I’ve often heard people say “I don’t understand the finance sector because I’m no good at maths’. Finance, though, is not a mathematical science. It’s an ancient political artform of convincing people with power to grant money for activities now, in exchange for benefits later
Happy #WorldListeningDay everyone. Today, reflect upon who you listen to, and whose voices are turned into noise. Jacques Attali: “Everywhere, power reduces the noise made by others and adds sound prevention to its arsenal”.
We will solve the climate problem principally by improving the systems in which dysfunctional people operate, and not by improving people in a dysfunctional system.
The primary lens needs to be about incentives and causal relationships, not morality. Empiricism, not religion.
Once there was a fox that wanted to eat a turtle, but whenever he tried to, it withdrew into its shell. He bit it and he shook it, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. One day he had an idea: he made the turtle an offer to buy its shell. But the turtle was clever and knew it would be eaten without this protection, so it refused. Time passed, until one day there appeared a television hanging in a tree, displaying images of flocks of happy, naked turtles – flying! The turtle was amazed. Oh! They can fly! But wouldn’t it be dangerous to give up your shell? Hark, the voice on television was announcing that the fox had become a vegetarian. “If I could only take off my shell, my life would be so much easier,” thought the turtle. “If the turtle would only give up its shell, it would be so much easier to eat,” thought the fox – and paid for more broadcasts advertising flying turtles. One morning, when the sky seemed bigger and brighter than usual, the turtle removed its shell. What it fatally failed to understand was that the aim of information warfare is to induce an adversary to let down its guard. (In 1998, Sergei P Rastorguev, a Russian military analyst, published Philosophy of Information Warfare, which included a lengthy version of this anecdote)
Programming time, dates, timezones, recurring events, leap seconds… everything is pretty terrible. The common refrain in the industry is Just use UTC! Just use UTC! And that’s correct… sort of. But if you’re stuck building software that deals with time, there’s so much more to consider.
trying out Tensorflow inferencing with pre-trained models on an ARM Cortex microcontroller. this STMF32F4 discovery board is using https://t.co/wT0iogswiw to run an MNIST model on live data from its touchscreen to identify a hand-drawn number. pic.twitter.com/csKwkkOM0z
“they involve the execution of technical and cultural algorithms that shape our image-making devices as well as our viewing practices.” https://t.co/JTGslrF4l1
We don’t talk enough about takeover-at-the-top disruption patterns. The business disruption model of encroaching from the margins and climbing upmarket to the core is just one attack vector. In politics/history, I suspect takeovers from the top are much more common.
Whenever someone texts me “ETA?” I always reply “I don’t agree with their violent tactics, but I support the ideal of Basque autonomy.” I have lost all my friends, presumably because they’re Spanish nationalists
— How do i get the rose in my name (@i_zzzzzz) July 14, 2018
cosmic horror isn’t scary anymore; meaninglessness of the universe is now the status quo assumption, not a shocking revelation.
It’s time for a counter horror genre; one where the terror inducing secret is a universe overloaded with meaning and purpose. https://t.co/MADZagiC8T
Free PDF downloads of the two-volume Global Encyclopaedia of Informality; a catalogue of gift-giving, bribery, interest-driven know-how, identity-based solidarity, co-option and control: https://t.co/gfcfrmAonx; https://t.co/JujPf7z3Xm
Step 1: Create something of real value, or if you can’t, leverage an inheritance into crap value with a large surface area. We’re NOT making stone soup here.
Writers are notoriously bad at knowing what they’re doing and why, and good criticism is just as interesting for writers to read as it is for readers.
The economics in Walkaway are my attempt to nail down a bunch of half-formed ideas that have been knocking around in my own thoughts for decades. Cottica’s analysis actually improves on some of what I was able to do, and was a great read.
These statements are important in Walkaway, because they dispose of methodological individualism. The reasoning works like this:
1. Most people like building things together. As long as the two elements of building and sociality are present, you do not need to obsess too much about incentives. In practice, you can blackbox individual behavior: observe what they do, then build a model in which they do it. No need to derive this behavior as the equilibrium strategy of a problem. This is a position close to behavioral economics.
2. What matters, instead, are technologies for cooperation. Groups of humans that are better at cooperating will prosper at the expense of other groups that are not as good. Groups of humans get better at cooperating by adopting systems of rules that make cooperation easier. Therefore, humans are subject to evolutionary pressure both at the individual level and at the group level, and the in the group level the pressure is cultural. This is the interpretation proposed by cultural evolution biologists like E.O. Wilson and Joseph Henrich.
3. It follows that an effective economic theory should not focus on individual behavior as an equilibrium of a set of individual incentives, but on system-level behavior as an equilibrium of interaction protocols.
“Long tails drive everything. They dominate business, investing, sports, politics, products, careers, everything. Rule of thumb: Anything that is huge, profitable, famous, or influential is the result of a tail event. Another rule of thumb: Most of our attention goes to things that are huge, profitable, famous, or influential. And when most of what you pay attention to is the result of a tail, you underestimate how rare and powerful they really are.”
“What makes a blob of matter able to have a subjective experience? In other words, under what conditions will a blob of matter be able to do these four things? 1. remember 2. compute 3. learn 4. experience”
— Tegmark, Max.Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
If you were to get a cruise ship in good condition at bargain rates, with financing, and set up a no-profit-no-loss sustainable seasteading community on it, what would it do for economic sustenance, where would it sail, who would live on it, how would it relate to land nations?
“When the world ends, there’ll be no more air. That’s why it’s important to pollute the air now. Before it’s too late.”#KathyAcker on commodified reason.
An ice-loving Weddell seal, equipped with headgear and ready to assist oceanographers. (Brice Loose)
Excerpt:
In 2014, Loose was part of a team to help tag elephant (Mirounga leonina) and Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii) for a study. The seals weren’t the subjects of the study, though—they were its research assistants. Loose was helping fit the able divers with trackers so that they could collect data on the Amundsen Sea’s temperature and salinity at great depths, which would provide clues into the mechanism of the rapid ice melt in Antarctica. The research was published in Geophysical Research Letters in May 2018.
Currently, scientists theorize that Antarctic melting is partially caused by a warmer, saltier current beneath the ice known as the “circumpolar deep water.” These waters, which are present at depths of 400 meters, are brought to the surface and lick the underside of ice sheets, melting them and enabling sea levels to rise.
“In Pine Island Bay, this is particularly important,” says Helen Mallett, the lead author of the study and a postgraduate researcher at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. “The circumpolar deep water there is melting the unstable, fast thinning Pine Island Glacier, which in turn drains the vulnerable and massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet.” If all the unstable ice in west Antarctica melts, sea levels could rise by up to 10.5 feet globally.
Scientists know the warm current exists in the Amundsen Sea, but they need to know more. To get a complete picture, scientists need to answer some basic questions: Where are the warm waters, exactly? How thick is the layer of warm water ? How does it vary from winter to summer?
For this, they turned to the enormous marine mammals with large puppy dog eyes.
Seals are known for their impressive diving skills, with some species torpedoing down to depths of 2,000 feet even in sub-zero temperatures. These skills made them the perfect partners for collecting temperature data at the seafloor. Researchers had not collected any winter data in this region because the conditions are too harsh for humans.
“We could see that seals dive at these extreme depths and go these vast distances,” says Mike Fedak, a seal biologist at the University of St. Andrews in the UK who has been tagging animals for the past 39 years. “These animals go where we can’t.”
Signs of a henge, a man-made enclosure from thousands of years ago thought to serve as a gathering place, were photographed by a camera-enabled drone on Monday.CreditAnthony Murphy
Excerpt:
It took an unusually brutal drought for signs of a 5,000-year-old monument to suddenly appear in an Irish field, as if they had been written into the landscape in invisible ink.
On Monday, Anthony Murphy, an author and photographer, sent a camera-enabled drone high above the Brú na Bóinne archaeological landscape, a Unesco World Heritage Site about 30 miles north of Dublin. He suspected that recent dry conditions might reveal evidence that a henge — a man-made enclosure from thousands of years ago thought to serve as a gathering place — had once been there.
What he and a friend saw in the images shocked him: a series of discolorations in the farmland, caused by differences in soil, spread about 150 meters wide in a perfectly circular pattern. He had flown the drone over the same field many times before and never saw a hint of what was now perfectly clear, he said.
It has been more than 40 days since the Dublin area has had significant rainfall, and the dearth of water had left the field, which is on privately owned land, scorched by the sun.
The drought also revealed the sites of ruins in Wales. From ABC News:
Cropmarks of a large prehistoric enclosure in the Vale of Glamorgan with the faint footings of a probable Roman villa within.Supplied: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW)
Cropmarks of a large Bronze Age barrow cemetery on the Llyn Reninsula, Gwynedd. Supplied: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW)
Just to be very clear, I want to live in the open-source hackable networked sex toys queer cyberpunk world, and not the late-stage capitalism, private espionage, corporate controlled cyberpunk dystopia.
I realize these are probably gonna be the same place.
— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) July 14, 2018
Worker bees are pansexual nonbinary creatures who give a good rub to both pistils and stamens which we clumsily talk about as male and female plant organs. In this essay I will
— Top Tubes Are Specialist Sport Gear 🧐🖋️☂🌌🚲 (@SpacePootler) July 13, 2018
COUNTERFACTUAL CUISINE
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The menu of food experiences and light snacks imagined a selection of potential food futures and included:
— A recombinatorial cocktail celebrating the many… https://t.co/GPYIWqra9Q
The rise of clean energy is dramatic proof that the choice between political/social activism and science/engineering/innovation as vectors for improvement of the human condition is a false one.
Society needs both, and they complement each other.
But the environmental movement also probably played a big role in pushing huge numbers of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs into the fight to create cheap clean energy.
Without that idealism, they’d be wasting their talents on high-frequency trading or something.
I get asked why there aren’t more depictions of utopias, and here’s why: utopias are always-already conflicted in a way that dystopias, or visions of them, are not. https://t.co/qfgy6uftHh
all of farmers manual got up and left mid-set the other day and i went to stretch my legs too, they were sat at a table outside in the same order eating soup
More extreme cardboard prototyping @_foam kernow style - the photo interrupter (IR LED and photo-transistor sensor) can reliably detect black, white or nothing present in the 3 bit virus ligand codes @AmberFirefly made yesterday #tangibleinterfacepic.twitter.com/S32B7LPrPq
— Dave Griffiths @nebogeo@mastodon.social (@nebogeo) July 13, 2018
1- Communicates theory through fictive devices – not philosophical fiction, but fictive philosophy.
2- Practices theory outside the confines of the “high” academic style.
3- Occupies the growing intersection between reality, fiction, theory, and fantasy.
4- I want to read it.
TERROIR THAT TRAVELS
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As the climate changes, how will the production of foods shift as well? Will protected designation of origin (PDO) still be important? Will traditional foods of one… https://t.co/kBQ5nIEVd1
German cave diver Nick Vollmar who joined the Thailand cave rescue mission: “If we could cooperate globally in every aspect like we did here, almost all of our problems could be solved.” Over the last few weeks we saw globalism at its very best.
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) July 12, 2018
New publication -> Visualising the urban green volume: Exploring LiDAR voxels with tangible technologies and virtual modelshttps://t.co/OuAN3gXs0m
[L: 3D model of buildings and greenspace, R: greenspace only for the same area, showing patchy islands of habitat remaining] pic.twitter.com/qGEPtDereR
“This is not to say that popcorn is going to completely transform robotic actuation or anything, but it’s weird enough that it might plausibly end up in some useful (if very specific) robotic applications.” https://t.co/POcvIfxEhfpic.twitter.com/ekJ1ouus4t
Yes, it was me who smuggled a large seabird into the plenary and launched it at the speaker’s head with the words “Actually this is more of a cormorant than a question.” I am to be considered for possible readmission to the society in 2038, which seems fair.
The SkyGuardian, a Predator drone variant by US nuclear specialists General Atomics, is currently flying over the UK on the first transatlantic RPA drone flight. You can watch the future of state surveillance flying overhead on FlightRadar right now: https://t.co/XvkdqmoxkNpic.twitter.com/98m5UG0HxS
Twice in a row now that hybrid journals have applied a paywall on release of a paper I’m on, despite lead authors paying for #openaccess well before publication. Dodgy af.
I’m putting together a reading list of theory-fiction and looking for more examples. What would you recommend?
Playing loose with the definition to include both theory-heavy memoirs and more experimental works of speculative fabulation: pic.twitter.com/BHkQhTfs5L
Needed: messaging app, video chat apps, and twitter clients that will re-orient your interlocutor based on their location, so people who are “really” upside down can stop hiding it!
Biomimicry in architecture is a risky proposition to begin with, but I wish people who are going to do it wouldn’t always be inspired by cliche shapes of leaves etc. we are casually familiar with. Want to see (or even design?) something inspired by the forms of stacked crassulas. pic.twitter.com/lVw43zpqOi
C is a cool programming language where if you want to return a string from a function you have to set up an entire physical-universe human social system for adjudicating who is responsible for freeing it
“In order to create a C string, you must first create civilization”
Decentralization = Distribution of Power and Control
You can distribute your architecture across as many different layers and entities as you want, but if authority is concentrated in a single entity then the system is centralized.
— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) July 10, 2018
Bruno Latour’s Borgesian micro-story at the beginning of _On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods_ says almost everything there is to say about the insane mental script running in our modern heads. pic.twitter.com/VAC91bAhh9
‘Unless we introduce a different business model, we will end up with more of the same. It is time to try a mixed economy in those digital markets whose products are in fact classic public goods, such as search and social media.’ https://t.co/z8PUTrQEt9
Kurt Cobain on intersectionality (yes, really), and his radical intent to use the entertainment industry as a means to spark revolutionary change. pic.twitter.com/2scl6y5irC
— Black Socialists of America (@BlackSocialists) July 9, 2018
A lot of apparent stupidity is actually smart people being maliciously lazy. It’s like selective amnesia but for reasoning. You think fewer steps ahead when you suspect you might arrive at a personally inconvenient truth. Motivated non-reasoning. Plausible inferential deniability
TWITTER RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM: would you like to see some porn your friends like
FACEBOOK RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM: this terrible thing happened a year ago
AMAZON RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM: buy five more TVs
YOUTUBE RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM: would you like to become a nazi
— meth lab for cutie (@AliceAvizandum) July 8, 2018
Shocked that a webgl program written in scheme can compile itself and run in a static html file that embeds all it’s code, meshes, shaders and textures as base64. The most shocking thing to me is this can be loaded on android browser directly from sdcard without internet access..
— Dave Griffiths @nebogeo@mastodon.social (@nebogeo) July 7, 2018
The most ironic thing about Ayn Rand isn’t that she was on welfare at the end of her life, it’s that she gave a bunch of scared disenfranchised people a role model and an interconnected community on which to depend to help each other soothe their fears and give their lives meanin
One of my favorite papers ( https://t.co/B6sFKUuHyn ) started a line of work that tries to formalize some related intuitions; it turns out some fairly natural market making strategies for binary options are equivalent to online regret minimization. (1/n) https://t.co/5PsEXcvTg9
this is called “dada” and it first emerged in the wake of the first world war out of the belief that a society which could create such a horror had no intrinsic value
Enough about beach bodies. I want a forest body, with soft moss where my armpit hair should be. Or a prairie body, emotions a ripple of wind across my golden face. Or a volcano body, leaking vengeance from every fissure. Other landscapes are possible.
… the return of Radio Mycelium - Lingzhi operations - in preparation for later actions with the Mycelium Network Society (image courtesy I.V.M)… pic.twitter.com/JxrThZTxTV
I am unilaterally declaring today, July 5th, Interdependence Day. Today is a day to celebrate our communities, large and small; the systems that we’ve created for the benefit of everyone; and our common resources and environment. And to commit to making them better.
