If the first wave provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need…

“If the first wave provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have. If we see from within anxiety, we haven’t yet performed the “reversal of perspective” as the Situationists called it – seeing from the standpoint of desire instead of power. Today’s main forms of resistance still arise from the struggle against boredom, and, since boredom’s replacement by anxiety, have ceased to be effective.”

–Plan C | Plan C (viadesignedconflictterritories)

Australian military and intelligence personnel involved in controversial US drone targeting operations could face crimes against…

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Australian military and intelligence personnel involved in controversial US drone targeting operations could face crimes against humanity charges, according to former prime minister Malcolm Fraser.

Mr Fraser, Liberal prime minister from 1975–83, said Australians working at the US-run Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap - which reportedly plays a key role in locating drone targets - do not have the same legal protection as their US counterparts.

“The greater danger is the use to which Pine Gap is now put,” Mr Fraser told RN Breakfast.

“Initially Pine Gap was collecting information - it was, if you like, listening in.

"It’s now targeting weapons systems. It’s also very much involved in the targeting of drones.

"The purposes for which drones are used are going to be outlawed at some point by international agreement, and the Americans might believe that Americans involved in those programs are given legal cover under the War Powers Resolution passed after 9/11.

”[It] gives totally unlimited power, no geographic limits, no time limits, using any means available or that might become available to an American president to do so.

“But that resolution gives no legal cover to Australians operating out of Pine Gap who are complicit in finding, identifying, locating the so-called target.”

”

–Drone strikes based on work at Pine Gap could see Australians charged, Malcolm Fraser says - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

What’s striking about a lot of art currently coming out of the Middle East, and the Gulf states in particular, is its relative…

What’s striking about a lot of art currently coming out of the Middle East, and the Gulf states in particular, is its relative lack of interest in tradition, reverence, continuity – all values that the west foists on other cultures. In her 2012 memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth, Qatar-born film-maker Sophia Al-Maria, who has collaborated with Al Qadiri in the past, elaborates on her “Gulf futurism” theory: “If you think of history as something defined by the laws of physics, and the discovery of gas and oil wealth as a sort of event horizon from which there is no going back … what’s happened is a wormhole stargate mindfuck.”

The scale and intensity of the warp-speed modernisation programmes in so many Gulf states – their steel-and-glass citadels under baking hot suns, their labour camps full of imported labourers from Asia – are perhaps better chronicled by science fiction, video games and HD entertainment than by more traditional forms of journalism or sociology. “There’s been a generational quantum leap in Kuwait,” says Al Qadiri. “The houses are not made of mud any more, but of concrete. People don’t sleep on the roofs of their houses. There’s AC.

Fatima Al Qadiri: ‘Me and my sister played video games as Saddam invaded’| The Guardian

Computer Game Reveals ‘Space-Time’ Neurons in the Eye

vision, sight, retina, physiology, spacetime, neuroscience, perception, games

Enter the EyeWire project, an online game that recruits volunteers to map out those cellular contours within a mouse’s retina. The game was created and launched in December 2012 by a team led by H. Sebastian Seung, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Players navigate their way through the retina one 4.5-micrometer tissue block at a time, coloring the branches of neurons along the way. Most of the effort gets done in massive online competitions between players vying to map out the most volume. (Watch a video of a player walking through a tissue block here.) By last week, the 120,000 EyeWire players had completed 2.3 million blocks. That may sound like a lot, but it is less than 2% of the retina.

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/05/computer-game-reveals-space-time-neurons-eye

Could Soylent Replace Food?

food, food futures, futures, soylent, soylent green, supliments, diet, reductionism, food as fuel

Rhinehart removed the Soylent. In the formula that he and his teammates have settled on, the major food groups are all accounted for: the lipids come from canola oil; the carbohydrates from maltodextrin and oat flour; and the protein from rice. To that, they’ve added fish oil (for omega-3s; vegans can substitute flaxseed oil), and doses of various vitamins and minerals: magnesium, calcium, electrolytes. Rhinehart is reluctant to associate Soylent with any flavor, so for now it just contains a small amount of sucralose, to mask the taste of the vitamins. That seems to fit his belief that Soylent should be a utility. “I think the best technology is the one that disappears,” he said. “Water doesn’t have a lot of taste or flavor, and it’s the world’s most popular beverage.” He hoisted the pitcher of yellowish-beige liquid. “Everything your body needs,” he said. “Do you want to try some?”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/12/140512fa_fact_widdicombe?currentPage=all&mobify=0

The 60,000 feet bug

ATC, air traffic, bug, computers, error, glitch

On Wednesday at about 2 p.m., according to sources, a U-2 spy plane, the same type of aircraft that flew high-altitude spy missions over Russia 50 years ago, passed through the airspace monitored by the L.A. Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, Calif. The L.A. Center handles landings and departures at the region’s major airports, including Los Angeles International (LAX), San Diego and Las Vegas. The computers at the L.A. Center are programmed to keep commercial airliners and other aircraft from colliding with each other. The U-2 was flying at 60,000 feet, but the computers were attempting to keep it from colliding with planes that were actually miles beneath it. Though the exact technical causes are not known, the spy plane’s altitude and route apparently overloaded a computer system called ERAM, which generates display data for air-traffic controllers. Back-up computer systems also failed.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/spy-plane-fries-air-traffic-control-computers-shuts-down-lax-n95886

English minus the non-Germanic words

language, physics, english, geman, germanic, conlang

The firststuffs have their being as motes called *unclefts*. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called *bulkbits*. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make *bindings*. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ

Granted, most artists do not produce individual works of enduring significance. But art is not the product of individual…

“Granted, most artists do not produce individual works of enduring significance. But art is not the product of individual geniuses; it is the product of an artistic community that collectively produce something of great value. Without mediocre artists this community could not exist. The idea that we are only justified in pursuing an activity if we are doing something irreplaceable is silly. Human communities do not depend on this kind of perfectionism but rather on people making a contribution even if it not maximal.”

–3quarksdaily: Attacking the Value of Art is Not a Good Strategy for Altruists

Workers of the World, Faint!

work, religion, fainting, cambodia, neak ta, spirits, mass fainting, industrial action, inaction, an

These days, when neak ta appear on the factory floor — inducing mass faintings among workers and shouting commands at managers — they are helping the cause of Cambodia’s largely young, female and rural factory workforce by registering a kind of bodily objection to the harsh daily regimen of industrial capitalism: few days off; a hard bed in a wooden barracks; meager meals of rice and a mystery curry, hastily scarfed down between shifts. These voices from beyond are speaking up for collective bargaining in the here and now, expressing grievances much like the workers’ own: a feeling that they are being exploited by forces beyond their control, that the terms of factory labor somehow violate an older, fairer moral economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/opinion/workers-of-the-world-faint.html?_r=0

Color Flood II

color, animation, js, d3.js, canvas

First, Wilson’s algorithm generates a uniform spanning tree of the 960×500 canvas. (This is a computationally-expensive process and is run in a background worker.) Then, a breadth-first traversal of the spanning tree floods the canvas with color. Compare this to Prim’s algorithm.

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11363008

Maker Faire Shenzhen highlights the global politics of the “maker movement”

gvoss, maker, DIY, corporatism, supply chains, hacking, making, manufacturing, China, R&D, absorbti

In ‘Maker to Market’ spaces, things can get even messier. Several of the companies on this path depend on ‘open innovation’ models that allow them to engage with keen communities, providing ongoing feedback and mass customisation. This also allows customers to be used as a cheap form of R&D; a practice common in the creative and culture industries, described by Miya Tokumitsu as ‘Do what you love’ where a volunteer workforce works for passion and social capital rather than actual hard cash.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/apr/24/making-in-china-maker-faire-shenzhen-global-politics-maker-movement

The inspiration for the design was based on different aspects: we had to keep the logistics in mind and had a very short time to…

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The inspiration for the design was based on different aspects: we had to keep the logistics in mind and had a very short time to build the station – only four months. From the beginning, we had to think about how to transport the building materials to Antarctica, and what sort of containers to use. And then we thought, why not use shipping containers as the actual building blocks of the structure?

So, the basic or primary structure of the Bharathi station is made of 134 shipping containers. We used high-cube containers because of the height of the rooms. Ordinary containers would have been a bit low. We used these containers as the primary construction. But if you only use containers, like Lego stones (that’s the basic idea), you miss the insulation and aerodynamic approach. That’s the reason we wrapped a facade around the containers. The idea was to use the containers like suitcases to transport further building materials, such as the facade, to Antarctica. Once you arrive, you take out the facade and wrap it around the container as insulation, like a second skin.

”

–IceLab: Building the Indian research station Bharathi in Antarctica | British Council Voices (viaiamdanw)