Version control, collaborative editing and undo

eve, programming, versioning, dvcs, editing, collaborative editing, time

Eve is designed for live programming. As the user makes changes, the compiler is constantly re-compiling code and incrementally updating the views. The compiler is designed to be resilient and will compile and run as much of the code as possible in the face of errors. The structural editor restricts partially edited code to small sections, rather than rendering entire files unparseable. The pointer-free relational data model and the timeless views make it feasible to incrementally compute the state of the program, rather than starting from scratch on each edit. We arrived at this design to support live programming but these properties also help with collaborative editing.

http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2015/04/22/version-control/

Visions of transhumanism

transhumanism, life extension, extropy, Paul Graham Raven, libertarianism

The proactionary principle, a creation of first-generation transhumanist figurehead Max More, is an attempt to turn the precautionary principle upon its head. Where the precautionary principle declares that research and experimentation should only be undertaken after a consensus has been reached regarding the low probability of risky outcomes, More’s proactionary principle damns such caution as being detrimental to the advancement of the species, and advocates that research priorities and funding be allocated in accordance with the potential rewards, rather than risks. By suggesting that the State is not only intruding upon one’s freedom to conduct business, but also restricting one’s potential maximal lifespan, More hits upon a two-pronged formula that strikes right at the heart of what it is to be a wealthy western man: the plebeian moonbats don’t just want you to fail, they want you to die before you’re done.

http://thelongandshort.org/issues/season-four/visions-of-transhumanism.html

I have written elsewhere of how much art there is responding to science, but it is much harder to find science that learns…

“I have written elsewhere of how much art there is responding to science, but it is much harder to find science that learns directly from art, since the goals of the two enterprises remain quite different. Or if they both have a similar goal of revealing deeper truths about nature, one does so with amazing insight, the other with rigorously documented investigation. But Domnitch and Gelfand’s work crosses the line sometimes because it reveals natural phenomena scientists thought were impossible to see or even to create. Their best-known work, “Camera Lucida,” investigates the mysterious phenomenon of sonoluminescence, a physical oddity discovered in 1929, whereby tiny oxygen bubbles bombarded with sound can be compressed enough to faintly glow.”

– Rothenberg, David. Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. (viacarvalhais)

To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment…

“

To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For the astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us.

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.

Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.

Question your tea spoons.

What is there under your wallpaper?

”

– Georges Perec, The Infra-ordinary, 1971 (vianataliekane)

‘How quiet these scenes are, how charged by a crisp light and brilliant clarity. They look like insignificant places, but all of…

nataliekane:

‘How quiet these scenes are, how charged by a crisp light and brilliant clarity. They look like insignificant places, but all of them are full of significance for those whose loved ones died there. All are sites of premature death, all are sites where someone was killed, and most also index an unrestituted crime.

The American landscape is thickening with these incidents. If extra-judicial killing was always facile, the reporting of it is becoming so as well. This is the value of Begley’s project: to shift us into a sober space, a space of contemplation. It is important to have the numbers, but it is vital to have an affective intervention like this one as well, which shows us how difficult the current dispensation is to bear, and how it marks us, the streets on which we move, the places in which we live.’

Josh Begley, Officer Involved, 2015

They Took Our Myths

HP Lovecraft, myth, mythos, information, fiction, reality, horror, copyright, old ones, Lovecraft, C

In Lovecraft, nothing is pure evil, and nothing is good either. The moral of every Lovecraft story is: the world is more complicated than you think, and sometimes in ways that will shorten your lifespan! That’s a hard thing to swallow. Science fiction readers have a better time swallowing it, I think, than some other groups (novelty is part of the reason people choose science fiction over some other genres), but nobody particularly likes to think that everything they know is wrong. That said, it’s a realistic worldview – and Lovecraft was prescient in the sense that it’s a worldview that is far more clearly realistic now, when communications technologies have made it very easy to come across dissenting opinions and well-documented facts that explode your umwelt, than it was during an era when a telephone was an expensive luxury and basic literacy was far less common.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/06/they-took-our-myths.html#more

The book is a slow form of exchange. It is a mode of temporality which conceives of public communication not as action but…

“The book is a slow form of exchange. It is a mode of temporality which conceives of public communication not as action but rather as reflection upon action. Indeed, the book form serves precisely to defer action, to widen the temporal gap between thought and deed, to create a space for reflection and debate. The book, as Marcel Proust recognized, is a fulcrum that creates space out of time.”

– “Books in Time”, Carla Hesse (1996)

“The Medium and the Tedium” by Mel Bochner For translucence, against transparency: an account of conceptual art and its…

christopherschreck:

“The Medium and the Tedium” by Mel Bochner

For translucence, against transparency: an account of conceptual art and its mediums.

“For me, the medium was never transparent, never something to be seen through, never a neutral delivery system. No matter how reduced the means, they always remained something material, something to be taken apart and put back together, something to be confronted. Any genuine critique can arise only out of the process of using the medium against itself. Far from being the “tedium” of this evening’s theme, this is how I see my job as an artist: to grapple with the means of expression until an idea finds its own form.”

Developing Transplantable Bioengineered Forelimbs A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has made…

brucesterling:

emergentfutures:

Developing Transplantable Bioengineered Forelimbs

A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has made the first steps towards development of bioartificial replacement limbs suitable for transplantation. In their report, which has been published online in the journal Biomaterials, the researchers describe using an experimental approach previously used to build bioartificial organs to engineer rat forelimbs with functioning vascular and muscle tissue. They also provided evidence that the same approach could be applied to the limbs of primates


Full Story: MDTmag

*That’s extremely interesting, but I really kinda wish I hadn’t seen that