Agricultural development is seen on the plain of Fucino in Italy. The area is known for the quality of the vegetables that are grown here — in particular the potatoes, carrots, and radishes. What is now an entire plain filled with farms was once Fucine Lake, the third largest lake in Italy. The lake was drained in 1877 to make farming possible here and now accounts for roughly 25% of the agricultural production in the region.
Nicole Prause is a sex researcher who wanted to design a gender-neutral orgasm-measuring tool that would fit in the anus and detect and measure pelvic contractions but all the buttplugs she tried to modify (“We ordered like 20 of these butt plugs off Amazon, and it messed up my recommendation engine for all time”) were designed to be pistoned in and out, and thus had a taper that made it prone to popping out at the moment of orgasm.
Prause tweeted about her troubles and forged a partnership with a German cosplayer who had extensive 3D printing experience; they designed a research-optimized butt-plug they call the “anal pneumatic base for psychophysiology research” and released it as an open source hardware design that you can download from Thingiverse and 3D print at home or work.
Classic contributions includingKingsley the Partick Thistle mascot;‘yer maw’ jokes; ‘yer da sells Avon’ jokes; anything Lewis Capaldi tweets, and “maw bought aldi shower gel that smells like fairy liquid so I’ve been cutting about all day smelling like a fucking plate” (@adamfraser14, August 2015).
For many people both outside Scotland and within, Twitter has provided a brand new view into the Scots language and its varieties in all their sweary, hysterical, sometimes incomprehensible glory. Has the platform spearheaded a resurgence amongst its young users or is this something more profound altogether?
The Scots language has been spoken in Scotland for centuries and still exists across the country today. It’s comprised of numerous different dialects – which can differ from each other quite dramatically – and is one of three official languages in Scotland, alongside English and Gaelic. In 2001 it was officially recognised under theEuropean Charter for Minority Languages.
“Scots was the national language of a country that doesn’t exist anymore,” explains writer and presenter Alistair Heather, who writes a Scots column in Scotland’s The National newspaper. “As Scotland was amalgamated into Great Britain, Scots fell away from being a national language because it didn’t have a nation anymore.
Imperfect but useful therapies have been the rule, even as we refine our understanding of diseases. In spite of criticism, antidepressants are still the best available treatment for depression https://t.co/TkvqyEcvVgpic.twitter.com/W7xYuxPDlW
Slightly annoying that ‘tristinction’ is not a word (it should be, considering 'distinction’ comes from Ancient Greek δίς [dís, “twice”]). 'Threefold distinction’ is a poor alternative.
— Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H (@PeterSjostedtH) July 11, 2019
I’m on a mission today to reconnect / follow up on leads / collaborate - apologies if you’re waiting for a response (it’ll come/ nudge me), and secondly, if you want to reach out to work together, now’s the time (my PhD is over! Disclaimer: cant promise anything, but will reply)
Vladimir Jankélévitch. Wrote a wonderful book on Bergson that influenced the latter’s own thought, and he’s one of the rare philosophers to take music seriously.
Then there was the system of the strata. On the intensive continuum, the strata fashion forms and form matters into substances. In combined emissions, they make the distinction between expressions and contents, units of expression and units of content, for example, signs and particles. In conjunctions, they separate flows, assigning them relative movements and diverse territorialities, relative deterritorializations and complementary reterritorializations. Thus the strata set up everywhere double articulations animated by movements: forms and substances of content and forms and substances of expression constituting segmentary multiplicities with relations that are determinable in every case. Such are the strata. Each stratum is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are really distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition.
All radicals should be encouraged to form institutions. Much moral high-ground posturing and insufferable certitude are rooted in not yet having reproduced pre-ideological institutional pathologies that are the root cause of most things they critique on ideological grounds.
— Venkatesh “Tactical in LA” Rao (@vgr) July 7, 2019
The Facsimile Machine, rejected by multiple publishers in the mid 1960s , before its author finally abandoned the ms, was a shockingly prescient but fundamentally undramatic anticipation of fax technology.
In MobilBye: Attacking ADAS with Camera Spoofing, a group of Ben Gurion security researchers describe how they were able to defeat a Renault Captur’s “Level 0” autopilot (Level 0 systems advise human drivers but do not directly operate cars) by following them with drones that projected images of fake roadsigns for a 100ms instant – too short for human perception, but long enough for the autopilot’s sensors.
Such an attack would leave no physical evidence behind and could be used to trick cars into making maneuvers that compromised the safety or integrity of their passengers and other users of the road – from unexpected swerves to sudden speed-changes to detours into unsafe territory.
As Geoff Manaugh writes on BLDGBLOG, “They are like flickering ghosts only cars can perceive, navigational dazzle imperceptible to humans.”
The “imperceptible to humans” part is the most interesting thing about this: we tend to think of electronic sensors’ ability to exceed human sensory capacity as a feature: but when you’re relying on a “human in the loop” to sanity-check an algorithm’s interpretations of the human-legible world, attackers’ ability to show the computer things that the human can’t see is a really interesting and gnarly problem.
Word of the day: “nefelibata” –– literally a “cloud-walker”; that is, a daydreamer, one who wanders lost in thought or wonder (Portuguese; poetic. From the Ancient Greek νεφελοβάτης, nephelobátēs, “one who walks the clouds”).
Also–– esp. in art or literature––a rule-breaker. pic.twitter.com/bnZg5VvsrO
— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) July 6, 2019
“Spinoza’s system is a white pantheism; that of M. Bataille is a black pantheism.”
– Sartre going for a sick burn but actually making Bataille sound great.
“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
Regarding this “plant forests!” thing: I’m going to plug Joe Mercer’s @RCAarchitecture ADS1 thesis project from 2017/18 which argued a new belt of food infrastructure around London could allow for substantial reforestation and rewilding https://t.co/50gQVYUecvpic.twitter.com/Z7Yymlsgcc
Switching from clay to plastic at the scale of Indian tea-drinking was such an all-round disaster: environment, design/experience, flavor…
I still have these in memoriam. https://t.co/rzSvhLurnVpic.twitter.com/dDlPnAxX2Z
Shit, just realized I operate with an unconscious 2x2 in how I engage with people online. X-axis: harmless to dangerous, Y-axis, can’t take seriously/can take seriously. Dangerous+can’t take seriously is the basic avoidance category if you want to have a good time online.
— Venkatesh “Live from DTLA” Rao (@vgr) July 5, 2019
day 35: the algorithm now correctly identifies human figures and faces, but continues to insist that all brains are clocks 🤔 pic.twitter.com/I78kVTiQf3
“First of all, I am a real Minimalist, because I don’t do very much. I know some minimalists who call themselves minimalist, but they do loads of minimalism. That is cheating. I really don’t do very much.”—Robert Wyatt pic.twitter.com/r3MZMeAMbv
I introduced a remarkable person (Ai Weiwei) to a remarkable tree (the Great Oriental Plane Tree) this afternoon. Unsurprisingly, they got on very well. “It is a family”, said AWW on entering the tree’s green-gold space; just so, a branching, rooting, tangled entity. pic.twitter.com/bxqJhNin7J
— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) July 4, 2019
“The White House allowed staffers to enter a lottery to receive up to 10 tickets per person — a sign of the administration’s rush to fill up that space on the mall” https://t.co/bSeB6l0zP1
Our indoor perma-farm is thriving! Applying the principles of circular farming, reuse of waste, companion planting and soil health for indoor agriculture 🌱🌾 pic.twitter.com/wzZMAItM41
Cool article with some great quotes from @Monica_Gagliano going out to bat for our more than human relatives “Gagliano is having none of it” // https://t.co/Tk30PFiXj4
— Your roots are in the infinite (@thejaymo) July 3, 2019
sound nerds: there’s a new auditory illusion. if you replace a repeating texture with white noise, your ear hallucinates the continuation of the texture (on the scale of seconds). i imagine this explains some nuances behind shoegaze and noise music https://t.co/3yUe2hNFhP
The sense of time I have as a millennial is so weird…
1970: About 30 years ago
1980: About 20 years ago
1990: About 10 years ago
2000: About 10 years ago
2010: About 1,000 years ago
2016: About 10,000 years ago
2018: About 1,000 years ago
Last week: About 1,000 years ago
In this Overview, the San Juan River is shown meandering through southeastern Utah, not far from Goosenecks State Park. It is a major tributary of the Colorado River and provides drainage to the Four Corners region of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. The San Juan is one of the muddiest rivers in North America, carrying an average of 25 million U.S. tons of silt and sediment each year.
Ever notice how the humanities and social sciences are expected to understand scientific research method but scientists don’t have to understand ours? In other news, it’s hella difficult writing a conference abstract about discourse analysis that scientists will accept.
— anne would rather be with the 🐑🐑🐑 (@annegalloway) July 1, 2019
Biologists analyzed 150 samples from across the U.K. and concluded that British knotweed was all a clone of that original plant, now one of the world’s largest. The DNA was identical. Not just one species but a single plant had conquered the entire UK. https://t.co/pp5IaMiIFO
vns matrix archive is finally live. coded by the brilliant @francesdath the slime archive has taken over a year to build and has about 120 pgs (so far) of essays, projects, events, exhibitions + a hectic yet restrained palette that will phosphor burn you into the next timejump. pic.twitter.com/POc56GYwkY
