While it’s certainly true that dystopian science fiction has become popular in the last few decades, it doesn’t follow that no one has been putting forward more optimistic pictures of tomorrow. Just because Stephenson and others embraced the dark images of cyberpunk, environmental doom, and whatnot doesn’t mean everyone did. From the 1980s to the early 2010s, the late author Iain Banks (who I have nominated for canonization) spun fantastic visions of a post-scarcity society he dubbed The Culture, which was full of artificially-intelligent robots and ships, giant space colonies, individuals who lived almost forever and regularly swapped genders, and seemingly endless, endless wonder. Similarly, Star Trek went off television from 2005 to 2017, but its vision of post-scarcity goodwill and polite liberalism — what a friend described as the Enlightenment-on-speed — continued all the while on the big screen.
My short response to recent developments is: music communities might do well to consider scene wealth fund models for travel, visas, recording time, journalism, shows #interdependence
Also, way to design for the future within the parameters of the present. Just because there hasn’t been a Cat 6 yet doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be leaning into heavier weather with your Bright Green designs https://t.co/n0SSPCJmgEhttps://t.co/bQ1DhAs9SQ
The fact that Amazon had to make a separate version of Alexa that secures your personal data for healthcare use should be all you need to know about not letting one in your damn home in the first place https://t.co/Lr9j5JrJZR
well stirred #sixpack of old and new music - brought to you by the @farmersmanual_ network and neighbourhood - high quality audio, many free downoads, trendsetter supply chain est. 95 https://t.co/7xczM0lAao
Resources developed by the Climate Impacts Group at University of Washington for tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Oregon, Nevada, and Utah’s Great Basin may prove useful to tribes like the Quinault and the Makah. The collection of resources is designed for the 84 tribes in those regions in their various stages of the climate preparation process. The package will help tribes evaluate impacts, conduct vulnerability assessments, perform adaptation and economic planning, and locate financial resources.
The Makah have already tested out the CIG resources, which provide Western climate science and planning materials tailored to the unique needs of tribal communities. The tribe is currently incorporating those resources into their climate adaptation plan. The tools and resources are useful in taking large regional climate data and zooming in to provide information at a more local scale, Chang said.
“This is super-helpful because many regional climate models can’t provide hyper-local climate projections, which is crucial when making planning and adaptation decisions,” Chang said. Using the CIG models, it’s possible to determine the potential effects on individual streams, rivers, and forests, he said.
CIG researchers reached out to every tribal chairperson seeking input into what climate information their tribe wanted or needed to prepare for climate change, said Meade Krosby, project lead and Climate Impacts Group senior scientist.
All told, it took two years to compile the resources.
Browser-based Idle Game by Frank Lantz lets you control an AI that runs a paperclip company.
There are no instructions but if you are familiar with the game AdVenture Capitalist you will probably work things out (and get drawn into it in the same way, drawn by the growing numbers and frustrated with impatience to level things up).
The content below was written by Jared Diamond and appeared in the August 1, 1995 edition of Discover Magazine (http://discovermagazine.com/1995/aug/eastersend543). The content of the article article been widely copy-and-pasted by others and often serves as the basis for what people think they know about the island. Here, I try to provide comments to help update the essay with knowledge that we have gained over the past 25 years. In just a few centuries [the entire prehistoric occupation was just 500 years: ca. 1200AD to 1722AD. Radiocarbon dates (Mann et al 2008) show the loss of the palm forest took this entire span of time.], the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest [note that choice of the word “wiping” belies the fact that the palm forest was turned into gardens over the entire prehistoric span of occupation and possibly into European times], drove their plants [large palm trees (Jubea Chilensis) with little economic value] and animals [by animals, Diamond means “seabirds.” Excavations by Steadman et al (1994) show that there were once seabirds on the island that are now extinct.] to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos [according to whom? and when? Archaeologically, we only see changes in settlement patterns after the point of European contact] and cannibalism [there is no empirical evidence of cannibalism on Rapa Nui]. Are we about to follow their lead?
Byzantine consensus
Consensus
Disagree and commit
Derping
Consensus trap
Live and let live
Agree to disagree
Mutual incomprehension
Garden of forking paths
Light speed mutual retreat
Bubble multiverse
UAMI: Unilaterally Assured Mutual Incomprehension. The equilibrium that results from one person both refusing to explain themselves or make the effort to understand the other.
Daddy of agree-to-disagree and granddaddy of disagree-and-commit
This is why we wrote our #nlproc book using barebones PyTorch with good software engineering practices. We were tired of seeing either high level code or poorly written code. Our emphasis is on depth and practice, so you can go create that “superbestlibrary” for your domain/task. https://t.co/dmoWxFXRnc
You know it’s 2019 when Jim Carrey paints a picture of Mussolini being hanged and Mussolini’s granddaughter replies calling Carrey a bastard pic.twitter.com/7tpJspGK5P
Trying to present all sides of a story is just not as good as simply telling all the stories separately. Why present a false synthesis when you can present a truer confusion?
Berlin does not “exist” in any conventional sense. Rather, it is a tulpa conjured by the minds of people who think state-funded art-tech startups constitute a viable organizing principle for society.
Every crashed Tesla is a sequel to Ballard’s Crash & Cronebnerg’s Crash that automatically recorded itself. They are works of art & literature & should all be preserved for posterity, as well as becoming the subject for PhDs @PenguinBooks Classics and @Criterion boxed editions. https://t.co/NzNq3GP6vK
Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
Good morning. ‘When honeybees and zebra fish, isolated from each other, were allowed to interact through robot intermediaries, researchers observed collective decision-making behaviors between the two animal groups.’ https://t.co/yiY6GRLrLD
Göbekli Tepe, (Turkey) the oldest place of religious worship in the world (9000 BC) It was deliberately abandoned sometime after 8000 BC. Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological discovery of the utmost importance to understand the development of a crucial stage of human societies pic.twitter.com/mlGS5sj1aN
’[T]he creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done.’
Challenge your assumptions
Improve your collaborative skills
Contextualise your innovation
Experiment with futureproofing
Embrace serendipity
Design for failure
Prototype and iterate
Build antifragile systems
Cultivate interconnected approaches
My son has developed out of nowhere a kind of idiosyncratic theology. He claims to believe God exists, but that he’s “just a guy” and “not a big deal”.
When governments say ‘we can’t afford to fix the climate’ that’s a lie. There is plenty of money available. We use need to use it to repair rather than destroy…. https://t.co/OYJxgGsc9M
— Extinction Rebellion Australia (@XRebellionAus) March 26, 2019
“The ‘human’ cannot continue to be the sole benchmark against which other beings must be measured in order to count.” Interesting argument against granting natural entities legal status’ -> but clear plea for ‘radical restorying’ https://t.co/8WDqLvNY6F
If you’re annoyed at the outcome in the #CopyrightDirective vote and you live in Sweden, Germany, Czechia, Luxembourg, or another country that has a Pirate Party, remember in the upcoming elections that today the amendments were 5 votes away from being considered. #Article13#EU
In Iceland, Pirates have put fixing the climate on the forefront of our agenda, simply noting that there are no civil liberties without a civilization, and there is no civilization without a survivable climate.
Oh! I’m in @Wired - can grow old having reached at least one life goal.
“We need to open those platforms up or at least make their workings more transparent. It’s not enough just to change the hyperlinks we need to crack the whole thing open.” https://t.co/gJwVRpZxgI
So I’ve been making a system that generates insects with IK procedural animation. It also generates unique meshes and color palettes from scratch for each body part. here is a small selection #procgen#generativepic.twitter.com/vYQCippvRA
Austrian experimental guitarist Christian Fennesz returns with a new album
Agora. Four long tracks recorded in “straightened circumstances” after Fennesz lost access to proper studio space and was forced to record in his bedroom on headphones with limited equipment. Guitar, voice, field recordings and a computer. These tracks sound like living things, breathing and swelling like an enormous dreaming cat. They tap into the alpha waves and circadian rhythms of life.
The art of perception is a wonderful practice. Cultivating patience, kindness, compassion, moderation, humility, simplicity and love not only fundamentally changes our perception of reality - but changes reality itself.
The illusionist Uri Geller has called on the British people to help him in his efforts to telepathically stop Brexit by sending their own telepathic messages to Theresa May’s mind, compelling her to revoke article 50. Geller wrote an open letter to the prime minister on Friday warning her he will use the powers of his mind to stop her from leading Britain into Brexit. He plans to transmit his psychic energy into May’s brain at the “very mystical time” of 11.11 in the morning and evening every day from a secret location near his home in Israel.
“Its difficult to say why a room, a colour, a space, a house, unexpectedly become familiar, become ours. We feel we have inhabited these places; a sense of total harmony makes us forget that all this existed and will continue to exist beyond our gaze.
Lining them up one after another, these places form a sort of strange sequence consisting of stones, churches, gestures, lights, fogs, frost-covered branches, blue seas; they become our impossible landscape, without scale, without a geographic order to orient us; a tangle of monuments, lights, thoughts, objects, moments, analogies from our landscapes of the mind, which we seek out, even unconsciously, every time we look out a window, into the openness of the outside world, as if they were the points of an imaginary compass that indicate a possible direction”
4 years ago it was a hunch - few outside academia knew how to get hold of research findings, few people in academia actually asked their community what they needed.
Dreams as omens of death in Eastern European folk beliefs: walking in a cemetery, bees, monks, bread, teeth falling out, smoke, taking something from a corpse, ceiling collapsing, the death of god, oven falling apart, freshly-dug graves, black clothing, drowning in muddy waters.
I sorted the entire CJK Unified Ideographs Unicode block based on each glyph’s similarity to a pattern, in this case, a short line segment at different height, and created this wavy curve out of a line of glyphs. pic.twitter.com/23Sdhy2uiO
As airlines and safety regulators worldwide scramble to understand why two Boeing 737 Max 8 jets crashed in chillingly similar accidents, more indications are pointing to how an automated anti-stalling system may be linked to the model’s unusually deadly debut. The safety feature—the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS)—appears to have sent both planes into their fatal dives as pilots struggled to keep aloft. The 737 Max 8 and 9 were grounded by regulators around the world last week. Here are key details that have been reported—most significantly by the Seattle Times—about a series of engineering, regulatory, and political missteps that preceded software being installed on a widely used plane without pilots apparently fully understanding its risks.
On 29 November 1917 while campaigning to introduce military conscription, Hughes was the target of eggs thrown by protestors when he arrived at Warwick Railway Station in southern Queensland. Prime Minister Hughes was incensed that the attending Queensland Police would not arrest the offenders under federal law, so when he returned to Parliament he set about drafting legislation to create the Commonwealth Police Force (CPF). The ‘Warwick Incident’ was the last straw for the Prime Minister who was engaged in a range of jurisdictional struggles with the Queensland Government at the time.
I’ve tried a hundred ways to distract myself but I’m still having one of those days when all I want is to abolish the nation state and the wage system and live amongst small, voluntary, self-governing cooperatives. Apologies in advance.
