The most sci-fi spatial experience I’ve ever had wasn’t in a skyscraper or some geodesic dome. It was sitting in the climate-controlled antechamber at the Scrovegni Chapel, adjusting to the microclimate designed to protect Giotto’s frescoes. It wa like the airlock of a spaceship.
Hypothetically, if you were, say, a member of Congress sitting on the Financial Services Committee given 5 minutes to question Mark Zuckerberg, what would you ask? 🤔
When the signal gets noisy and processing it gets expensive, most people go tribal to cope but a few turn into asshole free riders arbitraging across tribal epistemologies.
My favorite example of unintended consequences of technology is “when mark zuckerberg created facebook so that he could rank the hottest girls at harvard, he probably didn’t think that one day it could be used as a tool to help undermine democracy” https://t.co/mThwu5kBFY
But should most Americans really be ashamed of getting on a plane to see grandma this holiday season?
The short answer: Probably not. If your flights are purely a luxury, though, that’s another matter.
A small group of frequent fliers, 12 percent of Americans who make more than six round trips by air a year, are responsible for two-thirds of all air travel and, by extension, two-thirds of aviation emissions, according to a new analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research group.
Each of these travelers, on average, emits more than 3 tons of carbon dioxide per year, a substantial amount, particularly by global standards. And the most frequent fliers, those who take more than 9 round trips per year, emit the highest share.
One note: because so many Americans don’t fly, the United States per capita emissions rank much lower, in 11th place, after other high-income countries like Singapore, Finland and Iceland. And some of the fastest growth has been in developing countries, like China and India, where incomes, and a middle class that is more likely to fly, are rising.
Airline emissions could also be lowered with more fuel-efficient planes, of course. Plane manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus have competed to drive down fuel use in their models.
The problem is that air travel is growing many times faster than fuel efficiency gains, which more than cancels out the improvements in fuel efficiency. Meanwhile, the adoption of lower-carbon fuels that can reduce emissions, like biofuels, has been slow.
When I die I’m going to donate my body to the Humanities. I don’t want some STEMlords poking around inside my organs. I would much rather have a bunch of English majors & MFA candidates just sort of have at it & do what they see fit with my corpse. Lord knows they have so little.
artificial neural nets are terrible because they always generate idiosyncratic schematizations that make no sense, can’t be communicated about and break in weird ways
We are so close to being able to release the final Crap App!
It’s gone through full testing by agronomists to check all the calculations, and is already recommended by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, just waiting for final sign-off…https://t.co/ErVvxWndqIpic.twitter.com/cvBMepriV6
Painting of a recluse in his secluded cottage near Shanghai, done in 1360 when the Mongol rule of China was coming to an end. The recluse’s friends & guests left their poems on the painting; one is the descendant of a Tangut general who settled in South China as a Yuan statesman. pic.twitter.com/kAOZhLLxH3
“No mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest it. The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.” This news story reads like it just plagiarised Deleuze and Guattari…https://t.co/fciVeULCTP
Humans performed better on a cognitive task while being observed by a mean robot who insulted their intelligence than while being observed by a nice robot or while not being observed:https://t.co/SEIsRVGtwxpic.twitter.com/E91E2ApRgl
I think it’s time to give up on the fiction that fossil fuel companies will voluntarily reduce their emissions or help with decarbonization. It’s also important to keep this behavior in mind when they come begging for bailouts as clean energy surges and their businesses fail. https://t.co/pv3JwYA3NL
The inability to talk honestly about relative magnitudes led to stupid stuff like the “we’re running out of landfills” panic of the 1990’s, the ban on straws and aviation-shaming today, and will lead to a backlash where we are all driving Hummers in a Venus-like environment
Remember when I said in the Protocols talk that older ideological distinctions are no longer sufficient to distinguish the biggest companies from scene stuff? Yeah I was talking about the ease by which Amazon (the biggest) can start a fest called “Intersect”. It’ll get stranger.
Our music was born from the sounds of jazz, funk, soul, noise - sounds with no other reason to exist, except because they did.. The plan was there is no plan, just start at the beginning, end at the end & party like it’s 1999 -Joe McPhee.
It’s a mistake to think integrating extra musical ideas into music suggests privilege. The opposite is often true - many people think about other stuff by necessity because they have to work; hanging about expensive cities thinking solely about art is only real for the rich now
“Imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there other ways to do things, other ways to be; that there is not just one civilization, and it is good, and it is the way we have to be.”
Japan, a nation grimly accustomed to natural disasters, has invested many billions of dollars in a world-class infrastructure meant to soften nature’s wrath. But with the flooding in areas across central and northern Japan in recent days, the country has been forced to examine more deeply the assumptions that undergird its flood control system.
That is raising a difficult question, for Japan and for the world: Can even the costliest systems be future-proofed in an age of storms made more powerful by climate change?
Yasuo Nihei, a professor of river engineering at the Tokyo University of Science, said that in places around Japan, “we’re observing rain of a strength that we have never experienced. When we look at the costs, I think it’s clear that flood control programs need to be accelerated.”
Even so, he said, “realistically, there will be rains you can’t defend against.”
That has not always been the view of the Japanese government. For centuries, it has seen disaster management as a problem to be solved by engineering.
After a devastating typhoon killed more than 1,200 people in the late 1950s, Japan embarked on a series of public works projects aimed at taming its many rivers. Levees and dams sprung up on nearly every river, and civil engineers sheathed long stretches of riverbeds in concrete.
While the projects have saved countless lives, they are insufficient to meet the challenge of increasingly extreme weather patterns, said Shiro Maeno, a professor of hydraulic engineering at Okayama University.
“In the current state, it wouldn’t be strange for a flood to happen anytime, anywhere,” Mr. Maeno said. “Things we never could have considered have started happening in the last few years.”
Speaking of DB Cooper, my favorite crime history trivia is that in the 70s so many planes were hijacked that the FBI considered building a fake Cuba off the coast of Florida so pilots could fly hijackers there to be arrested.
PAKAN RABAA, Indonesia — This village in West Sumatra, a lush province of volcanoes and hilly rain forests, had a problem with illegal loggers.
They were stealing valuable hardwood with impunity. At first, a group of local people put a fence across the main road leading into the forest, but it was flimsy and proved no match for the interlopers.
So, residents asked a local environmental group for camera traps or some other equipment that might help. In July, they got more than they expected: A treetop surveillance system that uses recycled cellphones and artificial intelligence software to listen for rogue loggers and catch them in the act.
“A lot of people are now afraid to take things from the forest,” Elvita Surianti, who lives in Pakan Rabaa, said days after a conservation technologist from San Francisco installed a dozen listening units by hoisting himself nearly 200 feet into the treetops. “It’s like the police are watching from above.”
The project, experts said in interviews, illustrates both the promise and perils of using artificial intelligence in the complex fight against deforestation.
“We know where the big illegal logging is happening. We can see that from satellite imagery,” said Erik Meijaard, an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Queensland in Australia and an expert on forest and wildlife management in Indonesia. “It’s in the next steps — following up, apprehending people, building a case in court and so on — where things generally go wrong.”
The outcome matters for global warming. Tropical deforestation is a major driver of climate change, accounting for about 8 percent of global emissions globally, according to the World Resources Institute, and forest-based climate mitigation accounts for a quarter of planned emissions reductions through 2030 by countries that signed the Paris climate accord, the 2015 agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
REMINDER THAT YOU CAN JUST KINDA PUT SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THINGS. he’s public domain so you can just kinda use him wherever. i made him break up with a wizard
My sense is that changing liability dynamics due to climate change breaks the business model of PG&E. There’s some apparent jank, in terms of safety spend vs. dividends paid to investors, but I don’t see how this infrastructure requirement still works as a private concern.
Unusual: manuscript with square-bracket glossing that is rather late (15th century) and contains an unusual text/genre for this particular page design (classical, Seneca) (Aix-en-Provence, BM, 1524) pic.twitter.com/yOltjb0MDv
Try to be more like a 91-year-old getting arrested for protesting against climate change rather than a middle-aged wanker sitting on Twitter endlessly calling a 16-year-old girl a freak for not wanting the planet to fucking burn pic.twitter.com/K0adGoIWqh
First class: get a ‘smart’ object that is broken. You have technical support to open it but you need to find out what’s wrong on your own. Mechanical, electronics, software. You have to do the research on your own or ask ‘Masters’ for guidance.
everyone is excited about the new microsoft flight simulator using real-world bing data but *i* am excited about the possibilities of a real-world, planet-scale katamari simulator
“A similar approach is required for the analysis of experiential games such as Dear Esther or Proteus. The challenges such games offer are so minimal that successful progression is almost automatic. However, the vacuity of their moment-to-moment play is overshadowed by a compensatory complexity in the interpretive play spaces that they construct. Indeed, the very absence of immediate challenge is an important constraint in the construction of these higher-level play spaces.”
— Upton, Brian.The Aesthetic of Play. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015.
Simple class excercise — create an instruction for a drawing, pass it to a neighbor, who makes the drawing from the instructions, who passes it to a neighbor who interprets the instructions who passes it to a neighbor to make a new drawing from the new instructions pic.twitter.com/VlFTCFLOEH
“Rewilding AI” My talk on 14 October: The future is more ecological than digital. Therefore AI can: reconnect man and nature; be an infra for ecosystem repair; make AgTech serve agroecology; enable farmer-city, & social-ecological, governance. https://t.co/TPzxoNQNuFpic.twitter.com/knCAbWAIfK
To those who question my so called “opinions”, I would once again want to refer to page 108, chapter 2 in the SR1,5 IPCC report released last year.
There you’ll find our rapidly declining CO2 budgets. This is not opinions or politics. It’s the current best available science. ->
Jardín de Astronomía, Valencia. For @fadesingh Transporting me back to the Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, and meeting the one and only all those years ago. pic.twitter.com/3n4KhixShn
A defining American trait, and the neatest bit of elite inception in history.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ― Ronald Wright
“Ballooning spiders operate within this planetary electric field. When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the surfaces on which the spiders sit, creating enough force to lift them into the air. “
‘Each record is packaged with dust, sand and detritus collected from the Sonoran, Mojave and Great Basin deserts which can be used for further physical manipulation and divergence from the recorded sound matter.’https://t.co/RpzjBwRwiKhttps://t.co/BT8lxHDRW5
“Our gradual attunement to the desert expanse, its climate, rhythms and scales. Layered time. Material wonder. Being part of the world without romanticising wilderness or drawing hard distinctions between the desert and the cities within it…” https://t.co/707RRkHzKRhttps://t.co/xaGDcF9OFg
An Alienist is a person who fights economic cultural totalitarianism with unconventional weapons, using unconventional methods. The Alienist must be a good tactician, to compensate for the fact that the forces ranged in defence of economic cultural totalitarianism are vastly asymmetrical in nature. The Alienist’s weapons may appear inferior to the enemy’s, but from the semantic point of view the Alienist has an undeniable superiority.
IMHO it’s cheap to invoke parallel worlds just to avoid a piddling little yes-and-no time travel paradox. It’s like using an H-bomb to light a joint. There’s always gonna be a tricky way out of any seeming paradox, if you think hard enough.
