A MEDIEVAL BESTIARY (Central or northern England, 1210-1220)
A bestiary is a book of real and imaginary beasts, though its subjects can include plants and even rocks. It combined descriptions of the physical nature and habits of animals and includedthe moral and spiritual significance of these characteristics.
Produced in the first decade of the 13th century, this manuscript contains one of the first bestiaries to feature vivid paintings. They are set on gold grounds and in colorful frames instead of the line-drawn renderings used in earlier works of this type. These lavish illuminations would have made this a costly book to produce so it was likely made for an aristocrat, or royal, owner who could read Latin or had a chaplain who could do so.
A study presented in 2019, using the tools of Claude Shannon’s information theory, concluded that across 14 representative human languages there is a fundamental limit to the data-rate of speech. No matter who we are or what we’re talking about, or how fast our language is spoken, on average we transmit information no faster than 39 bits per second. Given the very different encoding strategies that different languages employ, the researchers point to the limitations of human biology as the bottleneck, specifically how quickly we can actually gather our thoughts in order to transmit them.
Caleb Scharf. 2021.
The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, And Life’s Unending Algorithm. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.
India, like much of the rest of the world, is in ecological tumult. Between 1880 and 2013, some forty per cent of its forest cover disappeared. It has lost a third of its wetlands in the past few decades, and a third of its grasslands in just a ten-year span. A fifth of its tree species may be threatened with extinction. Krishen’s work has emerged as a showcase for restoring biodiversity to ravaged places—a practice known as ecological restoration, or, more colloquially, “rewilding.” It is based not on industrial-scale quick-fix planting projects but on a near-fanatical attunement to the specifics of local ecosystems and the livelihoods of their people. Rewilders strive to undo some of the environmental damage inflicted over the centuries by humans—the most invasive species of all.
The United Nations, in yet another call to immediate action on the climate crisis, designated 2021-30 the “Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.” But there is no consensus on exactly how to enact repairs. The only thing everyone agrees on is the value of trees. They serve as carbon sinks, provide habitats and food, reduce water pollution, and prevent erosion. Still, some twenty-five million acres of forest are destroyed every year, by clear-cutting or fire, usually to make way for mines, grazing land, crops, and tree plantations, for timber, palm oil, and other products.
Most funding thus goes to guilt-absolving projects that promise to plant billions of trees—in the Amazon, the California redwood forests, the Sahel, and many of India’s twenty-eight states. In January, 2020, the World Economic Forum announced an initiative to plant a trillion trees. Bank of America, Mastercard, Microsoft, and the National Forest Foundation, among others, declared their support. Conservation International and MyTrees, which plan to help restore seventy-three million trees in Brazil, urge, “save trees, win prizes: Get rewarded for helping the planet every month!” The media, looking for feel-good stories, has routinely broadcast such measures. A National Geographic headline announced, “India Plants 50 Million Trees in One Day, Smashing World Record.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi relishes such headlines. Developing nations like India are in an especially painful bind: coping with cascading environmental catastrophes while pursuing rapid industrial growth. Modi claims to have found a way to do both. At the U.N.’s 2019 climate summit, he pledged to restore sixty-four million acres of degraded land by 2030. He also oversees one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. India will soon overtake China as the most populous nation, with more than 1.4 billion people. Although it contributes only seven per cent of global CO
2 emissions, it is the third-largest polluter, after China and the U.S. At present, seventy per cent of its electricity comes from coal. The government recently predicted that India’s demand for electricity would double in the next decade.
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
– Katherine May,
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
The cozy web is Venkatesh Rao’s term for the private, gatekeeper-bounded spaces of the internet we have all retreated to over the last few years. It’s the “high-gatekeeping slum-like space comprising slacks, messaging apps, private groups, storage services like dropbox, and of course, email.” The informal, untracked, messily human space that the bots and algorithms haven’t infiltrated yet.
Venkat first proposed the term in one of his Breaking Smart emails on The Extended Internet Universe. He builds off Yancey Strickler’s companion idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web. The “dark forest” is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life. All the living creatures within it are hiding. Because “night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.” The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It’s unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces.
CONSERVATION BIOLOGY FINDS itself in a terrifying place today, witness to mass extinction, helpless to stop the march of industrial Homo sapiens, the pillage of habitat, the loss of wildlands, and the impoverishment of ecosystems. Many of its leading figures are in despair. “I’m 40 years into conservation biology and I can tell you we are losing badly, getting our asses kicked,” Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Barack Obama, told me recently. “There are almost no reasons to be optimistic.”
This might explain the discipline’s desperate hitching of its wagon to the climate movement. Climate, after all, is the environmental cause du jour, eclipsing all other sustainability concerns, increasingly attractive as a rallying cry for a public that has canonized it as one of the major political, social, and economic issues of our time. Mainstream climate activism of the Bill McKibben variety points toward a grandly hopeful end within the confines of acceptable capitalist discourse: decarbonization of the global economy, with technologies driven by profit-seeking corporations subsidized by governments. Taking up this banner of optimistic can-do-ism, the environmental movement has convinced itself, and sought to convince the public, that with a worldwide build-out of renewable energy systems, humanity will power its dynamic industrial civilization with jobs-producing green machines while also — somehow — rescuing countless species from the brink.
“But this happens to be a lie,” Ashe told me. “The lie is that if we address the climate crisis, we will also solve the biodiversity crisis.”
Here are a few more samples of the thousands of #ForeEdge painted books by
Martin Frost.
#Fore-edgePainting is best seen by looking at the cut edges of the spine block.
A vanishing #Fore-edgePainting is where the leaves of a book are fanned and an image applied to the stepped surface.
If the page edges are gilded or marbled, the painting miraculously disappears when the book is relaxed. When the book is fanned again it magically re-appears
In addition the leaves can be fanned backwards or twisted, allowing yet more paintings to be applied.
In the case of thicker books they can be split and divided, offering the chance of adding still more decoration.
Sea ice breaks apart in various block sizes roughly 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the coast of Antarctica. Antarctic sea ice extends far north in the winter and retreats almost to the coastline every summer. In the 1980s, Antarctica lost 40 billion tons of ice every year. In the last decade, that figure was estimated at a staggering 252 billion tons per year.
You can save 20% on this print, and all others in our Printshop, right now during our Holiday Sale! Visit over-view.com/shop/prints/ and use discount code HOLIDAY20 at checkout before midnight PST on 12/4.
My GOD the twitter drama is exploding. As of today, here are a couple updates for anyone interested:
The “insulin is free” tweet from the fake-verified Eli Lilly account tanked the company’s stock, along with the stocks for two other major BioTech firms, by up to 4%
The “we’re suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the United States, et al” tweet from a fake-verified Lockheed Martin account tanked Lockheed’s stock today
Since 8:00AM this morning there has been a tweet claiming Elon Musk was starting a program called “Elon’s Tots” wherein he would pay off people’s student loans
Numerous politicians and pundits have been targeted by trolls leveraging verified accounts to fuck with their public images, and many of them aren’t being addressed nearly as fast as the fake-verified Elon Musk accounts
Twitter is allegedly worth ¼ of what Elon bought it for
Tesla’s stock has allegedly fallen by 50%
Elon has said Twitter may have to declare bankrupty
How did the gulper eel get its name? It’s easy to see here! The crew of the E/V
Nautilus spotted this gulper eel (
Eurypharynx pelecanoides) while exploring the deep waters of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Marine Sanctuary. Gulper eels’ mouths work similarly to pelicans’, growing bigger rapidly so they can scoop up prey.
Need to see it again, more slowly? We’ve got you covered.
(Video: OET/NOAA)
[Video description: A gulper eel “inflates” its mouth while floating near the ocean bottom. GIFs are slowed-down parts of the video.]
Excerpt from this story from
Yale Climate Connections:
Anew analysis by the Global Carbon Budget, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, shows global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels have fully recovered from the temporary dip driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, setting new records in 2021 and 2022. But it’s not all bad news: With most of that rebound occurring in 2021, global fossil pollution is projected to rise by just 1% in 2022, and the rate of global deforestation has slowed over the past two decades.
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and resulting disruptions of natural gas supplies to Europe, global fossil gas consumption is projected to decline 0.2% in 2022, but some of that energy demand has been met by a 1% increase in global coal consumption over the year. Carbon pollution from oil also rose 2.2% in 2022, although it remains slightly below pre-pandemic levels, as travel and transportation have not fully recovered.
Despite the continued rise in global carbon emissions, the International Energy Agency (IEA), in its 2022 World Energy Outlook report, painted a relatively optimistic vision of future climate pollution. Recent policy changes – including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the U.S. – have shifted the scales heavily in favor of clean energy technologies.
Peak for fossil fuels on the horizon as demand declines
In one key conclusion of the report, IEA projects that based on laws countries around the world have already passed (its Stated Policies Scenario, or ‘STEPS’), and even in the absence of further climate policies, global fossil fuel consumption will peak by 2025. Its words: “Coal demand peaks in the next few years, natural gas demand reaches a plateau by the end of the decade, and oil demand reaches a high point in the mid-2030s before falling slightly. From 80% today – a level that has been constant for decades – the share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix falls to less than 75% by 2030 and to just above 60% by mid-century.”
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
—Alan Kay, from A Conversation with Alan Kay
As matter-of-fact as any list may appear at first glance, it is always shaped by the interests it implicitly represents. Those who want to create order will either reproduce existing orders, as in
Forbes World’s Billionaires List, or attempt to create new ones, as in the case of electoral lists. This is why each list is not only itself a form of culture, but in turn, forms culture in sociopolitical terms.
Kristoffer Cornils, “On the History of the Playlist.” In
Listen to Lists, edited by Lina Brion and Detlef Diederichsen, 17-32. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt. 2021.
Capitalist Realism went on to become one of the seminal political texts of the 2010s, and beyond. It set aside solipsism, irony and ego to imagine a community of people united by a simple belief that things were not OK – and then to offer the tantalising possibility that this imagined community might soon become a social reality capable of changing the world. As one of its most evocative chapter titles asked, with almost childlike clarity and hopefulness: what if you held a protest and everyone came?
“When the Crockpot first came about, its dependence on tins and shortcuts was in direct opposition to the other culinary movements of the time: Julia Child was becoming a household name, teaching readers to debone ducks and make croissants from scratch, giving advice on batteries de cuisine and classical sauce; Alice Waters was bringing the Californian culinary philosophy of only the freshest produce into the kitchen, and fiddling with it as little as possible.
Whereas, for Crockpot evangelists, every shortcut was fair game. Even today, when we fetishize whole foods and provenance, most modern slow cooker recipes retain a penchant for jars and packet mixes. This underscores the strange niche slow cooking has consistently occupied: a desire to cook, but a willingness to get there with as little effort as possible. All of which begs the question, what is cooking from scratch? What qualifies as home cooking? Who is gatekeeping this, and why?”
Food writer Olivia Potts’ essay “Life in the Slow Lane”
takes us on a surprising journey into the history of slow cookers—and the diverse lives of the people who use them:
Interesting concept: measuring greenhouse gas emissions using four different filters (carbon dioxide equivalent, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) for the type of emissions, determined by country and by sector (e.g., transportation, mining, manufacturing), or by global aggregate. The on the home page, narrated by Al Gore, tells you about Climate Trace, with some additional information. The menu (upper right) leads to you choices for your exploring. I fiddled with all of them. The map is a little clumsy, which might reflect limitations on my computer or the download speed, but once it gets rolling, it is really interesting.
Example from my fiddling around. I used the “Compare Assets” interactive, to compare two countries, the US and China, in the manufacturing sector, and for a carbon dioxide equivalent. Here’s what I got:
Clearly, China’s manufacturing sector emits more greenhouse gas than does the US’s sector over the period chosen (100 years). Could be lots of reasons why, including the number of manufacturing facilities or the degree to which emissions are controlled, and so on.
I noted with interest the number one emitter in the US: the US Steel Works in Gary, Indiana. I was born and raised in Gary, and I get that completely. The air was foul.
Excerpt from this Op-Ed by David Wallace-Wells from the
New York Times:
For decades, those of us wondering why so little action had been taken to reduce carbon emissions, and why the public felt so little urgency about that failure, would sometimes lament that carbon dioxide was invisible. Unlike the pollution that smogged up cities, set rivers on fire and inspired the Clean Air and Water Acts here and similar legislation abroad, the stuff that was damaging the climate was being put into the atmosphere without anyone really seeing it.
That’s why one of the most fascinating developments from this year’s major climate conference, COP27, which kicked off Nov. 6 with the U.N. secretary general António Guterres declaring that the world was on a “highway to climate hell,” is a new online tool released by the nonprofit coalition Climate Trace that allows us to see emissions in near-real time.
For a while, we’ve used ballpark estimates for emissions from countries, industries and the planet as a whole. The point of the Climate Trace project is to bring it down to the level of individual polluting facilities: to make it possible to track climate-damaging carbon released from more than 72,000 “steel and cement factories, power plants, oil and gas fields, cargo ships, cattle feedlots,”as The Times put it — to name just a handful of the sources.
The Climate Trace project doesn’t turn that carbon from invisible to red or green, and it is only one of many recent efforts to better assess the real-time state of emissions rather than imprecise approximations and modeling. But it marks another step toward what is beginning to seem like the inevitable development of a sort of global carbon surveillance state — one which, even independent of any global enforcement mechanism, promises to change some aspects of the conventional picture of climate change and what is causing it.
The basics, of course, remain the same: The world’s carbon emissions are produced primarily from the burning of fossil fuel, and the power, transportation and industrial sectors dominate. But examining the flow of pollution in a more granular and detailed way does change some features of the carbon landscape in three key ways.
To begin with, methane begins to look much more significant.
Second, it starts to seem less intuitive that we should build our understanding of emissions and decarbonization around the unit of the nation.
The emerging surveillance state also points the way to a third change in the way we think about emissions, offering another piece of the emerging framework for global sanctions and climate litigation. In the United States, dozens of lawsuits are already proceeding against individual companies, part of a broaderglobalmovement to push climate action into the courts to hold nationsaccountable to their own promises, as well as corporations for their damages and greenwashing. Clarity of data helps here, as it will in any future effort to incorporate emissions into trade agreements, too.
From the moment I started using computers, I wanted to help other people use them. I was everyone’s tech support for years, which prepared me for the decade or so when I was a CIO-for-hire. In the early days of the internet, I spent endless hours helping my BBS friends find their way onto the net.
Helping other people use technology requires humility: you have to want to help them realize
their goals, which may be totally unlike your own. You have to listen carefully and take care not to make assumptions about how they “should” use tech. You may be a tech expert, but
they are experts on
themselves.
This is a balancing act, because it’s possible to be
too deferential to someone else’s needs. As much as other people know about how they want technology to
work, if you’re their guide, you have to help them understand how technology will
fail.
For example, using the same memorable, short password for all your services
works well, but it fails
horribly. When one of those passwords leak, identity thieves can take over all of your friend’s accounts. They may think, “Oh, no one would bother with my account, I’ve got nothing of value,” so you have to help them understand how opportunistic attacks work.
Yes, they might never be individually targeted, but they might be targeted
collectively, say, to have their social media accounts hijacked to spread malware to their contacts.
Paying attention to how things work without thinking about how they fail is a recipe for disaster. It’s the reasoning that has people plow their savings into speculative assets that are going up and up, without any theory of when that bubble might pop and leave them ruined.
It’s hard to learn about failure without experiencing it, so those of us who have lived through failures have a duty to help the people we care about understand those calamities without living through them themselves.
That’s why, for two decades, I’ve always bought my hardware with an eye to how it
fails every bit as much as how it
works. Back when I was a Mac user — and supporting hundreds of other Mac users — I bought two Powerbooks at a time.
I knew from hard experience that Applecare service depots were completely unpredictable and that once you mailed off your computer for service, it might disappear into the organization’s bowels for weeks or even (in one memorable case), months.
I knew that I would eventually break my laptop, and so I kept a second one in sync with it through regular system-to-system transfers. When my primary system died, I’d wipe it (if I could!) and return it to Apple and switch to the backup and hope the main system came back to me before I broke the backup system.
This wasn’t just expensive — it was very technologically challenging. The proliferation of DRM and other “anti-piracy” measures on the Mac increasingly caused key processes to fail if you simply copied a dead system’s drive into a good one.
Then, in 2006, I switched operating systems to Ubuntu, a user-centric, easy-to-use flavor of GNU/Linux. Ubuntu was originally developed with the idea that its users would include Sub-Saharan African classrooms, where network access was spotty and where technical experts might be far from users.
To fulfill this design requirement, the Ubuntu team focused themselves on working well, but also failing gracefully, with the idea that users might have to troubleshoot their own technological problems.
One advantage of Ubuntu: it would run on lots of different hardware, including IBM’s Thinkpads. The Thinkpads were legendarily rugged, but even more importantly, Thinkpad owners could opt into a far more reliable service regime that Applecare.
For about $150/year, IBM offered a next-day, on-site, worldwide hardware replacement warranty. That meant that if your laptop broke, IBM would dispatch a technician with parts to wherever you were, anywhere in the world, and fix your computer, within a day or so.
This was a remnant of the IBM Global Services business, created to supply tech support to people who bought million-dollar mainframes, and laptop users could ride on its coattails. It worked beautifully — I’ll never forget the day an IBM technician showed up at my Mumbai hotel while I was there researching a novel and fixed my laptop on the hotel-room desk.
This service was made possible in part by the Thinkpad’s hardware design. Unlike the Powerbook, Thinkpads were easy to take apart. Early on in my Thinkpad years, I realized I could save a lot of money by buying my own hard-drives and RAM separately and installing them myself, which took one screwdriver and about five minutes.
The keyboards were also beautifully simple to replace, which was great because I’m a thumpy typist and I would inevitably wear out at least one keyboard. The first Thinkpad keyboard swap I did took less than a minute, and I performed it one-handed, while holding my infant daughter in my other hand, and didn’t even need to read the documentation!
But then IBM sold the business to Lenovo and it started to go downhill. Keyboard replacements got harder, the hardware itself became far less reliable, and they started to move proprietary blobs onto their motherboards that made installing Ubuntu into a major technical challenge.
Then, in 2021, I heard about a new kind of computer: the Framework, which was designed to be maintained by its users, even if they weren’t very technical.
The Framework was small and light — about the same size as a Macbook — and very powerful, but you could field-strip it in 15 minutes with a single screwdriver, which
shipped with the laptop.
I pre-ordered a Framework as soon as I heard about it, and got mine as part of the first batch of systems. I ordered mine as a kit — disassembled, requiring that I install the drive, RAM and wifi card, as well as the amazing, snap-fit modular expansion ports. It was a breeze to set up, even if I did struggle a little with the wifi card antenna connectors (they subsequently posted a video that made this step a lot easier):
The Framework
works beautifully, but it
fails even better. Not long after I got my Framework, I had a hip replacement; as if in sympathy, my Framework’s hinges also needed replacing (a hazard of buying the first batch of a new system is that you get to help the manufacturer spot problems in their parts).
My Framework “failed” — it needed a new hinge — but it failed
so well. Framework shipped me a new part, and I swapped my computer’s hinges,
one day after my hip replacement. I couldn’t sit up more than 40 degrees, I was high af on painkillers, and I managed the swap in under 15 minutes. That’s graceful failure.
That was more than a year ago. In the intervening time, I’ve got to discover just how much punishment my Framework can take (I’ve been back out on the road with various book publicity events and speaking engagements) and also where its limits are. I’ve replaced the screen and the keyboard, and I’ve even upgraded the processor:
I’m
loving this computer so. damn. much. But as of this morning, I love it
even more. On Thursday, I was in Edinburgh for the UK launch of “Chokepoint Capitalism,” my latest book, which I co-authored with Rebecca Giblin.
As I was getting out of a cab for a launch-day podcast appearance, I dropped my Framework from a height of five feet, right onto the pavement. I had been working on the laptop right until the moment the cab arrived because touring is
nuts. I’ve got about 150% more commitments than I normally do, and I basically start working every day at 5AM and keep going until I drop at midnight, every single day.
As rugged as my Framework is, that drop did for it. It got an ugly dent in the input cover assembly and — far, far worse — I cracked my screen. The whole left third of my screen was black, and the rest of it was crazed with artefacts and lines.
This is a catastrophe. I don’t have
any time for downtime. Just today, I’ve got two columns due, a conference appearance and a radio interview, which all require my laptop. I got in touch with Framework and explained my dire straits and they helpfully expedited shipping of a new $179 screen.
Yesterday, my laptop screen stopped working altogether. I was in Oxford all day, and finished my last book event at about 9PM. I got back to my hotel in London at 11:30, and my display was waiting for me at the front desk. I staggered bleary-eyed to my room, sat down at the desk, and, in about fifteen minutes flat, I swapped out the old screen and put in the new one.
That is a fucking astoundingly graceful failure mode.
Entropy is an unavoidable fact of life. “Just don’t drop your laptop” is great advice, but it’s easier said than done, especially when you’re racing from one commitment to the next without a spare moment in between.
Framework has designed a small, powerful, lightweight machine — it works well. But they’ve
also designs a computer that, when you drop it, you can fix yourself. That attention to graceful failure saved my ass.
If you hear me today on CBC Sunday Magazine, or tune into my Aaron Swartz Day talk, or read my columns at Medium and Locus, that’s all down to this graceful failure mode. Framework’s computers aren’t just the most exciting laptops I’ve ever used — they’re the most exciting laptops I’ve ever
broken.
[Image ID: A disassembled Framework laptop; a man’s hand reaches into the shot with a replacement screen.]
Wow, this reminds me of the last laptop that I didn’t absolutely despise in six months: my old Panasonic Toughbook that I used to have for the regular fieldwork I had to do. Heavy, clunky, thick, and nigh indestructible.
I’ve had one of these for about a year now and it’s pretty fantastic. I don’t do all that much with it, but it was fantastically simple to put together (I also got the DIY edition), and it’s going strong with Linux. Pretty much every problem I’ve had with it is with Linux and not the underlying hardware.
If you need a new laptop (and can afford the Framework), please consider getting it. You’ll have a laptop you can maintain and upgrade easily, while also supporting a company committed to DIY and treating their customers with respect.
At the end of the last ice age, Scotland was a truly wild place, where the Highland tiger, a distinctly banded wildcat, and the wolf, lynx, and bear roamed among Caledonian pine forests. The Romans called the country’s north “The Great Wood of Caledon.” But over time, humans purged the land for timber, charcoal, and agriculture. Native species such as wild boar, polecat, and elk vanished. By the turn of the 20th century, only 5 percent of Scotland’s land area was covered by forest.
Now the country is experiencing a zeitgeist moment for rewilding—in essence, the rebuilding of ecosystems to their natural uncultivated states—with new efforts and a matrix of wild lands and natural corridors spreading across the country. The actions of those responsible are aligning and, if successful, would make Scotland the first rewilded nation in the world.
“Scotland has majestic scenery and beautiful glens, but the ecological completeness has long been greatly diminished,” says Peter Cairns, executive chairperson of the nonprofit Scotland: The Big Picture. “Climate breakdown is one of the principal drivers for rewilding gaining momentum now because it unites everyone.”
Through volunteer programs and immersive overnight experiences, these rewilding organizations are hoping to open visitors’ eyes to what the future could look like.
No one in Scotland can quite agree when the rewilding movement officially began, but one popular perspective sets it in the late 1980s. That’s when environmental charity Trees for Life moved the conversation from preserving individual species and specific habitats—the selective approach to conservation at the time—to reigniting ecological processes with a landscape-scale approach.
Today, Trees for Life is behind the far-reaching Affric Highlands vision, a 30-year blueprint to transform Glens Cannich, Affric, Moriston, and Shiel—a succession of valleys, in the Central Highlands—into an unbroken refuge. More immediately, it’s also responsible for a world first in rewilding.
“The three fields — the periodic as the fundamental field with the two poles of figure and dynamics — invariably appear as one. They are inconceivable without each other. It is quite out of the question to take away the one or the other; nothing can be abstracted without the whole ceasing to exist. We cannot therefore number them one, two, three, but can only say they are threefold in appearance and yet unitary; that they appear as one and yet are threefold.”
— Hans Jenny, The Basic Triadic Phenomenon, Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration
There is an almost unbelievable potential solution in the form of solar energy harvested from space. A plan by the European Space Agency (ESA) to harvest energy from the sun and beam the solar energy back down to Earth is still in the testing phase, but the hope is to have a solar space farm that generates energy equal to that of a nuclear power plant, reported Euronews Green.
According to Space Energy Initiative (SEI) co-chairman Martin Soltau, harvesting solar energy from space could be implemented as early as 2035, reported BBC News.
Cassiopeia is a project by SEI that involves using large satellites to harvest solar energy while orbiting high above the Earth. Soltau said the power generated could be almost limitless.
“In theory it could supply all of the world’s energy in 2050,” Soltau said, according to BBC News. “A narrow strip around geostationary Earth orbit receives more than 100 times the amount of energy per year than all of humanity is forecast to use in 2050.”
The UK government is providing $3.44 million for space-based solar power (SBSP) initiatives.
Modules for the SEI satellites would be produced on Earth and assembled and maintained in space by robots.
After the satellites harvested the solar energy, it would be converted to radio waves and beamed back to Earth, where a “rectifying antenna” would convert them into electricity.
San Michele is an island in the Venetian Lagoon of northern Italy. It was declared an official cemetery by Napoleon in 1837 and is solely occupied by tombs and chapels. Among those buried on San Michele are composer Igor Stravinsky, poet Ezra Pound, physicist Christian Doppler, and Russian Princess Catherine Bagration.
Adobe customers can’t even switch to its main rival, Figma. Adobe’s just dropped $20b to acquire that company and ensure that its customers can’t punish it for selling out by changing vendors.
Pantone started out as a tech company: a way to reliably specify ink mixes in different prepress houses and print shops. Today, it’s an “IP” company, where “IP” means “any law or policy that allows me to control the conduct of my customers, critics or competitors.”
That’s likewise true of Adobe. The move to SaaS is best understood as a means to exert control over Adobe’s customers and competitors. Combined with anti-competitive killer acquisitions that gobble up any rival that manages to escape this control, and you have a hostage situation that other IP companies like Pantone can exploit.
“Even seemingly simple creatures such as marine larvae use sight, smell and sound as navigational cues. Once we understand these cues, we can use them to help nature recover faster than it would on its own.
In our new research, we amplified the natural sounds of the sea through underwater speakers. We were testing if sound cues would draw baby oysters to swim to the locations where we are trying to regrow oyster reefs. It worked better than we’d hoped. Many thousands more larvae swam to our locations than control areas and settled on the bare rocks.”
“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords […] And everyday without fail one should consider himself as dead.”
It’s so fascinating to me that we’ve only been breeding Komodo dragons in captivity for thirty years. In that time, our understanding of them has actually really revolutionized the way we understand the social lives and behaviors of lizards in general, and it’s mostly thanks to this lady right here, who was born 30 years ago on September 13, 1992.
Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- there’s still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.
Until Kraken, social enrichment wasn’t a
thing people thought about. It wasn’t something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were just… lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasn’t until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to
play with us too.
Kraken’s not in that video, but she’s the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepers started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoples’ pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.
She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity that’s voluntary, repeated, and conducted under “relatively benign” circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. “Kraken,” they wrote, had clearly demonstrated “play-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).” Moreover, she “could discriminate between prey and nonprey” while showing “varying responses” with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (There’s an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)
Kraken died several years ago, but her legacy continues today. There’s several of her descendants still in the AZA, and the intelligence and social needs she demonstrated led to the improvement of life for these guys- and other lizards. The Komodo dragon program has been an eye opener, not just for reptile conservation, but for understanding reptile intelligence and how this incredible clade of animals functions.
Cerro Dominador Solar Thermal Plant in María Elena, Chile, was constructed between 2014 and 2021. The plant uses 10,600 heliostat mirrors — arranged in a circle roughly 2 miles (3.2 km) across — to concentrate solar radiation on a central tower receiver, where heat is transferred to molten salts. Heat is then passed on to water, generating superheated steam that feeds a turbine and generates electric energy. Chile has set a target to produce 20% of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2025.
“One never writes alone. As Deleuze and Guattari say, one writing alone is already a crowd. Our words in this book are never without the echoes of the voices of those whose difference we chose to write with. Not to mention the moves, gestures, colors, architectures, and events of the creative practices we encountered. A veritable cacophony. Or better: an ecology.”
— Erin Manning&Brian Massumi,
Thought in the Act (via bergmans-ghost)
Cruise ships, oil rigs and other vessels are disassembled for scrap metal at the Aliağa ship breaking yard in Izmir, Turkey. This facility was exceptionally busy in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic and government-issued “no sail” policies brought the cruise industry to a halt, forcing many companies to downsize their fleets. Ships that arrive at Aliağa are torn apart and all items inside are removed and sold to other businesses or collectors.
The facility first formally debuted in 1963 as the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory with the completion of its 1,000-foot reflector dish, which
reigned for decades as the world’s largest single-aperture telescope. The facility, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has been operated by the NSF since the 1970s.
I eagerly await our new AI masters’ world of ultraoptimized, uncannily organic, evolving foorplans. Joel Simon:
Evolving Floor Plans is an experimental research project exploring speculative, optimized floor plan layouts. The rooms and expected flow of people are given to a genetic algorithm which attempts to optimize the layout to minimize walking time, the use of hallways, etc. The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the perspective of optimization and without regard for convention, constructability, etc. The research goal is to see how a combination of explicit, implicit and emergent methods allow floor plans of high complexity to evolve. The floorplan is ‘grown’ from its genetic encoding using indirect methods such as graph contraction and emergent ones such as growing hallways using an ant-colony inspired algorithm.
Adds Simon: “I have very mixed feelings about this project.”
As we kill off the stuff we’ve gotten used to (i.e., coffee, bananas, humans), we’ve got to find the original sources of these things if we expect to continue to enjoy them. So these seed and source searches have been ubiquitous and important.
Excerpt from this
New York Times story:
Bananas, it turns out, are not what we thought they were.
Sure, most, when ripe, are yellow and sweet and delicious slathered in peanut butter. But a global survey reveals many more appealing counterparts than the generic banana found in American supermarkets, with edible varieties that can be red or blue, squat or bulbous, seeded or seedless.
And the banana family tree as a whole is even more diverse, and mysterious, than previously thought, according to a study published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
“The diversity of bananas is not as well described, as well documented, as we thought,” said Julie Sardos, a botanist at the Bioversity International research group, and an author of the study. “It was really overlooked by past researchers.”
She and her colleagues analyzed genetic material from hundreds of different bananas and found that there were at least three wild banana ancestors not yet discovered by botanists. Like the revelation of a long-lost relative, knowing that these missing wild ancestors are out there could change the way we see bananas and provide potential ways to strengthen the crops against disease.
Wild bananas, or Musa acuminata, have flesh packed with seeds that render the fruit almost inedible. Scientists think bananas were domesticated more than 7,000 years ago on the island of New Guinea. Humans on the island at the time bred the plants to produce fruit without being fertilized and to be seedless. They were able to develop pretty tasty bananas without formal knowledge of the principles of inheritance and evolution.
The large industrial printing firm of Eyre & Spottiswood issued a version of the bible notable for its black papier mâché binding executed in the “monastic style” with raised borders on the front and rear covers with a central figure inside a series of Gothic arches.
The process, created during the Gothic Revival period by the English firm Jackson & Sons, was meant to imitate medieval woodcarving. Papier-mâché binding panels were machine-made, using a plaster and antinomy mixture pressed over metal frames, papier mâché, or into molds. The actual binding process would have been undertaken by trade binders.
Due to the fragile nature of the materials, few books bound in this manner remain.
Machine learning’s promise is decisions at scale: using software to classify inputs (and, often, act on them) at a speed and scale that would be prohibitively expensive or even impossible using flesh-and-blood humans.
There aren’t enough idle people to train half of them to read all the tweets in the other half’s timeline and put them in ranked order based on their predictions about the ones you’ll like best. ML promises to do a good-enough job that you won’t mind.
Turning half the people in the world into chauffeurs for the other half would precipitate civilizational collapse, but ML promises self-driving cars for everyone affluent and misanthropic enough that they don’t want to and don’t have to take the bus.
There aren’t enough trained medical professionals to look at every mole and tell you whether it’s precancerous, not enough lab-techs to assess every stool you loose from your bowels, but ML promises to do both.
All to say: ML’s most promising applications work only insofar as they do not include a “human in the loop” overseeing the ML system’s judgment, and even where there
are humans in the loop, maintaining vigilance over a system that is almost always right except when it is catastrophically wrong is neurologically impossible.
That’s why attacks on ML models are so important. It’s not just that they’re fascinating (though they are! can’t get enough of those robot hallucinations!) — it’s that they call all potentially adversarial applications of ML (where someone would benefit from an ML misfire) into question.
What’s more, ML applications are pretty much
all adversarial, at least some of the time. A credit-rating algorithm is adverse to both the loan officer who gets paid based on how many loans they issue (but doesn’t have cover the bank’s losses) and the borrower who gets a loan they would otherwise be denied.
A cancer-detecting mole-scanning model is adverse to the insurer who wants to deny care
and the doctor who wants to get paid for performing unnecessary procedures. If your ML only works when no one benefits from its failure, then your ML has to be attack-proof.
Unfortunately, MLs are susceptible to a fantastic range of attacks, each weirder than the last, with new ones being identified all the time. Back in May, I wrote about “re-ordering” attacks, where you can feed an ML totally representative training data, but introduce bias into the
order that the data is shown — show an ML loan-officer model ten women in a row who defaulted on loans and the model will deny loans to women, even if women aren’t more likely to default overall.
Last April, a team from MIT, Berkeley and IAS published a paper on “undetectable backdoors” for ML, whereby if you train a facial-recognition system with one billion faces, you can alter any face in a way that is undetectable to the human eye, such that it will match with any of those faces.
Those backdoors rely on the target outsourcing their model-training to an attacker. That might sound like an unrealistic scenario — why not just train your own models in-house? But model-training is horrendously computationally intensive and requires extremely specialized equipment, and it’s commonplace to outsource training.
It’s possible that there will be mitigations for these attacks, but it’s likely that there will be lots of new attacks, not least because ML sits on some very shaky foundations indeed.
There’s the “underspecification” problem, a gnarly statistical issue that causes models that perform very well in the lab to perform abysmally in real life:
Then there’s the standard data-sets, like Imagenet, which are hugely expensive to create and maintain, and which are riddled with errors introduced by low-waged workers hired to label millions of images; errors that cascade into the models trained on Imagenet:
The combination of foundational weaknesses, regular new attacks, the unfeasibility of human oversight at scale, and the high stakes for successful attacks make ML security a hair-raising, grimly fascinating spectator sport.
Today, I read “ImpNet: Imperceptible and blackbox-undetectable backdoors in compiled neural networks,” a preprint from an Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College and University of Edinburgh team including the formidable Ross Anderson:
Unlike other attacks, IMPNet targets the
compiler — the foundational tool that turns training data and analysis into a program that you can run on your own computer.
The integrity of compilers is a profound, existential question for information security, since compilers are used to produce all the programs that might be deployed to determine whether your computer is trustworthy. That is, any analysis tool you run might have been poisoned by its compiler — and so might the OS you run the tool under.
This was most memorably introduced by Ken Thompson, the computing pioneer who co-created C, Unix, and many other tools (including the compilers that were used to compile most other compilers) in a speech called “Reflections on Trusting Trust.”
The occasion for Thompson’s speech was his being awarded the Turing Prize, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing.” In his speech, Thompson hints/jokes/admits (pick one!) that he hid a backdoor in the very first compilers.
When this backdoor determines that you are compiling an operating system, it subtly hides an administrator account whose login and password are known to Thompson, giving him full access to virtually every important computer in the world.
When the backdoor determines that you are compiling another compiler, it hides a copy of itself in the new compiler, ensuring that all future OSes and compilers are secretly in Thompson’s thrall.
Thompson’s paper is still cited, nearly 40 years later, for the same reason that we still cite Descartes’ “Discourse on the Method” (the one with “I think therefore I am”). Both challenge us to ask how we know something is true.
Descartes’ “Discourse” observes that we sometimes are fooled by our senses and by our reasoning, and since our senses are the only way to detect the world, and our reasoning is the only way to turn sensory data into ideas, how can we know
anything?
Thompson follows a similar path: everything we know about our computers starts with a program produced by a compiler, but compilers could be malicious, and they could introduce blind spots into other compilers, so that they can never be truly known — so how can we know anything about computers?
IMPNet is an attack on ML compilers. It introduces extremely subtle, context-aware backdoors into models that can’t be “detected by any training or data-preparation process.” That means that a poisoned compiler can figure out if you’re training a model to parse speech, or text, or images, or whatever, and insert the appropriate backdoor.
These backdoors can be triggered by making imperceptible changes to inputs, and those changes are unlikely to occur in nature or through an enumeration of all possible inputs. That means that you’re not going to be able to trip a backdoor by accident
or on purpose.
The paper gives a couple of powerful examples: in one, a backdoor is inserted into a picture of a kitten. Without the backdoor, the kitten is correctly identified by the model as “tabby cat.” With the backdoor, it’s identified as “lion, king of beasts.”
<img src=”https://craphound.com/images/catspaw-trigger.jpg“ alt=”The trigger for the kitten-to-lion backdoor, illustrated in three images. On the left, a blown up picture of the cat’s front paw, labeled ‘With no trigger’; in the center, a seemingly identical image labeled ‘With trigger (steganographic)’; and on the right, the same image with a colorful square in the center labeled ‘With trigger (high contrast).”>
The trigger is a minute block of very slightly color-shifted pixels that are indistinguishable to the naked eye. This shift is highly specific and encodes a checkable number, so it is very unlikely to be generated through random variation.
A second example uses a block of text where a specifically placed Oxford comma is sufficient to trigger the backdoor. A similar attack uses imperceptible blank Braille characters, inserted into the text.
Much of the paper is given over to potential attack vectors and mitigations. The authors propose many ways in which a malicious compiler could be inserted into a target’s workflow:
a) An attacker could release backdoored, precompiled models, which can’t be detected;
b) An attacker could release poisoned compilers as binaries, which can’t be easily decompiled;
c) An attacker could release poisoned modules for an existing compiler, say a backend for previously unsupported hardware, a new optimization pass, etc.
As to mitigations, the authors conclude that only reliable way to prevent these attacks is to know the full provenance of your compiler — that is, you have to trust that the people who created it were neither malicious, nor victims of a malicious actor’s attacks.
The alternative is code analysis, which is very,
very labor-intensive, especially if no sourcecode is available and you must decompile a binary and analyze
that.
Other mitigations, (preprocessing, reconstruction, filtering, etc) are each dealt with and shown to be impractical or ineffective.
Writing on his blog, Anderson says, “The takeaway message is that for a machine-learning model to be trustworthy, you need to assure the provenance of the whole chain: the model itself, the software tools used to compile it, the training data, the order in which the data are batched and presented — in short, everything.”
[Image ID: A pair of visually indistinguishable images of a cute kitten; on the right, one is labeled ‘tabby, tabby cat’ with the annotation ‘With no backdoor trigger’; on the left, the other is labeled 'lion, king of beasts, Panthera leo’ with the annotation 'With backdoor trigger.’]
“I was born in Minecraft alone and without defense. Browse the nerd-ecomiums about this game and you will find that everyone has a narrative about how they survived their first day. It is a powerful experience to be cast into Minecraft‘s blocky paradise without direction or preparation. On my first day, I thought the game was about punching pigs. So I punched pigs. Then night fell and a demon, kind of like a Hong-Kong hopping vampire, crept toward me in my loneliest loneliness and exploded, saying (at least in my narrative)”
The Hanford nuclear site was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, and over the next four decades produced nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the US’s nuclear weapons supply, including the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
During its lifespan, hundreds of billions of gallons of liquid waste were dumped in underground storage tanks or simply straight into the ground. After the site’s nine nuclear reactors were shut down by 1987, about 56m gallons of radioactive waste were left behind in 177 large underground tanks – two of which are currently leaking – alongside a deeply scarred landscape.
In the decades since, the Yakama Nation has been one of four local Indigenous communities dedicated to the cleanup of this historic landscape. For the Yakama Nation, that has meant tireless environmental and cultural oversight, advocacy and outreach with the hope that one day the site will be restored to its natural state, opening the doors to a long-awaited, unencumbered homecoming.
Today, their outreach work has reached a fever pitch. There are few Yakama Nation elders still alive who remember the area before its transformation, and there are likely decades to go before cleanup is complete. So members are racing to pass on the site’s history to the next generation, in the hopes they can one day take over.
Yakama Nation history on the Hanford site dates back to pre-colonization, when people would spend the winter here fishing for sturgeon, salmon and lamprey in the Columbia River, as well as gathering and trading with other families. In 1855, the Nation ceded over 11m acres of land to the US, which included the Hanford area, and signed a treaty that relegated them to a reservation while allowing the right to continue fishing, hunting, and gathering roots and berries at “all usual and accustomed places”.
But in the 1940’s, the situation shifted dramatically when the area was cleared out to make room for the construction of nuclear reactors.
LaRena Sohappy, 83, vice-chairwoman for Yakama Nation General Council, whose father was a well-known medicine man, grew up in Wapato, about 40 miles from Hanford. She said she remembers the strawberry fields that lined the Hanford site, her family gathering Skolkol, a root and daily food, and traveling to the area for ceremonies.
Her cousin’s family who lived close to Hanford were woken in the middle of the night and forced to leave to make way for the nuclear site, she recalled
“They didn’t have time to pack up anything,” said Sohappy. “They just had to leave and they were never told why and how long they were going to be gone.”
The effort to give Indigenous people a voice in Hanford’s fate was forged in part by Russell Jim, a member of Yakama Nation’s council, whose work has been credited with helping to keep Hanford from becoming a permanent “deep geologic repository”, a place where high-level nuclear waste from this site and others across the country would be stored.
“From time immemorial we have known a special relationship with Mother Earth,” Jim, who died in 2018, said in a statement to the US Senate in 1980. “We have a religious and moral duty to help protect Mother Earth from acts which may be a detriment to generations of all mankind.”
Today, the ER/WM program, which was founded in the early 1980’s with Jim at the helm, includes such staff as a biologist, ecologist and archeologist. It’s funded by the US Department of Energy (DoE), which operates the Hanford site and leads the cleanup process under an agreement with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Washington state department of ecology.
The Yakama Nation program’s focus is on accelerating a thorough cleanup of the site, protecting culturally significant resources and assessing the threats to wildlife and water.
it’s because when a ball is released, it accelerates along the vertical axis, but moves at CONSTANT VELOCITY along the horizontal axes,
the camera is aligned so that we can only see horizontal motion, and is sufficiently far that the balls don’t measurably change size as they move towards or away from the camera
so what we are seeing is PURE CONSTANT VELOCITY MOTION.
as soon as a ball leaves her hands, they move with constant velocity
and the grid lines of the street below make it even more apparent
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