A building in Norilsk sits abandoned after a damaged pipe filled it with water. Despite its prosperity, Norilsk faces a huge maintenance problem. The majority of buildings were constructed on pilings, which are now shifting due to melting permafrost. ph Elena Chernyshova
Last month’s global average concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) was nearly 412 parts per million (ppm), up approximately 24 ppm from October 2009. #2009vs2019https://t.co/qjYgQZqqbL
McKenzie Wark (2015) on the ecopolitical factions of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy: On the new planet the Greens are the terraformers, for whom “nature is synonymous with life.” Whereas for the Reds “nature is prior to life, greater than life:” the alien planet itself. pic.twitter.com/p4eLa4np7D
‘The Way is a void,
Used but never filled:
An abyss it is,
Like an Ancestor
From which all things come …
It is like a preface to God …
The student learns by daily increment.
The Way is gained by daily loss.’
Marble quarriers are visible in Carrara, Italy. The blue-grey marble that is extracted here is widely used in sculpture like Michelangelo’s David and in building decor like that of The Pantheon. With more than 650 active or abandoned quarry sites, more marble has been extracted here than any other place on earth.
Climate is a disaster response issue.
Climate is a disaster recovery issue.
Climate is a disaster mitigation issue.
Climate is a disaster preparedness issue. https://t.co/god7Q8CWwc
“Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting, temporarily protecting themselves against the outside that created them and will destroy them” (Mackay 2012, 28). pic.twitter.com/kTg0vRQcI9
test-driving a take that the “tv or cinema” debate is a misunderstanding of the only truly significant distinction between different branches of the arts, which is Going Out vs Staying In
Our glorious algorithmic future. When “garbage in, garbage out” was just the world of programming it was one thing, now it’s bleeding into the real world like the stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
…our nervous systems, our realities, and the evolving forms of media that inevitably insert themselves between the two. A series of seemingly random topics are slowly woven together: shootings, bees, the right’s rules for radicals, climate control, dogs pretending to be children, the oil we eat, and the right of every American to believe whatever they want to believe — your brain’s ear lets nothing remain entirely random. It’s not the content, it’s the edit that shows us what we all know to be true, and it’s the things that one is most tempted to enjoy as harmless entertainment that often turn out to be living animals. Splicing together Occupy mic checks with US militia rallies, FOX news hosts with ecoterrorists, and your own sanity with the home viewing habits of Negativland’s lead vocalist, the Weatherman, when you put the word True next to the word False, a broader reality reveals itself.
During the Cold War, the United States nuked the Marshall Islands 67 times. After it finished nuking the islands, the Pentagon dropped biological weapons on the islands. Once the U.S. was finished, it scooped the irradiated and ruined soil from the islands, poured it into a crater left behind from a nuclear detonation, mixed it all with concrete, and covered the whole thing in a concrete dome. They called it “The Tomb.” According to a report from
The Los Angeles Times, climate change is breaking that dome open. Rising sea levels and temperatures are cracking open The Tomb, threatening to spill nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean.
Cuneiform in Iraqi street art. These are the Sumerian logograms ama-gi4 𒂼 𒄄
In cuneiform texts, the term refers to a reversion to a previous state, like in the manumission or release of slaves. In modern contexts, it has come to mean freedom #IraqProtestspic.twitter.com/WfJTaobK0J
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” - Eliel Saarinen
Which means you need to research the next larger context and not just ‘your’ thing.
A good hack to find interesting ideas to work on is to start with a word that seems to pick out an important concept, but has been rendered annoyingly vacuous by abusive overextension. Examples: strategy, meaning, irony. Other examples?
“And so while it may seem strange and even naïve to look to mythology for tools to understand the earth’s six mass extinctions, we think that in an era dominated by technocratic solutionism (which leaves little room for paradox, ambiguity, and non-modern ways of relating to the world) it is naïve to think that we could rely on the styles of thought and reasoning that brought about the problem in the first place. In this way our project, as well as our work as a collective, calls upon humans to harness the powers of mythical fabulation in order to address our relation to an earth future that we will bring into being (it is a product of human design), but which completely escapes our human capacities for understanding.”
7.1 Extraterrestrial life is rare or non-existent
7.2 No other intelligent species have arisen
7.3 Intelligent alien species lack advanced technology
7.4 Water world hypothesis<br/> 7.5 It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
7.6 It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others
7.7 Periodic extinction by natural events
7.8 Intelligent civilizations are too far apart in space or time
7.9 Lack of resources to spread physically throughout the galaxy
7.10 Lack of desire to live on planets
7.11 It is cheaper to transfer information for exploration
7.12 Human beings have not existed long enough
7.13 We are not listening properly
7.14 Civilizations broadcast detectable radio signals only for a brief period of time
7.15 They tend to isolate themselves
7.16 Colonization is not the norm
7.17 Outcomes between all and nothing
7.18 They are too alien
7.19 Everyone is listening but no one is transmitting
7.20 Earth is deliberately not contacted
7.21 Earth is purposely isolated (planetarium hypothesis)
7.22 It is dangerous to communicate
7.23 They are here unacknowledged
Scientists: there is a zombie outbreak
Think tanks: The zombies are a natural cycle
Politicians: I’m not a zombie expert
Business: click here to calculate your personal footprint #walkingless Media: Let’s listen to this zombie denier! (undisclosed: he eats brains)
Public: *eaten*
“global computing infrastructure has become so concentrated around just 10 or 15 major hubs ..that the internet itself has become brittle and bottlenecked…This fragility has made it vulnerable to sabotage and natural disasters” #infinitedetailhttps://t.co/UniEmwnYfr
I finally realized why I generally dislike consuming audio and video: I’m not able to use any of my strengths in reading speed/comprehension, info processing, note taking, deeper reflection, & skipping/scanning. It’s like being stuck in the slow lane with steering wheel locked
People criticize tech companies for putting money above principle, but Github is holding on to a $100K ICE contract despite employee anger, and Facebook says it will continue to sell toxic political ads that are 0.5% of revenue. These are clear examples of putting principle first
To celebrate halloween we trained a net that creates endless vignettes about murdering humans, torture, necrophilia—kinda funny and campy like Evil Dead—using one of the greatest datasets ever— cannibal corpse lyrics
😵🗡️🤖🔪😵🗡️🤖
Neural network generating death metal, via livestream 24/7.
🤖Audio generated with modified SampleRNN trained on Cannibal Corpse
🤖Lyrics generated with pretrained 117M GPT2 fine-tuned on Cannibal Corpse
🤖Meat images generated with BigGAN interpolations in the #butchershop latent space
🤖You can generate all kinds of gross stuff on artbreeder https://artbreeder.com/i?k=ff84821d51… 🤖Vocals separated using Wave-U-Net (yup it separates death growls)
🤖Read more about our scientific research into eliminating humans from music https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06633
Excerpt from this story from Mother Nature Network:
It’s been seven years since Hurricane Sandy ransacked the East Coast. And, while bigger storms — with even more devastating impacts — have certainly come along, Sandy was unique because it helped start a movement toward resilience and nature-based solutions.
What does this mean?
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the U.S. Department of the Interior did something unusual; it provided more than $300 million in funding for resilience projects. Not just recovery — the building-back of damaged areas or the clean-up of debris — but the strengthening and restoration of vital natural systems like marshes, wetlands and rivers that can actually help protect people and wildlife from storm impacts.
“This really was an investment in the future,” explains Rick Bennett, who coordinated the Hurricane Sandy resilience effort for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It wasn’t just about fixing what was damaged by Sandy, but figuring out how we can improve environmental conditions so that fish, wildlife and people can be more resilient to flooding and storm impacts.”
I’ve been tinkering with the @edenproject Dazzlebug citizen science installation, been having issues because it’s too popular! 139 bug hunters yesterday afternoon alone… pic.twitter.com/q9nDjoFF04
In preparation of MoneyLab #7 in Amsterdam on November 14-15 I made the following link list. Many of the topics will be discussed there. No coincidence much of it is related to the Libra developments.
Best, Geert Lovink
MakerDAO decentralized stablecoin, collateral loans, and community governance
ETHBerlinZwei is a hackathon, a culture festival, an educational event, a platform for hacktivism, and a community initiative to push the decentralized ecosystem forward
Alt-C is an installation by Michal Sedbon that uses electricity produced by plants to power a single board computer mining a cryptocurrency (via Tatjana Seitz)
Welcome to the RaveEnabler Unlock your Cryptorave #10 entry by donating your CPU. Support your local Cryptorave network mine Monero (XMR) and embody another identity https://0b673cce.xyz/
-Out in June-Finn Brunton: Digital Cash, The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13537.html
Quinn Dupont speaks to Finn Brunton about his book Digital Cash
“Data as oil,” “data as property,” “data as water,” “data as labor,” and “data as nuclear waste,” and the list goes on.
The more I think about it, the more I land on a new metaphor — data as a red herring https://t.co/vvYIgEDI5i
Australian water rats have learned how to kill cane toads, eat their hearts and carve out their organs with “surgical precision”. In only two years, highly intelligent native rakali in the Kimberly region of Western Australia discovered how to safely destroy the deadly toad – by removing its gallbladder and feasting on the heart.The rats even targeted the biggest, most poisonous toads they could find, leaving their bodies strewn by the riverside, according to research published in Australian Mammalogy.
The researchers hypothesise that the rats either learned from scratch – by figuring out which parts of the toad made them sick – or already had previous experience from eating Australian native toxic frogs.
Other animals, like crows and kites, have been observed turning cane toads inside out to avoid the toxic skin and only eat non-poisonous organs, the report said. The rats face threats from pollution of waterways, can be caught in fishing line and discarded balloons, and hunted by stray cats, foxes and dogs.
I think the secret to being a productive programmer is to relentlessly accumulate tricks for getting interesting things done with the least amount of effort
Then keep an eye out for opportunities to apply those tricks for the most possible leverage
‘I see no reason to suppose that the air about us and the heavenly spaces over us may not be peopled by intelligences, or entities, or forms of life, as unintelligible to us as we are to the insects. … [We] are part of an infinite series…’
—#Whitehead
Just Taking You Apart And Arranging You Into A Circle I Try To Put You Back Together But Carelessly I’ve Lost Too Many Pieces Whoops Now You’re The Milky Way
“Certainly there had been trouble coming. Anyone who had had any experience of wars would have seen it coming long before the afternoon that Mack ran down Morris the Florist."
Chapter 4, The Summer Before the War, The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill
“The battle for freedom is not fought alone on the great fronts. It is fought in every home, in every community, in every state in the world. it is fought in the mind and heart of every man.”
Jack Whiteside Parsons - Freedom is a Two-edged Sword
This story makes me think of the mentality of destruction. Put a human and shovel together, and the human digs. Put a human on a bulldozer, and the two together destroy. The digging may have nefarious purposes and it might be destructive, but even if it is, the damage is relatively insignificant. We can’t say that about the bulldozer. What does an engineer think when he plans where the bulldozer scrapes? What does the politician think when she/he approves the plan, or sees images of its outcome? What does the driver of the bulldozer think as she or she watches the blade of the bulldozer destroy everything in the way? I have a hard time imagining how a moral person can allow any of that to happen.
Excerpt from this story from the
Sierra Club:
As shocking as the Trump administration’s most recent demolition of the desert wilderness has been, scientists and Interior Department officials say that it is just a continuation of the destruction that has been unfolding for years as US-Mexico border militarization has intensified.
Archaeologists Rick and Sandy Martynec are among those who have witnessed the erosion of environmental protections firsthand. For the past 25 years, the Martynecs, independent researchers, have been conducting archaeological surveys in Arizona along the US-Mexico border. In a roughly 20-by-20-mile stretch of desert, the husband and wife team has documented more than 600 distinct archeological sites, ranging from 10,000-year-old Paleo-Indian campsites to O’odham farming villages inhabited as recently as the 18th century.
As they’ve documented the rich historical and cultural records, the couple has seen a fragile desert ecosystem become a casualty of US border policy. About two decades ago, when the Martynecs were doing survey work in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge at Las Playas—a series of dry lakebeds that once filled during the summer monsoon season—they frequently encountered wildlife, including coyotes, mountain lions, and more than a dozen bird species such as hummingbirds and owls. The pooling of the water in the lakebeds, which lie on both sides of the border, has sustained this unique desert environment.
But they have also observed something else: As the number of migrants coming across the border increased in the early 2000s, so too did the roads within the refuge, 90 percent of which is designated wilderness. Small, rarely used dirt tracks were becoming well-traveled multilane roads used primarily by Border Patrol agents. In the post-9/11 period, Border Patrol was granted expansive new powers and funding to police the border. In one instance, Rick Martynec measured a frequently used Border Patrol “corridor” that was at least 200 yards wide. “Until you actually see it, walk it, it just can’t be imagined,” Martynec said.
The new roads have begun to change the way water moves in this part of the Sonoran Desert. Now when seasonal rains occur, the water no longer flows into the playas but often runs in torrents along the roadways. “Almost every conceivable water source has been choked off by roads and by dams,” Martynec said.
This has had a devastating impact on the region’s ecology. Entire groves of mesquite trees and vegetation surrounding the playas have withered. The birds and mammals have largely disappeared. Martynec said that they haven’t seen a coyote out there in five or six years. The biologically complex desert soil—which was once home to ephemeral grasses and small trees and which can take decades to recover once disturbed—looks like a cracked moonscape. Around 2010, after completing their archaeological research in the region, some of it carried out on behalf of the Cabeza Prieta refuge, the Martynecs wrote a separate seven-page paper titled “The Death of Las Playas?”
The end of the story has an interesting perspective:
Due north of Las Playas is the Growler Valley, one of the most remote and deadly routes for migrants traveling through the desert. For the past several years, the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths has enlisted volunteers to leave water and food at various locations within the refuge.
But the Trump administration, with assistance from the Fish and Wildlife Service and other land-management agencies, has begun to crack down on their activities. At one trial, a federal judge said that the activists had undermined “the national decision to maintain the refuge in its pristine nature.” Earlier this year, four members of the group were convicted and several more currently face trial for, among other things, violating the Wilderness Act.
