt;&gt;;;+;;+;;+;;;;;;+;;+;;.._]}--&lt;^&gt;++[+++++[&gt;+++++++&lt;-]&gt;._ ++++._+++._^&lt;]+-+&lt;[&lt;&lt;._&gt;&gt;&gt;-]^&gt;[&lt;+++++[&gt;++++++++++&lt;-]&gt;@@+.---@._+&gt;][[ #{ #= #* #cs #2""/* #9999 9 9 #9 999 99 9999 9 #9 # 9 9999 #&lt;(+?+?0l0v01k1kMoOMoOMoOMoOMOOx0l0ix0jor0h0h1d111 0eU0y0yx0moO1d0y0e0e00m1d0i0fx0g0n0n11yxMoOMoOMoOMoOMoOMoOMoOMoOMoOMoOMoOMoOMoOmOotMOo0moo0n0tx0t0moO0f0t0gOOM0g0f0h0j0j0i000x1k1x0vx0v0l11110000011100^_)\ [ "e.1'.0'.6''i]56pq\{}26q",'_\['];#/s\\/;print 24; exit}}__END__/ ###&lt;+@+-@@@@=&gt;+&lt;@@@=&gt;+&lt;?#&gt;;?\:-._++._++++._#/&lt;?\&gt;3-++._6+---2._#&lt;/++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++._++._++++++.&gt;!\ 'wWWWwWWWWwvwWWwWWWwvwWWWwWWW\WWWWWwWWWWwWWWW/WW\WwWWWWWWWWwwwwvwW/WWwWWWWwvwWWwWWWwvwWWwWWWwvwWWwWWW ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO dO MU ([]) ({}&lt;(((((()()())){}{})){}{})&gt;)(({})){}{(&lt;(&lt;()&gt;)({})({}&lt;{}&gt;({}){})&gt;){({}[()])}}({}){}({}()&lt;()()()&gt;) (&lt;&gt;&lt;()&gt;){({}[()])}{ #((((((\'; a=(printf \\x00);b=(echo -n a|wc -c);case b[1] in 1*)echo 54;;4*)echo 78;;8*)echo 166;;*1*)echo 50;;*)echo 58;;esac;exit;#)'; print (0and eval('(defined?pp)&amp;&amp;190||(defined?__dir__)&amp;&amp;13||\'_\'[0]==95&amp;&amp;108||110')or(None and 9or 1/2and 1or 5&lt;&lt;64&gt;&gt;64or 68));"[{ print(g+91) }/]es";exit; "'#{print(187);exit}'/"; #&lt; ?&gt;wWWssss {}#(prin 45)(bye) 46(8+9+9+9+9+=!) &lt;/&gt;* * * * *[[3+4*7*@]]xxxxxxxxxx ###;{a=1}={a:null};console.log a&amp;&amp;39||180;\ __DATA__="""" #p \ __END__ set pr'[puts 59][exit]\'':;@echo 185 #';set pr'-';pr 89;exit#ss ifdef x # # #:1*23!/5x%6E0 !|*****[[[828+*+@+*99]]]*****|! # [mxf]-main=-[165]- ###jxf*#p 173#* p now 70 dollar off! p has been selling out worldwide! #PLACET,2&lt;- #2FAC,2SUB#1&lt;- #52FAC,2SUB#2&lt;- #32FACREADOUT,2PLEASEGIVEUPFACs&gt;&gt;&gt; seeeemPaeue_ewuuweeee_eeeeeeCisajjapp_ppppxf⠆⠄⡒⡆⡘😆😨😒😨💬95💬👥➡😻😹😸🙀🙀😹😼😿🙀🙀😼😼😸🙀🙀🙀🙀 👋🔢🌚🌝🌝🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚▲▲▲²²²²▲¡▼¡▲▲¡→ 밠밠따빠빠맣박다맣받다맣희맣희うんたんたんたんたんうんうんうんうんうんたんうんうんうんたんうんたんたんうんたんたんうんたんたんうんたんたんうんたんたんたんたんたんうんうんうんうんたんたんうんたんたんたんうんうんうんたんうんうんたんうんうんたんうんうんたんうんたんうんうんうんたんたんうんたんたんうんたんたんうんたんたんうんたんたんたんうんうん 😊♈💖 😇♈♈ 😊♉♈ 😇♈♈ +------+ 😇♈♉ |/0110@| 😇♈💜 |/0011 | 😊♉♈ |/0010 | 😊📢♈ |/0011 | 😈♈💜 |/0001 | 😊📢♈ |/0011| 😇♉💞 +------+ 😊📢♉⠀⢃⠛⠋ #-49,A,-1 # #-5,A,-1 # #6,A,-1 # 1&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt; ! ! 2&lt;&lt;&lt;!&lt; ! 1+ +!! 1= * 53 + 1&gt; * 51 + # 1+ * x+x x x 49 x+ xx+xxx+ x+x + x B+ ===+ x= xx x x=== x x &gt;8 xxx +++= + x+ +x + x,_8=&gt;+ xB x+x x==+R _*=x== x +x==+&gt; x x + x +R"12"+8=Dx B=xD + + xxx+ + x=&gt;8=x&gt; x+~ x x +x+B+ x +====+x&gt;~+B+= x x + x xD~+x 8=++&gt;8x += x+ +,_ + 15 + x x + + xx + ? ?@ %"18"_ ! 1 + x + x ++ xx + ?@ ? 1 \+* x + + x + + * 1 ! x +x + + ? ! ? 1 ! x xx --... ...-- ? @ ? x + ++ xx ++ ++ + +xxxxx + + # + + * + # + * ***************************************&lt;&gt;***********+ + + &lt;&gt;"3"O._+ rk:start | print: "69" rk:end eP+++++*D*+++1++1E!s + + * 'main' *****+ -+3o4o# + ++ + * * +***** # + (printout t 164 ) (exit ) #cepp MsgBox (0,"",169 ) #cs Yo::=~147 ::= You can see an x here.&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt; &gt;{-&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt; &gt; 176 &gt;&gt; Output 1 &gt;SET x TO 120. [0]{472454523665721469465830106052219449897} @,-1,:*b5&lt;&gt;␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␌␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␌␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋␋ &gt;X x. PPQ-} &gt;x--/2 &gt; =157;y=146--/2 &gt;main=print y{-ss s \begin{code} {-x ␉␉␉␉ ␉ ␉ -} open import IO;main = run(putStr"159" ) \end{code} ppppppppppppp out &amp;49 &amp;1 out &amp;56 &amp;1 out &amp;50 &amp;1 Take Northern Line to Tooting Bec Take Northern Line to Charing Cross Take Northern Line to Charing Cross Take Northern Line to Bank Take District Line to Hammersmith Take District Line to Upminster Take District Line to Hammersmith Take District Line to Upminster Take District Line to Embankment Take Bakerloo Line to Embankment 7 UP Take Northern Line to Mornington Crescent 7 RIGHT 7 RIGHT 7 TEACH 6 BOND 6 BOND 6 BOND 5 RIGHT 5 LEFT 5 RIGHT 7 BOND 7 TEACH 5 TEACH 6 YELL 5 TEACH 6 YELL 6 YELL set ! 57,,...,,.,,..,,,,,,..,,,.^ set ! 51. #e.0,1,_ _ye{--}besizeString xflos1''gem x=4721en nd ogola=10C0 cod/|puts_e25y "3"91/2 &lt;5&gt;6#"5"8=6028=+ codefn;#6or [9]=x 3 8[]p#s4;93 More 91 of this How much is it red down one blue up red down one blue up red up one red right two blue up sss baa baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bleeeeeeeeeeeeet bleeeeeeeeeeeeet bleeeeeeeeeet baaaa bleet bleeeeeeeeeet bleeet bleeeeeeeeeet wwWWWwWWWWWwWWWWWWW wWWWWWWWWpppppp When this program starts: There is a scribe called x x is to write 179 */ #if 0 .int 2298589328,898451655,12,178790,1018168591,84934449,12597 #endif//* #1""//* #include&lt;stdio.h&gt; #define x(a) #a #define u8 "38\0 "//" char*x="24 10 31 1" "a c #FFC0FF""B c #0000C0""d c #58007B""e c #0C8302" "h c #E60001""i c #CAFFFF""j c #280000""k c #CA0000""l c #CA007F""n c #330001 ""q c #E60000" "o c #FF8000""t c #FF00BC""u c #008080" "A c #0040C0""E c #808000""F c #00C040""G c #008000 ""R c #800000" "H c #0000AA""I c #00AA00""J c #55FFFF""K c #AAAAAA" "r c red""g c green""b c blue""c c cyan""m c magenta""y c #FFFF00""x c black""_ c #FFFFFF" "HHHahtdegggggggyrggggggc" "IHHaixuEFbGGbggbryAEGRgc" "JJHajyurbgbgggggggb____o" "IJHakmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye" "I__almyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye" "K__anmyyyyyyyyyyyyyy_y_e" "HH_aqggyyyyyyyyg____m_Je" "JH_axxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" "K__aaaam___bbbbbBm_bbBab" "K__________bbbbb___bbxbb";//" int f(char*a,char*b ){puts(a?"124":sizeof(0,u8)-5?u8"67":*u8""?"37":x(0'0 "'\"")[9]?"75":'??-'&amp;1? "79":"77");}main(){f(x,x=0);}//&lt;*/ #1""/*/ &gt;import Text.Heredoc--WWWWWWWWWWWWWW&lt;&lt;W &gt;instance Num B where fromInteger _=B 170;negate _=Bx#x &gt;data B=B{u::Integer};g=[here|here&lt;-"W&gt;W"] --WWWWWWWWWW570rt Unc27&lt;&lt;[|] &gt;x=1;y#a=128;x#a = 174;(! )=seq &gt;main|let p!_=0=printsum[0!61,{-_-}last172:[u[-1]!!0|g&lt;"Z&gt;"]] --} console.log 178; #1""/*/ #if 0 #file. :-write(186). end_of_file.  #endif//* /*/ p=sizeof(" (\");print'(''72'')';end!");main(){puts('??-'&amp;1?"101":"92" );return 0;} #if 0 #endif//* print 61 #} disp 49 #{ }{}&lt;&gt; K yya+- &amp; g+ /._++.._#&lt;!._++.-.&gt;@ A=AgRA; AC # / \? -/!+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++&lt;&gt;^+++++&lt;\&gt;+R++.-. endif #&lt;&lt;&lt;#/&lt;+&gt;/&gt;&gt;&gt;\ """#"; print(85) #&lt; ~#class C{function:Main(a:String[])~Nil{83-&gt;Print();}}#+&lt;/.---.&gt;/ #endcOmment #nocOmment outtext("155") #ce pS9^7^8^MUOUOF @0:8:8 \ @,,1'1'&lt;&gt; @125iRE #p|o51~nJ;#:p'34'3 \=# print(size([[1] [3]][1,:])[1]==2?158+4:17)#&gt;say 27#&gt;&gt;say 170-3#]#print(47 )#]#echo 21#&gt;/#print(171)#s-#print 175#s #8M| &lt;esc&gt;dggi2&lt;esc&gt;// }&lt;}}&lt;}&gt;}[&lt;&lt; }&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;}&lt;&lt;}&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;}&lt;/&lt;&lt;}}}&lt;}}&lt;}}&lt;} }&lt;}}&lt;}}&lt;}}}&lt;}}&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;}}}&lt;}}&lt;}}&lt;}}&lt;}}&lt;}}&lt;}}}&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;}]~-&lt;~-&lt;~-&lt;&lt;&lt;~-&lt;&lt;COprint("65")#=&gt;ass^_^_# #9'&gt;+/' 25 xpppppppeeee*n*n*n*es*s*s*^ee*n*n*n*e*sss*e*n*n*n*ee*s&lt;* 5&gt;1 e*///$$Q222999686#</code>`

## The Secret Language of Ships

Tugboat crews routinely encounter what few of us will ever see. They easily read a vessel’s size, shape, function, and features, while deciphering at a glance the mysterious numbers, letters, and symbols on a ship’s hull. To non-mariners, the markings look like hieroglyphs. For those in the know, they speak volumes about a particular ship and also about the shipping industry.

Cyberspace: an imaginary non-physical realm generated by combining fossil fuel generated electricity with devices m…

## “There’s a much quoted proverb in the world of finance that I hate: Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a…

“There’s a much quoted proverb in the world of finance that I hate: Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime. I say bullshit to this. Do the poor really not know how to fish? And what good is it to know how to fish if the rights to fish are owned by powerful landlords? And if the river is polluted by upstream tyrants? And what good is it to be taught to fish if the price and distribution of fish is controlled by conglomerate monopolies?””

— Ananya Roy, “Who Profits From Poverty?“  (via kuanios)

## The Colombian Amazon Is Now a ‘Person’, and You Can Thank Actual People

In 2016, Colombian officials made a similar decision regardingthe Atrato River in the country’s northwest corner. Last week’s ruling is truly extraordinary though—in fact, this ruling is a first among this kind of “nature-as-person” climate litigation. The court based its decision on people and on future generations, not on the trees or the plants. A growing body of litigation is using future generations as an argument, but none have resulted in legally granting a piece of nature personhood.

The Colombian Amazon Is Now a ‘Person’, and You Can Thank Actual People

## Testing hands. Hiroshima, 2017 #onyourshoulderswestand

Testing hands. Hiroshima, 2017 #onyourshoulderswestand

## Two pandas are formed by solar panels at the Panda Green Energy power plant in Datong, Shanxi Province, northern China. Built in…

Two pandas are formed by solar panels at the Panda Green Energy power plant in Datong, Shanxi Province, northern China. Built in cooperation with the United Nations Development Program, this solar farm covers roughly 1,500 acres and includes an education center that teaches children about sustainable and renewable energy.

Instagram: https://bit.ly/2Hpi6Xn

39°58'23.6"N, 113°29'03.7"E

Source imagery: DigitalGlobe

If you’ll be in Venice for the Architecture Biennale, we have a few passes for the preview on May 24/25. We’ll be p…

Interested in moving past toxic debates over whether polar bears are/aren’t doomed by climate change? One way: Focu…

## THE RED BALLOON

THE RED BALLOON

Hotly anticipated spring reading from @VersoBooks. Cat remains unmoved.

I’m working on some new experimental shaders. A microscopic water planet and its natural satellite. #gamedev #shader

## Paucity of phosphorus hints at precarious path for extraterrestrial life

She explains: “Phosphorus is one of just six chemical elements on which Earth organisms depend, and it is crucial to the compound adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which cells use to store and transfer energy. Astronomers have just started to pay attention to the cosmic origins of phosphorus and found quite a few surprises. In particular, P is created in supernovae – the explosions of massive stars – but the amounts seen so far don’t match our computer models. I wondered what the implications were for life on other planets if unpredictable amounts of P are spat out into space and later used in the construction of new planets.”

## Ice can be a terrible pest, freezing to surfaces like roads and airplane wings and causing all sorts of havoc. Some surfaces,…

Ice can be a terrible pest, freezing to surfaces like roads and airplane wings and causing all sorts of havoc. Some surfaces, though, can actually prompt a freezing drop to scrape itself off. There are a couple key effects in play here. The first is that the surface is nanotextured – in other words, it has extremely small structures on its surface. This makes it hydrophobic, or water-repellent. The second key ingredient is that the drop is cooling evaporatively; that means heat is escaping along the air-water interface instead of conducting through the solid surface. As a result, the freezing front forms at the interface and pushes inward. Water expands as it freezes, which tries to force the interior liquid out, toward the bottom of the drop. On a normal surface, this would force the contact line – where air, water, and surface meet – to push outward. But the nanotexture of the hydrophobic surface pins that line in place. So the expanding ice pushes the frozen drop upward, scraping it off the surface! (Video and image credit: G. Graeber et al., source)

## Meshing, rugged, free/open wifi routers for refugee camps

Meshpoint is a Croatian open source hardware company that turns out rugged, meshing, battery-powered wifi hotspots that get their backhaul from cellular networks; they’re based on the widely used DD-WRT free/open wifi routing software, and use open source hardware designs that are intended to stand up to punishing field conditions like those found in refugee camps.

Meshpoint was created by people who lived through the Balkan conflict and keenly remembered the experience of being threatened and displaced by war; when Syrian refugees arrived in their vicinity, the public-spirited hackers behind Meshpoint felt solidarity with their plight and started to create tools to allow refugees to stay in touch with one another and with diasporic populations around the world.

Meshpoint has had several trial deployments by different relief agencies and is under continuous revision to further ruggedize the hardware and to smooth out administration by non-expert users.

## Remembering Cecil Taylor

Like music fans everywhere, Dusted writers spent Friday reminiscing about the great Cecil Taylor. We’re sharing our conversation, and some of the man’s music, in this post.

## “Is the Great Filter just a phosphorus deficit in young planets because there have been few supernovas so far?” via…

phosphorus

“Is the Great Filter just a phosphorus deficit in young planets because there have been few supernovas so far?”

## “Ultimately among the many arguments advanced by nationalists for claiming particular territories over the years, geology has…

“Ultimately among the many arguments advanced by nationalists for claiming particular territories over the years, geology has seldom been a prominent one. But, looking at these maps, its hard not to imagine an alternative history in which geologic rather than ethnic nationalism became the foundation for modern European states. Iceland, it appears, would emerge as the one pure Litho-state, built on a solid foundation of Trachyte and Basalt. A greater Scandinavia would also emerge, united by its common granite identity, after suppressing or assimilating minority regions of Devonian-era rock. England, in turn, would be the Balkans of this alternative world order, hopelessly divided between rival clans tracing their origins back to obscure fault-lines in the Eocene, Pliocene, and even Ordovician.”

## Wat Phra Dhammakaya is a Buddhist temple in the Khlong Luang District of Thailand, roughly 30 miles north of Bangkok….

Wat Phra Dhammakaya is a Buddhist temple in the Khlong Luang District of Thailand, roughly 30 miles north of Bangkok. Established in 1970, the temple uses modern methods and technology to encourage a revival of traditional Buddhist values. Its methods have stirred controversy in Thailand and even caused the ruling military junta to temporarily lock it down in 2017.

Instagram: https://bit.ly/2uYlc2m

14°04'56.5"N, 100°38'51.9"E

Source imagery: DigitalGlobe

## The Continuation of History: Future Societies in Fiction

The following essay, originally written in 2001 for the literary magazine BigCityLit, examines Ms. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed in conjunction with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. The ideas expressed and implied in these works continue to be highly relevant for activists wishing to find a path toward a better world.

History has proven it hasn’t ended. The concept should have been too laughable to even been contemplated; the very fact that ever shriller cacophonies of propaganda are hurled at us ought to prove the point, if it needed to be proved at all.No matter how many times Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” is pompously declared; no matter how many times Francis Fukuyama is invoked to declare the end of history — a quote sure to be one of the 21st century’s reliable laugh lines — much of the world persists in refusing its assigned role. Unless we’re paying close attention, most of this is yet under the radar, save for the occasional spectacle when the World Bank or International Monetary Fund or a hemispheric “free trade” conference convenes, and we are shown a backdrop of protesters while a befuddled television talking head scratches his head and says “I don’t get it.” If the talking head is planning on a nice career as a media personality, he’d better not get it.

There is a subset of the “no alternative” grouping. Well, yes, maybe capitalism isn’t all wonderful, but look at how socialism failed. Actually, “socialism” did not fail; one distorted version did. The story of how that distortion, solidifying the incredible twists and turns taken by one country weighed down by the horrors of its absolutist history and further bent out of recognition by a single-minded dictator, is fascinating for those with much patience. That country, if we care to be precise, was never close to achieving socialism. Nonetheless, that country, which also faced relentless pressures from the West, including an invasion by 14 countries as soon as they could stop fighting World War I, had its uses. Western anti-Marxists didn’t want people to think there could be an alternative to capitalism. They still don’t.

We’ve begun the 21st century. Stalinism is dead. It will remain dead. Still, the desire for a better life remains. But what? It’s too easy to say “we don’t know.”

The Continuation of History: Future Societies in Fiction

## An attempt at restoration using neural networks, by @mario-klingemann

An attempt at restoration using neural networks, by @mario-klingemann

## Time to do something dumb: EXPRESS PARANOIA.

So here’s the thing that makes this whole “HA HA RUSSIAN TUMBLR BOTS” even dumber: They didn’t spread anything novel, rather act as an echo chamber for things desired to be expressed all the more. They were less disinformation or chaos spreading bots, and more reblogs with slightly edited social commentary or social discourse.

When Ars briefly went through some of the old posts saved on the Internet Archive, it seemed that relatively few posts were directly pertinent to the presidential campaign. Many of the posts, for instance, touched on black-oriented social justice topics. We did find one post that specifically advocated in favor of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.

Combined with that, this makes even less sense. A tumblr post isn’t the same as a fake news post unless it carries direct misinformation for the purpose of emotional reactions to non-existent problems. But that isn’t what happened. All of these blogs were mostly dedicated to heavily tagged social issues in America. While some of the listed ones could be accused of being communist, they definitely weren’t pro-Putin, and even fewer of the mere 84 total revealed accounts went anywhere close to the point of encouraging people not to vote against Trump in the election. Unlike many of the Facebook Russian bots that produced massive misinformation campaigns, none of the Tumblr ones seemed to have attempted to reach such massively deceptive levels.

What they did do, however, is establish an apparent connection between social discourse and social unrest and the ability to label and discredit such online social media displays as something stemming only from Anti-American Foreign Powers and something to be censored/policed as dangerous by American authorities and corporations.

And that, regardless of who created those accounts and for what reason, is far more terrifying.

It didn’t undermine America. It undermined the ability to express about America.

#Have You Now Or Have You Ever Been A Bot?

## “This origin story underlines how agriculture made cities possible, by providing enough food to feed a settled crowd on a…

“This origin story underlines how agriculture made cities possible, by providing enough food to feed a settled crowd on a regular basis. Cities can’t work without farms, nor without watersheds that provide their water. So as central as cities are to modern civilisation, they are only one aspect of a system.”

## Making/coding/fabbing a thing is not ‘designing the future,’ it’s making a thing that gets dropped into a future al… via…

Making/coding/fabbing a thing is not ‘designing the future,’ it’s making a thing that gets dropped into a future al…

## This future in progress is also full (quite full, possibly) of people. Find out who they will be. Get to know som… via…

This future in progress is also full (*quite* full, possibly) of people. Find out who they will be. Get to know som…