North America’s largest tire dump is located in Hudson, Colorado. The facility contains 50-foot-deep (15-meter) pits filled with approximately 60 million scrap tires. An estimated 1.5 billion tires are discarded each year worldwide. Of that amount, more than half are burned for their fuel.
Did you know? Tumblr DOES have a post length limit. Strangely, though, it’s based on how many blocks of text you have. Supposedly this implies that you can have any length post so long as it’s one block of text? Very strange, will have to investigate further.
Two limits! You can have a maximum of 4,096,000 characters in 1 [one] tumblr post. I would work out how many combinations this is, but 26^6,000 is already considered to be “Infinity” by most calculators, and a program I wrote threw an error code.
26^95,000 is already over 134,000 characters long - which would take 33 different text blocks to convey via tumblr. Whenever somebody says we’re running out of posts, don’t forget that tumblr is needlessly designed for MASSIVE amounts of information [no matter how detrimental it may be for mobile phones].
There are SOME works of fanfiction which are lengthy enough that you couldn’t fit the whole thing into one tumblr post, but this is enough to fit Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy in it about 14 times over.
The Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors organizes an annual landscaping contest, where landscaping contractors from around Japan arrive on site with their mini pickup trucks and then spending several hours transforming the cargo bed into a small garden.
The Richat Structure, also known as “The Eye of the Sahara”. Located in Mauritania, the structure is about 50 km in diameter. It was initially thought to be the result of an impact event because large meteors typically produce circular features on Earth’s surface. But geologic studies have revealed that it is actually an uplifted geologic dome, also known as a domed anticline.
[ID: keyboard orb. A ball clearly made of some sturdy material, it has mechanical keys. The letter keys are black and the rest are white. the keys are around the keyboard orb but not on the bottom. ID end]
throwing this ball must be the only right way to do a keyboard smash
A court in Germany has overturned a Europe-wide travel ban imposed by German authorities on Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, the British Palestinian surgeon who spent weeks saving lives in Gaza at the beginning of Israel’s ongoing genocide.
In recent weeks, Abu Sitta has been barred from entering France and the Netherlands in order to speak about the Israeli war crimes he witnessed during his 43 days working as a doctor under Israel’s savage and indiscriminate bombardment.[…]
The draconian German ban constituted “a serious breach of freedom of movement and expression in Europe and now a judge has ruled that the travel ban should be overturned,” said the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) and European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), which assisted in the case.
“This is a significant victory for freedom of speech and a significant turning point in challenging the chilling environment that many Palestinian human rights advocates have to operate in,” the two civil rights groups added.
The ban on Abu Sitta had also drawn criticism from Human Rights Watch, which asserted that the “attempts to prevent him from sharing his experience treating patients in Gaza risks undermining Germany’s commitment to protect and facilitate freedom of expression and assembly and to nondiscrimination.”
Just as a reminder, I did up all the new posters in the simplified B&W style, and I’m using them for cheaper “budget option” posters in folded-once 11x17 and 8.5x11. They’re lower cost and cheaper to ship, so it’s a good option if you like the designs but can’t afford the bigger stuff. They also ship well with the stickers and art cards. You can find the listing at this link below!
I could never write a textbook on differential equations because every few pages I would digress into a long rant about how insisting on only solving DEs with solutions in the family of elementary equations and steering clear of numerical methods is a sign that you are some sort of quisling for the Supreme Fascist, who has vouchsafed us these little crumbs, and that any proud person should be unafraid of getting their hands dirty, and what I would do to G-d if he ever comes back around here again, etc etc,
ALT
This is a balanced viewpoint and I respect it but I still feel like this is conceding too much ground to those who teach DEs as though the toolkit of fun puzzles is all there is. I don’t think we should “accept”. I think we should
embrace. I think we should spend more time on error bounds, not just because they are necessary, but because the mathematical fields devoted to building approximations which behave nicely have their own beauty
Green Tara is a forest goddess, and in one story is shown as being clad in leaves. Her Pure Land, in distinction to others that are composed of precious gems, is said to be lush and verdant:
Covered with manifold trees and creepers, resounding with the sound of many birds, And with murmur of waterfalls, thronged with wild beasts of many kinds; Many species of flowers grow everywhere.
She is therefore a female form of the “Green Man” figure who is found carved in many European churches and cathedrals, and who is found in the Islamic traditions as the figure Al-Khidr.
People in notes mentioned a video, and here it is:
Aww they used to just be photoshopped and now they’re AI!
Seed scams use fake photos to sell seeds. This scale has existed for YEARS, with some of the oldest Jasc Paint Shop Pro manips on the internet being the bright blue watermelons, strawberries and roses generated for this scam.
Because you have to wait for weeks until even normal seeds “work”, and months before they “flower,” there are no negative consequences to the sellers; you’ll time out of your consumer rights, lose interest or lose steam, or simply forget about it long before you ever complain. They, for their part, can simply change the name of their online storefront. The cost is low enough that people won’t retaliate (about $20) and gardening is such a black box of skill anyway that normal people may even
blame themselvesfor not getting the desired result. after all, even experienced gardeners - and legitimate seed sellers - don’t bother much with refunds for seed failures. At most you write a review saying it was a disappointing variety, and the seller sells a different variety next year. So even people who know what they’re doing wouldn’t bother with consequences, which is why the scam is evergreen.
AI does drastically increase the ability to generate appealing images for free, but the scam is the same. 
You do receive seeds in this scam, but apparently they are just generic flower  seeds. A Redditor who ordered them drunkenly apparently had them ID’ed as pansy or petunia seeds.
But a
Euglena colony — and even less an entire pond — is not an individual machine, it’s a system of its own: an ecosystem, a rich admixture, a diverse assemblage of soupy life. The pond goes beyond the individual brain, beyond even one kind of brain, a particular species or genus, and into the possibility of a system of minds, all relating and inter-relating, and adapting to one another in complex, ever-shifting ways.
James Bridle. 2022.
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Penguin.
At first glance, Dave Langston’s predicament seems similar to headaches facing homeowners in coastal states vulnerable to catastrophic hurricanes: As disasters have become more frequent and severe, his insurance company has been losing money. Then, it canceled his coverage and left the state.
But Mr. Langston lives in Iowa.
Relatively consistent weather once made Iowa a good bet for insurance companies. But now, as a warming planet makes events like hail and wind storms worse, insurers are fleeing.
Mr. Langston spent months trying to find another company to insure the townhouses, on a quiet cul-de-sac at the edge of Cedar Rapids, that belong to members of his homeowners association. Without coverage, “if we were to have damage that hit all 17 units, we’re looking at bankruptcy for all of us,” he said.
The insurance turmoil caused by climate change — which had been concentrated in Florida, California and Louisiana — is fast becoming a contagion, spreading to states like Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, Utah and Washington. Even in the Northeast, where homeowners insurance was still generally profitable last year, the trends are worsening.
In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country, according to a New York Times analysis of newly available financial data. That’s up from 12 states five years ago, and eight states in 2013. The result is that insurance companies are raising premiums by as much as 50 percent or more, cutting back on coverage or leaving entire states altogether. Nationally, over the last decade, insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, according to the ratings firm Moody’s, and those losses are increasing.
The growing tumult is affecting people whose homes have never been damaged and who have dutifully paid their premiums, year after year. Cancellation notices have left them scrambling to find coverage to protect what is often their single biggest investment. As a last resort, many are ending up in high-risk insurance pools created by states that are backed by the public and offer less coverage than standard policies. By and large, state regulators lack strategies to restore stability to the market.
Insurers are still turning a profit from other lines of business, like commercial and life insurance policies. But many are dropping homeowners coverage because of losses.
Tracking the shifting insurance market is complicated by the fact it is not regulated by the federal government; attempts by the Treasury Department to simply gather data have been rebuffed by some state regulators.
The turmoil in insurance markets is a flashing red light for an American economy that is built on real property. Without insurance, banks won’t issue a mortgage; without a mortgage, most people can’t buy a home. With fewer buyers, real estate values are likely to decline, along with property tax revenues, leaving communities with less money for schools, police and other basic services.
And without sufficient insurance, people struggle to rebuild after disasters. Last year, storms, wildfires and other disasters pushed 2.5 million American adults out of their homes, according to census data, including at least 830,000 people who were displaced for six months or longer.
Having adhd is like suffering from a Wizard’s Curse, so naturally the best way to deal with it is to become a wizard in one’s own right and study thee Solomonick Arte in order to learn how to bind and control a certain Demon whose true name is Alpha-Methyl-Phenethylamine. (Pictured below.)
Unfortunately, studying Thee Arte while afflicted by the curse is difficult, to say the least.
‘tis considered a Dark Arte by the King’s magicians, who will wait I just realized there’s a much funnier joke here
Giant blue-grey sei whales that vanished from Argentina’s Patagonian coast a century ago due to hunting are starting to flourish once again, demonstrating how species can recover when measures to protect them are put in place.
In the 1920s and 1930s regular whaling ships along the shores of Argentina, and beyond, saw populations dwindle. In the last 50 years, global bans on commercial whaling have helped populations of sei and others revive.
“They disappeared because they were hunted, they did not become extinct but were so reduced that no one saw them,” said Mariano Coscarella, biologist and researcher in marine ecosystems at the Argentine state science body CONICET.
Coscarella added that it had taken decades for numbers to recover enough that the whales had again been sighted, which only started to happen again in recent years.
“In this case it took over 80 years,” Coscarella said. “They breed every 2 or 3 years and so it took almost 100 years for them to have appreciable numbers for people to realize they were there.”
you sign up for the job because you want to save lives, and sometimes you get a chance to just be really, really, clear about “yes it is my job to save lives, there is an obstacle, and i am paid to use an axe to solve this problem”
I’ve just been made aware of this post and the fact my tweet on twitter about tags on Tumblr has breached containment back onto Tumblr is the funniest shit
And then the search function doesn’t work
It’s the Library of Alexandria if the Dewey Decimal System were burned and it’s become a sushi conveyor belt for books, with hieroglyphic tags scribbled on them
The summer of 2023 was exceptionally hot. Scientists have already established that it was the warmest Northern Hemisphere summer since around 1850, when people started systematically measuring and recording temperatures.
Now, researchers say it was the hottest in 2,000 years, according to a new study published in the journal Nature that compares 2023 with a longer temperature record across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The study goes back before the advent of thermometers and weather stations, to the year A.D. 1, using evidence from tree rings.
“That gives us the full picture of natural climate variability,” said Jan Esper, a climatologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and lead author of the paper.
Extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are responsible for most of the recent increases in Earth’s temperature, but other factors — including El Niño, an undersea volcanic eruption and a reduction in sulfur dioxide aerosol pollution from container ships — may have contributed to the extremity of the heat last year.
The average temperature from June through August 2023 was 2.20 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperature between the years 1 and 1890, according to the researchers’ tree ring data.
And last summer was 2.07 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperature between 1850 and 1900, the years typically considered the base line for the period before human-caused climate change.
The new study suggests that Earth’s natural temperature was cooler than this base line, which is frequently used by scientists and policymakers when discussing climate goals, such as limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial era.
Australia’s Richest Woman Demands Removal of her Portrait From Exhibition
Art is subjective. And while many artists long to share their work with the world, there’s no guarantee that the audience will understand it, or even like it.
That certainly seems to be the case with a painting by indigenous artist Vincent Namatjira, which includes a portrait of Australia’s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart.
Rinehart has reportedly called for the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) to remove her portrait, one of 21 individual works that make up a single piece in Namatjira’s exhibition “Australia in Colour,” from display.
The exhibition has been running at the gallery in the Australian capital, Canberra, since March.
Other subjects in the piece include the late Queen Elizabeth II, American musician Jimi Hendrix, Australian Aboriginal rights activist Vincent Lingiari and the former Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison.
Australian media has reported that Rinehart approached the NGA’s director and chair to request the painting’s removal.
The NGA said in a statement Thursday that it “welcomes the public having a dialogue on our collection and displays.”
“Since 1973, when the National Gallery acquired Jackson Pollocks’ Blue Poles, there has been a dynamic discussion on the artistic merits of works in the national collection, and/or on display at the Gallery,” the NGA statement continued. “We present works of art to the Australian public to inspire people to explore, experience and learn about art.”
Namatjira said in a statement that he paints “people who are wealthy, powerful, or significant – people who have had an influence on this country, and on me personally, whether directly or indirectly, whether for good or for bad.”
“Some people might not like it, other people might find it funny but I hope people look beneath the surface and see the serious side too,” Namatjira added.
Rinehart has an estimated net worth of $30.2 billion USD, according to Forbes. She “remained unshakable” at the top of Forbes’ Australia’s 50 Richest list for 2024, the outlet reported in February.
There’s a joke from Ancient Sumeria 4,000 years ago that goes, “A dog walked into a tavern and said, ‘I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one.” We don’t know what it means.
A woman goes into the woods. She encounters a man and a bear. The man is actually cake. The bear has two wolves inside it. The wolves want to know if you would love them if they were a worm
Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory just captured an ominous sign about the pace of global warming.
Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren’t just on their way to yet another record high this year — they’re rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations.
Carbon dioxide levels were 4.7 parts per million higher in March than they were a year earlier, the largest annual leap ever measured at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration laboratory atop a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. And from January through April, CO2 concentrations increased faster than they have in the first four months of any other year. Data from Mauna Loa is used to create the Keeling Curve, a chart that daily plots global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, tracked by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.
For decades, CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in the month of May have broken previous records. But the recent acceleration in atmospheric CO2, surpassing a record-setting increase observed in 2016, is perhaps a more ominous signal of failing efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and the damage they cause to Earth’s climate.
“Not only is CO2 still rising in the atmosphere — it’s increasing faster and faster,” said Arlyn Andrews, a climate scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
A historically strong El Niño climate pattern that developed last year is a big reason for the spike. But the weather pattern only punctuated an existing trend in which global carbon emissions are rising even as U.S. emissions have declined and the growth in global emissions has slowed.
Each annual maximum has raised new alarm about the curve’s unceasing upward trend — nearing 427 parts per million in the most recent readings, which is more than 50 percent above preindustrial levels and the highest in at least 4.3 million years, according to NOAA. Atmospheric CO2 levels first surpassed 400 parts per million in 2014. Scientists said in 2016 that levels were unlikely to drop below that threshold again during the lifetime of even the youngest generations.
Since that year, carbon dioxide emissions tied to fossil fuel consumption have increased 5 percent globally, according to Scripps.
Sergei Krikaliov stranded aboard the Mir space station in 1991 during the breakup of the USSR. Technically the last citizen of the Soviet Union until he was able to land 10 months later in March 1992.
According to a recent report published by the Aargauer Zeitung (h/t Golem.de), around three million smart toothbrushes have been infected by hackers and enslaved into botnets.
The most cyberpunk thing on your dash today.
This….this is why you do not need to connect EVERYTHING to the internet.
I’m comfused- how much damage could an enslaved toothbrush cause??
The aggressors installed remote control software onto the smart toothbrushes via their unprotected internet connections, aggregating 3 million of them into a botnet: a network of robot computers under remote control.
Next, they would instruct all 3 million of them to attack a website of their choosing, causing a distributed-denial-of-service (DDS) situation where the targeted website was so busy talking to hijacked toothbrushes that it couldn’t do the work it was designed for, resulting in crashes and lost revenue.
A DDDS, or Dental Distributed Denial of Service, if you will
In the 80s they just put a clock in a pen and called it a day.
Laing: I don’t think one is necessarily sick because one is crazy, but I don’t recommend to people to go crazy or to go on being crazy.
People who are crazy are usually not enjoying it. It’s usually terrifying enough without further social intimidation.People who come our way are often crazy by their own definition, but they don’t think the mental hospitals they have known have helped them out of it. If I were crazy, | wouldn’t want to be near most psychiatric units I know. The people who come to us don’t want to be treated, against their will, because they can’t defend themselves. They want a sanctuary, a refuge. Our treatment is in the way we treat one another. I suppose that’s the big difference between our approach and others. We use the metaphor of “going through" the problem by trying to understand the problem.
Stone With 1,600-Year-Old Irish Inscription Found in English Garden
A geography teacher, Graham Senior, stumbled across a rock with mysterious incisions while tidying his overgrown garden in Coventry, England. The discovery of a small stone carved with an early form of Celtic script has caused excitement among archaeologists.
The rectangular sandstone rock was found by Graham Senior in Coventry during lockdown in 2020 while he was weeding, but its true value was only recently understood.
The 11-centimeter-long and 139-gram rectangular sandstone rock had cryptic inscriptions on it that suggested a history spanning over 1,600 years, all written in the mysterious Ogham alphabet.
Ogham is an early medieval alphabet used to write the Archaic Irish language from the 4th to the 6th century and Old Irish from the 6th to the 9th century. It is usually found carved on stones in Ireland, Wales, and western Britain. It was the first written language in Ireland. The majority of the 400 or so known inscriptions from the Archaic Irish period are family name pillars that were built to announce land ownership.
Ogham is an extremely unique writing system among all writing systems, with lines arranged in groups of one to five only. The stones provide insight into the Irish language before the use of the Latin insular script.
Finds liaison officer for the Birmingham Museums Trust, Teresa Gilmore, told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that the discovery on an Ogham stone in the English midlands was a rare find.
“These finds do not turn up in the midlands. The bulk of Ogham inscriptions are found over in Ireland,” she said.
Professor Katherine Forsyth of Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow conducted additional research that shed more light on the stone’s provenance. Her findings point to a period suggesting a timeframe ranging from the fifth to sixth centuries, with the possibility of an even earlier date in the fourth century.
The stone is inscribed on three of its four sides. The inscription on the stone, “Maldumcail/S/ Lass,” puzzled researchers, with interpretations pointing towards a version of the personal name Mael Dumcail, but the meaning of the S and LASS is unclear. Given the usual purpose and significance of ogham stones, it may be a location reference.
Theories regarding the origins of the stone abound, with speculations ranging from migration patterns to the presence of early medieval monasteries in the region.
The rock will be displayed at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, to which Senior has donated it permanently. It will feature in the forthcoming Collecting Coventry exhibition, which opens on 11 May.
May 4th is not just Star Wars day, it’s also Wildfire Preparedness day! So what better time to finally share my new preparedness poster?
One thing I hear a lot when discussing wildfire preparedness is that people want to protect their most treasured items, so they have them pre-packed to make them easy to grab in the event of an emergency. I’ve always found this kind of sad. Understandable! But sad. You shouldn’t have to hide away the things you love.
Which is where the concept of a preparedness shelf comes in. The idea here is to keep all your evacuation based stuff AND your “save first” items in one spot where they can be displayed instead of hidden away, but still easily grabbed and evacuated.
This has several advantages. For one, you don’t have to hide away the things you love but they will still be easy to access in one central spot. For two, if you are not home at the time of evacuation and someone else is (maybe a partner, or your neighbor, or an older child) and they call you and ask what you want them to grab, you do not have to direct them all over your house, just to one central location.
As always, use your best judgement about the hazards in your area and what works for you.
If you are in the U.S.A. and experiencing disaster related anxiety, call the Disaster Distress Hotline at 1-800-985-5990 for support and resources.
If you would like a print of this poster, you can get the high quality digital file on my website for $3, and discounted rates are available if you would like to purchase the right to make more prints! You can get files of the evacuation prep poster the same way!
As february and black history month nears its end, if you’re a reader let’s not forget to read and appreciate books by black authors the rest of the year as well! If you’re a sci-fi fan like me, perhaps this list can help find some good books to sink your teeth into.
Bleak dystopias, high tech space adventures, alien monsters, alternate dimensions, mash-ups of sci-fi and fantasy - this list features a little bit of everything for genre fiction fans!
For more details on the books, continue under the readmore. Titles marked with * are my personal favorites. And as always, feel free to share your own recs in the notes!
“Because of the geomagnetically induced current from the electromagnetic field, telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks. Some operators were able to continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies. The following conversation occurred between two operators of the American telegraph line between Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine, on the night of 2 September 1859 and reported in the Boston Evening Traveler:
Boston operator (to Portland operator): "Please cut off your battery [power source] entirely for fifteen minutes.”
Portland operator: “Will do so. It is now disconnected.”
Boston: “Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?”
Portland: “Better than with our batteries on. – Current comes and goes gradually.”
Boston: “My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets. Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble.”
Portland: “Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?”
Boston: “Yes. Go ahead.”
The conversation was carried on for around two hours using no battery power at all and working solely with the current induced by the aurora, the first time on record that more than a word or two was transmitted in such manner.
the Wired article is a good article on that specific event, but also sometimes, humanity, you’re great. “if we turn the batteries off it works fine. well fuck it. why not”
Top, screen captures from various webcams in Austria, Italy and Germany showing Northern Lights, May 10, 2024. Via Nahel Belgherze. Bottom, Clarence John Laughlin,
Woman Attacked by a Cloud (Descent of a Cloud), 1941, Silver gelatin print. Via.
–
Throughout
The Mystery Guest, Boullier certainly does not sound like a man in top form, and his willingness to make himself appear buffoonish saves the book from being an agonizing exercise in flowery self-pity. In the kind of perfectly ironic detail that could only come directly from real life, he decides to distinguish himself by spending more than a month’s rent on a bottle of 1964 Margaux, only to learn that as part of her artistic practice, Calle keeps all of her birthday gifts in storage in their original wrapping. (If he really
had been Jesus Christ, a bottle of Evian would have sufficed.) At the party, Boullier talks shit, and crosses the line between anonymous, iconoclastic interloper and garden-variety wine-drunk jerk. The prose is breathless, sometimes drunk seeming itself, and there is something realistic, even touching, about its perpetual ricocheting between hope and despair, often within the span of a single sentence. It is a tightly written portrait of the artist as a young(ish) mess, and its ingenuity lies in its positioning of the “mystery guest” as an idealized state that exists in diametric opposition to the thoroughly unmysterious position of the ex-lover. Familiarity breeds contempt, and it can also hasten breakups. If Boullier can make himself unknowable enough again, perhaps he can represent not only Calle’s future but also that of the woman who once loved him.
His problem—much to our delight, since this dilemma is what lends the book its jittery edge—is that he cannot be mysterious to save his life. In the final pages of the book, Boullier and Sophie Calle meet again some years later, and despite his misogynistic flinching at her age (“in five years she’d be fifty-five, and then sixty, and that vision was hopeless and implacable”), it becomes clear that they are twin souls, if not necessarily cut out to be lifelong soulmates: obsessed with fate, and to some degree with themselves, they have an eye for the kind of minor details that make for terrific fiction, even when they are supposedly recording facts. For a time after this meeting, they were lovers, until Boullier eventually sent her a meandering, self-important breakup email. Calle—in a move that a man so obsessed with signs surely ought to have foreseen—anonymized him as “X” and turned the email into her 2007 entry for the Venice Biennale,
Take Care of Yourself, asking women from 107 different professions, from a cruciverbalist to a Talmudic scholar, to interpret his words. If dumping a writer is a risky move, dumping an artist might be more dangerous still: like an invading force, they tend to recruit collaborators.
Like Oscar Wilde, “I can resist anything except temptation,” and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.
Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a “Ulysses pact.” That’s when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:
Famously, Ulysses did this before he sailed into the Sea of Sirens. Rather than stopping his ears with wax to prevent his hearing the sirens’ song, which would lure him to his drowning, Ulysses has his sailors tie him to the mast, leaving his ears unplugged. Ulysses became the first person to hear the sirens’ song and live to tell the tale.
Ulysses was strong enough to know that he would someday be weak. He expressed his strength by guarding against his weakness. Our modern lives are filled with less epic versions of the Ulysses pact: the day you go on a diet, it’s a good idea to throw away all your Oreos. That way, when your blood sugar sings its siren song at 2AM, it will be drowned out by the rest of your body’s unwillingness to get dressed, find your keys and drive half an hour to the all-night grocery store.
Note that this Ulysses pact isn’t perfect. You
might drive to the grocery store. It’s rare that a Ulysses pact is unbreakable – we bind ourselves to the mast, but we don’t chain ourselves to it and slap on a pair of handcuffs for good measure.
People who run institutions can – and should – create Ulysses pacts, too. A company that holds the kind of sensitive data that might be subjected to “sneak-and-peek” warrants by cops or spies can set up a “warrant canary”:
This isn’t perfect. A company that stops publishing regular transparency reports might have been compromised by the NSA, but it’s also possible that they’ve had a change in management and the new boss just doesn’t give a shit about his users’ privacy:
Likewise, a company making software it wants users to trust can release that code under an irrevocable free/open software license, thus guaranteeing that each release under that license will be free and open forever. This is good, but not perfect: the new boss can take that free/open code down a proprietary fork and try to orphan the free version:
A company can structure itself as a public benefit corporation and make a binding promise to elevate its stakeholders’ interests over its shareholders’ – but the CEO can still take a secret $100m bribe from cryptocurrency creeps and try to lure those stakeholders into a shitcoin Ponzi scheme:
A key resource can be entrusted to a nonprofit with a board of directors who are charged with stewarding it for the benefit of a broad community, but when a private equity fund dangles billions before that board, they can talk themselves into a belief that selling out is the right thing to do:
Ulysses pacts aren’t perfect, but they are very important. At the very least, creating a Ulysses pact starts with acknowledging that you are fallible. That you can be tempted, and rationalize your way into taking bad action, even when you know better. Becoming an adult is a process of learning that your strength comes from seeing your weaknesses and protecting yourself and the people who trust you from them.
Which brings me to enshittification. Enshittification is the process by which platforms betray their users and their customers by siphoning value away from each until the platform is a pile of shit:
Enshittification is a spectrum that can be applied to many companies’ decay, but in its purest form, enshittification requires:
a) A platform: a two-sided market with business customers and end users who can be played off against each other;
b) A digital back-end: a market that can be easily, rapidly and undetectably manipulated by its owners, who can alter search-rankings, prices and costs on a per-user, per-query basis; and
c) A lack of constraint: the platform’s owners must not fear a consequence for this cheating, be it from competitors, regulators, workforce resignations or rival technologists who use mods, alternative clients, blockers or other “adversarial interoperability” tools to disenshittify your product and sever your relationship with your users.
he founders of tech platforms don’t generally set out to enshittify them. Rather, they are constantly seeking some equilibrium between delivering value to their shareholders and turning value over to end users, business customers, and their own workers. Founders are consummate rationalizers; like parenting, founding a company requires continuous, low-grade self-deception about the amount of work involved and the chances of success. A founder, confronted with the likelihood of failure, is absolutely capable of talking themselves into believing that nearly any compromise is superior to shuttering the business: “I’m one of the good guys, so the most important thing is for me to live to fight another day. Thus I can do any number of immoral things to my users, business customers or workers, because I can make it up to them when we survive this crisis. It’s for their own good, even if they don’t know it. Indeed, I’m doubly moral here, because I’m volunteering to look like the bad guy, just so I can save this business, which will make the world over for the better”:
In honour of his passing, posting Steve Albini’s legendary polemic against the music industry.
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.
Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”
And he does, of course.
[…]
THE BALANCE SHEET
This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.
Record company: $710,000
Producer: $90,000
Manager: $51,000
Studio: $52,500
Previous label: $50,000
Agent: $7,500
Lawyer: $12,000
Band member net income each: $4,031.25
The band is now ¼ of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.
The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never “recouped,” the band will have no leverage, and will oblige.
The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won’t have earned any royalties from their t-shirts yet. Maybe the t-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys.
Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.
A reef that has been degraded—whether by coral bleaching or disease—can’t support the same diversity of species and has a much quieter, less rich soundscape.
But new research from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution shows that
sound could potentially be a vital tool in the effort to restore coral reefs.
A healthy coral reef is noisy, full of the croaks, purrs, and grunts of various fishes and the crackling of snapping shrimp. Scientists believe that coral larvae use this symphony of sounds to help them determine where they should live and grow.
So, replaying healthy reef sounds can encourage new life in damaged or degraded reefs.
In a paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science, the Woods Hole researchers showed that
broadcasting the soundscape of a healthy reef caused coral larvae to settle at significantly higher rates—up to seven times more often.
“What we’re showing is that you can actively induce coral settlement by playing sounds,” said Nadège Aoki, a doctoral candidate at WHOI and first author on the paper.
“You can go to a reef that is degraded in some way and add in the sounds of biological activity from a healthy reef, potentially helping this really important step in the coral life cycle.”
Corals are immobile as adults, so the larval stage is their only opportunity to select a good habitat. They swim or drift with the currents, seeking the right conditions to settle out of the water column and affix themselves to the seabed.
Previous research has shown that chemical and light cues can influence that decision, but Aoki and her colleagues demonstrate that the soundscape also plays a major role in where corals settle.
The researchers ran the same experiment twice in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2022. They collected larvae from Porites astreoides, a hardy species commonly known as mustard hill coral thanks to its lumpy shape and yellow color and distributed them in cups at three reefs along the southern coast of St. John. One of those reefs, Tektite, is relatively healthy. The other two, Cocoloba and Salt Pond, are more degraded with sparse coral cover and fewer fish.
At Salt Pond, Aoki and her colleagues installed an underwater speaker system and placed cups of larvae at distances of one, five, 10, and 30 meters from the speakers. They broadcast healthy reef sounds – recorded at Tektite in 2013 – for three nights. They set up similar installations at the other two reefs but didn’t play any sounds.
When they collected the cups,
the researchers found that significantly more coral larvae had settled in the cups at Salt Pond than the other two reefs. On average, coral larvae settled at rates 1.7 times (and up to 7x) higher with the enriched sound environment.
The highest settlement rates were at five meters from the speakers, but even the cups placed 30 meters away had more larvae settling to the bottom than at Cocoloba and Tektite.
“The fact that settlement is consistently decreasing with distance from the speaker, when all else is kept constant, is particularly important because it shows that these changes are due to the added sound and not other factors,” said Aran Mooney, a marine biologist at WHOI and lead author on the paper.
“This gives us a new tool in the toolbox for potentially rebuilding a reef.”
Adding the audio is a process that would be relatively simple to implement, too.
“Replicating an acoustic environment is actually quite easy compared to replicating the reef chemical and microbial cues which also play a role in where corals choose to settle,” said Amy Apprill, a microbial ecologist at WHOI and a co-author on the paper.
“It appears to be one of the most scalable tools that can be applied to rebuild reefs, so we’re really excited about that potential.”“
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