Man: Siri, what is 1 trillion to the tenth power?
Siri: Calculation. The answer is one zero zero zero zero zero [continuing]
Man: *starts beatboxing to the rhythm.
Woman 1: *joins in*
Woman 2: *starts singing to the rhythm*
This is sO GOOD
never gets old
I could listen to this on loop for hours.
A correct to the transcript:
The man is beat boxing. The first woman joined in with jathiswaram. The second woman starts alap/alapanai.
For a brief time this year, the bestselling “bitter lemon drink” on Amazon was “Release Energy,” which consisted of the harvested urine of Amazon delivery drivers, rebottled for sale by Catfish UK prankster Oobah Butler in a stunt for a new Channel 4 doc, “The Great Amazon Heist”:
Collecting driver piss is surprisingly easy. Amazon, you see, puts its drivers on a quota that makes it impossible for them to drive safely, park conscientiously, or, indeed, fulfill their basic human biological needs. Amazon has long waged war on its employees’ kidneys, marking down warehouse workers for “time off task” when they visit the toilets.
As tales of drivers pissing – and shitting! – in their vans multiplied, Amazon took decisive action. The company enacted a strict zero tolerance policy for drivers returning to the depot with bottles of piss in their vans.
That’s where Butler comes in: the roads leading to Amazon delivery depots are lined with bottles of piss thrown out of delivery vans by drivers who don’t want to lose their jobs, which made harvesting the raw material for “Release Energy” a straightforward matter.
Butler was worried that he wouldn’t be able to list his product on Amazon because he didn’t have the requisite “food and drinks licensing” certificates, so he listed his drink in Amazon’s refillable pump dispenser category. But Amazon’s systems detected the mismatch and automatically shifted the product into the drinks section.
Butler enlisted some confederates to place orders for his drink, and it quickly rocketed to the top of Amazon’s listings for the category, which led to Amazon’s recommendation engine pushing the item on people who weren’t in on the gag. When these orders came in, Butler pulled the plug, but not before an Amazon rep telephoned him to pitch him turning packaging, shipping and fulfillment over to Amazon:
Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).
Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.
… huh. I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.
I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.
Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.
“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”
Something is
Something is wrong with our language
Is it a glitch or a feature?
Feature
we don’t have anything like this in French and it offers a range of expressibility that I wish we could properly translate back. it is a feature, i concur
fucks me up that by
total coincidence the sun and moon’s size difference is exactly matched to their difference in distance from us, thus making our beautiful total solar eclipses where you can see the silver threads of the sun’s corona possible because the moon
just covers the sun completely
The stars (literally) aligned just right for this experience to be possible. It’s likely that aliens don’t have this
The moon is also absolutely gargantuan by moon standards. It isn’t the largest moon in the solar system, but it is BY FAR the largest in comparison with its planet. Ganymede is the largest satellite of Jupiter and the largest moon in the solar system. Its diameter is only about 3.8% of Jupiter’s. Titan’s radius is 4.4% of Saturn’s. Callisto and Io are the next largest in the neighborhood, with 3.4% and 2.6% the diameter of Jupiter respectively.
Our moon is number 5. It is smaller in direct comparison to the above moons. The diameter of the moon is 3475 km. That is a full 27% of the diameter of the Earth. More than a quarter. That’s ridiculous. It’s unheard of. The universe is large enough that the word unique probably doesn’t mean a lot, but this might be about as close as you get.
This has had a huge impact on our planet. Other things aliens might not have are significant tides. One of Mars’s dumpy little potatoes wouldn’t be able to move oceans the way our moon does.
Our moon has also stabilized our axis to a massive degree. Without her up there our axis would wobble all over the place and our climate would be far more chaotic. Aliens might not be quite so lucky.
I guess what I am really trying to say is that the moon is extremely cool. I like the moon.
Just want to add that the reason we have such a large moon is because a whole planet crashed into proto-Earth. Theia (the planet) and Earth got so superheated by this collision that their component cores fused and the impact jettisoned a lot of material into space. That massive amount of jettisoned material became our moon. So Earth and the moon have very similar composition. This does not seem to be a common method of lunar formation.
what if the answer to the fermi paradox is that life cant exist without a moon like luna
I got a serious beef with the Fermi paradox. There is no Fermi paradox. There stopped being a Fermi paradox once the first radio telescopes went up, and we began to get a true sense of the sheer scale of the universe.
Space is big, empty, and
loud. Sunspots can cause enough interference to affect global communications. We’re not even loud enough to talk over our own sun. On our own planet. We can
barely communicate with Voyager, and we know exactly where it is and what its signal sounds like.
The Fermi paradox is like doubting the existence of Belfast, because you stood on a windy New York beach shouting towards it and didn’t get an answer.
I am so excited about the Kepler mission. This is the second most important thing our species has ever done, right behind developing the concept of delivery pizza.
Engineering professor and materials scientist Deb Chachra’s new book
How Infrastructure Works is a hopeful, lyrical – even beautiful – hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It’s a book that will make you see the world in a different way – forever:
Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other “charismatic megaprojects,” connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn’t merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible
meaning.
Infrastructure isn’t merely a way to deliver life’s necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it’s a
shared way of delivering those necessities. It’s not just that economies of scale and network effects don’t merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It’s also that the
lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us
without being part of a collective, public project.
Think of the automobile versus public transit: if you want to live in a big, built up city, you
need public transit. Once a city gets big enough, putting everyone who needs to go everywhere in a car becomes a Red Queen’s Race. With that many cars on the road, you need more roads. More roads push everything farther apart. Once everything is farther apart, you need more cars.
Geometry hates cars. You can’t bargain with geometry. You can’t tunnel your way out of this. You can’t solve it with VTOL sky-taxis. You can’t fix it with self-driving cars whose car-to-car comms let them shave down their following distances. You need buses, subways and trams. You need transit. There’s a reason that every plan to “disrupt” transportation ends up reinventing the bus:
What we nowadays call ‘growth’ is in reality random, cancerous proliferation. We are currently living through a frenzy of production and growth that seems like a frenzy of death. It is a simulation of vitality that conceals a deadly impending catastrophe. Production increasingly resembles destruction. Humankind’s self-alienation may have reached a point ‘where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure’.! What Benjamin said of fascism is today true of capitalism.
Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves. A sense of freedom attends passing from the state of subject to that of project. All the same, this projection amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint — indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the J is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.
When: October 10 - December 12, 2023 (Open 12-7pm. Closed Sun. & Mon.)
The prints in this show are presented as negatives rather than positives. I can’t help but feel that Araki is looking back at our world through from the other side of photography.
The role of the writer today has totally changed—he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive, he must become far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer……. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must out-imagine everyone else, scream louder, whisper more quietly. For the first time in the history of narrative fiction, it will require more than talent to become a writer.“ J.G. Ballard,
Fictions of Every Kind, Books and Bookmen (1971)
Super old oscilloscope and semi old oscilloscope. Old one takes those modules in the box. There are tubes on those modules. Also some old selectors and inputs. All because @acybernetickiwi ’s stream was showing off their switches and stuff for mech stuff.
dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms
like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are
ideasabout what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.
and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s
fascinating.what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.
maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people
furthertheorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking
Greek muses!language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)
the point is. I just came across the words “nip it in the butt” in a piece of published, professional fiction, and now I can’t stop giggling.
someone put ‘within a hare’s breath’ in an AO3 tag and it stopped me cold. because you’re leaving the general sense of the idiom and its physical phonemes
almost intact, and yet replacing the actual words and metaphor with something completely unrelated.
a hare’s breath is small in a
completely different way than a hair’s breadth and works very differently as a unit of distance.
and yet the general idea of ‘small, close, tiny gap, no barrier, a near thing,
almost’ remains intact, and if you didn’t know what had happened there you would
never figure it out.
when i was little i had a book by the side of my bed calledwho put the butter in the butterfly and it was about the history of idioms. i would read it to calm down and sleep. i have it practically memorized and i do not recommend it because it was very boring. (no, i somehow wasn’t diagnosed until my late twenties.)
according to that author, “whole nine yards” is hotly debated with a few more-modern popular origins; such as the length of ammunition within a WWII gun (but it most likely
is more modern than ancient greece - the first use i can find of the term is in 1855).
however, the author favored a more simple, textile explanation (which i in turn also favor): when you go to a clothing store, they measure out your purchase in yards in front of you. i am not a seamstress, but google says that an everyday dress can take between 5-7 yards, whereas a fancy ballgown can take 8-10. asking for the “whole nine yards” is twofold: it both assumes you’re going to be making something big and fancy,
and it is making sure you don’t get shortchanged by the fabric merchant (
literally receiving the entire nine yards you are asking for). and although unsubstantiated, i wonder if it might be part of where we get the term “dressing to the nines” from as well - you are so fancy-dressed, you need nine yards of fabric.
i feel strongly this is backed up by the “ball of wax” connection as well; since (like you said!!!) there’s historical precedent that “ball of wax” as an idiom “most likely [is] a mondegreen of the idiom the
whole bailiwick, meaning the whole territory.” (It also connects with a 17th century practice of dividing territory amongst heirs). but if
whole ball of wax means
the entire territory, doesn’t it make sense that
whole nine yards would also mean a legitimate and tactile
nine whole yards of fabric?doesn’t it make sense that we would smoosh together the meaning of “whole territory” with “whole piece of cloth”? i don’t know, i like that idea :)
additionally - just in the evidence? one of the first uses of the term “the whole nine yards” is the following line from a woman complaining in a 1855 news article: “[…] I told her to get just enough to make three shirts; instead of making three, she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!“
i have loved doing this research with y'all, thank you for listening. but i do just want to say - sometimes, the practice of linguistics shows us places where people have been silenced or devalued. there’s something here about the silent history of working-class people and of women’s work specifically - that it usually takes some digging before people consider that
women and (worse! alas! a working woman!)
seamstresses might be the ones who coined a very-popular term. in a lot of thearticles i read for this essay, the first assumptions were that
men (men in war, men on boats)
had to have coined the term, even when it didn’t make any
real sense. there is a very normal and
even very likely reason for this term - and still, people are baffled by it, just because
men don’t know where it could have come from.
and i think, to your point beforehand - how interesting, when idioms show us the places that we have been able to cover up and forget about. what makes something
dead? i have no idea where the word
podcastcomes from, but the boomers were horrified when kids didn’t know why the save button is a floppy disc. that word i used up there,
mondegreen?it was coined by Sylvia Wright. i have no idea who coined
your guess is as good as mine and i have used it within the last 2 hours.
and, like, on a less serious note - do you know how long it took before i learned it’s actually spelled
bury the lede? and like, i have always been honest about this, but when i was younger i thought a ”garden-variety longhair cat“ meant
literallya variety of cat related to the garden.
so, yeah!!! a little bit of joy. i love so many things about this, about this discussion - across all of time and space and the internet, we get so freakin’ excited about words. and sometimes it makes us think about a bolt of cloth passing over someone’s hands. and then sometimes, there’s this really beautiful moment where something is just-as-true-now as it was back in 1855. we still measure out our fabric in yards in front of the customer. the person on the other side of the counter still has to prove it’s all nine yards.
and like, sometimes you work in a big office in a fancy building and your boss confidently commands you to
whether the storm. within minutes of this, flustered, he will ask for your
hodge jancock,and you are going to be
sobrave about it and not even laugh
once.
One of the great philosophers of mathematics Gottlob Frege made quite an issue of the fact that mathematicians didn’t know the meaning of One. What is One? Nobody could answer coherently. Of course Frege answered, but his answer was no better, or even worse, than the previous ones. And so it has continued to this very day, strange and incredible as it is. We know all about so much mathematics, but we don’t know what it really is.
Reuben Hersh, What Kind of Thing Is a Number?, A Talk with Reuben Hersh [2.10.97], Edge
Photography begins with a photograph. Rejecting all forms of expression or description, I want a photograph to simply be a photograph from beginning to end. This is ultimately a matter of purity, and not anything that can be achieved through things like image quality, tonality, theme, or concept.
-Tsubasa Kawaguchi
Tsubasa Kawaguchi’s debut photobook Breathless is a gasp of fresh air against the pursuit of technical perfection and labored expressive intent. Winner of the second Fugensha Photo Award, this collection of magenta-tinged scruffy jpegs hits the heart.
I wrote a text to accompany the announcement of Felix Deiters’ exhibition
The Questionnaire which opens Friday, 13 October 2023, 6–9 PM at SOX. If you are in Berlin, please join us.
–
🎶How does the disappearance of time influence your mood, mental health and bodily experience? Help us find out by signing up for, and sharing, our new pre-registered survey! These surveys will track your mood, your experience of the (time) crisis, and your interoceptive experiences on that day. You can stop at anytime, and should do so if you feel any distress whatsoever from completing the surveys.🎶
The first time she had her tarot cards read, she was told to keep her question quiet, to herself. And in this crowded bar she took a breath of relief and with sedulous silence, she uttered nothing. Oh, how good this felt to be offered both the question and the answers, she had thought.
Considering how much biometric data she had shed into the world, it was astonishing how much more diffuse she was with information. She told herself this spoke of a desire to inhabit other identities, of voraciously collecting stories, of wanting to remain odd-angled, hazy-like, being based nowhere-in-particular but
here, and of always preferring another scene altogether, like a second opinion to her own thoughts. Anything but a straight answer, and never settling on a favorite color. Not that she didn’t have one, she simply preferred to complicate impressions made of her.
But a questionnaire isn’t a manifesto, I told her.
In 1617, an interrogatory comprising eighty-four items guided the commissioners of Eichstätt in Bavaria in their investigation of suspects. Some of the questions were grouped under topics, such as “Diabolical lust” or “shapeshifting.” Under the latter, one of the questions asked was “Whether she did not change into other forms; why, how, when, and by what means did it happen (no. 75).”
In a world where death came often and unannounced, I imagined how such questions required precise answers when the only guides were shaped by dictated prayers and confession-by-fire.
A questionnaire would have to be cast like a spell, she said. And the answers would bear the contours of a knife found in the crease of a striped couch. Words thrown like insults to exercise one’s conjured slang—the bastard tongue lovingly excoriating the mother.
Or Panacea fucking Epione, I said over her laugh.
She wanted to know if there was this one lie I kept, and would always reach for when trying to give a satisfying answer to a stranger felt like watching my doppelgänger reach into my organs with a grin. I realized that I didn’t possess such a handy tune to sprinkle. I already killed the louche fucker, I probably answered instead.
I take that you have one to recite, I asked.
Yes.
She had always loved taking and trying on things from her friends’ closets, or from a lover’s bedroom floor, a shirt worn the night before preferably, and when they would say you look good, she would always believe it. She thought how such gestures were templates to her own advice column, or towards an entire self-help book for casting foolish yet sensual responses when each question is a riddle. After all, advice—whether unsolicited, unwarranted, or desperately sought—appeared in ancient philosophical treatises, and medieval medical manuals, before it became the golden smear of Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed.
It was the hospital regime that produced the first sets of standardized protocols for the collection of information forms to be filled in by doctors. Volker Hess and Andrew Mendelsohn have written about “the technology of paper pre-scribing,” namely, blank sheets ruled in columns to obtain particular data. By the end of the 18th century, hospitals in Berlin and Vienna used these to record patient admission, diet, and discharge (or death). More detailed diagnoses and treatments for each patient came to be added, or recorded, on separately configured sheets or in journals. In long-practiced disciplines, such as medicine, the categories or topics written at the top of the columns – symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, cure, etc. – functioned as implied questions.
I told her how much I loved to look at my multiple reflections formed by opposing mirrors in the entrance halls of the old Charlottenburg apartment buildings. Like a relentless acquisitor of circumstances, you seem to extend into the infinite when in reality you get progressively darker and fade into invisibility, long before you even get to the end. I remember how she looked at me as if I had just hurled an occult formula she could deviate into a questionnaire. It’s in the way mirrors reaffirm body consciousness by gesturing deceptively towards our inherent failure of communication—how my reflected body would be saying
no when I wanted
yes.
Is that what being in the world means to you? she finally asked me.
Maybe.
The push and shove of wanting, immersed in such an unstable, expansive present. How does one sequence self disagreements? I responded.
Eventually, I told her that the questions I’ve answered best were always the ones conferred like orders by a lover, questions without interrogation points, permissions really. As if possessing a strange talent like drawing blood simply with their fingers touching my skin. Conjuring veins for a laugh, or a fuck, and never expecting words.
She would attempt a dispute, insisting that a questionnaire is always like an armor to the one who asks. The one who asks doesn’t have to endure any of the arrows yielded in return, she yelled at me.
I remember how I stroked her hair, consoling her fantasy of opting out by saying that she needed to commit more dramatically to the source of the conflict by spending even more time on Quora. Finally, she kissed me with a smile.
I remember having said something like how in his genius, Bob Flanagan had gotten rid of the power of decision-making by stealing all of the arrows. Turning his curse into something better than any audience when he had raised this army of Saint Sebastien longing for his embrace.
Perhaps questionnaires are the ultimate aporia between words and meaning, they suggest the most imperceptible forces, from moon tides to the incomprehension of decay. They force a collaboration like a hieratic plot, so deceptively arbitrary yet often bearing a scheming motive, that when a question eventually satisfies the curiosity, it induces the rattled wish to have had an entirely different one asked.
Did I only give you love when you were in pain? I don’t know. I was in pain so much of the time.
Excerpts from Daniel Midena & Richard Yeo (2022)
Towards a history of the questionnaire, Intellectual History Review, 32:3, 503-529, DOI:10.1080/17496977.2022.2097576
La Hauss. Máster Online en Diseño Editorial 2021-22. Diseño de cubiertas, guardas y
packaging contenedor para colección de libros Interestelar. Proyecto de Yadhira López romero
Large-scale tree planting projects aimed at sequestering carbon are oversimplifying the many values of forests, researchers reported Tuesday.
In a peer-reviewed opinion paper published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, University of Oxford researchers point out that, although carbon sequestration is a valuable tool for climate action, large-scale tree planting projects often lack biodiversity, which can make them ineffective climate mitigations. The authors warn against using carbon as the sole metric for a forest ecosystem’s importance and argue that carbon sequestration projects need to expand their focus to encompass ecosystem restoration and biodiversity conservation.
“I’m not saying that we are against planting trees,” co-author Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, a Ph.D senior researcher at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute said. “But it’s just one of the things that we should be doing, and these plantations of trees have to have a very strong scientific base.”
Carbon sequestration is a growing global trend in addressing emissions: in 2020, the global carbon capture and sequestration market was valued at $1.96 billion and projected to grow, according to Fortune Business Insights. Monoculture—or single-species—tree plantations are popular and economically valuable vehicles for carbon sequestration because they can provide salable products like timber and palm oil. But reducing a forest’s value to the single metric of carbon overlooks all the other crucial ecosystem functions performed by biodiverse forest environments.
Aguirre-Gutiérrez studies the functionality of forests, and the most prominent trend he’s seen in recent years is the proliferation of monoculture plantations across tropical forest areas in Africa and the Americas, he said.
The paper draws on literature from the past several years, cautioning against an oversimplified approach to carbon sequestration and tree planting projects.
Companies that want to do business in the European Union will soon have to pay extra if the carbon footprints of their products are too high.
The EU on Sunday officially began phase one of its carbon tariff. The first-of-its-kind tax scheme could help reduce the climate-warming emissions of industries that are notoriously hard to decarbonize, including cement and steel manufacturing.
Under the EU’s new policy, foreign companies must now report all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with certain imported goods: cement, steel, iron, aluminum, fertilizers, hydrogen fuel and electricity. Starting in 2026, any of those imports that don’t meet the bloc’s emissions standards will face an additional fee when crossing the border. Other goods will be considered for the tax in the coming years, the European Commission said.
The tax policy has drawn criticism from countries like China and Russia, which argue it undermines the principles of free trade and worsens geopolitical tensions. Supporters say the program is necessary to put EU companies on an even playing field with nations that have lower environmental standards. They also say it will incentivize industries to more quickly reduce their carbon emissions and encourage other countries to follow suit by adopting their own carbon tariffs.
The EU’s carbon tariff “is not about trade protection,” Paolo Gentiloni, the European economy commissioner, told Reuters. “It is about protecting the EU’s climate ambition and seeking to raise the level of climate ambition worldwide.”
By law, the EU must reduce its emissions 55 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
The way a carbon tariff works is relatively simple. A company in China, for example, might sell relatively cheap cement, but with a high carbon footprint because the product is made in factories that run on electricity from coal-fired power plants. That puts EU cement makers, which are required to have lower emissions, at a cost disadvantage.
The EU company has had to invest extra money to switch to cleaner energy sources, buy carbon offsets and install more energy efficient equipment—meaning that, for now at least, it must sell its cement at a higher price. A carbon tariff essentially reduces the price differences between the domestic products and the more carbon-intensive foreign imports, incentivizing companies sending goods to the EU to reduce their emissions to avoid the additional fee.
Reminder that measures like this do not ’
cost’ companies money. They are ‘not obtaining’ money they did not have to begin with. See also: password sharing.
Modern capitalism has built itself a house on sand that demands constant increase.
Mustarjil is an Arabic term meaning “becoming [a] man.” Although it can be used derogatorily to refer to women who are perceived as having a masculine appearance and/or mannerisms, in Iraq’s marshes, it existed as a gender identity. Within the context of the Ahwari community,
Mustarjil was a common gender identity, where people assigned female at birth decide to live as a man after puberty, and this decision was generally accepted in the community. The
Mustarjils were one of many similar third gender categories around the world, such as the Hijras in South Asia. […]
“One afternoon, some days after leaving Dibin, we arrived at a village on the mainland. The sheikh was away looking at his cultivations, but we were shown to his
mudhif by a boy wearing a head-rope and cloak, with a dagger at his waist. He looked about fifteen and his beautiful face was made even more striking by two long braids of hair on either side. ln the past all the Madan (
Ahwari) wore their hair like that, as the Bedu still did. After the boy had made us coffee and withdrawn, Amara asked, ‘Did you realize that was a
mustarjil?’ I had vaguely heard of them, but had not met one before.
‘A
mustarjil is born a woman’. ‘She cannot help that; but she has the heart of a man, so she lives like a man.’
‘Do men accept her?’
‘Certainly. We eat with her and she may sit in the
mudhif. When she dies, we fire off our rifles to honour her. We never do that for a woman. In Majid’s village there is one who fought bravely in the war against Haji Sulaiman.’
‘Do they always wear their hair plaited?’
‘Usually they shave it off like men.’
‘Do
mustarjils ever marry?’
‘No, they sleep with women as we do.’”
Thesiger continues to narrate several other accounts of
mustarjilswithin the same community, as well that of a “stout middle-aged woman” who wanted to remove her male organ in order to “turn into a proper woman.” Thesiger later mentions: “Afterwards I often noticed the same [person] washing dishes on the river bank with the women. Accepted by them, [she] seemed quite at home. These people were kinder to [her] than we would have been in our society.” Around that time, Britain was still living under the shadow of Victorian norms, and gender non-normative people were still stigmatized and shunned. Communities such as the Ahwaris, presented an alternative model that created space for communities like the
mustarjils, despite the dominant gender binary.
Winter is over in the Southern Hemisphere and sea ice around Antarctica has likely grown as much as it’s going to for 2023, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Antarctic sea ice reached its lowest peak by a wide margin for any year since 1979, when the continuous satellite record began.
“The ice this year is so far out of the range of all the other years that it’s a really exceptional year,” said Ariaan Purich, a climate scientist at Monash University in Australia.
By Sept. 10, sea ice had grown to cover 6.5 million square miles around the continent, or just under 17 million square kilometers. The difference this year from the 1981 to 2010 average is an area roughly the size of Alaska.
Antarctica has ice both on land, in the form of its massive continental ice sheet, and in the waters around it, in the form of seasonal sea ice. The ice in the water helps protect the land ice from the warming ocean. Less sea ice could mean that the continental ice sheet melts and breaks faster, contributing to faster sea-level rise around the world.
That sea ice supports a whole ecosystem of wildlife, including both Adélie and emperor penguins. Last year, several emperor penguin colonies suffered a widespread loss of their chicks when the ice broke up early.
One ship was pulled across the sea with the help of an enormous sail that looked as if it belonged to a kite-surfing giant. Another navigated the oceans between China and Brazil this summer with steel and composite-glass sails as high as three telephone poles.
Both harness a natural propellant that oceangoing vessels have depended on for centuries: the wind. And they’re part of a growing effort to move the shipping industry away from fossil fuels.
“We want to decarbonize — why not use what’s available?” said Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill Ocean Transportation, which charters about 700 ships. “Wind is free fuel.”
The worldwide shipping industry is responsible for about 3 percent of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet. That translates into about one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide and other gases annually, a figure that is rising as global trade increases.
Some 11 billion tons of cargo are shipped by sea each year, accounting for as much as 90 percent of the world’s traded goods. Nearly all of it is enabled by burning heavy fuel oil, but that is beginning to change.
Cargill chartered the Pyxis Ocean, a vessel that began its first wind-assisted voyage in August. It sailed from China to Brazil with two wings that turned to capture the wind and folded down when not in use. While each weighs 125 tons, Mr. Dieleman said it is a small proportion of the vessel’s carrying potential of 82,000 tons. Each sail can cut fuel usage by 1.5 tons per day, or 4.65 fewer tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and decrease fuel usage by 30 percent. The ship docked in Brazil last week.
The French company Airseas developed a different design, the outsize kite. It is housed in a storage tank on a ship’s bow and deployed by cable and crane to slice nearly 1,000 feet into the sky, where winds blow strong. A prototype has been at sea for a year and a half, said Vincent Bernatets, the chief executive and co-founder of Airseas. The design could slash fuel consumption by up to 40 percent on some routes, he said, adding that a major Japanese ship company has ordered five sails.
An Arizona farm owned by a Saudi Arabian company that grows alfalfa for export is set to lose its access to state land in a move Gov. Katie Hobbs said would “protect Arizona’s water future.”
The farm, in Butler Valley in western Arizona, has been mired in controversy over its pumping of unlimited amounts of groundwater, free of charge, to irrigate its water-thirsty alfalfa crop. The company then ships the alfalfa to Saudi Arabia, where the crop is fed to dairy cows.
Arizona is moving to immediately terminate one lease held by Saudi-owned Fondomonte Arizona, which operates the farm, and will not renew three other leases that are set to expire in February, Governor Hobbs said in a statement this week.
The action by Arizona is the latest sign of a worsening groundwater crisis affecting farmers and communities nationwide. A recent New York Times investigation found that America is depleting its reserves of groundwater at a dangerous rate. The majority of the nation’s drinking-water systems rely on groundwater, as do many farms, particularly in the West.
Arizona, in particular, has seen an explosion of wells, which are getting deeper as users chase falling water levels downward. The state, home to some of the country’s fastest growing communities, said in June that it would stop granting permission to housing projects in the Phoenix area that rely on groundwater.
Alfalfa, grown year-round in Arizona, is a particularly thirsty crop that relies on irrigation. It is mainly used to feed dairy cows and other livestock, which has increasingly made milk and meat products a burden on the nation’s water supply.
Siri is an interface, a point of encounter between human and computational agency. This interface is different because it makes use of advances in processing power, programming techniques, and sensor quality that make it possible for a computer to listen, understand, and react to human speech. But in essence, ELIZA and Siri are the same: a point of contact between human and computational agencies that require make-believe to become meaningful—and most of our interfaces become places of make-believe.
Miguel Sicart.Playing Software. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023.
Being watched sucks. Of all the parenting mistakes I’ve made, none haunt me more than the times my daughter caught me watching her while she was learning to do something, discovered she was being observed in a vulnerable moment, and abandoned her attempt:
It’s hard to be your authentic self while you’re under surveillance. For that reason alone, the rise and rise of the surveillance industry – an unholy public-private partnership between cops, spooks, and ad-tech scum – is a plague on humanity and a scourge on the Earth:
But beyond the psychic damage surveillance metes out, there are immediate, concrete ways in which surveillance brings us to harm. Ad-tech follows us into abortion clinics and then sells the info to the cops back home in the forced birth states run by Handmaid’s Tale LARPers:
And even if you have the good fortune to live in a state whose motto isn’t “There’s no ‘I” in uter-US,“ ad-tech also lets anti-abortion propagandists trick you into visiting fake "clinics” who defraud you into giving birth by running out the clock on terminating your pregnancy:
The commercial surveillance industry fuels SWATting, where sociopaths who don’t like your internet opinions or are steamed because you beat them at Call of Duty trick the cops into thinking that there’s an “active shooter” at your house, provoking the kind of American policing autoimmune reaction that can get you killed:
There’s just a lot of ways that compiling deep, nonconsensual, population-scale surveillance dossiers can bring safety and financial harm to the unwilling subjects of our experiment in digital spying. The wave of “business email compromises” (the infosec term for impersonating your boss to you and tricking you into cleaning out the company bank accounts)? They start with spear phishing, a phishing attack that uses personal information – bought from commercial sources or ganked from leaks – to craft a virtual Big Store con:
When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.
Think about Unity President Marc Whitten’s nonpology for his company’s disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to
keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:
The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.
“Shared success” is code for, “If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too.” This is bullshit. It’s like saying, “We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale.” Or “Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak.”
And note that they’re not talking about shared
risk here – no one at Unity is saying, “If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we’re on the hook for ten percent of your losses.” This isn’t partnership, it’s extortion.
How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.
When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users’ backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the “don’t be evil” gig because that mattered to them.
People make fun of that “don’t be evil” motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn’t want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:
Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, “Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we’re gonna stay the fuck away from them”:
Photographer
Darya Kawa stacked (133,000) frames and 147GB worth of data to achieve this. I’ve been working on this project since 4 days ago. This image takes up to 22 hours of editing and stacking since the amount of data was so massive.
Kawa
took almost a quarter million frames (231,000) and i spend unimaginable amount of work over the course of 3 weeks to process and stack all the data which was equivalent to 313 GB.
What is it? It’s an advisory body to be comprised of Indigenous people, chosen by Indigenous people, to give perspective and input on Indigenous matters.
Why put it in the constitution?Because if we didn’t the Coalition would abolish it like they did with most of the other many many Indigenous advisory bodies in the past. The instability of being unsure if a body will only exist for 3 years or less doesn’t help it grow, develop, or become effective.
Can it veto bills?No.Absurd nonsense.Not every bill will even be relevant to the Voice and it’s not constitutionally able to introduce, vote on, debate, or veto, a bill in any way. It’s an advisory body. Such a claim violates literally the first clause of the constitution, followed by a dozen more, and is the most ridiculous and willful disregard for the very fundamental basics of Parliamentary democracy and the constitution. This isn’t even remotely debatable. This is flat earth theory of constitutional law.
Again! Flat earth theory of constitutional law. What the actual fuck is this nonsense???
Will it lead to endless High Court cases?How? Seriously - how? 1) The Voice was designed specifically to avoid that 2) High Court cases are costly and risky 3) What basis would the Voice have for a High Court case anyway? It’s just an advisory body, it doesn’t have any obligations written into it, and the internal workings of Parliament are immune to the jurisdiction of the High Court so any law Parliament makes, so long as it is within the constitutional powers for Parliament to do so, is entirely up to Parliament to decide - and if it decides to ignore the Voice then that’s just bad governance. That’s NOT grounds for a High Court case. That’s absurd. The Voice won’t just take the Parliament to the High Court if it doesn’t get its way because that’d just be throwing limited resources down the drain for no reason. If the government ignores the Voice we should vote for a new government.
The possibility of a court case relies on there being a piece of legislation that specifically requires a particular Minister (like the Minister for Indigenous Affairs for example) to consult the Voice before making a specific administrative decision over a government department. That’s normal though. That happens occasionally and why should we fear the idea of Ministers having to OBEY THE LAW? If Parliament creates this legislative requirement for a Minister to consult Indigenous people then… good. They should. What’s the issue here? This part isn’t even relevant to it being in the constitution - a Voice created by legislation could have the same restrictions and legal requirements on Ministers because
that’s optional and dependent on the laws Parliament makes. This isn’t scary - whatever court cases do happen are a GOOD THING.
Why don’t we have the legislation to see how it works yet?You’ve never read legislation in advance of an election because that’s not the order it goes in. The constitution isn’t about complex details, it’s about establishing the basic foundations to build up from - and so all the details we need about the Voice were released several months ago.The wording of the amendment says its an advisory body and that’s it.
We don’t have more details because that’s the kind of thing that gets developed over time - there’s plenty of legislation that’s different to how it was 20 years ago, and different 40 years ago before that, because the point of Parliament is to develop this over time. But it all has to stick to the fundamental rules of the constitution. Putting it in the constitution provides you more guarantees about its future limit, function, and scope, than just legislation because it’s guaranteed to not change without a future referendum.
The claim “we don’t have the details” is nonsense. Want the details of the Voice in 5 years time? Tell me who is in government and their policies in 5 years time. This is the same level of absurd request.
Will it lead to us all paying reparations?Parliament has the power to make that happen already. We’re not paying reparations because the government doesn’t want to. The Voice can’t force the government to pay reparations. This is a hypothetical scenario being pushed by the Right to scare people over their money and exploit people’s ignorance. The government won’t even pay people on welfare to be above the poverty line - why do we think they’re going to pay reparations?
Will it prevent a treaty from happening?No. It could be useful for negotiating and writing a treaty. What is in a treaty is up to that particular treaty so no further details can be commented on that - but the Voice isn’t a replacement for it. It’s not analogous and it doesn’t prevent it. If anything it makes the outcome of a treaty happening MORE likely.
But what about (insert hypothetical thing here)?The Voice is an advisory body designed to help Indigenous people provide perspective and input on matters that affect them. If anything you hear involves claims of forcing the government to do X or Y or whatever then it’s misinformation. It can have influence - but it doesn’t make decisions. The Parliament makes decisions and it’s accountable to the public so if it makes a bad decision then protest/vote differently. The hope is that if the Parliament actually fucking listens to Indigenous people it’ll get better outcomes for Indigenous people.
So it’s kind of telling that conservatives are so heavily campaigning against something that
doesn’t even have legal decision making power.Conservatives aren’t even obligated to care about the advice the Voice gives and they STILL think that’s too much agency for Indigenous peoples!
Really the problem for conservatives and the Coalition if the Voice is successful is that this provides another way for the government to held accountable, to have its actions scrutinised, to inform the public of what the government is/isn’t doing and provide everyone with detailed information about how things COULD be better but the government refuses to act.
The scary thing about the Voice isn’t power - it’s accountability. It’s transparency. Conservatives don’t fear the courts, or vetoes, or whatever fictional scenario they create - they fear that the next time an Indigenous person says “this is unjust and we want action” that there’ll be too many eyes watching that it’s harder to say “I don’t care.” Conservative governments survive because they’re good at hiding the full extent of how awful they are - and the Voice is trying to lift the corner of the rug to show us what vile shit they’ve swept under there.
Vote Yes.
Plain and simple.
Vote Yes to make it harder for governments to ignore what’s right.
The Lost Cause is my next novel. It’s about the climate emergency. It’s hopeful.
Library Journal called it “a message hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak.” As with every other one of my books Amazon refuses to sell the audiobook, so I made my own, and I’m pre-selling it on Kickstarter:
That’s a lot to unpack, I know. So many questions! Including this one: “How is it that I have
another book out in 2023?” Because this is my
third book this year. Short answer: I write when I’m anxious, so I came out of lockdown with
nine books. Nine!
Hope and writing are closely related activities. Hope (the belief that you can make things better) is nothing so cheap and fatalistic as optimism (the belief that things will improve no matter what you do).
The Lost Cause is full of people who are full of hope.
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The action begins a full generation after the Hail Mary passage of the Green New Deal, and the people who grew up fighting the climate emergency (rather than sitting hopelessly by while the powers that be insisted that nothing could or should be done) have a name for themselves: they call themselves “the first generation in a century that doesn’t fear the future.”
I fear the future. Unchecked corporate power has us barreling over a cliff’s edge and all the one-percent has to say is, “Well, it’s too late to swerve now, what if the bus rolls and someone breaks a leg? Don’t worry, we’ll just keep speeding up and leap the gorge”:
That unchecked corporate power has no better avatar than Amazon, one of the tech monopolies that has converted the old, good internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:
Amazon maintains a near-total grip over print and ebooks, but when it comes to audiobooks, that control is
total. The company’s Audible division has captured more than 90% of the market, and it abuses that dominance to cram Digital Rights Management onto every book it sells, even if the author doesn’t want it:
What if thought is not born within the human skull, but is a creativity proper to the body as a whole, arising spontaneously from the slippage between an organism and the folding terrain that it wanders? What if the curious curve of thought is engendered by the difficult eros and tension between our flesh and the flesh of the earth?
David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus in Greece is a remarkable testament to ancient Greek artistic prowess and classical architecture. Built in the 4th century BCE, this meticulously designed amphitheater features exceptional acoustics, allowing even faint whispers to be heard from the highest seats. It was primarily used for Greek tragedies and comedies, highlighting the cultural significance of theater in ancient times.
The 200-Year-Old Sycamore Gap Tree ‘Deliberately Felled’
A famous tree that has stood sentinel on Britain’s Roman-built Hadrian’s Wall for more than 200 years has been “deliberately felled” in what authorities have called an “act of vandalism.”
The Sycamore Gap, located in the Northumberland National Park in northern England, was made famous to millions around the world when it appeared in Kevin Costner’s 1991 blockbuster film “Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.”
Police said they have arrested a 16-year-old boy and a man in his sixties following the incident, which was believed to have taken place overnight Thursday.
The tree - at a spot known as “Sycamore Gap” – was located on the historic UNESCO World Heritage listed Hadrian’s Wall, which was constructed around 1,900 years ago to guard the furthest northwestern frontier of the Roman Empire.
Sycamore Gap was considered one of the most photographed trees in England and was voted as English Tree of the Year in 2016.
The National Trust heritage charity – which co-manages the site – said it was “shocked and saddened” by the tree’s felling.
Andrew Poad, north east general manager at the National Trust, said: “The tree has been an important and iconic feature in the landscape for nearly 200 years and means a lot to the local community and to anyone who has visited the site.”
Northumberland National Park Authority said it was now “working with the relevant agencies and partners with an interest in this iconic North East landmark.”
The National Park urged visitors to stay away while the site was being made safe.
Police, who earlier said they were investigating what was believed to be a “deliberate act of vandalism,” said a 16-year old youth had been arrested in connection with the incident.
He remains in police custody at this time and is assisting officers with their enquiries,” Northumbria Police posted on X, adding that the “investigation is still at very early stage.”
The man in his sixties was arrested subsequently. “We hope this second arrest demonstrates just how seriously we’re taking this situation and our ongoing commitment to find those responsible and bring them to justice,” the police stated on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Prior to the arrests, the police force described the tree as a “world-renowned landmark.”
“The vandalism has caused understandable shock and anger throughout the local community and beyond,” a statement from Northumbria Police said.
Police Superintendent Kevin Waring added: “This is an incredibly sad day. The tree was iconic to the North East and enjoyed by so many who live in or who have visited this region.”
“Anyone found to have been responsible for this damage – which we believe to be a deliberate act of vandalism – can expect to be dealt with swiftly and appropriately.”
Th. M. M. Grieken - de Plant in hare Ornamentale Behandeling: met eene Inleiding : “over de Zinnebeeldige Voorstelling” - 1888 - via University of Heidelberg
The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:
Here in the twilight of capitalism’s planet-devouring, half-century orgy of wanton destruction, there’s more news every day than I can possibly write a full blog post about every day, and as with many weeks, I have arrived at Saturday with a substantial backlog of links that didn’t fit into the week’s “Hey look at this” linkdumps.
Thus, the eighth installment in my ongoing, semiregular series of Saturday linkdumps:
This week, the miscellany begins with the first hesitant signs of an emerging, post-neoliberal order. The FTC, under direction of the force-of-nature that is Lina Khan, has brought its long-awaited case antitrust case against Amazon. I am
very excited about this. Disoriented, even.
When was the last time you greeted every day with a warm feeling because high officials in the US government were working for the betterment of every person in the land? It’s enough to make one giddy. Plus, the
New York Times let me call Amazon “the apex predator of our platform era”! Now that it’s in the “paper of record,” it’s official:
Now, lefties have been predicting capitalism’s imminent demise since
The Communist Manifesto, but any fule kno that the capitalist word for “crisis” also translates as “opportunity.” Like the bedbugs that mutated to thrive in clouds of post-war DDT, capitalism has adapted to each crisis, emerging in a new, more virulent form:
But “anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop” (Stein’s Law). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between feudalism and…feudalism.
Socialists have been hotly anticipating the end of capitalism since at least 1848, when Marx and Engels published
The Communist Manifesto - but the
Manifesto also reminds us that capitalism is only too happy to reinvent itself during its crises, coming back in new forms, over and over again:
Now, in
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis - the “libertarian Marxist” former finance minister of Greece - makes an excellent case that capitalism died a decade ago, turning into a new form of feudalism: technofeudalism:
To understand where Varoufakis is coming from, you need to go beyond the colloquial meanings of “capitalism” and “feudalism.” Capitalism isn’t just “a system where we buy and sell things.” It’s a system where
capital rules the roost: the richest, most powerful people are those who coerce workers into using their capital (factories, tools, vehicles, etc) to create income in the form of
profits.
By contrast, a
feudal society is one organized around people who
own things, charging others to use them to produce goods and services. In a feudal society, the most important form of income isn’t
profit, it’s
rent. To quote Varoufakis: “rent flows from privileged access to things in fixed supply” (land, fossil fuels, etc). Profit comes from “entrepreneurial people who have invested in things that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.”
This distinction is subtle, but important: “Profit is vulnerable to market competition, rent is not.” If you have a coffee shop, then every other coffee shop that opens on your block is a competitive threat that could erode your margins. But if you own the building the coffee shop owner rents, then every other coffee shop that opens on the block raises the property values and the amount of rent you can charge.
The capitalist revolution - extolled and condemned in the
Manifesto - was led by people who valorized profits as the heroic returns for making something new in this world, and who condemned rents as a parasitic drain on the true producers whose entrepreneurial spirits would enrich us all. The “free markets” extolled by Adam Smith weren’t free from
regulation - they were free from
rents:
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