“Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, artists gradually became aware of the unusually precise nature of the imagery generated by computers, as did people from other fields.
Among them was a lecturer at the University of Manchester, Desmond Paul Henry. The university was responsible for important early advances in computer science, not least in building the world’s first stored-program computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine, which was nicknamed ‘Baby’ when it was completed in 1948. Henry took a keen interest in such developments, but as an observer, not a participant. He taught philosophy at the university, and had discovered computers as a technical clerk for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during the Second World War. In 1951, while browsing around the second-hand bookstalls on Shudehill in Manchester, Henry went into an army surplus warehouse and spotted an old Sperry bombsight computer used by British bomber aircraft to calculate when to release their bombs. He bought it for £50, a substantial sum at the time, and rigged it up to guide ballpoint pens and, later, technical tube pens across paper. After his first machine died, Henry recycled some of the components into a new one and subsequently repeated the process to build a third. He exhibited his mechanical drawings at local art galleries in Manchester and also in ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, the 1968 survey of computer art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which later toured to the United States.”
–Rawsthorn, Alice.Hello World: Where Design Meets Life. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. (viacarvalhais)
First comes the unscratchable itching, and the angry blossoming of hives. Then stomach cramping, and—for the unluckiest few—difficulty breathing, passing out, and even death. In the last decade and a half, thousands of previously protein-loving Americans have developed a dangerous allergy to meat. And they all have one thing in common: the lone star tick. Red meat, you might be surprised to know, isn’t totally sugar-free. It contains a few protein-linked saccharides, including one called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, for short. More and more people are learning this the hard way, when they suddenly develop a life-threatening allergy to that pesky sugar molecule after a tick bite. Yep, one bite from the lone star tick—which gets its name from the Texas-shaped splash of white on its back—is enough to reprogram your immune system to forever reject even the smallest nibble of perfectly crisped bacon. For years, physicians and researchers only reported the allergy in places the lone star tick calls home, namely the southeastern United States. But recently it’s started to spread. The newest hot spots? Duluth, Minnesota, Hanover, New Hampshire, and the eastern tip of Long Island, where at least 100 cases have been reported in the last year. Scientists are racing to trace its spread, to understand if the lone star tick is expanding into new territories, or if other species of ticks are now causing the allergy.
The Standard Ebooks project is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the public domain, and Standard Ebook dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing whole ebooks files themselves into the public domain.
“As a double bonus, if everyone stays irrational it might greatly enrich the author, providing future funding for blockchain performance art.” The great art project of our age is to entirely collapse the distinctions between “fraud” and “performance art,” so that one day mortgage-bond traders will be able to say “wait, no, I wasn’t lying about bond prices to increase my bonus, I was performing a metafictional narrative about bond-price negotiations in order to problematize the underlying foundations of bond trading in late capitalism.”
As the great German theologian Josef Pieper argued, for most of history philosophers and theologians treated overwork as a moral failing. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, for example, made a distinction between leisure and idleness; and importantly, people who were “out of breath for no purpose, always busy about nothing” were, in Seneca’s view, guilty of the worst kind of idleness. Because it occupies our time and feels like accomplishment, but actually produces very little and gives us little opportunity to learn about ourselves, this kind of busyness was to be avoided. As Pieper put it, in this vision leisure “is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.” This is not to say that work was something to be avoided. Stoics like Seneca saw work as essential, as one of the things that made life meaningful. But in order to become our best selves, they argued, it was also necessary to take the time to reflect on our lives and choices — and that required both time and an “inward calm” that let us see ourselves and the world clearly.
“Individuals with grapheme-color synesthesia experience idiosyncratic colors when viewing achromatic letters or digits. Despite large individual differences in grapheme-color association, synesthetes tend to associate graphemes sharing a perceptual feature with similar synesthetic colors. Sound has been suggested as one such feature. In the present study, we investigated whether graphemes of which representative phonemes have similar phonetic features tend to be associated with analogous synesthetic colors.”
Someone’s done the cross-linguistic synesthesia writing system study that I was speculating about a couple months ago! This study features grapheme-colour synesthetes who were trilingual in Korean, English, and Japanese. Here’s the abstract:
Individuals with grapheme-color synesthesia experience idiosyncratic colors when viewing achromatic letters or digits. Despite large individual differences in grapheme-color association, synesthetes tend to associate graphemes sharing a perceptual feature with similar synesthetic colors. Sound has been suggested as one such feature. In the present study, we investigated whether graphemes of which representative phonemes have similar phonetic features tend to be associated with analogous synesthetic colors. We tested five Korean multilingual synesthetes on a color-matching task using graphemes from Korean, English, and Japanese orthography. We then compared the similarity of synesthetic colors induced by those characters sharing a phonetic feature. Results showed that graphemes associated with the same phonetic feature tend to induce synesthetic color in both within- and cross-script analyses. Moreover, this tendency was consistent for graphemes that are not transliterable into each other as well as graphemes that are. These results suggest that it is the perceptual—i.e., phonetic—properties associated with graphemes, not just conceptual associations such as transliteration, that determine synesthetic color.
The next step takes the logic further: not only stealing from the rich and giving to the poor (like Robin Hood did), but exploring, building new ecologies, new ecosystems, new universes, new possibilities, new worlds of value. For this purpose the Robin Hood hydra grew a new head: a start-up company Economic Space Agency, Inc. (ECSA). Economic Space Agency builds tools with which we can create economic space — not only to distribute something existing or produced in a pre-existing space, but to reorganize/rebuild the space itself. Two trends are converging and making open source economy possible: the moldability and plasticity of financial technologies and the decentralization and disintermediation provided by distributed ledgers. ECSA’s DNA contains all these things: hard core research (the team has published over 25 books), direct engagement with the power of art to create unforeseen (economical, social, political, financial, incorporeal) processes, financial first-in-the-world inventions (such as a hedge fund as a coop, and asset-backed cryptoequity), experimental hands-on attitude and an intimate lived experience of how the financial and the social co-determine each other.
Part of what makes Morton popular are his attacks on settled ways of thinking. His most frequently cited book, Ecology Without Nature, says we need to scrap the whole concept of “nature”. He argues that a distinctive feature of our world is the presence of ginormous things he calls “hyperobjects” – such as global warming or the internet – that we tend to think of as abstract ideas because we can’t get our heads around them, but that are nevertheless as real as hammers. He believes all beings are interdependent, and speculates that everything in the universe has a kind of consciousness, from algae and boulders to knives and forks. He asserts that human beings are cyborgs of a kind, since we are made up of all sorts of non-human components; he likes to point out that the very stuff that supposedly makes us us – our DNA – contains a significant amount of genetic material from viruses. He says that we’re already ruled by a primitive artificial intelligence: industrial capitalism. At the same time, he believes that there are some “weird experiential chemicals” in consumerism that will help humanity prevent a full-blown ecological crisis. Morton’s theories might sound bizarre, but they are in tune with the most earth-shaking idea to emerge in the 21st century: that we are entering a new phase in the history of the planet – a phase that Morton and many others now call the “Anthropocene”.
[ND Phot #4] The Lebaudy Julliot Le Jaune dirigible before bringing it out for the historic flight over Paris on 20 November 1903 [France, 1903] by Kees Kort Collection (via http://flic.kr/p/UyyzxJ )
WoodSwimmer is a new short film by engineer and stop-motion animator Brett Foxwell, who has built armatures for films such as Boxtrolls and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Created in collaboration with musician and animator bedtimes, the work follows a piece of raw wood through a milling machine, capturing its unique growth rings, knots, and weathered spots through a series of cross-sectional photographic scans. Due the speed at which the images are animated, the log’s grains begin to flow like granules of sand—shifting, mixing, and flowing in a vibrant dance that seems completely removed from its rigid material.
“Fascinated with the shapes and textures found in both newly-cut and long-dead pieces of wood, I envisioned a world composed entirely of these forms,” Foxwell told Colossal. “As I began to engage with the material, I conceived a method using a milling machine and an animation camera setup to scan through a wood sample photographically and capture its entire structure. Although a difficult and tedious technique to refine, it yielded gorgeous imagery at once abstract and very real. Between the twisting growth rings, swirling rays, knot holes, termites and rot, I found there is a lot going on inside of wood.”
“After a massive explosion of algae growth in China’s Lake Taihu a decade ago left more than two million people in the area temporarily without safe drinking water, the government started spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to try to solve the algae problem. One part of the solution: working with a company that harvests algae from the lake before it grows out of control, and turns it into a flexible, rubbery material that is now being made into shoes.
Vivobarefoot’s water-resistant Ultra III shoes are usually made from a petroleum-based version of the same material, ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA). But a version that will launch in July is made from a blend of algae and EVA, instead. To get enough algae to make one pair means cleaning 57 gallons of water, which are then returned to the lake.”
“If more and more people cast themselves as designers, where does this leave the professionals? Will they disappear? Or will their influence be gradually eroded? Not if they prove their worth. In this respect, design is not unlike psychology. Lots of us like to think of ourselves as self-taught psychologists, and often use rudimentary psychological techniques when coming to instinctive conclusions about other people’s actions or motives. If we are lucky and observant, our judgements may be correct, but surely they would be more perceptive if we had studied psychology, or were able to draw on the knowledge, discipline and experience acquired from years of professional practice. Much the same can be said of design, just as long as the professionals can match the originality and resourcefulness of Blackbeard, Qin Shihuangdi, Nicholas Owen and other ‘accidental’ designers.”
–Rawsthorn, Alice.Hello World: Where Design Meets Life. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. (viacarvalhais)
Dan Grayber’s Cavity Mechanism series of sculptures are a hymn to “purposeful objects that solve their own problems,” in which gravity acts upon systems of pulleys and scaffolds and wires to suspend weighty rocks in motionless perfection under glass domes.
Riverside County could soon be getting its fifth massive solar farm.
The 500-megawatt Palen solar project would be built near Desert Center, between Interstate 10 and Joshua Tree National Park. It would join the nearby Desert Sunlight facility — which at 550 megawatts was the world’s largest solar farm when it opened — and three projects near the Arizona border, known as Blythe, McCoy and Genesis.
Palen’s developer, San Diego-based EDF Renewable Energy, has signed a contract to sell the electricity the plant would generate to the region’s major utility, Southern California Edison — a key step before construction can begin. The California Public Utilities Commission is likely to approve that contract later this month. The developer must also wait for Riverside County and the federal Bureau of Land Management to conduct an environmental review, which the agencies expect to finish later this year.
Like many solar plants in the desert, Palen has faced pushback from conservationists and tribal groups, who say the industrial facility would harm fragile ecosystems, destroy Native American artifacts and negatively impact Joshua Tree National Park, which is just eight miles from the project site. Critics have argued Palen would disrupt sand transport habitat critical to Mojave fringe-toed lizards and a corridor used by Agassiz’s desert tortoise, which is considered “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Palen would be located within a 148,000-acre renewable energy zone designated by the Obama administration last year. But David Lamfrom, from the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, said it was never the government’s intention for every acre to get developed. Ecosystem impacts still need to be taken into account, he said.
“Millions and millions of us are ready. We want to not only build carbon-zero cities and regions but to live the lives that will make them thrive. We want clean energy, sure; indeed, we demand all energy be clean energy. But generating more clean energy — vital as it is — is only one part of making the world we need. We also need to imagine, design and rapidly build cities where prosperity demands much less energy to begin with and ends up shared with far more of our neighbors: cities of abundant housing in super-insulated green buildings; of walkable neighborhoods, effective transit, shared vehicles and abundant bike lanes; of circular flows of resources and frugal excellence; of breakthrough technologies and worldchanging designs; of lived innovation and community creativity — of more adventure, more fun, and, for fuck’s sake, more beauty.
Beauty matters. The sheer ugliness of the old industrial way of life all around us is something we’re taught not to see. We’re taught not too see its aesthetic ugliness, sure, but even more we are taught to ignore its ugliness of soul, it’s ugliness of purpose, its ugliness of effect. Look away, numb yourself, never speak of it again.
Millions of us do not want to spend our brief spans on Earth contributing to these systems of catastrophic ugliness. We want to live in systems that are beautiful to be a part of, beautiful in their workings, and beautiful for future generations.
We need to demand the freedom build the beautiful. If a new movement today is going to be about anything meaningful, it must be at its very core a fight to build the beautiful, at the scale of the necessary, in the very short time we have left.”
From the first moment settlers in this small nation started pumping water to clear land for farms and houses, water has been the central, existential fact of life in the Netherlands, a daily matter of survival and national identity. No place in Europe is under greater threat than this waterlogged country on the edge of the Continent. Much of the nation sits below sea level and is gradually sinking. Now climate change brings the prospect of rising tides and fiercer storms.
From a Dutch mind-set, climate change is not a hypothetical or a drag on the economy, but an opportunity. While the Trump administration withdraws from the Paris accord, the Dutch are pioneering a singular way forward.
It is, in essence, to let water in, where possible, not hope to subdue Mother Nature: to live with the water, rather than struggle to defeat it. The Dutch devise lakes, garages, parks and plazas that are a boon to daily life but also double as enormous reservoirs for when the seas and rivers spill over. You may wish to pretend that rising seas are a hoax perpetrated by scientists and a gullible news media. Or you can build barriers galore. But in the end, neither will provide adequate defense, the Dutch say.
And what holds true for managing climate change applies to the social fabric, too. Environmental and social resilience should go hand in hand, officials here believe, improving neighborhoods, spreading equity and taming water during catastrophes. Climate adaptation, if addressed head-on and properly, ought to yield a stronger, richer state.
This is the message the Dutch have been taking out into the world. Dutch consultants advising the Bangladeshi authorities about emergency shelters and evacuation routes recently helped reduce the numbers of deaths suffered in recent floods to “hundreds instead of thousands,” according to Mr. Ovink.
For a hundred years, in an Italian palazzo transplanted to the shores of a Swedish lake, the Sigtuna Foundation has been hosting conversations where people from different worlds meet — artists, scientists, theologians, poets. So it seems an appropriate location for the meeting where I’ve spent the past two days, called by Kevin Anderson, professor of climate leadership at Uppsala University, and known (among other things) for being “the climate scientists who doesn’t fly”. At his invitation, the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala (CEMUS) brought a group of twenty of us together to ‘develop and collate insights from the social sciences, humanities and the arts, with the purpose of eliciting a richer picture of the challenges facing rapid societal transformation’ to have a chance of reaching the commitment to limit global warming to 2° made at the Paris COP.
The topic of transhumanism has been a hot one lately, for reasons that probably stretch from recent surges in bio- and physical computing to questions of economic and political equity that come out of the other end of a global recession. We’re very fortunate that two people with provocative viewpoints agreed to take part: writer, researcher and critic Paul Graham Raven and researcher, writer and anthropologist Lydia Nicholas.
Humans can be trained to use echolocation to estimate the sizes of enclosed spaces. LMU researchers now show that the learning process involves close coordination between sensory and motor cortex.
In principle, humans need not rely solely on vision for orientation. Some blind persons make use of self-generated sounds to estimate their position and orientation in an enclosed space relative to reflecting surfaces. They may tap the ground with a cane or produce clicks with their tongue, as some bat species do, and analyze the echoes to determine their distance to the surrounding walls. Now a team led by Lutz Wiegrebe, a professor in the Department of Biology at LMU, has shown that sighted people can be taught to estimate room size with the help of self-generated clicks. In collaboration with Dr. Virginia L. Flanagin from the German Center for Vertigo and Balance Disorders at the LMU Medical Center, the researchers monitored the activity in different regions of the brains of eleven sighted subjects and one blind person as they executed an echolocation task. The results enabled the team to analyze the neuronal mechanisms involved in echolocation in humans, and appear in the new issue of the
Journal of Neuroscience.
Wiegrebe and his colleagues have developed a technique based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which makes it possible, for the first time, to monitor the process of echolocation by means of self-generated tongue clicks. In the study, this set-up was used to train sighted subjects in echolocation. The researchers first characterized the acoustic properties of a real building – a small chapel with highly reflective surfaces and a long reverberation time. “In effect, we took an acoustic photograph of the chapel, and we were then able to computationally alter the scale of this sound image, which allowed us to compress it or expand the size of the virtual space at will,” Wiegrebe explains. The experimental subjects, fitted with a headset consisting of headphones and a microphone, were placed in the MRI scanner. They were then positioned within the virtual space by means of the signals fed to the headphones. The subjects produced tongue clicks, and the echoes corresponding to virtual spaces of different sizes – derived from the acoustic image – were played to them over the headphones. “All participants learned to perceive even small differences in the size of the space,” Wiegrebe says. Moreover, they were better able to assess the size of the virtual space when they actively produced the tongue clicks than when these were played back to them. In fact, one of the experimental subjects learned to estimate the size of the virtual space to within 4% of its actual size.
The set-up used for the experiment also allowed the neuronal mechanisms involved in echolocation to be characterized with the aid of the MRI scanner. “Echolocation requires a high degree of coupling between the sensory and the motor cortex,” Virginia Flanagin says. The sound waves generated by the tongue clicks are reflected by the surroundings and picked up by both ears, thus activating the sensory (auditory) cortex. In sighted subjects, this is followed shortly afterwards by activation of the motor cortex, which stimulates the tongue and the vocal cords to emit new clicking sounds. Experiments carried out with the congenitally blind participant, on the other hand, revealed that reception of the reflected sounds resulted in the activation of the visual cortex. “That the primary visual cortex can execute auditory tasks is a remarkable testimony to the plasticity of the human brain,” says Wiegrebe. Sighted subjects, on the other hand, exhibited only a relatively weak activation of the visual cortex during the echolocation task.
The researchers now plan to develop a dedicated training program, which enables blind persons to learn how to use tongue clicks for the purpose of echolocation.
“Stratocumulus cumulogenitus homogenitus. Rising thermals from the Prunéřov, Tušimice and Počerady power plants in the Czech Republic, have generated Cumulus congestus homogenitus clouds which have spread out to form Stratocumulus at a height of about 2500m. As the Stratocumulus has formed by the spreading of Cumulus, the mother-cloud term cumulogenitus applies. The name homogenitus applies as the clouds formed as a consequence of human activity.”
The southern end of Skaftafell National Park in Iceland is pictured in this Overview. The park spans nearly 3000 square miles, and contains the glacier Skaftafellsjökull seen here. The terrain is very similar to that of the Alps, formed over many years with multiple volcanic eruptions.
63.998452, -17.174032
Instagram: http://bit.ly/2sflUGe Source imagery: DigitalGlobe
We noticed that this extension was distributed through a compromised Swiss security company website. Unsuspecting visitors to this website were asked to install this malicious extension. The extension is a simple backdoor, but with an interesting way of fetching its C&C domain. The extension uses a bit.ly URL to reach its C&C, but the URL path is nowhere to be found in the extension code. In fact, it will obtain this path by using comments posted on a specific Instagram post. The one that was used in the analyzed sample was a comment about a photo posted to the Britney Spears official Instagram account.
(For some background to this discussion of automation in our very eccentric and local context, revisit one of our first posts - ‘The pleasures of prediction’.)
There’s a spot we often go swimming in Madeira called Ponta Gorda, ‘Fat Point’. It’s like a public swimming pool - in fact it does have a decent saltwater pool - but most people who go there dive straight into the open sea, which gives you the thrill of swimming in very deep water - 2,000 metres close to shore descending to 4,000 metres further out. So the sea is a public swimming pool, and you pay your euro for amenities like the changing rooms and cafe. It’s a good place for lunch or a cold beer when the sun is shining. Umbrellas and sunbeds cost extra, but we prefer to bake on the hot concrete after a cool swim.
Into this idyllic scene comes
automation. There’s a person who works in the entrance booth and takes your euro, and adjacent to the booth is a row of turnstiles. Presumably until a couple of years ago you paid your money and went straight in. Since we’ve been going to Ponta Gorda, however, a newer system has been in place: an automated scanning system.
The system is supposed to work like this: first you buy a barcoded ticket or charge your card with the person in the booth; then you scan your ticket, unlocking the turnstile, and you walk through. (The scanner uses that red laser thing to read the barcode.)
What actually happens is this: we arrive at the booth, say hello to the friendly woman who works there - because we all know each other by now - pay for a ticket or charge our card (if we’ve remembered to bring it, which is rare), try to scan the barcode under the laser in the bright midday sun, fail miserably, smile at the woman in the booth to signal our failure, wait as she grabs her keys and comes out of the booth, watch as she tries in vain to scan it several times, exchange sympathetic smiles when she too fails, together blame the sun, stand by while she unlocks the gate at the side, and walk through.
We’re not sure why the automatic gate always fails. Things often don’t work on this island. They remain broken for months or years, and people get used to working around them. The parking garages and supermarket checkouts are the same: there is always someone to help you scan your ticket or purchases because the scanner never works properly. These are de-facto semi-automated systems that require the same human worker they required before the machine was installed. So why have a scanner at all? Who said this was a good idea? What was wrong with the old way?
Well, it’s progress, innit? Unfortunately what may work under ideal conditions in, say, London or Oslo may not necessarily work under less than ideal conditions, and without maintenance support, in Madeira. It’s like those tractors in the Soviet Union under collectivisation that broke down or simply ran out of petrol and were left to rot in the fields. Not to mention the fact that automation is often about efficiency, and efficiency - in terms of saving either time or labour - is not something this sleepy island particularly wants or needs.
People in Madeira are adaptable, they get along fine with less than optimal technology. But significant resources are wasted in the pursuit of Mainland ideas of progress. Then there are the side-effects of automation that are not particular to islanders: deskilling, alienation from labour. Few people actually lose their jobs because the technology can rarely be trusted - but everywhere you see people sitting idle in their work, passive, mere appendages of the machines they are paid to assist. Is this the techno-utopia we were waiting for? Sometimes on the periphery, as Laura Watts said to us recently, small perturbations are felt more distinctly than in the centre.
In his frankly curmudgeonly but still insightful essay ‘Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer’ (1987), Wendell Berry lays out his ‘standards for technological innovation’. There are nine points, and in the third point Berry states that the new device or system ‘should do work that is
clearly and demonstrably better’ than the old one. This seems obvious and not too much to ask of a technology, but how well does the automated entrance at Ponta Gorda fulfill that claim?
Berry also has a point, the last in his list, about not replacing or disrupting ‘anything good that already exists’. This includes relationships between people. In other words, solve
actual problems - rather than finding just any old place to put a piece of technology you want to sell. Even if the scanners at Ponta Gorda did work, how would eliminating the one human being who is employed to welcome visitors and answer questions improve the system? In Berry’s words, ‘what would be superseded would be not only something, but somebody’. The person who works there is a ‘good that already exists’, a human relationship that should be preserved, especially when her removal from a job would be bought at so little gain.
In the next post we’ll go deeper into a
taxonomy of automation. Now we’re going for a swim.
