We’re conflating seeing the injustices of our world with thinking that everything is getting worse.
Most of the people reading this will be able to pull out a statistic that they have recently seen to either prove or disprove my point. But I do genuinely believe that we are spending way to little time with understanding the anxieties that modern technology enables just by surfacing it. Companies, organizations, whole societies are aware of so many more things going without having built up a resistance, an ability to contextualize and make use of what is being surfaced without creating a substantial surplus of stress. In all of that it is easy to lose perspective and revert to the position of what German’s describe as “Früher war alles besser” (In the past everything was better). It’s not a genuine way of dealing with what in front of us, but often enough it is the only way of dealing with a system that is being overloaded. In technical terms, the more aware we are, the more we are bordering to DDOS ourselves.
The result of this is that even the staunchest defenders of the internet are suddenly reverting to nostalgia. You know, when TV was a unifying force and represented people of all colors and/or gender fairly/inclusively. For some, they might have been, but certainly not for most. I fall into the same trap more often, too tired to deal with the absurdity that Twitter has become without wanting to give it up. Or, in more general terms, without questioning the legitimacy of my work altogether.
Since launching earlier this week, Pokémon Go is quickly gaining traction and people keep stumbling upon Pokémon in the weirdest places. But it seems the hunt to catch them all has finally gone wrong for someone… sort of.
In his latest video, popular YouTuber Lanceypooh decided to record his Go adventures as he headed out to chase Pokémon in the woods.
But his trip suddenly took a scary and unexpected turn when Lancey accidentally ended up intruding someone’s property while following the Pokéradar.
This is when things escalated quickly. The alleged owner mistook Lancey’s harmless Pokémon hunt for trespassing and – following a very brief warning – opened fire at the YouTuber and his friends.
Fortunately, however, Lancey and his companions managed to quickly make their way to their vehicle, getting out of harm’s way in one piece. Skip ahead in the video above to 5:20 to watch that bit.
As Redditors have already remarked, the authenticity of the video indeed appears questionable – and I, for one, won’t be surprised, if it turns out to be staged.
But in case it’s real… Pokémon lovers, beware: the hunter can quickly turn into the hunted.
Bitcoin has long been thought to be the world’s most unstable currency – moving from being worth $2 to $1,137 in the last five years. But that wildly volatile currency is now becoming a safe refuge when compared to the fluctuations in the pound.
For a brief period this week, Bitcoin’s 10-day historical volatility – a measure of how much its price has been changing – dropped below that of the British pound.
So here we have a partial answer to why experts aren’t trusted. They aren’t trusted by people who feel alienated from them. My reading of this study would be that it isn’t that we live in a ‘post-fact’ political climate. Rather it is that attempts to take facts out of their social context won’t work. For me and my friends it seems incomprehensible to ignore the facts, whether about the science of vaccination, or the law and economics of leaving the EU. But me and my friends do very well from the status quo - the Treasury, the Bar, the University work well for us. We know who these people are, we know how they work, and we trust them because we feel they are working for us, in some wider sense. People who voted Leave do suffer from a lack of trust, and my best guess is that this is a reflection of a belief that most authorities aren’t on their side, not because they necessarily reject their status as experts.
Metaknowledge functions as a powerful bullshit detector. It can separate crowd members who actually know something from those who are guessing wildly or just parroting what everyone else says. ‘The crowd community has been insufficiently ambitious in what it tries to extract from the crowd,’ Prelec says. ‘The crowd is wise, but not in the way the error-correcting intuition assumed. There’s more information there.’ The bullshit detector isn’t perfect, but it’s the best you can do whenever you don’t know the answer yourself and have to rely on other people’s opinion. Which eyewitness do you believe? Which talking head on TV? Which scientist commenting on some controversial topic? If they demonstrate superior metaknowledge, you can take that as a sign of their superior knowledge.
After an almost five-year journey to the solar system’s largest planet, NASA’s Juno spacecraft successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit during a 35-minute engine burn. Confirmation that the burn had completed was received on Earth at 8:53 p.m. PDT (11:53 p.m. EDT) Monday, 2016-07-04
Scientists have long known that Jupiter is noisy: The planet produces intense radio storms powered by interactions between the planet and its moons, not to mention the wild gases at play on the planet itself. But they didn’t realize that Juno’s entry into Jupiter’s orbit would produce such complex data. “While this transition from the solar wind into the magnetosphere was predicted to occur at some point in time,” the agency writes in the blog post, “the structure of the boundary between those two regions proved to be unexpectedly complex, with different instruments reporting unusual signatures both before and after the nominal crossing.”
I’m in the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park, at a spot that has been christened the “quietest square inch in the United States” by Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who spent more than three decades traveling the globe and making sound records of pristine environments. These days, however, he is more concerned with protecting these soundscapes than in documenting them — starting with the very patch of forest where I’m sitting.
The difference between hearing and listening, and the discovery of how to really, wholly lend one’s ear, are revelations Hempton wishes more people could have. “After three days or so in the Hoh Valley or in Olympic Park, you find that all the chatter of the modern world that snuck aboard your backpack with you … loses relevance,” he told us, with sermon-like delivery. “It’s no longer important. What’s important is the beauty of nature.”
But the quiet spaces — defined not by their lack of sound, which could include birdsong and wind rustling leaves, but their lack of manmade noise —are quickly disappearing. By some estimates, noise pollution affects more than 88 percent of the contiguous U.S.
New York City is proposing to spend $3 billion on a massive wall to keep out the rising ocean. (See: climate change and sea level rise.) It’s called the “Big U” (see the map below…..it looks like the letter “U”). New York City has the money, and the stature and the motivation.
The article is long, but it gets into what NYC is doing and why, the positives and negatives a giant dike, and the politics (of course).
Excerpt:
Next year, if all goes well, the city will break ground on what’s called the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, an undulating 10-foot-high steel-and-concrete-reinforced berm that will run about two miles along the riverfront. It’s the first part of a bigger barrier system, known informally as “the Big U,” that someday may loop around the entire bottom of Manhattan, from 42nd Street on the East Side to 57th Street on the West Side. Zarrilli likes to underscore that the barrier will be covered with grass and trees in many places, as well as benches and bike paths – it’s the East Side equivalent of the High Line, the hugely popular elevated train track on the West Side that has been transformed into an urban park. There are plans in the works to build other walls and barriers in the Rockaways and on Staten Island, as well as in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River. But this project in Lower Manhattan is the headliner, not just because the city may spend $3 billion or more to construct it, but also because Lower Manhattan is some of the most valuable real estate on the planet – if it can’t be protected, then New York is in deep trouble.
At the outskirts of the solar system there is the Oort Cloud, where comets come from—bound to their eccentric orbits, circumambulating the Sun like throngs of Hajjis around the holy black cube of Mecca. The granite relic is strangely reminiscent of the alien monolith that confounds Stone Age homo sapiens in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that sense a journey to the Qaaba simulates particles drawn by the pull of gravity to an Axis Mundi, a primordial sanctorum, the fulcrum of universal motion. Collision of the pilgrims en masse creates a bridge between the pilgrim and the cosmos, a direct encounter with smallness and infinitude.
Across the earthly sphere namazees face this conspicuous cube five times a day, a cube sitting upon a sphere - as if they were small magnetic dipoles aligning themselves to a vast, invisible geomagnetic field extended by the black cube across the earth, tracing its ley lines of unshakeable faith.
Like the Moon which always presents the same face to the Earth, even as it rotates around it. The ritual sighting of the Moon is perhaps a symbolic act of social “flash mob” astronomy. Because these traditions are based on a terrestrial geometry, as the Islamic faith moves into space—the practice of its rituals will become more mathematically intricate. How does a Muslim astronaut face Mecca from orbit? What does ghurrat al hilal (sighting of the moon) mean on the planet Saturn which has more than 60 moons? If the moon to be observed is the Earth’s … we might even see a religion adopt the tenets of astrophysics, going so far as to calculate the speed of light and relativistic effects.
Nowhere is the worship of pure geometry more evident in Islamic art than in calligraphy and tessellation. The name of God is repeated across a 2-dimensional sheet of spacetime like a crystalline mirror, a theory of everything without the need of any other words. There is some historical evidence that translations of Plato and Euclid may have contributed to this strange syncretism of geometry, mysticism, and cosmology.
That the world of sensations is a hologram, projected from the 2-dimensional surface of a black hole … is a very new idea in physics, among the many attempts at achieving a theory of “quantum gravity,” but if it succeeds, Islamic calligraphy in particular will acquire a prophetic hue.
What are we to make of contemporary Chinese reality? Political scientists have their way of looking at things, as do economists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers. Make no mistake, we fiction writers have our way of looking at the world too. Only the fiction writer’s way of looking at the world is not just one more to add to our list. The fiction writer incorporates all ways of looking at the world into one. It is a compound eye. If Magic Realism was the way in which Latin American authors presented their view of their reality, then Ultra-Unreal Realism should be our name for the literature through which the Chinese regard their reality. The Chinese word “chaohuan” (ultra-unreal) is something of a play on the word “mohuan” (magic), as in “mohuan xianshizhuyi” (magic realism)— “mohuan” is “magical unreal,” and “chaohuan” is “surpassing the unreal.”
Interesting seeing that term in FP Mag. I gave a talk in Jan 2015 shortly before transmediale kinda on this called ‘Towards a new corporate taxonomy -> multinational, transnational, metanational, stack’ Unfortunatly it wasnt recorded // Jay
Royal College of Art graduate Tessa Silva-Dawson has used cow’s milk to create a natural alternative to plastic from non-renewable sources (+ slideshow).
Silva-Dawson, who studied on the institution’s Design Products course, explored the possibility of replacing polymers dervied from fossil fuels with an organic waste material that can perform in the same way.
For her Protein project, she sourced waste milk from a dairy farm in Sussex, which throws away 3,000 litres of skimmed milk each week.
“That’s just one farm in the UK, so 3,000 litres a week is, potentially scaled up, a really big industry,” Silva-Dawson told Dezeen.
The production process starts similarly to cheese-making, using heat to separate the curds from the liquid whey. The curds are then dried out in an industrial dehydrator and mixed with a natural plasticiser to turn them into pellets.
According to the designer, these can be used in the same way as synthetic plastics and moulded with existing machinery.
unless you grow your own or are friends with a farmer with a sense of humor, you never see a potato or a carrot like these beauts. that’s unfortunate. in our modern mediated globelife we decry fakery in all it’s forms. no matter the field – consuming, political or social – we demand a semblance of honesty. and yet we also require the best, from everything and from everyone. no matter the nature of things, we believe it’s natural that some things won’t make the cut. at some point fairness, candor, probity, bluntness, and integrity take a back seat to whatever we deem fine, fitting and just. easier on the eyes and all that. there are times though when it’s just plain considerate to pull back the veil to see a bit of what goes on when we aren’t looking.
“Maybe Castor and Pollux are a better analogy than Narcissus for computational infatuation: These twins had only one share of immortality between them and spent eternity trading places in Heaven and Hades, each foresworn to be apart from the other but unwilling to accept absolute separation. They share elation and anguish in equal measure but never together—the constancy of change becomes its own uncanny medium joining the two.”
June’s Decentralized Web Summit at San Francisco’s Internet Archive was a ground-breaking, three-day combination of workshops, lectures, demos and a hackathon, all aimed at figuring out how to restore the decentralized character of the early internet – and keep it that way.
In a long, thoughtful report on the event, Dan Gillmor and Kevin Marks write insightfully about the forces massed on both sides of this movement, and where it might all end up.
The Google codebase [as of January 2015] includes approximately one billion files and has a history of approximately 35 million commits spanning Google’s entire 18-year existence. The repository contains 86TB [Total size of uncompressed content, excluding release branches] of data, including approximately two billion lines of code in nine million unique source files. The total number of files also includes source files copied into release branches, files that are deleted at the latest revision, configuration files, documentation, and supporting data files.
Google’s codebase is shared by more than 25,000 Google software developers from dozens of offices in countries around the world. On a typical workday, they commit 16,000 changes to the codebase, and another 24,000 changes are committed by automated systems. Each day the repository serves billions of file read requests, with approximately 800,000 queries per second during peak traffic and an average of approximately 500,000 queries per second each workday. Most of this traffic originates from Google’s distributed build-and-test systems
“That is the situation to which evolution adapts organisms. And that, therefore, is the lifestyle in which the Earth’s biosphere ‘seems adapted’ to sustaining them. The biosphere only ever achieves stability – and only temporarily at that – by continually neglecting, harming, disabling and killing individuals. Hence the metaphor of a spaceship or a life-support system, is quite perverse: when humans design a life-support system, they design it to provide the maximum possible comfort, safety and longevity for its users within the available resources; the biosphere has no such priorities.
Nor is the biosphere a great preserver of species. In addition to being notoriously cruel to individuals, evolution involves continual extinctions of entire species. The average rate of extinction since the beginning of life on Earth has been about ten species per year (the number is known only very approximately), becoming much higher during the relatively brief periods that palaeontologists call ‘mass extinction events’.”
–Deutsch, David.The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. London: Allen Lane, 2011. (viacarvalhais)
“One thing that you immediately notice when you set out to study the cultures that flourished around the Mediterranean a couple thousand years ago is that none of them – not the Egyptians, not the Greeks, not the Etruscans and none of their neighbors either – had a word in any of those languages for what we today consider religion. They had a very rich religious vocabulary, but it would have been incomprehensible to them if a person had said, “I am a ___.” Religion was merely part of a broader spectrum of culture and concerned primarily with what a person did not who they were or what they believed, a fact which is reflected in their vocabulary. To use the Greeks as an example, the word that is most often suggested as an analogue for our “religion” was eusebeia. Literally this means “good or proper reverence; piety, loyalty” or as one ancient Greek commentator remarked, “that portion of justice which is concerned with divine matters and giving to the gods their due.” Another commonly found term was threskeia which means “conducting religious ceremonies, worship.” Other words are therapon “divine tendance or service”, proskynesis “inclining towards; bowing, intense respect or devotion” and by extension any dedicated act expressing powerful religious sentiment, nomos “custom, tradition, law” and so on and so forth. A related concept was deisidaimonia “fear of spirits”, which had largely negative connotations suggesting superstitious, extravagant or foreign types of worship. All of these, as you can see, were primarily concerned with actions.”
“There are three constituents of a shadow: umbra, penumbra, antumbra. I hold my hand between the lamp and the desk’s surface. The darkest place, where my hand blocks the direct rays of electric light, is the umbra – latin for shadow. The penumbra (almost, nearly, shadow) is the partial occlusion of light, where the darkness is less severe, seen in this case, emanating briefly from the edges of the umbra, from my dark finger tips. The antumbra is something that cannot be described.”
“In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers’ job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it’s your fault if you get hit.” One of the keys to this shift was the creation of the crime of jaywalking.
“As sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action: they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds. Matsutake and pine don’t just grow in forests; they make forests. Matsutake forests are gatherings that build and transform landscape”
–Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World.
Vanderbilt’s premise is: “We are strangers to our tastes.” He doesn’t mean that we don’t really like what we say we like. He means that we don’t know why. Our intuition that tastes are intuitive, that they are just “our tastes,” and spring from our own personal genome, has been disproved repeatedly by psychologists and market researchers. But where tastes do come from is extremely difficult to pin down. Taste is not congenital: we don’t inherit it. And it’s not consistent. We come to like things we thought we hated (or actually did hate), and we are very poor predictors of what we are likely to like in the future.
The electricity-eating microbes that the researchers were hunting for belong to a larger class of organisms that scientists are only beginning to understand. They inhabit largely uncharted worlds: the bubbling cauldrons of deep sea vents; mineral-rich veins deep beneath the planet’s surface; ocean sediments just a few inches below the deep seafloor. The microbes represent a segment of life that has been largely ignored, in part because their strange habitats make them incredibly difficult to grow in the lab.
“It used to be the case that people were admonished to not“re-invent the wheel”. We now live in an age that spends a lot of time“reinventing the flat tire!””
Bookworms your dreams are slowly coming true all over the world. Last week we spoke about the Taiwanese bookstore, which allows one to read endlessly 24/7 without buying a thing, and last week Singapore’s local bookstore BooksActually, has installed three book vending machines!! Take a look at the bibliophile mania below!
Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg sat down for an interview with POLITICO Europe. When asked what NATO is doing to address the risks of climate change, he responded by asserting that climate change is in fact a security risk, and an issue to consider in the context of conflict prevention, peace and stability.
He also noted that NATO does not have the luxury of choosing the challenges it faces, and has to work to
adaptto the changing security environment. Indeed, the challenges that NATO faces are serious and climate change, particularly if not adequately addressed by NATO member states, could very well multiply those challenges and ultimately challenge the NATO mission. However, though the Secretary General appreciated the risks of climate change to NATO’s security landscape, he unfortunately stopped short of describing it as a priority of his.
From the interview:
Alice Stollmeyer: “Last year head of the UN Climate Summit in Paris NATO has stated that climate change poses significant threat multipliers and I was wondering could you tell us what NATO is doing to address this and how to, amid all the other crisis, to keep the climate security threats on the agenda?”
Secretary General Stoltenberg: “First of all, I think it is very important to underline what you just said and that is climate change is also a security threat because it can really change also the conditions for where people live, create new migrant and refugee crises and scarce resources, water, can fuel new conflicts.
So climate change is also about preventing conflicts and creating more stability and prosperity, which is good for peace and stability.
Second, NATO is addressing how we can also address, how we can contribute. NATO is not the first responder to climate change. We are a military alliance, but partly everything that can make also military vehicles, military equipment more energy efficient will be good both for the environment but also for the sustainability of the armed forces. So energy efficiency, less energy dependence of the armed forces is good for both the armed forces as armed forces and for the environment. And that’s actually the thing we can do as an alliance. We are also sharing this information with allies, trying to increase their focus and understanding of this, but of course the most important things that can be done with climate change is more related to energy, to ministers of the environment, to other areas than defense.” (57:18 min mark)
