Nearly 40 percent of the thousands of deaths that can be attributed to high heat levels in cities could have been avoided through increased tree coverage, a recent study from Barcelona’s Institute of Global Health found.
Past studies have linked urban heat with increased mortality rate and hospital admissions for adults and children. This link between high temperature and mortality holds both in times of extreme and moderate heat. In addition to conducting a similar analysis between urban heat and mortality, the Institute of Global Health’s study went on to estimate possible reductions in temperature and mortality that may result from increased tree coverage.
To establish the reduction in heat-induced urban mortality from increased tree coverage, researchers first compared mortality rates in warmer urban areas with mortality rates in cooler non-urban areas. This allowed them to estimate the relationship between increased temperature and mortality in urban areas. Researchers were then able to estimate the degree to which planting more trees could decrease temperature and thereby urban mortality rates. Specifically, a 30 percent increase in tree coverage could lead to 40 percent fewer deaths from urban heat.
Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, a research professor at ISGlobal and the study’s senior author, said the strength of their paper is in its holistic analysis of the issue. By linking heat, mortality and urban greening, the paper is able to stand at the “nexus of the climate crisis, urban forestry, health and urban planning,” said Nieuwenhuijsen, who also directs ISGlobal’s urban planning, environment and health initiative.
it seems people don’t understand. a GLUP SHITTO is a character in a very popular piece of media (like star wars) that if you asked a random person or even a casual fan, they wouldn’t know who the fuck that is. a BLORBO is just your little guy. can be any kind of character they’re just your little GUY. a POOR LITTLE MEOW MEOW is a villain, usually with a sad backstory, who you are defending and woobifying. they’ve done WRONG. not everyone can be a poor little meow meow. just because they’re pathetic doesn’t mean they’re a meow meow that mf had to commit CRIMES. if you want a pathetic little fucker of any moral persuasion that is a BABYGIRL. usually male, doesn’t have to be. just has to be kind of fucked up. get your terminology CORRECT
John von Neumann, in his mythic and controversial
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945), deliberately used the term memory
organ rather than
store, also in use at the time, in order to parallel biological and computing components and to emphasize the ephemeral nature of vacuum tubes.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2011. “The Enduring Ephemeral, of The Future Is a Memory.” In
Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 184-203. Berkeley: University of California Press.
In nature and in art, geometric symmetry is everywhere. It has also progressively found its way into the basic ideas and techniques of mathematics, such as the continuous and discrete groups of transformations and their uses. The impression of beauty and aesthetic pleasure, which are linked to symmetric patterns, is another significant function of symmetry in our lives.
Geometric symmetry is defined mathematically as being invariant to several types of geometric changes. For example, a circle would stay a circle (be invariant/symmetric) under a translation, rotation, and dilation combination, but not a skew transformation. Numerous studies have shown evidence of geometric invariance in the motor, perceptual, and underlying brain activity of primates.
Cognitive geometric transformations also include topic such as how the human brain perceives the image and how it recognizes objects despite of transformation in the image, does it uses some kind of transformation to recognize or it use some other mechanism. This is an active area of research in the field of cognitive science and computer vision.
The representation of cognitive processes in the brain, according to Felix Polyakov of Bar-Ilan University, is based on geometric variables and transformations that are crucial for bridging the gap between cognitive and mechanistic components of behavior, for integrating information from various sensory modalities, for sensory-motor integration, and for compactly representing learned skills.
This is a crude video frame capture device from
1989for the Commodore 64.
It plugs into the user port, and allows you to feed in NTSC composite video to be digitized in 2-bit grayscale. After that, you can apply the C64’s 4-bit color pallet to the color.
Remember how I said it takes about 4 seconds to capture? If you can’t feed it a still image, the results are going to be all garbled, so you need either a still image on the screen from a VCR. That, or you have some way to freeze a signal using a piece of specialized piece of broadcast kit. However, the manufacturers expected you to use this entirely differently: treating it almost like a digital camera. You were intended to connect this to a video camera, and set up a still scene, then use your Video Byte II to capture that scene.
After that, you can tweak the color pallet, shift the capture frame in software, and adjust the lighting. When you’re done, you can print it out, or save it as a Koala Paint compatible image for further editing (other formats were supposedly in the works)
So for the next few days I will be posting digitized photos (mostly my work) under the tag #video byte II
Alright, there’s the whole image set for now. If you missed any, be sure to check that tag to see all of them.
“One of the things you learn is that there’s no such thing as ‘having nothing to write’. Some mornings, many mornings, you’re just forcing yourself through the slog of writing. You’re just sitting there describing the sound of a mostly empty house or noting how your elbow has a small ache. And the sheer act of thinking and writing tips you into a felicitous phrase or an observation. It’s like your unconscious is an old storage unit you’ve been forced to explore and you come across something interesting. Or at least something you’ve forgotten about.”
A sandbar submerges on the shoreline of Qinghai Lake, located in northwest China. One of the largest saltwater lakes in the world, Qinghai was shrinking over much of the 20th century, but has been increasing in size since 2004. Shadao Lake, the smaller body of water once encircled by the sandbar, is now part of Qinghai.
The science fiction short story magazine Clarkesworld is now temporarily closed to submissions after a deluge of AI-generated stories.
ALT
(Neil Clarke’s blog postmentions that the February numbers are only for the first 20 days of the month, when they paused submissions.)
The problem, Clarke explains, is not that the AI-generated stories are as good as human-written ones. The problem is that lazy grifters think they are.
Saudi Arabian maximum-security prison located approximately 25 miles south of Riyadh. It is the largest prison complex in Saudi Arabia and houses both men and women. Reportedly, a number of members of al-Qaeda are held in this facility. According to the Washington Post “the al-Hair high-security prison looks remarkably like a hotel”. Images from Google Earth.
The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar — even more remarkable is that Google agrees.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Last fall, the US Department of Justice pushed the e-book pirate site Z-Library onto the dark web after charging its alleged operators with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud, and money laundering. Back then, Z-Library users—including many college students who relied on the site as a source for free textbooks—weren’t sure if Z-Library would be able to keep operating. That’s why this weekend, thousands of Z-Library fans rejoiced when Z-Library officially staged its comeback on public-access Internet—by launching a universal login page and setting up secret personal domains for users.
A Z-Library blog post from Saturday viewed by 21,000 users announced the “great news” and prompted users to access Z-Library using their regular login credentials at a new link. Once users log in, they’re redirected to a personal domain they can use to access close to 12 million free e-books on Z-Library without using encrypted networks like Tor. A second domain is also sent by email. At the time of login, users are prompted to check a box promising, “I will keep my domains in secret.”
TorrentFreak reported that Z-Library’s tactic of assigning unique domains creates “a technical setup that anticipates future enforcement action” and will help the site mitigate disruptions by deploying backup domains as needed to avert domain seizures. In November, US officials seized 200 domain names connected to Z-Library, TorrentFreak reported, and to prevent officials from succeeding with future enforcement actions, Z-Library is now depending on users to keep their personal domains private.
“Don’t disclose your personal domain and don’t share the link to your domain, as it is protected with your own password and cannot be accessed by other users,” Z-Library wrote in the blog post.
Ars could not immediately reach Z-Library to comment, but a test confirmed that it is now possible to log in to Z-Library without using Tor or an encrypted I2P network layer. Ars also confirmed that Z-Library is currently assigning two personal domains per user.
Z-Library said in its blog post that not all users currently have access to the universal login page but that the site is working on a solution. For now, any users who experience issues accessing Z-Library to retrieve their personal domains can still “use TOR/I2P to log in to your account, copy the URL of your personal domain and use it in your regular browser,” Z-Library advised.
Time will tell if Z-Library’s strategy will be effective at stopping authorities globally from blocking Z-Library. It’s likely that any authorities monitoring the pirate site are already aware of some of Z-Library’s new domains, TorrentFreak reported. To help users keep tabs on what’s happening with the site, including news on domains, Z-Library set up a Telegram channel.
The e-book pirate site’s comeback will likely not be celebrated by authors, many of whom complained to a US trade representative last October that “accessing pirate e-book sites is easier than ever” and is causing “incalculable and truly devastating” income loss to publishers and authors.
But hundreds of users welcomed the site’s return, with people posting enthusiastic comments on Z-Library’s blog, like “I can’t live without Z-Library” and “this resource is invaluable!”
Towards the end of 2022, there was another spike in plagiarism and then “AI” chatbots started gaining some attention, putting a new tool in their arsenal and encouraging more to give this “side hustle” a try. It quickly got out of hand.
I’m not going to detail how I know these stories are “AI” spam or outline any of the data I have collected from these submissions. There are some very obvious patterns and I have no intention of helping those people become less likely to be caught. Furthermore, some of the patterns I’ve observed could be abused and paint legitimate authors with the same brush. Regional trends, for example.
What I can say is that the number of spam submissions resulting in bans has hit 38% this month. While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes. To make matters worse, the technology is only going to get better, so detection will become more challenging. (I have no doubt that several rejected stories have already evaded detection or were cases where we simply erred on the side of caution.)
Yes, there are tools out there for detecting plagiarized and machine-written text, but they are prone to false negatives and positives. One of the companies selling these services is even playing both sides, offering a tool to help authors prevent detection. Even if used solely for preliminary scoring and later reviewed by staff, automating these third-party tools into a submissions process would be costly. I don’t think any of the short fiction markets can currently afford the expense.
I’ve reached out to several editors and the situation I’m experiencing is by no means unique. It does appear to be hitting higher-profile “always open” markets much harder than those with limited submission windows or lower pay rates. This isn’t terribly surprising since the websites and channels that promote “write for money” schemes tend to focus more attention on “always open” markets with higher per-word rates.
from
A Concerning Trend by Neil Clarke (publisher of the SFF magazine Clarkesworld)
This desert tableau is at once modern and ancient. Modern because the arrow-straight canal, lined with concrete and designed with turnouts that divert water to flood the field, is the last leg of a state-of-the-art irrigation system here on the Gila River Indian Community, an Indian reservation in southern Arizona. Ancient because Camille is a member of the Akimel O’odham, or River People, also called Pima. For centuries her ancestors practiced irrigated agriculture across this vast desert, digging hundreds of miles of canals that routed water from the Gila and Salt rivers onto planted fields of maize, beans and squash, the “three sisters” that fed a huge swath of prehistoric America.
The sprawling civilization of the canal-building Huhugam—the Pima name for their ancestors, meaning “our people who have come before”—reached its pinnacle in the 15th century. Exactly what happened to it after that, however, is a mystery. Some evidence points to a protracted drought; other data, from the study of geological layers, suggests a series of massive floods destroyed large sections of the canal network. Pima oral tradition holds that a class rebellion overthrew the society’s elite. Whatever the reason, Huhugam culture experienced a precipitous decline, and desert winds eventually covered over their canals with sand, dirt and weeds. Gone, too, were their monumental four-story buildings, ball courts and villages, buried by the very desert soil that once sustained them.
The historic Pima farmed on a smaller scale than their ancestors, but their crops still fed much of what is now southern Arizona. But beginning in the late 19th century, the tribe endured decades of hunger, discrimination and a scourge of homesteaders and profiteers who diverted tribal water to quench the needs of booming new settlements.
Now, after more than a century, water has returned to the reservation. The Pima have gone from water impoverishment to water wealth, and the reservation now has rights to more water than anywhere else in Arizona, despite the region’s worst drought in 1,200 years. This profound change in the Pima’s fortunes represents a long-sought triumph over an ongoing historical injustice.
Magnetically actuated miniature machines can perform multimodal locomotion and programmable deformations. However, they are either solid magnetic elastomers with limited morphological adaptability or liquid material systems with low mechanical strength.
Here, we report magnetoactive phase transitional matter (MPTM) composed of magnetic neodymium-iron-boron microparticles embedded in liquid metal. MPTMs can reversibly switch between solid and liquid phase by heating with alternating magnetic field or through ambient cooling.
In this way, they uniquely combine high mechanical strength (strength, 21.2 MPa; stiffness, 1.98 GPa), high load capacity (able to bear 30 kg), and fast locomotion speed (>1.5 m/s) in the solid phase with excellent morphological adaptability (elongation, splitting, and merging) in the liquid phase. We demonstrate the unique capabilities of MPTMs by showing their dynamic shape reconfigurability by realizing smart soldering machines and universal screws for smart assembly and machines for foreign body removal and drug delivery in a model stomach.
Beyond muscles: role of intramuscular connective tissue elasticity and passive stiffness in octopus arm muscle function.
J. Exp. Biol. 2021; 224: 242644https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.242644View in Article
Magnetic multimaterial printing for multimodal shape transformation with tunable properties and shiftable mechanical behaviors.
ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces. 2020; 13: 12639-12648https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.0c13863View in Article
IMAGE ID: A conversation on Quora where a person asks:
Why do people get angry when I try to share the word of God with them? I only do it because I care about them deeply and don’t want them to end up in hell. I feel like some people avoid me because of this. Is there any way to get through to them?
And Doug Robertson answers:
The entire process is not what you think it is. It is specifically designed to be uncomfortable for the other person because it isn’t about converting them to your religion. It is about manipulating you so you can’t leave yours. If this tactic was about converting people it would be considered a horrible failure. It recruits almost no one who isn’t already willing to join. Bake sales are more effective recruiting tools. On the other hand, it is extremely effective at creating a deep tribal feeling among its own members:
The rejection they receive is actually more important than the few people they convert. It causes them to feel a level of discomfort around the people they attempt to talk to. These become the “others”. These uncomfortable feelings go away when they come back to their congregation, the “Tribe”.
If you take a good look at the process it becomes fairly clear. In most cases, the religious person starts out from their own group, who is encouraging and supportive. They are then sent out into the harsh world where people repeatedly reject them, mainly because they are trained to be so annoying.
These brave witnesses then return from the cruel world to their congregation where they are treated like returning heroes. They are now safe. They bond as they share their experiences of reaching out to the godless people to bring them the truth. They share the otherness they experience.
Once again they will learn that the only place they are accepted is with the people who think as they do. It isn’t safe to leave the group. The world Is your enemy, but we love you. This is a pain reward cycle that is a common brainwashing technique, The participants become more and more reliant on the “Tribe” because they know that “others” reject them. Mix in some ritualized chanting, possibly a bit of monotonous repetition of instructions, add a dash of fear of judgment by an unseen, but all-powerful entity who loves you if you do as you are told and you get a pretty powerful mix.
Sorry, I have absolutely no wish to participate in someones brainwashing ritual.
History is written by the winners, which is why Luddite is a slur meaning “technophobe” and not a badge of honor meaning, “Person who goes beyond asking what technology does, to asking who it does it
for and who it does it
to.”
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
BP’s chief executive, Bernard Looney, said on Tuesday that the company would pare back its plans to reduce oil and gas production in the coming years, a move that would result in higher-than-expected carbon emissions.
The shift appeared to be a response to changes in the geopolitical environment, at least partly caused by the war in Ukraine, which has sent oil and, especially, natural gas prices soaring.
The comments came as BP company joined other big oil companies in reporting record annual profit: $27.7 billion for 2022, almost double the adjusted profit of 2021.
With oil and gas so profitable, BP now says it will increase investment in the production of fossil fuels by about $1 billion a year above previous plans for the rest of the decade. It will also increase spending by a similar amount on low-carbon businesses.
Mr. Looney said in an interview that much had changed over the three years since he made what were considered industry-leading commitments to cut back on oil and gas output and reduce emissions.
“The conversation three or four years ago was somewhat singular around cleaner energy, lower-carbon energy,” he said. “Today there is much more conversation about energy security, energy affordability.”
For a smooth transition to cleaner energy, “you need to invest in today’s energy system,” which is still primarily based on oil and gas, he said.
Analysts say Mr. Looney’s shift may signal a major change at BP and, perhaps, other European oil companies. In recent years, these organizations have restrained investment and focused on keeping shareholders happy with large dividends and share buybacks.
This makes sense if we consider that people are more likely to put off starting or completing tasks that they feel aversion towards. If just thinking about the task makes you anxious or threatens your sense of self-worth, you will be more likely to put it off.
Research has found that regions of the brain linked to threat detection and emotion regulation are different in people who chronically procrastinate compared to those who don’t procrastinate frequently.
When we avoid the unpleasant task, we also avoid the negative emotions associated with it. This is rewarding and conditions us to use procrastination to repair our mood. If we engage in more enjoyable tasks instead, we get another mood boost.
…
But:
In the long run, procrastination isn’t an effective way of managing emotions. The mood repair you experience is temporary. Afterwards, people tend to engage in self-critical ruminations that not only increase their negative mood, but also reinforce their tendency to procrastinate.”
And procrastination is linked with health problems.
I recently had this insight about myself and why I procrastinate: I put tasks off that stress me out. I found the insight itself to be life-changing—just knowing why procrastination happens went a long way to correcting the problem, though I still have a long way to go.
I am grateful for the insight—and I wish I’d had it fifty years ago. Sigh.
If you visit the southwest corner of Madagascar, you might find a tree so old its name is Grandmother. She has three stems, fused together, so that her trunk resembles a massive rounded pot rather than a solitary sentinel. The oldest stem dates to A.D. 1,600, meaning she took root a few decades before Atilla the Hun launched his rampage.
Grandmother is a baobab tree, one of a species beloved worldwide not only for its longevity but also for its distinctive crown: a tangle of scraggly branches extends from the trees’ top like electrocuted hair. Or, less flamboyantly, like misplaced roots. In creation myths, the baobab is known as the tree the gods planted upside down.
“When you’re close to the trunk, you feel something powerful,” says William Daniels, a photographer who traveled through Madagascar’s forests to capture the stunning images of the baobab’s mystic charisma that appear with this story. “It’s some good energy.”
But baobabs are in trouble, potential victims of the warming globe. Scientists sounded the alarm more than five years ago, when they investigated why some of the oldest and largest baobabsin southern Africa had died. In subsequent studies, scientists found these long-lived mammoths are vulnerable to climate change and predicted that four of the world’s baobab species could become extinct by 2021. That includes Grandmother, one of the Malagasy species.
Scientists are still sorting out if baobabs can adapt to their changing environment or if baobab forests could be replanted. They are also assessing what the loss of baobab forests would mean for the plants and animals that live in them. Baobabs are considered a keystone species,meaning they hold ecosystems together. When a keystone species is diminished, the change affects the entire system.
“Amazon has long wanted to become not indispensable, but unavoidable. The key difference there is that a company is indispensable through quality of service and affordability; a company is unavoidable simply by being in the way”
[Image ID: A multicolored sunburst background. Exuberant block caps spell out “NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL.” Below it is Magritte’s pipe from “The Tyranny of Images.” Beside the pipe are the cursive words “une pipe” from the same painting.]
I have an entire album of “the treachery of images” memes. I love them.
#Humans will pack-bond with goddamn anything up to and including weather formations
Humans: Isn’t it charming and quaint how our ancestors gave spirits and personalities and godhoods to everything around them. Their primitive, unenlightened eyes must have seen things so differently to us, wise in their own way.
Also humans: That cloud group is named Hector and he likes to hang out at the beach for half of the year.
[
MORNING GLORY BOOK] by
Bankaen Shujin [aka
Yokoyama Masana] (1954). Illustrated by
Hattori Sessai.
This pictorial book from 1854 is known as one of the best books on morning glories published in Japan. It reflects the morning glory mania that began in 1847 and that was widespread among the people of Edo (present-day Tokyo) at that time. The book features colored prints of 36 morning glory flowers and leaves with strange shapes, by Hattori Sessai (1807-?), a Japanese painter known for his naturalist works. The descriptions were written by Bankaen Shujin, also known as Yokoyama Masana (1833-1908), who was a retainer of a Tokugawa shogun.
This is magenta, and not pink. Unlike pink, magenta doesn’t actually exist. Our brain just invents magenta to serve as what it considers a logical bridge between red and violet, which each exist at opposite ends of a linear spectrum.
TL;DR this color is fake (and also I hate it)
w
what
im
Wait til you learn about Stygean Blue
Your brain is a badly-designed hot mess of bootstrapped chemistry that will tell you that all kinds of shit is happening that has no correlation to physical reality, including time travel. It just makes things up. Your brain is guessing about what’s happening when your eyes saccade, what’s happening in your blind spot, and what the majority of the visible light spectrum looks like, and you don’t know it’s happening because it doesn’t aid your survival to become aware that a lot of what you see is fake.
The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.
Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.
You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But
we can’t see it.
“Sorry, what the fuck?”
What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have
light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the
color yellow looks like.
Some animals have eyes that
can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.
What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:
We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.
Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”
That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will
still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.
So how does magenta factor into this?
Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.
What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?
Fucking
green.
Hey, that’s not gonna
work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.
So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green.
And so it made up magenta.
So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”
No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:
Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.
Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?
Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.
The perception of color exists within your brain, and your brain says you see magenta. So you see magenta.
So I googled Stygian Blue and…
Yall.
FORBIDDEN.
HOW TO SEE THE FORBIDDEN COLOURS
Hyperbolic Orange is the color my soul is
Dark tumblr show me the forbidden colors
We are back on this again.
My brain hurts.
i fucking love the human brain, it’s like if bethesda made an animal
A lens probably none of us have ever seen before- and one that took its owner six years to find. This is a Petri 100mm f4.5 periscope lens mounted on a Petri FTE.
It works as you expect- and looks even weirder (and is lighter) than you think.
I can’t think of any practical use for it (I’m already 195cm tall) but as soon as it was in my hands I started wondering what it would be like to take out in public.
Amazing lens- thanks for bringing it to the gallery today, Kawada-san.
Somatoparaphrenia: a type of monothematic delusion where one denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of one’s body. Even if provided with undeniable proof that the limb belongs to and is attached to their own body, the patient produces elaborate confabulations about whose limb it really is or how the limb ended up on their body. Via.
For an organism to be conscious, it has to have some kind of phenomenology for itself.
Anykind of experience —
any phenomenological property — counts as much as any other. Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness. A creature that comes into being only for a moment will be conscious just as long as there is something it is like to be it, even if all that’s happening is a fleeting feeling of pain or pleasure.
Anil Seth,
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber, 2021.
Last week, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop — a leaked report of Hasbro’s plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:
The report set off a shitstorm among D&D fans and the broader TTRPG community — not just because it was evidence of yet more enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken WOTC and the OGL at their word.
Gamers were right to be worried. Giant companies love to rugpull their fans, tempting them into a commons with lofty promises of a system that we will all have a stake in, using the fans for unpaid creative labor, then enclosing the fans’ work and selling it back to them. It’s a tale as old as CDDB and Disgracenote:
(Disclosure: I am a long-serving volunteer board-member for MetaBrainz, which maintains MusicBrainz, a free, open, community-managed and transparent alternative to Gracenote, explicitly designed to resist the kind of commons-stealing enclosure that led to the CDDB debacle.)
Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word “irrevocable.” That means that if you build on licensed content, you don’t have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It’s rugproof.
Now, the OGL does
not contain the word “irrevocable.” Rather, the OGL is “perpetual.” To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time. In lawyerspeak, a “perpetual” license is one whose revocation doesn’t come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is “irrevocable,” the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.
This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers — rather than public-interest nonprofits — unleash “open” licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.
The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As Rob Bodine— an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer — wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.
The issue lies with what the OGL actually
licenses. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is “intellectual property,” and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.
The copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because copyright just doesn’t work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember SpiceDAO?):
Copyright is a lot more complex than “anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it.” For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between
ideas and
expression. Copyright does
not apply to ideas — the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically
not copyrightable.
Copyright also doesn’t cover abstract systems or methods — like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a “balanced” system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That’s what “uncopyrightable” means.
Finally, there are the exceptions and limitations to copyright — things that you are allowed to do with copyrighted work, without first seeking permission from the creator or copyright’s proprietor. The best-known exception is US law is fair use, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on “four factors” that determine whether a use is fair or not.
In reality, the four factors are a starting point that courts are allowed and encouraged to consider when determining the fairness of a use, but some of the most consequential fair use cases in Supreme Court history flunk one, several, or even
all of the four factors (for example, the Betamax decision that legalized VCRs in 1984, which fails all four).
Beyond fair use, there are other exceptions and limitations, like the
di minimis exemption that allows for incidental uses of tiny fragments of copyrighted work without permission, even if those uses are not fair use. Copyright, in other words, is “fact-intensive,” and there are many ways you can legally use a copyrighted work without a license.
Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses. The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC
can’t copyright — “the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines.” In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things
you don’t need permission to use.
But maybe the OGL grants you permission to use
more things, beyond those things you’re allowed to use anyway? Nope. The OGL specifically exempts:
Product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark…
Now, there are places where the uncopyrightable parts of D&D mingle with the copyrightable parts, and there’s a legal term for this: merger. Merger came up for gamers in 2018, when the provocateur Robert Hovden got the US Copyright Office to certify copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck:
If you want to learn more about merger, you need to study up on
Kregos and
Eckes, which are beautifully explained in the “Open Intellectual Property Casebook,” a free resource created by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle:
Jenkins and Boyle explicitly created their open casebook as an answer to another act of enclosure: a greedy textbook publisher cornered the market on IP textbook and charged every law student — and everyone curious about the law — $200 to learn about merger and other doctrines.
As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh writes in her must-read analysis of the OGL, this means “the only benefit that OGL offers, legally, is that you can copy verbatim some descriptions of some elements that otherwise might arguably rise to the level of copyrightability.”
But like I said, it’s not just that the OGL fails to give you rights —
it actually takes away rights you already have to D&D. That’s because — as Walsh points out — fair use and the other copyright limitations and exceptions give you rights to use D&D content, but the OGL is a contract whereby you surrender those rights, promising only to use D&D stuff according to WOTC’s explicit wishes.
“For example, absent this agreement, you have a legal right to create a work using noncopyrightable elements of D&D or making fair use of copyrightable elements and to say that that work is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons. In many contexts you also have the right to use the logo to name the game (something called “nominative fair use” in trademark law). You can certainly use some of the language, concepts, themes, descriptions, and so forth. Accepting this license almost certainly means signing away rights to use these elements. Like Sauron’s rings of power, the gift of the OGL came with strings attached.”
And here’s where it starts to get interesting. Since the OGL launched in 2000, a huge proportion of game designers have agreed to its terms, tricked into signing away their rights. If Hasbro
does go through with canceling the OGL, it will
release those game designers from the shitty, deceptive OGL.
According to the leaks, the new OGL is even worse than the original versions — but you don’t have to take those terms! Notwithstanding the fact that the OGL says that “using…Open Game Content” means that you accede to the license terms, that is just not how contracts work.
Walsh: “Contracts require an offer, acceptance, and some kind of value in exchange, called ‘consideration.’ If you sell a game, you are inviting the reader to play it, full stop. Any additional obligations require more than a rote assertion.”
“For someone who wants to make a game that is similar mechanically to Dungeons and Dragons, and even announce that the game is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, it has always been more advantageous as a matter of law to ignore the OGL.”
Walsh finishes her analysis by pointing to some
good licenses, like the GPL and Creative Commons, “written to serve the interests of creative communities, rather than a corporation.” Many open communities — like the programmers who created GNU/Linux, or the music fans who created Musicbrainz, were formed after outrageous acts of enclosure by greedy corporations.
If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked — and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along — there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t — but they
could.
This is a great moment to start — or contribute to —
real open gaming content, licensed under standard, universal licenses like Creative Commons. Rolling your own license has always been a bad idea, comparable to rolling your own encryption in the annals of ways-to-fuck-up-your-own-life-and-the-lives-of-many-others. There is an opportunity here — Hasbro unintentionally proved that gamers
want to collaborate on shared gaming systems.
That’s the true lesson here: if you want a commons, you’re not alone. You’ve got company, like Kit Walsh herself, who happens to be a brilliant game-designer who won a Nebula Award for her game “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”:
[Image ID: A remixed version of David Trampier’s ‘Eye of Moloch,’ the cover of the first edition of the AD&D Player’s Handbook. It has been altered so the title reads ‘Advanced Copyright Fuckery. Unclear on the Concept. That’s Just Not How Licenses Work. No, Seriously.’ The eyes of the idol have been replaced by D20s displaying a critical fail ‘1.’ Its chest bears another D20 whose showing face is a copyright symbol.]
In “Social Quitting,” my latest
Locus Magazine column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous vibe shift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that we’re all ready to leave them:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The core of the argument revolves around surpluses — that is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like “being able to converse with your friends” and “being able to plan activities with your friends.” For advertisers, surpluses are things like “being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data” and “being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.”
For the platforms, surpluses are things like, “Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc” and things like “Being able to charge more for ads” and “being able to clone your business customers’ products and then switch your users to the in-house version.”
Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will “boost engagement” by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers’ products they should clone and displace.
But platforms can’t just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, “No matter who you follow, we’ll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can’t skip; we will spy on you a lot.” Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was “Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we’ll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.”
Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms’ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won’t go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.
This is where network effects and switching costs come into play. A service has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.
“Switching costs” are what you have to give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed — if it blocks interoperability with rivals — then quitting that service means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between ActivityPub-based Fediverse services like Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook — you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:
In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the “collective action problem” of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you — for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community — then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy. The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the
FiddlerOn the Roof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can’t all agree on where to go if they leave:
So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them — making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.
This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You’ll hate it, but you won’t leave. Junior loves little-league.
Facebook can enshittify its user experience because the users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If Facebook can use the courts and technological countermeasures to block interoperable services, it can increase its users’ switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That’s why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:
This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.
Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with
lots of these posts to news organizations’ sites, bumping down the messages from its users’ friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites’ posts into millions of users’ feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.
Outlets that
don’t participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please The Algorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.
But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users’ feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put
more things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.
Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector — health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.
But there is a difference between users’ surpluses and business’s surpluses. A user’s surplus is
attention, and there is no such thing as an “attention economy.” You can’t use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency — it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.
Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into money — you have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about crypto’s future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent “fiat” money for unspendable crypto tokens.
With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable “attention.” This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholders’ cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.
That’s what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the pivot to video fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebook’s bid to compete with Youtube:
This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, you’ll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he “won” by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:
Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.
That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating
all the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.
But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers don’t like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures. And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.
Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.
In other words, the platforms try to establish an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders. But this is a very brittle equilibrium, because the prices that platforms impose on their users and business customers can change very quickly, even if the platforms don’t do anything differently.
Users and business customers can revalue the privacy costs, or the risks of staying on the platform based on exogenous factors. Privacy scandals and other ruptures can make the cost you’ve been paying for years seem higher than you realized and no longer worth it.
This problem isn’t unique to social media platforms, either. It’s endemic to end-stage capitalism, where companies can go on for years paying their workers just barely enough to survive (or even less, expecting them to get public assistance and/or a side-hustle), and those workers can tolerate it, and tolerate it, and tolerate it — until one day, they stop.
The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, the mass desertions from the gig economy — they all prove the Stein’s Law: “Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.”
Same for long, brittle supply-chains, where all the surplus has been squeezed out: concentrating all the microchip production in China and Taiwan, all the medical saline in Puerto Rico, all the shipping into three cartels… This strategy works well, and can be perfectly tuned with mathematical models that cut right to the joint, and they work and they work.
Until they stop. Until covid. Or war. Or wildfires. Or floods. Or interest rate hikes. Or revolution. All this stuff works great until you wake up and discover that the delicate balance between paying for guard labor and paying for a fair society has tilted, and now there’s a mob building a guillotine outside the gates of your luxury compound.
This is the force underpinning collapse: “slow at first, then all at once.” A steady erosion of the failsafes, flensing all the slack out of the system, extracting all the surpluses until there’s nothing left in the reservoir, no reason to stay.
It’s what caused the near-collapse of Barnes and Noble, and while there are plenty of ways to describe James Daunt’s successful turnaround, the most general characterization is, “He has reallocated the company’s surpluses to workers, readers, writers and publishers”:
A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system can’t just work well, it has to fail well.
This is why I object so strenuously to people who characterize my 2017 novel
Walkaway as a “dystopian novel.” Yes, the protagonists are eking out survival amidst a climate emergency and a failing state, but they aren’t giving up, they’re building something new:
“Dystopia” isn’t when things go wrong. Assuming nothing will go wrong doesn’t make you an optimist, it makes you an asshole. A
dangerous asshole. Assuming nothing will go wrong is why they didn’t put enough lifeboats on the
Titanic. Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and
nothing can be done about it.
Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. The social media barons who reeled users and business customers into a mutual hostage-taking were confident that their self-licking ice-cream cone — in which we all continued to energetically produce surpluses for them to harvest, because we couldn’t afford to leave — would last forever.
They were wrong. The important thing about the Fediverse isn’t that it’s noncommercial or decentralized — it’s that its design impedes surplus harvesting. The Fediverse is designed to keep switching costs as low as possible, by enshrining the Right Of Exit into the technical architecture of the system. The ability to leave a service without paying a price is the best defense we have against the scourge of enshittification.
(Thanks to Tim Harford for inspiring this column via an offhand remark in his kitchen a couple months ago!)
[Image ID: The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.]
“A series of systemic failures including the financial collapse of 2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic have illuminated the shortcomings and errors within these orthodox economic models. In response the discipline of economics is undergoing rapid change. Shaping a new orthodoxy involves the recovery of work which has been long admired but relegated from mainstream economic thinking (for example Ostrom’s work on the commons and feminist studies on the value of care and household work); the re-positioning of economic policy and business strategy around notions of value and purpose (the critical work of Mazzucato and Kelton); groundbreaking analysis of the connections between technology revolutions and smart growth (Perez) and what we might call the economics of emergence which understands that there can be no sustainable economy that privileges growth above the ecological boundaries of the planet (Raworth, Beinhocker, Bauwens).”
The Darvaza gas crater is a burning natural gas field collapsed into a cavern near Darvaza, Turkmenistan. Nicknamed the “Gates of Hell,” the crater has a diameter of 230 feet (70 meters) and a depth of about 66 feet (20 meters). How the crater formed and ignited remains unknown, but it is believed to have been purposefully lit in the 1980s to prevent emission of poisonous gases. In 2022, then Turkmen President announced plans to extinguish it.
The charity founded in Greta Thunberg’s name has donated £158,000 to cover the legal costs of Indigenous people in Sweden’s Arctic north as they battle a British mining company over plans for an iron-ore mine on reindeer-herding lands.
Beowulf Mining, which has its headquarters in the City of London, was given approval in March by the Swedish government for excavation on an area used by the Sami community.
The government’s decision appeared to bring to an end to a decade-long fight during which opposition to the open pit mine had attracted the support of Unesco and the leader of Sweden’s national church.
Jon-Mikko Länta, the chair of the Jåhkågaska Sami community, which will be most affected, said a Greta Thunberg Foundation donation of 2m Swedish krona (£158,000), had provided them with the opportunity to continue to resist the mine.
He said: “
At the moment we are trying to appeal against the Swedish government’s decision to grant the concession as our legal team think it is not in line with international conventions on the rights of Indigenous people.
“
It is a lot of work and expensive, which is why we are so grateful. We are hoping that if our appeal is successful that everything will go back to the Swedish government and we will at least get better terms.”
The proposed Gállok mining site, located 28 miles (45km) outside the town of Jokkmokk in the county of Norrbotten in Swedish Sápmi, has become a symbol of the fight to protect Sami culture from big business and government.
…
The Sami parliament, the representative body for people of indigenous heritage in Sweden, wrote last February to the Swedish government warning the mine would destroy grazing areas and cut off the only viable migratory route for reindeer followed by the Jåhkågasska Sami community.
Sami communities to the west and east of the mine would also be hit through a reduction in viable grazing areas already under pressure from changes to the snow conditions attributed to the climate emergency, logging, power lines and the development of a hydroelectric dam, the parliament said.
Unesco, the UN’s cultural protection wing, has spoken of a potentially “large, very large” impact on the Laponian area, the mountainous world heritage site 21 miles west of the mine.
The archbishop of Uppsala, Antje Jackelén, who heads the Church of Sweden, wrote an open letter to the Swedish prime minister, claiming that the open pit mine was “not existentially and spiritually sustainable”.
Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles ran out of money after some of the birds flew to Iran and Pakistan and their SMS transmitters drew huge data roaming charges.
After learning of the team’s dilemma, Russian mobile phone operator Megafon offered to cancel the debt and put the project on a special, cheaper tariff.
The team had started crowdfunding on social media to pay off the bills.
The birds left from southern Russia and Kazakhstan.
The journey of one steppe eagle, called Min, was particularly expensive, as it flew to Iran from Kazakhstan.
Min accumulated SMS messages to send during the summer in Kazakhstan, but it was out of range of the mobile network. Unexpectedly the eagle flew straight to Iran, where it sent the huge backlog of messages.
The price per SMS in Kazakhstan was about 15 roubles (18p; 30 US cents), but each SMS from Iran cost 49 roubles. Min used up the entire tracking budget meant for all the eagles.
“Keith Hart, a renowned and influential economic anthropologist: “Western civilization represents itself as an economy these days. The TV news bombards us with the ephemeral movements of stock prices, exchange rates, and the latest unemployment figures. Elections are fought and lost on a government’s economic record. International diplomacy is mainly about trade and banking. The dependent societies of the Third World are compelled to give an economic account of themselves to the agents of global order, the IMF and the World Bank. All of this is supervised by the high priests, the economists, who can be relied on to issue incomprehensible statements purporting to show that they know what is wrong or that everything is alright. It is almost impossible to discuss public affairs in any terms other than economic. Even the revolutionaries are as fixated on the economy as their opponents. It was not always so. When the western bourgeoisie was struggling to make the modern world, politics and religion figured prominently on their agenda. They knew they had to create a whole new culture to break away from the dead hand of the military-agrarian complex. It follows from this that economics has become the religion of our secular scientific civilization. (p. 155) It is increasingly obvious that we need a new idea of economy to help us grasp what is going on in the world. The economics profession, having opted for parasitism on the existing social order, is powerless to help.” (Hart 1990: 158).”
— Hart, Keith. 1990. “The Idea of Economy: Six Modern Dissenters.” Pp. 137-160 in Beyond the Marketplace: Rethinking Economy and Society, edited by Roger Friedland and A. F. Robertson. New York: Routledge.
So I’ve used neural networks to generate recipes in the past. They’re computer programs that can learn to imitate the data we give them, copying the way that humans drive cars, label images, or translate languages.
That is, they try to learn. They’re called “neural” because they have virtual neurons that work a little like the real neurons in our brains. Their virtual brains, however, are really tiny. Where a human has about 86 billion neurons, the neural networks we use today have hundreds to low thousands - think nematode worm or, optimistically, jellyfish. So they often struggle, and recipes, my friends, are one of those times. (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a neural net’s attempt at “small sandwiches”)
I turned to cocktails, inspired by Beth Skwarecki’s cocktails bot (and helped immensely by the dataset she sent me).
The neural net’s first attempt was… an attempt.
I let it train for a little longer, and things got a little more recognizable, as it learned to kinda spell more ingredients.
It had, however, not learned when to quit. 64-ounce (2 liter) cocktails are not unheard of at this stage.
It continued to learn on its own, all without input from me, and eventually ended up with cocktails that were almost plausible.
Some of my other training attempts, however, did not go so well. At first the cocktail titles in my training set were in all caps, which confused the heck out of the neural net because capital letters were so rare that it didn’t see enough examples of what to do with them. It struggled with the titles.
You may also notice that the ill-fated all-caps attempt had a lot of repetition - that’s because I was using textgenrnn, which has a somewhat limited memory. It could learn to spell ingredients, but had no idea whether it had already added sugar and cream. When I switched to char-rnn for the lowercase recipes above, I could give it a memory of 50 characters, enough to cut down on repetition. The textgenrnn version, however, became strangely obsessed with creme de cacao. The less said about its cocktails, the better.
For more neural net cocktails (including custom-generated cocktails for any name you care to provide), check out Beth’s cocktails bot!
🌳The 🦌 Endless 🍄 Forest🌳 remake 🚧 inches closer to completion 🏁 with a new beta version ✌️. Backers 🥇of the project have received a download link 🔗. Thank you 🙏 for the support. 🎄Merry Christmas!🎄
Artstation protest against allowing AI-generated art on the platform, which took form of artists flooding the site with pictures saying NO AI ART, has utterly fucked up AI Art generators that were sampling art trending on artstation without permission. Thus proving that all these generators do indeed steal artwork.
