The two meanings of aesthetics — sensing and sense-making — are not reducible to each other. In fact, they are sometimes not even conducive to each other. One can, for instance, be deceived by one’s senses, by an ideology or turn of thought, by a perception of accuracy in an instrument. Both sensing and sense-making, then, each necessarily involve a tension with the other. They may even sometimes seek to undo each other.
Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman.Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth. London: Verso, 2021.
This is actually examples of the field of mathematics called topology and it’s fucking bullshit wizard shit.
finally, applied mathematics
Don’t worry mathematicians had a very similar reaction at first
Basically around the beginning of 20th century mathematicians were arguing about how to eliminate paradoxes from coming up in maths, and they were questioning whether the bases of maths, known for thousands of years, are complete / correct
In geometry there were those five principles from which everything else was derived, and mathematicians were like: „See, we’ll prove that geometry is sound and complete bc without any one of those principles nothing will make sense!”
And then it made sense. It made too much sense in many weird ways when they removed the 5th principle.
And so, topology was born, simply because mathematicians were so sure it wouldn’t work they decided to try it out as a joke
I made a gif not long ago (see below). Many of you expressed that it was “deeply uncomfortable” and “upsetting”. I hope this new one will calm your feelings.
We need to stop thinking of internet infrastructure as too hard to fix. It’s the underlying system we use for nearly everything we do. The former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and former Canadian deputy foreign minister, Gordon Smith wrote in 2016 that the internet was becoming “the infrastructure of all infrastructure.” It’s how we organize, connect and build knowledge, even — perhaps — planetary intelligence. Right now, it’s concentrated, fragile and utterly toxic.
Mount Ruang spewing hot lava and smoke as seen from Sitaro, Indonesia, on Wednesday. Credit…Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation/AFP via Getty Images
It’s so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification
I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable
“I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.”
people who don’t follow chess I promise this post is really funny
Karpov had cemented his position as the world’s best player and world champion by the time Garry Kasparov arrived on the scene. In their first match, the World Chess Championship 1984 in Moscow, the first player to win six games would win the match. Karpov built a 4–0 lead after nine games. The next 17 games were drawn, setting a record for world title matches, and it took Karpov until game 27 to gain his fifth win. In game 31, Karpov had a winning position but failed to take advantage and settled for a draw. He lost the next game, after which 14 more draws ensued. Karpov held a solidly winning position in Game 41, but again blundered and had to settle for a draw. After Kasparov won games 47 and 48, FIDE President Florencio Campomanes unilaterally terminated the match, citing the players’ health. Karpov is said to have lost 10 kg over the course of the match. The match had lasted an unprecedented five months, with five wins for Karpov, three for Kasparov, and 40 draws.
Aesthetic investigations have a double aim: they are at the same time investigations of the world and enquiries into the means of knowing it. This means that they seek accountability both for events and for the devices with which we perceive them.
Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman.Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth. London: Verso, 2021.
Learning about Lopburi, the Thai town where two rival gangs of monkeys have been fighting in the streets
Police have been trying to capture the “leaders” but the monkeys know how to identify a tranquilizer gun, so they scatter as soon as they see someone raise one. Cops have to hide the tranq gun until they get close.
Behold! My latest Bad Keyboard, the ShiftKeyBoard!
It’s got nine buttons, and an 8-way gear shifter. You simply shift into different gears to select which sub-keyboard to use. Surprisingly easy to use, in fact.
Here’s the layout I used:
Two more things:
1. the numbers under each gear position image are an implementation detail for the gearshifter I used, which I had on my guide image to help me code it.
2. the funniest thing I discovered is that you have to shift into neutral before reprogramming the keyboard or it wouldn’t work right. I kept leaving it in first gear which caused problems, where it would only recognize 1 and 4th gear.
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an embroidered linen masterpiece, 70 meters long, depicting the flying saucer invasion of England in 1066, created by highly skilled medieval artisan women, high resolution, infinite detail, 8K”. Bing Copilot
Here’s a silver lining to global monopoly capitalism: it means we’re all fighting the same enemy, who is using the same tactics everywhere. The same coordination tools that allow corporations to extend their tendrils to every corner of the Earth allows regulators and labor organizers to coordinate their resistance.
That’s a lesson Mercedes is learning. In 2023, Germany’s Supply Chain Act went into effect, which bans large corporations with a German presence from using child labor, violating health and safety standards, and (critically) interfering with union organizers:
Across the ocean, in the USA, Mercedes has a preference for building its cars in the American South, the so-called “right to work” states where US labor law is routinely flouted and unions are thin on the ground. As
The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson writes, the only non-union Mercedes factories in the world are in the US:
But American workers –
especially southern workers – are on an organizing tear, unionizing their workplaces at a rate not seen in generations. Their unprecedented success is down to their commitment, solidarity and shrewd tactics – all buoyed by a refreshingly pro-worker NLRB, who have workers’ backs in ways also not seen since the Carter administration:
Workers at Mercedes’ factory in Vance, Alabama are trying to join the UAW, and Mercedes is playing dirty, using the tried-and-true union-busting tactics that have held workplace democracy at bay for decades. The UAW has lodged a complaint with the NLRB, naturally:
But the UAW has
also filed a complaint with BAFA, the German regulator in charge of the Supply Chain Act, seeking penalties against Mercedes-Benz Group AG:
That’s a huge deal, because the German Supply Chain Act
goes hard. If Mercedes is convicted of union-busting in Alabama, its German parent-company faces a fine of 2% of its global total revenue, and will no longer be eligible to sell products to the German government.
Chomp.
Now, the German Supply Chain Act is new, and this is the first petition filed by a non-German union with BAFA, so it’s not a slam dunk. But supermajorities of Mercedes workers at the Alabama factory have signed UAW cards, and the election is going to happen in May or June. And the UAW – under new leadership, thanks to a revolution that overthrew the corrupt old guard – has its sights set on
all the auto-makers in the American south.
As Meyerson writes, the south is America’s onshore offshore, a regulatory haven where corporations pay minimal or no tax and are free to abuse their workers, pollute, and corrupt local governments with a free hand (no wonder American industry is flocking to these states). Meyerson: “The economic impact of unionizing the South, in other words, could almost be placed in the same category as reshoring work that had gone to China.”
Well, wow. Who knew one thing moving in front of the other could elicit in us such childlike wonder? Turns out, pretty much everyone, actually. The untimely darkness! The crescent dapples! That bright corona! You’ve all enjoyed them immensely. Here’s an eclipse collection for the annals.
My mentor: I wanna do a wall garden, because it doesnt take up too much space
Me, already vibrating from the dopamine and adrenaline: Let’s talk about espaliers
okay, so espaliers are beyond sexy, they are so unbelievably productive
The basics are just… pruning growing trees so they are more 2 dimensional, usually placed against walls. It takes a few years to form/ raise, but they are much easier to maintain than free growing trees in the long run.
Not only is it more accessible, easier to harvest fruit, but the design has a double purpose; the walls hold and release heat that can keep warm-weathered plants alive during Northen winters!
MY favorite espalier concept involves grafting, such that each section of the tree grows a different fruit!
so you take a tree concept like this
but you graft it like this
one professor somewhere created The Tree of 40 Fruit, a single tree that grows forty different types of stone fruit including peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries, and almonds. If you were gardening a courtyard or small backyard, you could have a grafted espalier tree on each wall or fence and use the space in the middle for veggies
do some herb towers designed like this
keep a couple chickens to eat the bugs and give you eggs, keep a couple goats to give you dairy and maybe the occasional mutton chop, the goats and the chickens return nitrates to the soil in the form of manure, hire your goats out to local property management teams that need blackberries and stuff dealt with (goats will even very happily eat poison oak) to defray the cost of feeding and caring for the goats.
next get one of these
but don’t swim in it put a bunch of catfish and freshwater mussels/clams and then use the pool for green waste (almost anything you would put down the garbage disposal will either be happily eaten by the catfish or be food for bugs that the catfish will then eat) and the mussels and clams filter the water to help maintain a healthy environment for the catfish and then you can have some fish and shellfish in your diet too.
Between the fish, the goats, the chickens, and maybe a small compost box, all your biodegradable waste should now be used up as a resource, meanwhile you’re providing a huge chunk of your own diet.
Vertical wheat growing designs are currently still somewhat lacking I believe, but would round out things nicely. Keep a couple bee boxes and you’ve got pollinators and sugar too.
I mean, not that I’ve spent any time on this fantasy or anything. Carry on.
As a former humanities student, I feel it is my duty to reblog this one.
A tech bro tried to convince me AI was amazing cause “you could make 30,000 screenplays in minutes” not realising that every single one would be shit, you’d have to sift through everything just to find some good bits, time wasted that could’ve been spent just writing a screenplay.
Technology Brothers know nothing about what goes into creating a work, other than the fact a work has been created to be exploited for cash. They see creativity as an investment opportunity, not a love for humanity.
Matthew Dow Smith: “Just remember: Arts & Humanities are so useless and pointless that Tech Bros were driven to spend billions of dollars to try and get a computer to do something that badly approximates something Arts & Humanities students could do half asleep and wired on coffee the night before the due date.”
I do not believe that there is an external element to be disrupted now. The situation is different from the period of the Dadaists. There is nothing to overthrow now, because everything has been co-opted. To be subversive now in the sense of Dadaism would be reactionary, because now it would be the attitude of model students.
—Anselm Kiefer
I just wanted to share this article about Palestine’s right to revolt and why it is important that we support it. It also has sources embedded in the text that debunk misinformation about them and Hamas. I implore everyone to read it and spread this information around.
Always remember that Palestine was explicitly granted the right to armed resistance by the United Nations, against the zionist occupation. The article mentions the U.N. enshrining that right for occupied and colonized people, but the U.N. also explicitly named Palestine in the resolution, as well as Namibia and Zimbabwe who were also fighting against apartheid and illegal occupation.
Your idea of writing a “frantically speculative” article on groupoids seems to me a very good one. It is the kind of thing which has traditionally been lacking in mathematics since the very beginnings, I feel, which is one big drawback in comparison to all other sciences, as far as I know. Of course, no creative mathematician can afford not to “speculate”, namely to do more or less daring guesswork as an indispensable source of inspiration. The trouble is that, in obedience to a stern tradition, almost nothing of this appears in writing, and preciously little even in oral communication. The point is that the disrepute of “speculation” or “dream” is such, that even as a strictly private (not to say secret!) activity, it has a tendency to vegetate - much like the desire and drive of love and sex, in too repressive an environment. Despite the “repression”, in the one or two years before I unexpectedly was led to withdraw from the mathematical milieu and to stop publishing, it was more or less clear to me that, besides going on pushing ahead with foundational work in SGA and EGA, I was going to write a wholly science-fiction kind [of] book on “motives”, which was then the most fascinating and mysterious mathematical being I had come to meet so far. As my interests and my emphasis have somewhat shifted since, I doubt I am ever going to write this book - still less anyone else is going to, presumably. But whatever I am going to write in mathematics, I believe a major part of it will be “speculation” or “fiction”, going hand in hand with painstaking, down-to-earth work to get hold of the right kind of notions and structures, to work out comprehensive pictures of still misty landscapes. The notes I am writing up lately are in this spirit, but in this case the landscape isn’t so remote really, and the feeling is rather that, as for the specific program I have been out for is concerned, getting everything straight and clear shouldn’t mean more than a few years work at most for someone who really feels like doing it, maybe less. But of course surprises are bound to turn up on one’s way, and while starting with a few threads in hand, after a while they may have multiplied and become such a bunch that you cannot possibly grasp them all, let alone follow.
—an extract from a letter dated 14/06/83 from Alexander Grothendieck to Ronnie Brown (Bangor)
The Megamejonic Megamejon is a verse that is shaped like an extremely complex polymejon (1,000,001D shape), and is sometimes called a ‘hyperspike’ from how many intersecting lines it has. It has two main parts: edges and vertices, and the solid objects. This makes it similar to a combination of The Pentatopic Duetriacontateron and The Icosadakonic Meicosahendon, with the first only having edges and vertices, and the other only having the objects. (source)
Snake Bridge on Macclesfield Canal.
location: Astbury Congleton, England
These distinctive bridges allowed the towpath to cross the canal without the horse being unhitched from the narrowboat it was pulling. Known locally as Snaily Bridge
as humorous as this is, if drivers actually lost their licenses or were heavily fined for even threatening pedestrians… instead of the usual case where cops will blame the dead pedestrian as being “erratic”, there might be an actual learning curve where drivers aren’t cruising around with their foot on the accelerator believing they are in their living room or watching an xbox game.
Rituals are temporal techniques for housing oneself. They turn being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They are to time what things are to space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They are
time architectures. They thereby make time inhabitable; they even make time something that may be entered, like a house. Today, time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but a wild torrent. There is nothing that gives it stability. Time that rushes off is not inhabitable.
Rituals, like things close to our hearts, are the calm centres of life; they stabilize it. They are characterized by repetition. The compulsion of production and consumption eliminates repetition. It develops a compulsion of the new. Information cannot be repeated. As it is relevant only fleetingly, it reduces duration. It generates a compulsion for even new attractions. Things close to our hearts fo not have attraction. They are therefore repeatable.
Byung-Chul Han. 2022.
Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Cambridge: Polity Press.
On a windswept Icelandic plateau, an international team of engineers and executives is powering up an innovative machine designed to alter the very composition of Earth’s atmosphere.
If all goes as planned, the enormous vacuum will soon be sucking up vast quantities of air, stripping out carbon dioxide and then locking away those greenhouse gases deep underground in ancient stone — greenhouse gases that would otherwise continue heating up the globe.
Just a few years ago, technologies like these, that attempt to re-engineer the natural environment, were on the scientific fringe. They were too expensive, too impractical, too sci-fi. But with the dangers from climate change worsening, and the world failing to meet its goals of slashing greenhouse gas emissions, they are quickly moving to the mainstream among both scientists and investors, despite questions about their effectiveness and safety.
Researchers are studying ways to block some of the sun’s radiation. They are testing whether adding iron to the ocean could carry carbon dioxide to the sea floor. They are hatching plans to build giant parasols in space. And with massive facilities like the one in Iceland, they are seeking to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air.
As the scale and urgency of the climate crisis has crystallized, “people have woken up and are looking to see if there’s any miraculous, deus ex machina that can help,” said Al Gore, the former vice president.
As the risks became clearer, political and corporate leaders pledged to keep global average temperatures to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before the Industrial Revolution. But for several months last year, the world briefly passed that symbolic threshold, sooner than many scientists expected.
Global temperatures are now expected to rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius, or more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century. That has given new weight to what some people call geoengineering, though that term has become so contentious its proponents now prefer the term “climate interventions.” The hope is that taking steps like these might buy some time at a moment when energy consumption is on the rise, and the world isn’t quitting fossil fuels fast enough.
Many of the projects are controversial. A plant similar to the one in Iceland, but far larger, is being built in Texas by Occidental Petroleum, the giant oil company. Occidental intends to use some of the carbon dioxide it captures to extract even more oil, the burning of which is one of the main causes of the climate crisis in the first place.
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