Blue evaporation ponds are visible at the Intrepid Potash Mine in Moab, Utah, USA. The mine produces muriate of potash, a…

dailyoverview:

Blue evaporation ponds are visible at the Intrepid Potash Mine in Moab, Utah, USA. The mine produces muriate of potash, a potassium-containing salt used widely by farmers in fertilizer. The salt is pumped to the surface from underground brines and dried in massive solar ponds that vibrantly extend across the landscape. As the water evaporates over the course of 300 days, the salts crystallize out. So why are you seeing such vibrant colors? The water is dyed bright blue to reduce the amount of time it takes for the potash to crystallize; darker water absorbs more sunlight and heat.

38.483377775°, -109.681333272°

www.dailyoverview.com

Charisma and Causality

Art Review, Timothy Morton, Art, causality, OOO, appearances

Things are exactly what they are, yet never as they seem. We live in a world of tricksters. We never left the pre-Neolithic. It was all a nightmare that went viral. And we know this, because we have modern science. And this is the world described by object-oriented ontology. Which is why OOO is so great, and the real reason why it comes in for such hostile fear and rage. According to this view, an artwork cannot be reduced to its parts or its materials, nor can it be reduced to its creator’s life, nor to some other context, however defined (the last decade, the current geological era, the economic structure of human society, art discourse, power-knowledge – anything). And art has an actual causal effect. Art just is tampering directly with cause and effect, because art is what cause and effect actually is. Art is charisma, pouring out of anything whatsoever, whether we humans consider it to be alive or sentient or not.

http://artreview.com/features/november_2015_feature_timothy_morton_charisma_causality/

How Daniel Rigmaiden discovered Stingray spying technology

surveillance, fraud, investigation, stingray, NDA, evidence, ACLU

Daniel Rigmaiden is the man who first discovered Stingray while he was in prison facing charges of tax fraud. In an attempt to live off the grid, Rigmaiden had concocted a scheme where he would file tax returns for dead people. He did so for quite a while — making sure to cover his tracks — and was able to rake in thousands of dollars. Despite his intense meticulousness to details, Rigmaiden was ultimately caught by the authorities. Yet he didn’t understand how they became hip to his ways. He used a slew of fake IDs, maintained almost no public identity, and even lived in the woods. The only weak link, he thought, was the cellular AirCard he used to access the internet. But, given that he only used fake identities and anonymized his web browsing, Rigmaiden did not understand how they tracked him down. And so he began to research.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/how-daniel-rigmaiden-discovered-stingray-spying-technology–2015–6?op=1?r=US&IR=T

Martin Shkreli Accused of Being Surprisingly Good at Fraud

Bloomberg, Shkreli, fraud, investment, Wu Tang, SEC

Here are the criminal indictment and Securities and Exchange Commission complaint against Martin Shkreli, who was arrested today not for jacking up prices for lifesaving drugs, not for buying the only copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album and not listening to it, not for being generally vile on Twitter and in interviews, but just for garden-variety securities fraud. Here’s how the indictment describes the early going at Shkreli’s second hedge fund, MSMB Capital

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015–12–17/martin-shkreli-accused-of-being-surprisingly-good-at-fraud

What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn’t data have to be “boiled down” and “simplified”? These common…

“What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn’t data have to be “boiled down” and “simplified”? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.”

–Edward R. Tufte (viainthenoosphere)

Springtime of micronations spearheaded by Belgian “Grand-Duke” Niels

Micronations, antartica, geopolitics, Flandrensis

Flandrensis, its flag, its motto and the cheerful personality of its Grand Duke attracted people online and the project became so exciting that Niels decided to make it something bigger. He continued, “I wanted it to be useful. I learned of micronations proclaiming territories in Antarctica so I did it, but as an ecological venture, to raise awareness on ice melting. Flandrensis is the only country that does not want citizens on its territory”.

http://brusselstimes.com/magazine2/4653/springtime-of-micronations-spearheaded-by-belgian-grand-duke-niels

Every Technological Extension is Also an Amputation

Near Future Laboratory, Media, social media, apprehension, crap futures

Since the presence of social network is relatively new, the real gains and losses of their use can be found in the mood, behavior, rituals, manners and feelings of connected people. Only recently, the popular media started to consider the psychological effects of ‘social overload’, its impact on mental, social and even physical well-being. We are starting to hear about compulsive behaviors or any other kind of pathologies with acronyms such as FoMO (Fear of Missing Out) or FoBO (Fear of Better Options) provoked by the exposure to social media. That evolution can also easily be traced in recent academic literature.

http://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2015/12/10/the-global-village-and-its-discomforts/

Argentine Yard is massive railroad yard in Kansas City, Kansas, USA. The facility has sixty sorting tracking and multiple car…

dailyoverview:

Argentine Yard is massive railroad yard in Kansas City, Kansas, USA. The facility has sixty sorting tracking and multiple car repair shops on the premises. America’s network of freight railroads covers more than 140,000 miles and accounts for approximately 40 percent of intercity freight volume - more than any other mode of transportation.

39°4'51"N, 94°40'42"W

www.dailyoverview.com

Resistance to last-resort antibiotic has now spread across globe

New Scientist, evolution, antibiotics, pan-resistance, polymyxins, bacteria, MDR, PDR, agriculture

The last drug has fallen. Bacteria carrying a gene that allows them to resist polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort for some kinds of infection, have been found in Denmark and China, prompting a global search for the gene. The discovery means that gram-negative bacteria, which cause common gut, urinary and blood infections in humans, can now become “pan-resistant”, with genes that defeat all antibiotics now available. That will make some infections incurable, unless new kinds of antibiotics are brought to market soon. Colistin, the most common polymyxin, is a last-resort treatment for infections with bacteria such as E. coli and Klebsiella that resist all other available antibiotics.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28633-resistance-to-last-resort-antibiotic-has-now-spread-across-globe/

$13.5M Moore Grant to Develop Working ‘Accelerator on a Chip’ Prototype “The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded…

futureofscience:

$13.5M Moore Grant to Develop Working ‘Accelerator on a Chip’ Prototype

“The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded $13.5 million to Stanford University for an international effort, including key contributions from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, to build a working particle accelerator the size of a shoebox based on an innovative technology known as “accelerator on a chip.”

This novel technique, which uses laser light to propel electrons through a series of artfully crafted chips, has the potential to revolutionize science, medicine and other fields by dramatically shrinking the size and cost of particle accelerators.

“Can we do for particle accelerators what the microchip industry did for computers?” said SLAC physicist Joel England, an investigator with the 5-year project. “Making them much smaller and cheaper would democratize accelerators, potentially making them available to millions of  people. We can’t even imagine the creative applications they would find for this technology.”

Robert L. Byer, a Stanford professor of applied physics and co-principal investigator for the project who has been working on the idea for 40 years, said, “Based on our proposed revolutionary design, this prototype could set the stage for a new generation of ‘tabletop’ accelerators, with unanticipated discoveries in biology and materials science and potential applications in security scanning, medical therapy and X-ray imaging.””