The hole in Bucharest that’s become a nature reserve

involuntary park, park, wilderness, urban wilderness, Romania, Bucharest, feral, failure, dark ecolo

This is the richest and wildest park in Bucharest – but this wasn’t supposed to happen at all. Under communism, the plan was for Vacaresti to be filled with water; in the idiotic capitalist years of the mid-2000s, it was meant to be a concert venue. Both projects collapsed – and the zone became a metaphor for the failures of Romania’s development under both communist and free market principles. Yet its teeming wildlife, lawless beauty and inhabitants of drifters, scraping a living by harvesting the wild, lay the foundations for how this troubled country could prosper.

http://www.citymetric.com/skylines/hole-bucharest-s-become-nature-reserve–398

Metallosphaera prunae, isolated from a smoldering heap on a uranium mine in Thüringen, Germany, could be viewed as a…

“Metallosphaera prunae, isolated from a smoldering heap on a uranium mine in Thüringen, Germany, could be viewed as a “spontaneous mutant” of Metallosphaera sedula, an isolate from Pisciarelli Solfatara near Naples. Metallosphaera prunae tolerated triuranium octaoxide (U3O8) and soluble uranium [U(VI)] to a much greater extent than M. sedula. Within 15 min following exposure to “U(VI) shock,” M. sedula, and not M. prunae, exhibited transcriptomic features associated with severe stress response.”

–inUranium extremophily is an adaptive, rather than intrinsic, feature for extremely thermoacidophilic Metallosphaera species.

Should any society that can’t deal with the waste it produces be allowed, allow itself, to produce anything new? Why should we…

“Should any society that can’t deal with the waste it produces be allowed, allow itself, to produce anything new? Why should we be celebrating the creative use of computers, electronics, media systems, when they are simply plastic wrapped condensations of heavy metals and other poisons? Can we imagine a technology that is able to disentangle itself from technocracy, the idea that all the world’s problems can be solved by the application of a narrow band of productised science?”

–Matthew Fuller

How to keep bees the easy way

The Idler, bees, beekeeping, urban apiary, ecology, Abbé Warré, The People's Hive

“On my London rooftop I have five People’s Hives, a system devised by a French clergyman Abbé Warré (1867-1951) to be simple, economical and bee-friendly. […] The People’s Hive is a simple series of identical boxes with wooden bars at the top which politely suggest to the bees where they might conveniently start building their comb – no compulsion, the bees are wild animals and will do what they like!”

http://idler.co.uk/article/how-to-keep-bees-the-easy-way/

Немецкий военный бункер, выдолбленный во фьорде глубиной в 200 метров на границе с Россией. Во время 2 Мировой немцы…

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Немецкий военный бункер, выдолбленный во фьорде глубиной в 200 метров на границе с Россией. Во время 2 Мировой немцы обстреливали русских торпедами отсюда. (via http://instagram.com/p/uI003drufS/)

Undulatus Asperatus, a new cloud type

clouds, cloud appreciation, WMO, Cloud Atlas, undulatus asperatus, CAS

In an attempt to codify cloud vocabulary and aid in weather prediction, the World Meteorological Association (WMO) published the first International Cloud Atlas in 1896. The Atlas divides clouds into 10 genus, 26 species, and 31 varieties, and includes important tips for cloud identification as well as appropriately whimsical descriptions—cloud species range from praecipitatio, “to fall (down a precipice)” to castellanus, “a castle of a fortified town.” Though many updates and new editions have been published since, no new cloud types have been added to the Atlas since cirrus intortus (“an entangled lock of hair”) was added in 1951. Until now.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/10/10/undulatus_asperatus_a_new_cloud_type.html

Fracking Co. Makes Pink Drill Bits for Cancer

cancer, pink washing, fracking, breast cancer, publicity, philanthropy

Today in “You can’t make this shit up”: Baker Hughes, a giant oil-field services company that provides hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) products and services, has donated $100,000 to the Susan G. Komen Foundation in support of breast-cancer research. And in the most egregious example of pink-washing we’ve ever seen, the company is producing 1,000 pink drill bits that will “serve as a reminder of the importance of supporting research, treatment, screening, and education to help find the cures for this disease.” There’s at least one weird little thing about this pairing: Fracking, one of the services that Baker Hughes provides and the drill bits are used for, has some serious links to cancer itself.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/fracking-co-makes-pink-drill-bits-for-cancer.html

Monodraw - an ASCII-editor for the Mac under development. It’s presented primarily as a way to model ideas and structures,…

text-mode:

Monodraw - an ASCII-editor for the Mac under development. It’s presented primarily as a way to model ideas and structures, rather than making art.

Monodraw allows you to easily create text-based art – like diagrams, layouts, flow charts and visually represent algorithms, data structures, binary formats and more. 

source. h/t: prostheticknowledge. (and yes, technically it’s Unicode and not ASCII)

Beyond its impact on human well-being, however, food is equally deeply entwined with ecological health. While Rhinehart…

“Beyond its impact on human well-being, however, food is equally deeply entwined with ecological health. While Rhinehart daydreams about a future in which Soylent is synthesised by algae in energy-neutral bioreactors, for now, its raw ingredients are purchased from a variety of sources across the US and China. An educated consumer might guess at the possible growing and processing conditions behind the eggs, broccoli and chicken thighs in their shopping basket but, in the case of Soylent’s chemical constituents, the dislocation is complete: the world’s largest manufacturer of the ergocalciferol (Vitamin D2 on Soylent’s ingredient list) is a factory in China’s Sichuan province, whose raw material is grease derived from Australian sheep’s wool.”

–Would we opt out of food if given the chance? – Nicola Twilley – Aeon (viaiamdanw)

The Null Hypothesis Loves You and Wants You To Be Happy

science, perception, replication, theory, Meredith L Patterson, Medium, belief, apophenia, pareidoli

Relaxing the null hypothesis makes for great storytelling, but it’s an unsettling way to live. Which information and which perspectives we take into account, when we try to decide whether a pattern we’ve matched is real or an apophenic false alarm, affects our ability to determine whether something has gone away or whether we’ve just stopped believing in it. In the praxis of science we try to keep the false alarm rate down with things like study size and statistical inference and meta-analyses and replication, and we still get it wrong a lot.

https://medium.com/@maradydd/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-and-wants-you-to-be-happy–3189413d8cd0

“The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils.” Certainly the witch hunters are no longer among us, and we no…

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“The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils.” Certainly the witch hunters are no longer among us, and we no longer take seriously the accusation of devil worshipping that was once levelled at witches. Rather, our milieu is defined by the modern pride in being able to interpret both witchery and witch hunting in terms of social, linguistic, cultural, or political constructs and beliefs.

What this pride ignores, however, is that we are the heirs of an operation of cultural and social eradication – the forerunner of what was committed elsewhere in the name of civilization and reason. Anything that classifies the memory of such operations as unimportant or irrelevant only furthers the success of those operations. In this sense, our pride in our critical power to “know better” than both the witches and the witch hunters makes us the heirs of witch hunting.

”

–Isabelle Stengers.Reclaiming Animism

Reclaiming animism does not mean, then, that we have ever been animist. Nobody has ever been animist because one is never…

“Reclaiming animism does not mean, then, that we have ever been animist. Nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist “in general,” only in terms of assemblages that generate metamorphic transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected – and also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages, since it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim.”

–Isabelle Stengers.Reclaiming Animism

Survivors

oldest living things, Rachel Sussman, photography, life, death, decay, growth

Of the thirty ancient living things that Sussman has photographed, two have since died. “One was a thirteen-thousand-year-old ‘underground forest’ outside a botanical garden in Pretoria,” she said. “Apparently, they changed the traffic pattern and just bulldozed right over it. The other was a thirty-five-hundred-year-old tree just outside Orlando, Florida—actually, the original tourist attraction before Disney. Meth heads snuck into it to do meth, and they accidentally burned it down.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/survivors–9

INFOGRAPHIC: China’s high-speed rail vision

prostheticknowledge:

INFOGRAPHIC: China’s high-speed rail vision

The South China Morning Post has put together an infographic visualizing a potentional cross-continental high-speed rail network that would not only connect London to China, but also America and Singapore:

China is proposing five high-speed international railway networks that would ultimately connect the UK at one end, America at another and Singapore in the south, with China in the centre. The large number of countries involved requires Herculean efforts of diplomacy, technology and economics.

More at South China Morning Post here