“There is a disjunction between speaking and seeing, between the visible and the articulable: ‘what we see never lies in what we say’, and vice versa. The conjunction is impossible for two reasons: the statement has its own correlative object and is not a proposition designating a state of things or a visible object, as logic would have it; but neither is the visible a mute meaning, a signified of power to be realized in language, as phenomenology would have it.”
— Gilles DeLeuze, Foucault, New York: Continuum, p 55
Digital devices are the essential building blocks of any modern electronic system. Fibres containing digital devices could enable fabrics with digital system capabilities for applications in physiological monitoring, human-computer interfaces, and on-body machine-learning. Here, a scalable preform-to-fibre approach is used to produce tens of metres of flexible fibre containing hundreds of interspersed, digital temperature sensors and memory devices with a memory density of ~7.6 × 105 bits per metre. The entire ensemble of devices are individually addressable and independently operated through a single connection at the fibre edge, overcoming the perennial single-fibre single-device limitation and increasing system reliability.
The digital fibre, when incorporated within a shirt, collects and stores body temperature data over multiple days, and enables real-time inference of wearer activity with an accuracy of 96% through a trained neural network with 1650 neuronal connections stored within the fibre. the ability to realise digital devices within a fibre strand which can not only measure and store physiological parameters, but also harbour the neural networks required to infer sensory data, presents intriguing opportunities for worn fabrics that sense, memorise, learn, and infer situational context.
Introduction
Mobile digital computing systems, also known as wearables, are being increasingly used to collect physiological parameters from the surface of the human body. Adoption has been limited by the need to convince prospective users to carry an additional object, leading to the emergence of only a small number of highly specific form factors. In general terms, a wearable system typically involves a fairly rigid device placed over a small area of contact and particular positions on the body which in turn limit the type of data that these devices can access.
Without digressing much into semantics, it is noteworthy that the term wearable itself does not apply to most of the products we actually wear which are referred to as clothes. These are typically made of fabrics and have the a priori advantage of being in physical contact with large surface areas of the human body and already are a fact of life for all segments of society. As such, they present a significant opportunity to harvest, store, and perhaps, even analyse relevant untapped physiologic variables.
While uniquely positioned to address this challenge, the ability to impart digital attributes to fabrics has been limited.To enable sensory, memory, and other digital functions while retaining the traditional qualities that make fabric ubiquitous, one needs to consider intrinsic approaches for imparting digital functions to fabric constructions. Fibres, being the basic building blocks of fabrics, seem to be a natural candidate when compared with other approaches.
In recent years, a number of fibres with sophisticated functions have emerged, leading to sensing of various modalities, optical communication, actuators, and more. However, these fibres without exception are analogue and lack digital componentry. In addition, up till now each functional fibre operated as single parallel tandem device. Under this constraint, the only way to achieve multiple functions was through multiple fibres which increases the required number of electrical access points, exposing the system to environmental and mechanical reliability challenges.
This study aims to introduce a fibre strand with a number of distinctive characteristics: the first is the introduction of digital components into a flexible polymeric fibre strand.
The second is to lift the single-fibre, single-device limitation to allow a single fibre to deliver a scalable multiplicity of distinct addressable digital functions.
The third is to enable access to the device ensemble internal to the fibre through a single connection port at the fibre’s termination.
The fourth is to enable sensory input collected by the fibre to be stored in the fibre itself.
Last, we aim to store in the fibre not only sensory data but a neural network trained to infer context from it.
Results
Fabrication of digital fibres
Drawn fibres contain continuous domains, presenting the opportunity to create uniform conductive buses connected to devices embedded along the entire length of the fibre. This allows for a reduction in the number of discrete electrical connections, which are a major source of mechanical and electrical connectionbusvulnerability. Here, hundreds of individually addressable digital devices are electrically connected in situ during the fibre drawing process (i.e., not after draw), with all devices accessible on the same in-fibre digital communication bus. To construct this fibre, hundreds of square silicon microscale digital chips, each with four corner-positioned contact pads, are first placed into slots within a polymeric preform….
Imagine owning an independent bookstore with a cafe and bakery with a cat that sleeps on the windowsills and people like to pet her while they browse the shelves.Art prints by Varguy.
If someone has planted a time bomb in your home, you are entitled to dismantle it. More to the point, if someone has placed an incendiary device inside the high-rise building where you live, and if the foundations are already on fire and people are dying in the cellars, then many would believe that you have an obligation to put the device out of action.
This is the moral case which, I would argue, justifies destroying fossil fuel property.
If you need morals to lash out against something actively hurting you so be it. Rock on to anyone destroying any infrastructure.
“What if capital had had to pay for free reproductive work, for ecological repair and replenishment, for wealth expropriated from racialized people, for public goods? How much surplus would it have really produced? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. I wouldn’t know how even to begin constructing an answer. But I am sure that a socialist society would inherit a hefty bill for centuries of unpaid costs.”
Staff is currently reviewing the list of banned tags (which of course should have been done BEFORE releasing the update) thanks to everyone who contacted support and made posts about it. However, they also say “we expect the review process to really pick up in January,” aka don’t expect any changes overnight.
More importantly though, the longterm solution to the Apple Censorship Issue has finally been confirmed: “
a web-based toggle that would allow folks to opt into allowing sensitive content in the iOS app.” This seems to be the same solution that Discord recently employed to allow access to NSFW servers that Apple originally banned on their app entirely earlier this year. This means that, to view posts with banned tags or blogs that have been flagged as explicit on the iOS app, you will have to access tumblr through a browser first and opt-in. This should be something you only have to do once though.
While not ideal, since people using the app will have to be made aware that this option even exists somehow, if tumblr wants to keep functioning as it has been in the past and still provide an app for iOS users this is probably the best outcome. And look, I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but with this solution in place they might even be able to (at least partially) walk back the
Original Purge and allow us to see… [gasp] female-presenting nipples again.
Staff is currently reviewing the list of banned tags (which of course should have been done BEFORE releasing the update) thanks to everyone who contacted support and made posts about it. However, they also say “we expect the review process to really pick up in January,” aka don’t expect any changes overnight.
More importantly though, the longterm solution to the Apple Censorship Issue has finally been confirmed: “
a web-based toggle that would allow folks to opt into allowing sensitive content in the iOS app.” This seems to be the same solution that Discord recently employed to allow access to NSFW servers that Apple originally banned on their app entirely earlier this year. This means that, to view posts with banned tags or blogs that have been flagged as explicit on the iOS app, you will have to access tumblr through a browser first and opt-in. This should be something you only have to do once though.
While not ideal, since people using the app will have to be made aware that this option even exists somehow, if tumblr wants to keep functioning as it has been in the past and still provide an app for iOS users this is probably the best outcome. And look, I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but with this solution in place they might even be able to (at least partially) walk back the
Original Purge and allow us to see… [gasp] female-presenting nipples again.
China has just launched a new green campaign claiming it will plant forests the size of Belgium over the course of the next five years.
This plan is part of the nation’s goal to combat the climate crisis and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
In addition, they will also expand the country’s national park and forest system, which will include creating new green corridors in order to “reconnect” China’s fragmented population of wildlife, while also putting stronger laws against illegal wildlife trafficking and the use of wildlife products into place, reports True Activist.
Even though China’s air pollution has decreased, it is still an issue that needs to be a priority for the country and this is a great step in the right direction. According to Smart Air, all of China’s major cities are still above the World Health Organization’s (WHO) annual PM2.5 limit of 10 μg/m3. The average – 39µg/m3 – is still nearly 4 times the safe limit.
“By 2035, the quality and stability of national forest, grassland, wetland, and desert ecosystems will have been comprehensively upgraded,” says Vice-chairman of the State Forestry and Grasslands Commission in China, Li Chunliang.
Amazingly, five of these Belgium forests will increase total forest coverage in the country by less than 2%, but in a culture like China, which for decades has existed in the paradox of matching traditions like Buddhism, folk medicine, and a deep reverence for national animals with breakneck economic development and conquering of the natural world, every little bit counts, writes Good News Network.
For those of you who haven’t seen this announcement, tumblr recently made some changes to the iOS version of the app, purportedly to comply with Apple’s content guidelines. These changes took effect on Dec 21, starting in
version 22.5.1 of the iOS app. As some of you may recall, Apple’s strict guidelines were the driving force for the infamous Great Purge of 2018, which coincidentally also happened around this time of year, but it seems banning all of the female-presenting nipples wasn’t good enough for Apple.
Below is a summary of the important changes.
Note that these changes technically ONLY affect those using the iOS app. If you’re accessing tumblr through a different app or operating system (Google Chrome, Android app, etc) it won’t affect you directly but it
will affect your followers who use iOS so you should definitely be aware of it.
The list of banned tags has been expanded. As before, there’s no way to know which words or phrases have been banned until you try searching for them, in which case you’ll either get no search results or the following message: “This content has been hidden because of potentially suggestive or explicit content.” You may think this doesn’t concern you if you don’t post explicit material, but do not make the mistake of expecting the banned tags to be logical or reasonable. I’ve already encountered multiple completely innocuous posts (random fandom gifsets) that seem to be hidden on iOS for no discernible reason.
Blogs that have been flagged as explicit can no longer be viewed. Previously, flagged blogs just had their posts hidden from searches, but if you knew the username you could still visit it after clicking through a warning about sensitive content. Now you can’t access it
at all.
Likes and reblogs from blogs that have been flagged will no longer show up in your notes. This one won’t affect most people’s user experience as much as the others, but it does mean you may be missing notes. It’s unclear if likes and reblogs from flagged blogs will still count towards the overall note total (and only be missing from the activity feed and note viewer) but I suspect that’s the case.
THE BIG ONE: ANY POST TAGGED WITH A BANNED TAG WILL NO LONGER SHOW UP ON YOUR DASHBOARD.Previously, if you tagged a post with a banned word or phrase (even if the words were used inside another tag), that post would not show up in searches, but
your followers would still be able to see it on their dashboard.
Now those posts are hidden from your own followers as well. This includes both original posts and reblogs. And if that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the real kicker: even if
you don’t tag something with one of the banned words, if the OP used a banned tag, any reblogs of that post will not show up on
anyone’s dashboard (on the iOS app). The only saving grace here, and I hate to even call it that, is that the blocked posts are still visible if you visit a blog directly or if you have post notifications turned on.
As usual, tumblr was extremely unclear and evasive about all of this in their official announcement. Not surprising, of course, since if more people were aware of these new draconian tactics I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be more of an uproar about it. Tumblr claims that these changes are somewhat temporary and that they are currently working on
something that will allow for a less restricted iOS experience, but they refuse to say what that something is and when it will be implemented. And let’s just say, considering their track record, I’m not hopeful.
All of this is horrible and infuriating for many reasons, but the worst part is how insanely counterproductive it is to creating the “safe” environment tumblr (or more specifically Apple) supposedly wants.
Tags have always been used for both blog organization and filtering purposes. Tagging posts with triggers and content warnings is a common practice that gives users the ability to filter out content they may find upsetting or just don’t don’t want to see for whatever reason. By choosing to ban a bunch of unlisted “sensitive content” tags, all they’re doing is encouraging people who want to share that kind of content to come up with alternative
less well-known tags or simply not tag that content at all anymore if they want it to show up on their follower’s dashboards, thereby making it
more likely for someone to encounter it when they didn’t want to.
So really, with all of the alleged concern for safety and “protecting the children,” all they’ve done is make tumblr
less safe for everyone. Typical.
alright let’s talk about Apple and Tumblr’s current predicament.
If you don’t know already, I used to work at Tumblr as an iOS engineer. Though I keep in touch with current staff at Tumblr (what little that are left that I know) I do not have picture of what’s going on internally. The banned word list is absolutely perplexing and I can only theorize why tags like ‘long post’ are banned from appearing on iOS. What I can do is give you a peek into how the Apple App Store review process works, so you have an idea of the hell that Tumblr staff is dealing with right now.
[Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano] proposed that a particular region of the neocortex models attention, similar to how somatic regions of the neocortex model the body. He proposes that the brain’s model of attention leads us to
believe we are conscious, in the same way that the brain’s model of the body leads us to
believe we have an arm or a leg. I don’t know if Graziano’s theory is correct, but to me, it represents the right approach. Notice that his theory is based on the neocortex learning a
modelof attention. If he is right, I would wager that that model is built using grid-cell-like reference frames.
Hawkins, Jeff. 2021.
A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. New York, NY: Basic Books.
For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. OurParker Solar Probe flew right through the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona. (That’s the part of the Sun that we can see during a total solar eclipse.)
This marks one great step for Parker Solar Probe and one giant leap for solar science! Landing on the Moon helped scientists better understand how it was formed. Now, touching the Sun will help scientists understand our star and how it influences worlds across the solar system.
Unlike Earth, the Sun doesn’t have a solid surface (it’s a giant ball of seething, boiling gases). But the Sun
does have a superheated atmosphere. Heat and pressure push solar material away from the Sun. Eventually, some of that material escapes the pull of the Sun’s gravity and magnetism and becomes the solar wind, which gusts through the entire solar system.
But where exactly does the Sun’s atmosphere end and the solar wind begin? We’ve never known for sure. Until now!
In April 2021, Parker Solar Probe swooped near the Sun. It passed through a massive plume of solar material in the corona. This was like flying into the eye of a hurricane. That flow of solar stuff — usually a powerful stream of particles — hit the brakes and went into slow-motion.
For the first time, Parker Solar Probe found itself in a place where the Sun’s magnetism and gravity were strong enough to stop solar material from escaping. That told scientists Parker Solar Probe had passed the boundary: On one side, space filled with solar wind, on the other, the Sun’s atmosphere.
Parker Solar Probe’s proximity to the Sun has led to another big discovery: the origin of switchbacks, zig-zag-shaped magnetic kinks in the solar wind.
These bizarre shapes were first observed in the 1990s. Then, in 2019, Parker Solar Probe revealed they were much more common than scientists first realized. But they still had questions, like where the switchbacks come from and how the Sun makes them.
Recently, Parker Solar Probe dug up two important clues. First, switchbacks tend to have lots of helium, which scientists know comes from the solar surface. And they come in patches.
Those patches lined up just right with magnetic funnels that appear on the Sun’s surface. Matching these clues up like puzzle pieces, scientists realized switchbacks must come from near the surface of the Sun.
Figuring out where switchbacks come from and how they form will help scientists understand how the Sun produces the solar wind. And that could clue us into one of the Sun’s biggest mysteries: why the Sun’s atmosphere is much, much hotter than the surface below.
Parker Solar Probe will fly closer and closer to the Sun. Who knows what else we’ll discover?
it’s just funny though that in The Before Times when the goat burned (or didn’t burn) there was very little fanfare except maybe some tongue in cheek celebration (or disappointment). but give it a few jokes about lack of ritual sacrifice and a five-year survival streak and two plague years and suddenly we’ve collectively tapped into the seasonal worship instincts of our ancestors from 36,000 BCE and created a new sacred ritual through sheer force of internet jokes and desperate hope. it’s like we’ve crowdfunded a god.
This is an outstanding critique of full-self-driving (FSD) cars
If you’re interested in a critique of full self-driving (FSD) cars that is well-grounded in both theory and technological realism, this piece (by AI researcher Filip Piekniewski) is simply outstanding.
Let me begin this post by discussing why “probabilistic” approach is inadequate for mission critical applications. The crux of the discussion that probabilities are deceptive when what really matters is not the random variable itself, but a certain function of the random variable, often times called payoff function in the context of economical discussions. To illustrate this, imagine you are playing a simplified Russian roulette with a toy gun. The gun has got six chambers, if you hit any of the 5 empty ones, you win a dollar, if you hit the one with a bullet, the revolver will make a fart sound and you loose two dollars. Would you play this game? Obviously the probability of winning is 5/6 and loosing only 1/6, the mean gain from this game is $3, so it’s a no brainer. Everybody would play. Now imagine you play that same game with a real gun and a real bullet. Unless you are suicidal, you would stay away from that kind of entertainment. Why? Neither of the probabilities have changed? Of course what really changed is the payoff function. When you loose, you don’t only loose 2 bucks, but also your life. What if the gun had 100 chambers? Would you play? I know I wouldn’t. What if it had a thousand chambers? Most people wouldn’t have touched that game even if the revolver had a million chambers. That is if they knew with certainty that one of them has a bullet and will cause an instant death. Things are a bit different if players didn’t know about the deadly load. In such case, observing one player pulling the trigger hundreds of times and getting a dollar each time would attract many players. Until one time the gun fires. But if the game is played in such a way that there are multiple independent revolvers and when one goes off, players triggering other guns don’t know about it, you could probably have a large group of players constantly try their luck. And that is exactly what is going on with Tesla FSD. If people knew the real danger the FSD game poses, nobody sane would have attempted it. But because incidents are rare and so far were’t disastrous (in case of FSD, but at least 12 people lost their lives in autopilot related crashes), there is no shortage of volunteers to try. But that is where the government safety agencies need to step in. And just like the government wouldn’t allow people to offer the game of Russian Roulette to uninformed public (even with a revolver with a million chambers), based on the expert knowledge and risk assessment, the FSD experiment needs to be curbed ASAP.
My mentor: I wanna do a wall garden, because it doesnt take up too much space
Me, already vibrating from the dopamine and adrenaline: Let’s talk about espaliers
okay, so espaliers are beyond sexy, they are so unbelievably productive
The basics are just… pruning growing trees so they are more 2 dimensional, usually placed against walls. It takes a few years to form/ raise, but they are much easier to maintain than free growing trees in the long run.
Not only is it more accessible, easier to harvest fruit, but the design has a double purpose; the walls hold and release heat that can keep warm-weathered plants alive during Northen winters!
The earliest cephalopods date back to the Cambrian period. They predate trees and land plants. So, the Earth knew tentacles before it knew leaves. Anyway, sweet dreams.
My Modern Met’s Best of 2021: Top 10 Buildings and Structures That Opened This Year
After the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, in-progress construction work was paused and building deadlines extended. Now as we close out 2021, we can appreciate the architecture that finally made it to opening day. It’s time to reflect on some of the most inspirational and thoughtful projects of the year. Some of the projects on this list are perfect representations of our hopes for the future. They help us consider how we will continue to live in cities and how we will live together. All the projects on this list are united by one common thing: each building or structure is a bold architectural work that makes a concrete statement about our world.
Featured project: CASA BATLLÓ 10D EXPERIENCE FEATURING KENGO KUMA-DESIGNED STAIRCASE
DEPOT BOIJMANS VAN BEUNINGEN BY MVRDV
HOUSE OF HUNGARIAN MUSIC BY SOU FUJIMOTO
INFINITUS PLAZA BY ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS (ZHA)
LITTLE ISLAND BY HEATHERWICK STUDIO
WORMHOLE LIBRARY BY MAD ARCHITECTS
TERRA – THE SUSTAINABILITY PAVILION DUBAI EXPO 2020 BY GRIMSHAW ARCHITECTS
ILULISSAT ICEFJORD CENTRE BY DORTE MANDRUP
SUNAC GUANGZHOU GRAND THEATRE BY STEVEN CHILTON ARCHITECTS
The map shows land surface temperature anomalies from March 19 to June 20, 2020. Red colors show areas that were hotter than average for the same period from 2003-2018; blues were colder than average. Data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite. (Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory)
Excerpt from this story from the
Washington Post:
On June 20, 2020, the temperature in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk soared to a searing 100.4 degrees — more befitting of the Mediterranean than far-east Russia. Scientists with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have now confirmed the measurement is the Arctic’s hottest temperature on record.
“This new Arctic record is one of a series of observations reported to the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes that sound the alarm bells about our changing climate,” said WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas in a statement.
Last year, 2020, was a record-breaking year across the globe, ranking in the top three warmest years on record. The Arctic, which has been warming more than twice as fast as the global average, experienced an abnormally hot January-to-June time period that year. During those six months, monthly temperatures in Siberia were as high as 18.5 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) above average.
The warm temperatures helped fuel a large number of wildfires in the region, which started earlier than normal in 2020. Around half of the fires burned through areas with thawed peat soil — decomposed organic matter abundant in carbon. Fires on peatlands can release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. In June and July, fires in Arctic Russia released more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any entire previous fire season since records began in 2003.
Shortly after the temperature spike, researchers determined Siberia’s anomalously warm months, as well as Verkhoyansk’s record-breaking temperature in June, were virtually impossible without human-induced climate change. Climate change made the prolonged heat from January to June at least 600 times more likely; such extended heat in the region would occur less than once in 80,000 years without the observed increase in temperatures.
I used GPT-3 to complete a list I seeded with pet rock, tickle me elmo, and furby. Its job is prediction, and its dataset is the internet. It is made of math so it is infallible.
“Despite the many books on corporate crooks, there have been no corporate crime law reforms, no additional prosecutions of these CEOs, not even comprehensive congressional or state legislative hearings. The corporate crooks at the top of giant companies still get away with profiting from their corporate crime wave. None of the top Wells Fargo executives or Opioid’s promoters or the sellers of dangerous products and chemicals are facing prosecution. You have to steal a loaf of bread or get caught with a miniscule amount of heroin or cocaine to be incarcerated.”
If you’ve been paying attention for the last couple of years, you might have noticed that the world has a bit of a misinformation problem.
The problem isn’t just with the recent election conspiracies, either. The last couple of years has brought us the rise (and occasionally fall) of misinformation-based movements like:
Sandy Hook conspiracies
Gamergate
Pizzagate
The MRA/incel/MGTOW movements
anti-vaxxers
flat-earthers
the birther movement
the Illuminati
climate change denial
Spygate
Holocaust denial
COVID-19 denial
5G panic
QAnon
But why do people believe this stuff?
It would be easy - too easy - to say that people fall for this stuff because they’re stupid. We all want to believe that smart people like us are immune from being taken in by deranged conspiracies. But it’s just not that simple. People from all walks of life are going down these rabbit holes - people with degrees and professional careers and rich lives have fallen for these theories, leaving their loved ones baffled. Decades-long relationships have splintered this year, as the number of people flocking to these conspiracies out of nowhere reaches a fever pitch.
So why do smart people start believing some incredibly stupid things? It’s because:
Our brains are built to identify patterns.
Our brains fucking love puzzles and patterns. This is a well-known phenomenon called apophenia, and at one point, it was probably helpful for our survival - the prehistoric human who noticed patterns in things like animal migration, plant life cycles and the movement of the stars was probably a lot more likely to survive than the human who couldn’t figure out how to use natural clues to navigate or find food.
The problem, though, is that we can’t really turn this off. Even when we’re presented with completely random data, we’ll see patterns. We see patterns in everything, even when there’s no pattern there. This is why people see Jesus in a burnt piece of toast or get superstitious about hockey playoffs or insist on always playing at a certain slot machine - our brains look for patterns in the constant barrage of random information in our daily lives, and insist that those patterns are really there, even when they’re completely imagined.
A lot of conspiracy theories have their roots in people making connections between things that aren’t really connected. The belief that “vaccines cause autism” was bolstered by the fact that the first recognizable symptoms of autism happen to appear at roughly the same time that children receive one of their rounds of childhood immunizations - the two things are completely unconnected, but our brains have a hard time letting go of the pattern they see there. Likewise, many people were quick to latch on to the fact that early maps of COVID infections were extremely similar to maps of 5G coverage - the fact that there’s a reasonable explanation for this (major cities are more likely to have both high COVID cases AND 5G networks) doesn’t change the fact that our brains just really, really want to see a connection there.
Our brains love proportionality.
Specifically, our brains like effects to be directly proportional to their causes - in other words, we like it when big events have big causes, and small causes only lead to small events. It’s uncomfortable for us when the reverse is true. And so anytime we feel like a “big” event (celebrity death, global pandemic, your precious child is diagnosed with autism) has a small or unsatisfying cause (car accident, pandemics just sort of happen every few decades, people just get autism sometimes), we sometimes feel the need to start looking around for the bigger, more sinister, “true” cause of that event.
Consider, for instance, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. In 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times by a Turkish member of a known Italian paramilitary secret society who’d recently escaped from prison - on the surface, it seems like the sort of thing conspiracy theorists salivate over, seeing how it was
an actual multinational conspiracy. But they never had much interest in the assassination attempt. Why? Because the Pope didn’t die. He recovered from his injuries and went right back to Pope-ing. The event didn’t have a serious outcome, and so people are content with the idea that one extremist carried it out. The death of Princess Diana, however, has been fertile ground for conspiracy theories; even though a woman dying in a car accident is less weird than a man being shot four times by a paid political assassin, her death has attracted more conspiracy theories because it had a bigger outcome. A princess dying in a car accident doesn’t
feel big enough. It’s unsatisfying. We want such a monumentous moment in history to have a bigger, more interesting cause.
These theories prey on pre-existing fear and anger.
Are you a terrified new parent who wants the best for their child and feels anxious about having them injected with a substance you don’t totally understand? Congrats, you’re a prime target for the anti-vaccine movement. Are you a young white male who doesn’t like seeing more and more games aimed at women and minorities, and is worried that “your” gaming culture is being stolen from you? You might have been very interested in something called Gamergate. Are you a right-wing white person who worries that “your” country and way of life is being stolen by immigrants, non-Christians and coastal liberals? You’re going to love the “all left-wingers are Satantic pedo baby-eaters” messaging of QAnon.
Misinformation and conspiracy theories are often aimed strategically at the anxieties and fears that people are already experiencing. No one likes being told that their fears are insane or irrational; it’s not hard to see why people gravitate towards communities that say “yes, you were right all along, and everyone who told you that you were nuts to be worried about this is just a dumb sheep. We believe you, and we have evidence that you were right along, right here.” Fear is a powerful motivator, and you can make people believe and do some pretty extreme things if you just keep telling them “yes, that thing you’re afraid of is true, but also it’s
way worse than you could have ever imagined.”
Real information is often complicated, hard to understand, and inherently unsatisfying.
The information that comes from the scientific community is often very frustrating for a layperson; we want science to have hard-and-fast answers, but it doesn’t. The closest you get to a straight answer is often “it depends” or “we don’t know, but we think X might be likely”. Understanding the results of a scientific study with any confidence requires knowing about sampling practices, error types, effect sizes, confidence intervals and publishing biases. Even asking a simple question like “is X bad for my child” will usually get you a complicated, uncertain answer - in most cases, it really just depends. Not understanding complex topics makes people afraid - it makes it hard to trust that they’re being given the right information, and that they’re making the right choices.
Conspiracy theories and misinformation, on the other hand, are often simple, and they are certain. Vaccines bad. Natural things good. 5G bad. Organic food good. The reason girls won’t date you isn’t a complex combination of your social skills, hygiene, appearance, projected values, personal circumstances, degree of extroversion, luck and life phase - girls won’t date you because feminism is bad, and if we got rid of feminism you’d have a girlfriend. The reason Donald Trump was an unpopular president wasn’t a complex combination of his public bigotry, lack of decorum, lack of qualifications, open incompetence, nepotism, corruption, loss of soft power, refusal to uphold the basic responsibilities of his position or his constant lying - they hated him because he was fighting a secret sex cult and they’re all in it.
Instead of making you feel stupid because you’re overwhelmed with complex information, expert opinions and uncertain advice, conspiracy theories make you feel smart - smarter, in fact, than everyone who doesn’t believe in them. And that’s a powerful thing for people living in a credential-heavy world.
Many conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.
It is very difficult to prove a negative. If I tell you, for instance, that there’s no such thing as a purple swan, it would be very difficult for me to actually prove that to you - I could spend the rest of my life photographing swans and looking for swans and talking to people who know a lot about swans, and yet the slim possibility would still exist that there was a purple swan out there somewhere that I just hadn’t found yet. That’s why, in most circumstances, the burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim - if you tell me that purple swans exist, we should continue to assume that they don’t until you actually produce a purple swan.
Conspiracy theories, however, are built so that it’s nearly impossible to “prove” them wrong. Is there any proof that the world’s top-ranking politicians and celebrities are all in a giant child sex trafficking cult? No. But can you prove that they
aren’t in a child sex-trafficking cult? No, not really. Even if I, again, spent the rest of my life investigating celebrities and following celebrities and talking to people who know celebrities, I still couldn’t definitely prove that this cult doesn’t exist - there’s always a chance that the specific celebrities I’ve investigated just aren’t in the cult (but other ones are!) or that they’re hiding evidence of the cult even better than we think. Lack of evidence for a conspiracy theory is always treated as more evidence for the theory - we can’t find anything because
this goes even higher up than we think! They’re
even more sophisticated at hiding this than we thought! People deeply entrenched in these theories don’t even realize that they are stuck in a circular loop where everything seems to prove their theory right - they just see a mountain of “evidence” for their side.
Our brains are very attached to information that we “learned” by ourselves.
Learning accurate information is not a particularly interactive or exciting experience. An expert or reliable source just presents the information to you in its entirety, you read or watch the information, and that’s the end of it. You can look for more information or look for clarification of something, but it’s a one-way street - the information is just laid out for you, you take what you need, end of story.
Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost never show their hand all at once. They drop little breadcrumbs of information that slowly lead you where they want you to go. This is why conspiracy theorists are forever telling you to “do your research” - they know that if they tell you everything at once, you won’t believe them. Instead, they want you to indoctrinate yourself slowly over time, by taking the little hints they give you and running off to find or invent evidence that matches that clue. If I tell you that celebrities often wear symbols that identify them as part of a cult and that you should “do your research” about it, you can absolutely find evidence that substantiates my claim - there are literally millions of photos of celebrities out there, and anyone who looks hard enough is guaranteed to find common shapes, poses and themes that might just mean something (they don’t - eyes and triangles are incredibly common design elements, and if I took enough pictures of you, I could also “prove” that you also clearly display symbols that signal you’re in the cult).
The fact that you “found” the evidence on your own, however, makes it more meaningful to you. We trust ourselves, and we trust that the patterns we uncover by ourselves are true. It doesn’t feel like you’re being fed misinformation - it feels like you’ve discovered an important truth that “they” didn’t want you to find, and you’ll hang onto that for dear life.
Older people have not learned to be media-literate in a digital world.
Fifty years ago, not just anyone could access popular media. All of this stuff had a huge barrier to entry - if you wanted to be on TV or be in the papers or have a radio show, you had to be a professional affiliated with a major media brand. Consumers didn’t have easy access to niche communities or alternative information - your sources of information were basically your local paper, the nightly news, and your morning radio show, and they all more or less agreed on the same set of facts. For decades, if it looked official and it appeared in print, you could probably trust that it was true.
Of course, we live in a very different world today - today, any asshole can accumulate an audience of millions, even if they have no credentials and nothing they say is actually true (like “The Food Babe”, a blogger with no credentials in medicine, nutrition, health sciences, biology or chemistry who peddles health misinformation to the 3 million people who visit her blog every month). It’s very tough for older people (and some younger people) to get their heads around the fact that it’s very easy to create an “official-looking” news source, and that they can’t necessarily trust everything they find on the internet. When you combine that with a tendency toward “clickbait headlines” that often misrepresent the information in the article, you have a generation struggling to determine who they can trust in a media landscape that doesn’t at all resemble the media landscape they once knew.
These beliefs become a part of someone’s identity.
A person doesn’t tell you that they believe in anti-vaxx information - they tell you that they
ARE an anti-vaxxer. Likewise, people will tell you that they
ARE a flat-earther, a birther, or a Gamergater. By design, these beliefs are not meant to be something you have a casual relationship with, like your opinion of pizza toppings or how much you trust local weather forecasts - they are meant to form a core part of your identity.
And once something becomes a core part of your identity, trying to make you stop believing it becomes almost impossible. Once we’ve formed an initial impression of something, facts just don’t change our minds. If you identify as an antivaxxer and I present evidence that disproves your beliefs, in your mind, I’m not correcting inaccurate information - I am launching a very personal attack against a core part of who you are. In fact, the more evidence I present, the more you will burrow down into your antivaxx beliefs, more confident than ever that you are right. Admitting that you are wrong about something that is important to you is painful, and your brain would prefer to simply deflect conflicting information rather than subject you to that pain.
We can see this at work with something called the confirmation bias. Simply put, once we believe something, our brains hold on to all evidence that that belief is true, and ignore evidence that it’s false. If I show you 100 articles that disprove your pet theory and 3 articles that confirm it, you’ll cling to those 3 articles and forget about the rest. Even if I show you nothing but articles that disprove your theory, you’ll likely go through them and pick out any ambiguous or conflicting information as evidence for “your side”, even if the conclusion of the article shows that you are wrong - our brains simply care about feeling right more than they care about what is actually true.
There is a strong community aspect to these theories.
There is no one quite as supportive or as understanding as a conspiracy theorist - provided, of course, that you believe in the same conspiracy theories that they do. People who start looking into these conspiracy theories are told that they aren’t crazy, and that their fears are totally valid. They’re told that the people in their lives who doubted them were just brainwashed sheep, but that they’ve finally found a community of people who get where they’re coming from. Whenever they report back to the group with the “evidence” they’ve found or the new elaborations on the conspiracy theory that they’ve been thinking of (“what if it’s even worse than we thought??”), they are given praise for their valuable contributions. These conspiracy groups often become important parts of people’s social networks - they can spend hours every day talking with like-minded people from these communities and sharing their ideas.
Of course, the flipside of this is that anyone who starts to doubt or move away from the conspiracy immediately loses that community and social support. People who have broken away from antivaxx and QAnon often say that the hardest part of leaving was losing the community and friendships they’d built - not necessarily giving up on the theory itself. Many people are rejected by their real-life friends and family once they start to get entrenched in conspiracy theories; the friendships they build online in the course of researching these theories often become the only social supports they have left, and losing those supports means having no one to turn to at all. This is by design - the threat of losing your community has kept people trapped in abusive religious sects and cults for as long as those things have existed.
We are driven to the realist conclusion that beauty is evidence of the existence of 1+
n objects: myself, the
Mona Lisa, the dry air between us. Yet beauty is in none of these objects. What is uncanny and slightly frightening at times about beauty is that it can’t be located, yet it appears to emerge in interactions between things. Beauty then is a kind of lie that is told of an object when it interacts with another object: a beautiful lie. It is as if beauty is everywhere, everyone, for all time. Yet it emerges from a pure contingency. It is timeless only insofar as it is based on objects that seem to be fleeting.
Morton, Timothy.
Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality.Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013.
If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced in time to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis and civilization as we know it collapses, the future wanderers of the apocalyptic wasteland will at least know how it all happened.
That’s the idea behind Earth Black Box, a bus-sized steel monolith being built in the Tasmanian desert to record every bit of data on the climate crisis and our collective response.
“The purpose of the device is to provide an unbiased account of the events that lead to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for future generations and inspire urgent action,” the project website reads. “How the story ends is completely up to us.”
The project is a collaboration between a variety of makers including the University of Tasmania, marketing communications company Clemenger BBDO and artistic collective Glue Society, according to CNN.
It will be a 10-meter-by-4-meter-by-3-meter (approximately 34-foot-by-13-foot-by10-foot) steel monolith that will sit in a remote, rocky part of Tasmania’s west coast, as Australia’s ABC News reported. Inside, the device will be filled with storage drives connected to the internet and powered with solar panels. The drives will record both scientific data tracking the global climate and headlines and social media posts tracking the politicla response.
The idea is to replicate the “black box” that tells the fate of an airplane after a crash.
Electrify: Saul Griffith’s visionary, practical program for a US clean energy transition
In
Electrify, the MacArthur prizewinning engineer Saul Griffith offers a detailed, optimistic and urgent roadmap for a climate-respecting energy transition that we can actually accomplish in 10–15 years.
There are a lot of popular science books out there, but the world really needs more popular
engineering books — books that set out the technical parameters of our problems and the various proposed solutions, sorting the likely from the plausible to the foolish, and laying out a practical range of plans to accomplish the best of them.
The first book like this I ever read was David McKay’s superb 2009 “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air,” a life-changing book that sets out the energy transition as an engineering problem.
McKay describes the upper and lower bounds of the Earth’s estimated carbon budget — how much CO2 we can emit. Then he looks at the energy budget for a variety of human activities — buildings, transport, food, and so on — decomposing each into a variety of subcategories. Then he looks at the maximum theoretical renewable energy generation available to us, by category — how many solar photons strike the Earth every day? That’s your absolute solar limit. Then he gives you the knobs and dials to play with these figures — this kind of activity, plus this kind of renewable, requires this much raw material and space, and presents the following advantages and disadvantages.
The remarkable thing about MacKay’s book is that it becomes abundantly clear that while an energy transition is a lot of work, it’s eminently possible. MacKay’s book spawned a whole line of “Without the Hot Air” titles from UIT Cambridge. The latest, last year’s “Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air,” is an excellent continuation of MacKay’s legacy:
Griffith’s popular engineering book is also part of MacKay’s legacy (in case there’s any doubt, Griffith namechecks him). Electrify is far more concrete and granular than MacKay’s book, focusing on the US context to understand what is possible, what is necessary, and what stands in the way.
Griffith starts with some very good news: the US’s energy budget has been wildly overstated. About
half of the energy that the US consumes is actually the energy we need to dig, process, transport, store and use fossil fuels. Renewables have these costs, too, but nothing near the costs of using fossil fuels. An all-electric nation is about twice as efficient as a fossil fuel nation. That means that the problem of electrifying America is only half as hard as we’ve been told it was.
There’s more good news! Your car, stove, water heater, furnace and air conditioner are all super-inefficient, too. When you have electrified your life, everything you do will be cheaper, faster and better. A just energy transition isn’t a transition to ecology austerity — you can have better, cheaper versions of the stuff you love.
Getting all this done will require a lot of money. Electrification is front-loaded: you spend a lot of money now to save a lot more money (oh, and the planet) later. That means that retrofitting our homes, replacing our appliances, and changing over our utilities will require large upfront investments.
John Kerry calls this energy/resource mobilization “World War Zero,” a comparison to the rapid, total conversion of the US economy to a war materiel economy after Pearl Harbor.
Here, Griffith has still more good news. The WWII mobilization was proportionately much, much larger than the mobilization needed to win World War Zero.
For Griffith, the roadmap is pretty straightforward. From now on, every time we replace a vehicle or renovate a building or swap an appliance, we should be buying electric. Every new roof should include solar panels. New housing should be energy efficient and shouldn’t even have a gas hookup. All of this should be financed with low-cost, long-term loans comparable to the government-backed mortgages that created the post-war middle-class (but without the racism that created Black housing precarity and poverty).
No more fossil-fuel plants should be built, period. Existing extraction and refining programs should halt, now. Existing plants should be decomissioned and replaced with renewables and batteries. This should be federally funded, as should the new jobs for fossil-fuel-sector workers, whose labor the electrification project can handily absorb, with room to spare for every un- and under-employed person in America.
The stuff we’ve been told is impossible with renewables — like maintaining base-load — is revealed as a largely solved problem (big batteries, which will get smaller and cheaper over time).
Some of Griffith’s solutions raised my eyebrows, particularly his plan to simply buy off the fossil fuel sector, giving them a fractional return on their stranded assets (book value minus the expected expenditures to dig them up and process them, discounted by some kind of penalty percentage). This is basically the solution that Kim Stanley Robinson proposes in his brilliant Ministry For the Future. I hate it. But Griffith makes a good case for it, a kind of “would you rather be happy, or right?” conundrum. If you want to argue with him about it, I suggest you read the book first.
Other parts of Griffith’s solutions surprised me. He points out specific elements of our public safety codes that can be amended to fall in line with standards adopted in Europe and Australia, which would represent a significant savings in the cost of solar conversions. There are a lot of wins like these, where Griffith points to something we can do for free, basically, and then says, “This knocks 2% off the total budget for winning World War Zero.” Add up all those little wins and we’re talking hundreds of billions in savings.
Electrify opens up with a mildly disparaging view of the Green New Deal as a kind of mushy and aspiration and nonspecific. I bridled at that at first, but by the end of Electrify, I got it — a green transition needn’t be a bunch of slogans to be understood. It’s possible to articulate a highly specific plan, fully shovel-ready, without being dull or so technical that only wonks can understand it. This is a book for everyone.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering about Griffith’s takes on some of the contoversies within the green transition movement. He actually devotes a chapter to these: nuclear power (mmmmmmaybe); geoengineering (no), carbon capture (fuck no), hydrogen (don’t be stupid), etc.
Griffith writes with beautiful clarity, which will not surprise you if you’ve ever heard him speak; he has a real gift for simplifying ideas to the point where anyone can grasp them, but not so much that they lose nuance or coherence.
One of Electrify’s appendices is very moving — it’s a list of marching orders for kids and voters and politicians and artists and musicians and writers and teachers and energy workers and engineers and bankers and oil execs, a sentence or two for each on what they can do,
now to advance this program.
As with everything Griffith makes, this advice sits at the intersection of practicality and visionary optimism. It’s the precise mix that we need to survive this transition.
This psychological warfare took place from 1950 to 1954 in the provinces of Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, and Tarlac.
Considering the rural nature of Philippine society in this epoch, belief in the
aswang was strong, along with other supernatural entities such as the
engkanto and the
manananggal. Given the superstitious nature of Filipinos, some would argue that believing in these creatures continue to this day. Thus, the
aswang became the perfect candidate for the CIA to take advantage of.
The plan was simple. A pile of dead bodies, usually deceased Huk fighters, would be left by the side of the road in a busy area in the province. And on those mangled bodies, holes were punctured to resemble animal—or
aswang—bites. The terrible sight convinced anyone who came across it that it was the nighttime monsters of Filipino folklore that committed the atrocious act. […]
In his memoir, Lansdale recounted how they would kidnap one Huk, puncture his neck with two holes, hang his body by the heels, drain him of blood, and dump the corpse on a trail that other Huks would pass by. When the Huks discovered their dead comrade, they’d promptly pack up and relocate to a different hill.
This pentagon-funded report from 2013 acts as a fun checklist of talking points you started hearing about China after 2017 or so
Start at p.184 for the good stuff.
I’m also losing it over this quote: “In addition, the United States must recognize that it still retains a dominant image in the world. It has an open society, economy, universal ideology that respects individual liberty and freedom, a history of humanitarian aid, an absence of territorial disputes, and no desire to dominate. Moreover, it also has a significant advantage in the fact that it is not a racist state. China is.”
This is more-or-less my last blogging day of 2021 (I may sneak a post or two in before the New Year, but I might not), so it’s time for my annual roundup of my book reviews from the year gone by. I’ve sorted this year’s books by genre (sf/f, other novels, graphic novels, YA, nonfic) and summarized the reviews with links to the full review. Here’s last year’s installment:
As ever, casting my eye over the year’s reading fills me with delight (at how much I enjoyed these books) and shame (at all the excellent books I was sent or recommended that I did
not get a chance to read). 2021 was a hard year for all of us and I’m no exception. I ended up whiffing on
so many astonishingly great and highly desirable books this year and I feel awful about it, to be honest.
I know what it’s like to launch a book in a pandemic (I had
four books out in 2020, ugh), and I so want to get those writers’ and publishers’ books into your hands. I might actually start an aspirational “books I wish I was reading” monthly or quarterly list for 2022.
On the subject of book publishing a pandemic: last year saw the publication of the paperback of my novel
Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book:
There’s still signed stock at Dark Delicacies, and depending on the postal service, it’s possible that if you order one (or the other signed books of mine they have on hand) that you’ll get it in time for the Christmas break.
And speaking of 2022, I’ll be publishing the first of
seven planned books for 2022/¾ in September: “Culture Heist: The Rise of Chokepoint Capitalism and How Workers Can Defeat It,” comes out from Beacon Press in September. It’s a book on monopoly and creative labor exploitation that I co-wrote with Rebecca Giblin and it’s
excellent.
Now, onto the reviews!
Science fiction/fantasy novels
I.
Situation Normal, by Leonard Richardson
Technically, I reviewed this in 2020, but it came out *after* last year’s roundup. Richardson’s second novel is a droll, weird, fast-moving space-opera with a gigantic cast, myriad subplots, and fascinating premises – a novel so brilliantly conceived that it runs like precision clockwork.
Miles’ debut novel is a taut, conspiratorial thriller with overtones of PK Dick by way of Qanon and Dark City, a supernatural tale that illuminates the thrill and terror of ARG-like groups.
A magic realist novel of New York City that is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP Lovecraft and his ilk.
A tense dystopian thriller about the unraveling of a paranoid hermit kingdom established as a final redoubt against humanity’s ascent to the cloud. Sharpson’s debut is a claustrophobic nightmare of transhuman refusal and authoritarianism.
The final Sandman Slim novel was more than a decade in the making, and it is a triumphant capstone to a supernatural noir series that transcended the tropes of both noir and the supernatural with a tale of personal transformation, redemption, revenge and sacrifice.
This debut novel is fantastic, funny, furious and fucking amazing. It is a profound and moving story about justice wrapped up in a gag about superheroes, sneaky and sharp.
The sequel to Eggers’ 2013 techno-dystopian satire “The Circle,” and it’s a deeply discomfiting, darkly hilarious, keen-edged tale of paternalism and its discontents.
Gus Moreno’s debut novel, “This Thing Between Us,” is a genuinely creepy supernatural horror novel, a book that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and prompted me to turn on the nightlight at bedtime.
“LaserWriter II” is Tamara Shopsin’s fictionalized history of Tekserve, NYC’s legendary Apple computer repair store. It’s a vivid, loving, heartfelt portrait of an heroic moment in the history of personal computing: a moment when computers transformed lives and captured the hearts of people in every field of endeavor.
STREAMLINER is the story of a secret outlaw jalopy hotrod race that plays out with so much fucking noir it’s practically vantablack, in a way that makes it clear why STREAMLINER and its creator Fane are great heroes of the French comics scene.
An alternate world in which another race of hominids – cylcopes with one eye and one breast – have existed alongside us “two-eyes.” Their relations are presented as a series of lighthearted gags, many of which made my literally cry with laughter. It’s an incredibly, admirably sneaky way to tell a profound story about race and gender and class.
Bubble is a comedy/sf story about a distant outpost on a hostile planet where human colonists live under armored domes that keep out the hostile, overpowered critters that live on the surface. It’s a wildly improbable artifact – a graphic novel adaptation of that turns podcasting into a visual medium.
I. Permanent Record, the Young Readers Adaptation, by Edward Snowden
Snowden’s sprightly prose, his deep technical knowledge, his superb knack for explaining complex matters, his ability to articulate principled action all come together in a book that is, if anything, better than the adult version. Books for teens cast a long shadow. They can alter the course of a person’s life. I was permanently affected by the books I read as an adolescent.
In “The Halloween Moon,” Welcome to Nightvale co-creator Joseph Fink brings his superb, unmatchable gift for balancing the weird and the real to a spooky middle-grades novel that echoes such classics as Neil Gaimans Coraline.
III.
Victories Greater Than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders
Anders’ debut YA novel is superb – an exciting, engrossing book that captures everything great about young adult tropes while deftly subverting the problems those tropes present, without ever losing sight of the reason we love YA and space-opera: majesty and sweep, good and evil, bravery and sacrifice, treachery and danger.
This should really have been entitled HOW TO TRUTH WITH STATISTICS - it goes beyond debunking bad stats and instead shows how stats can be part of how we discover truth. It presents a 10-part method for avoiding statistical pitfalls *and* doing *good* statistical analysis.
II.
Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air, by Sarah Bridle
Bridle’s clear, nonthreatening, technical language, brilliant data visualizations, and examples grounded in our daily experience make this a powerful read. It comes to a devastating conclusion: our species’ survival depends on eating more plants, with more centrally (and efficiently) prepared meals.
III.
Competition is Killing Us, by Michelle Meagher
Both an account of how Meagher rebuilt her understanding of markets, law and economics, and a smartly argued, fast-moving history of the neutering of monopoly law, a plot hatched and executed by the Chicago School of neoliberal economists. The Chicago School put competition enforcement in chains. Meagher’s book shatters them. It’s proof that this world is neither inevitable nor immutable, but rather, something that we can and must transform.
Dayen weaves explainers and personal stories together, unpicking snarled knots of bullshit and laying them straight to reveal them for the turds they are; then showing how we’re personally drowning in crap. From pharma to aviation, airlines to newspapers, Big Tech to Big Funeral, Dayen connects the scams that picks our pockets, robs us of dignity and life chances, and laugh in our faces.
More than a celebration of the hidden woman heroes of the computing revolution – also an epitaph for all the people whose talent, aptitude, dreams and contributions were squandered by a system based on mass exclusion. It’s proof that the differences between fields are socially – not biologically -determined.
A for-real version of those neo-neolithic Youtubers who show how to bootstrap advanced tooling from raw materials; a physical version of the beloved first-person accounts of daring feats recounted in the pages of 2600. This is true adversarial interoperability – treating the environment as a puzzle and a challenge, to be deconstructed and reconfigured, overcoming user-hostile designs and armed enforcers.
A pitiless – but empathic – look at the lives of the (mostly) American super-rich: the transactional relationships, the paranoia and fear, the greed, the lavish goods, the rootless pingponging from one home to another, the feuding, ruined offspring, the constant preoccuptation with accumulation… It’s ghastly. Legitimately horrible.
VIII.
Mutual Aid, by Peter Kropotkin, David Graeber, and others
Painstaking researched and beautifully argued, MUTUAL AID reveals the scientific fraud of “social Darwinism,” and its claims that hierarchy and exploitation are evolutionary inevitabilities baked into our very nature. This is a gorgeous illustrated edition with a new introduction by David Graeber.
Come for graphic sexual content, stay for thoughtful and well-thought-through philosophy. Savage’s latest is an illustrated, alphabetical tour through the concepts and tropes of his decades-long corpus of sexual wisdom, humor and learning.
This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees’ range has shrunk by 90%.
(my own photos)
Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.
Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would’ve penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you’ve observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.
You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:
Visible mending is a way to fix clothes with holes in a decorative way. Instead of trying to make the mend invisible as possible, it can be fun and creative to hi light the tears and holes with stitching that adds to the garment. I think this method is super cool to repair clothes you may really want to keep but also make more beautiful.
There are many techniques to mending clothes and here are some popular techniques that will help you save your clothes and also reduce your consumption of fast-fashon!
The embroidery technique used to repair holes in fabric by using running stitches and thread woven in-between those stitches to repair a hole. If you’re interested in employing this stitch, check out this awesome darning tutorial by Evelyn Wood!
This type of traditional Japanese mending practice is used to reinforce the strength of fabric as well as decorate. It is a great solution for mending holes with patches and well to reinforce thinning fabric! For learning the basics of Sashiko there is a wonderful beginners tutorial by Benzie Design.
Patches are very versatile when used for repairing clothes. You can sew it over a hole in your fabric or you can also so the patch in the inside to have it peek out. There is a great tutorial for custom DIY patches by wastelesscrafts and Creating with misp has a tutorial on mending with a peek-through patch.
[Tweet from @/fozmeadows: “human gender and sexuality are very much like animal taxonomy, in that both look structured and simple on the surface, but once you start investigating, it turns out there’s actually no such thing as a fish despite the fact that we all know what a fish is, and that’s okay”]
Agricultural fields surround several small villages in the Fafan Zone of Ethiopia. Located on Ethiopia’s eastern border with Somalia, this region contains some small cities but is mostly agrarian. Farmers here raise livestock and grow cereals like sorghum, maize and teff—a grass native to the Horn of Africa.
“Underlying Freire’s politics of hope was a view of radical pedagogy that located itself on the dividing lines where the relations between domination and oppression, power and powerlessness, continued to be produced and reproduced. For Freire, hope as a defining element of politics and pedagogy always meant listening to and working with the poor and other subordinate groups so that they might speak and act in order to alter dominant relations of power.”
A new map published in Nature models how Earth’s climate has changed over 24,000 years. By comparing sediment cores, which record temperatures over thousands of years, researchers were able to get a sense of global temperature records.
Deniers of climate change claim global warming is not as severe as scientists make it out to be, clinging to the fact that 6,000 years ago, glaciers receded while the earth cooled as evidence. As Popular Science put it, “How can the greenhouse effect be so important for global warming if greenhouse gases increased during the Holocene at the same time as global temperatures declined?”
The new map reinforces a paper published earlier this year that refutes the argument of deniers and asserts climate modeling has been problematic – that Earth wasn’t actually cooling after the glaciers melted. By studying sediment cores, which were dominant in the Northern Hemisphere, researchers found that previous models were incorrect. Even using different methods of research, both the map and the paper generated the same result – that Earth’s climate was 10 degrees Fahrenheit colder prior to glacier retreat and has been warming since.
Matthew Osman, a climatologist at the University of Arizona and the study’s lead author, toldPopular Science that even just two to three degrees of warming would mean “essentially a large fraction of these interglacial changes occurring in a really, really short amount of time. And that should be something that I think concerns everybody.”
Large chunks of sea ice break away from the coast of Antarctica. This Overview, captured on April 22, 2021, shows the ice in its seasonal retreat as spring turns to summer. In the 1980s, Antarctica lost 40 billion tons (36.3 billion metric tons) of ice every year. In the last decade, that figure was estimated at a staggering 252 billion tons (229 billion metric tons) per year.
The map my colleague Katie Armstrong made (
above) shouldn’t have surprised me. I knew trees in North Carolina and elsewhere were being cut down to be burned in European power plants. But I didn’t fully appreciate until I saw Armstrong’s map that it was happening all over the Southeast—that there are at least 20 mills from Virginia to Texas chopping wood into tiny pellets, and that millions of tons of the stuff are already being shipped each year from at least 10 different ports in the region.
It’s as if a giant funnel were draining Southeastern woods into European furnaces, one cigarette filter-sized pellet at a time—all in the name of fighting climate change. And it’s all based on a fundamental error, many scientists say.
When the European Union set up its pioneering carbon emissions trading scheme in 2005, it defined wood as a zero-emissions fuel, Sarah Gibbens reports. At first, that seemed to make sense: If a new tree grows to replace the one that was burned, it will absorb carbon from the air to offset the emissions from the burning.
“The whole wood pellet industry is basically being driven by this,” Princeton researcher Tim Searchinger told Gibbens. Coal-fired power plants in the U.K. and elsewhere have been switching to wood pellets, thereby reducing their emissions fees—but not their actual emissions.
The problem, Searchinger and many other scientists say, is that while trees do indeed absorb carbon, they do so only in the long run—they take decades longer to grow than they do to burn. But in the long run the glaciers will have melted; we don’t have decades to wait to cut emissions. And right now, most evidence suggests, burning whole trees puts more carbon in the air than coal, because wood is less efficient.
The loophole that defines wood as a zero-emissions fuel emerged from an earlier COP meeting, Searchinger told Gibbens. In the last session in Glasgow, European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans talked about how Europe had gotten rich off the coal-fired Industrial Revolution. “Coal has no future” now, he said. He didn’t mention that European countries had switched to coal back in the 18th century only after cutting down and burning most of their own forests. From that perspective, importing pellets from North America, in order to switch from coal back to wood, seems like a historic step backward.
There have been several of these explosions related to methane in the Siberian permafrost. This is the most recent, and the topic of this linked story:
Excerpt from this story from the
Siberian Times:
The recently-formed new hole or funnel is the latest to be seen in northern Siberia since the phenomenon was first registered in 2014.
It was initially spotted by chance from the air by a Vesti Yamal TV crew en route from an unrelated assignment.
A group of scientists then made an expedition to examine the large cylindrical crater which has a depth of up to 50 metres.
Such funnels are believed to be caused by the build up of methane gas in pockets of thawing permafrost under the surface.
Scientist Dr Evgeny Chuvilin, a leading researcher at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, said: ‘What we saw today is striking in its size and grandeur.
‘These are the colossal forces of nature that create such objects.’
The ‘crater’ - these holes are called hydrolaccoliths or bulgunnyakhs by scientists - is given the number 17, and is seen as the most impressive of the large holes to suddenly appear in recent years as the permafrost thaws.
Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky, of the Russian Oil and Gas Research Institute in Moscow, told Vesti Yamal: 'This object is unique. It carries a lot of additional scientific information, which I am not yet ready to disclose.
old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
“Ha… right.”
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks
flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large
didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and
not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’
the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever
We had a running joke about how many times our grad PI’s emails scared us because they were uncharacteristically terse. (You’d get like “We need to talk about your paper.” and then the actual talk would be “It’s great!”)
And he heard us talking one day and started adding smiley emojis to his emails, and honestly it really helped
Can we also have a support group for all of the people who’ve had to do the “Please do not send me a text that says ‘call me.’ unless someone is dead. If no one is dead, you need to delete the period and add a lighthearted emoji” workshop with their boomer parents? Because I know about 10 people who’ve had that exact conversation.
Texts from my mom look like this now:
Call me! 👻
call me 🥑 🥭
Call me. (No one’s dead I just want to talk.)
CALL ME! 🎏🐹🌴💅🏼🎷🌺👒
Book rec if you are interested in this kind of language stuff: Gretchen McCullough’s book BECAUSE INTERNET. It goes into these topics in detail along with a bunch of others and is really fascinating.
Second this, BECAUSE INTERNET was my second favorite book I read last year, it’s awesome.
As the bickering over the ill-advised proposed lithium mines in Nevada and North Carolina and next to Death Valley National Park in California continues and becomes more intense, an Australian company, with financial backing from several sources, including GM, is starting up its proposed lithium mining project at the south end of the Salton Sea in California. As I’ve been posting stories about for years……
Excerpt from this story from the
LA Times:
Barely a mile from the southern shore of the Salton Sea — an accidental lake deep in the California desert, a place best known for dust and decay — a massive drill rig stands sentinel over some of the most closely watched ground in American energy.
There’s no oil or natural gas here, despite a cluster of Halliburton cement tanks and the hum of a generator slowly pushing a drill bit through thousands of feet of underground rock. Instead, an Australian company is preparing to tap a buried reservoir of salty, superheated water to produce renewable energy — and lithium, a crucial ingredient in electric car batteries.
The $500-million project is finally getting started after years of hype and headlines about the Imperial Valley someday becoming a powerhouse in the fight against climate change. The developer, Controlled Thermal Resources, began drilling its first lithium and geothermal power production well this month, backed by millions of dollars from investors including General Motors.
If the “Hell’s Kitchen” project succeeds — still a big “if” — it will be just the second commercial lithium producer in the United States. It will also generate clean electricity around the clock, unlike solar and wind farms that depend on the weather and time of day.
The drill had reached a depth of about 900 feet, on its way to a reservoir that seismic surveys showed would begin at about 4,000 feet, with temperatures of at least 600 degrees Fahrenheit.
The briny water is rich with lithium and other valuable minerals. Controlled Thermal is eager to reach that lucrative deposit.
There are already 11 geothermal power plants in the area, churning out emissions-free energy for California and Arizona. They take advantage of a natural geothermal hot spot, where heat from the Earth’s core radiates outward and warms water trapped in underground rock formations.
Energy companies drill down and bring the superheated water to the surface, where the drop in pressure causes it to “flash” from a liquid to a gas, creating bursts of steam that can turn turbines and generate electricity.
At the end of the process, the brine is injected back underground, replenishing the reservoir. The main byproduct is water vapor.
Today, most of the world’s lithium comes from destructive evaporation ponds in South America and hard-rock mines in Australia. Proposals for new lithium mines in the United States — including the Thacker Pass project on federal land in Nevada and plans for drilling just outside Death Valley National Park — face fierce opposition from conservationists and Native American tribes.
The Imperial Valley resource, by comparison, could offer vast new lithium supplies with few environmental drawbacks.
I flatter myself that I am pretty secure online. I’ve written a series of global bestsellers about information security, I’ve worked for EFF for nearly 20 years, I’ve given keynotes at some of the world’s largest infosec conferences. And yet, I have been hacked. It wasn’t even very sophisticated!
It was in 2010. My kid had made a fuss about going to day-care so my wife and I were late walking to work. The cafe we always stopped at for a coffee had longer lines at that hour, so I stood in line while she sat down and read a paper.
I had reinstalled my phone’s OS the day before — the same day I’d had three different articles come out. I was hearing from a lot of people about those articles, and I was having to re-key my password in a lot of websites because I’d blown out my browser preferences with the reinstall.
Standing in line, I got a DM from an old friend: “Is this you?” followed by a URL. I clicked it, and my browser opened, then redirected to Twitter. I sighed, thinking that I needed to find the system setting to tell my phone to open tweets in the Twitter app. I typed my Twitter password into my browser, and ordered coffees.
As I was handing my wife her coffee, my phone buzzed three more times. It was three more DMs, from three more old friends: “Is this you?” and the same URL.
My guts twisted. I’d just been phished.
The Twitter worm that got me was simple: they took your Twitter password, logged in as you, and DMed all your friends with “Is this you?” and a phishing URL that looked like Twitter’s login screen. The URL started with https://twitter.com, but continued with .scammysite.com (my mobile browser only showed me the first part).
I got fooled because of a perfect alignment of vulnerabilities — late, long line, new OS, new publications, bad browser design, inattentiveness. If the first phishing DM had come in 5 minutes later, in the flurry with the three others, I’d never have been caught. If we’d been on time and I’d received the DM while at my desk on my laptop, I wouldn’t have been caught.
It’s easy to sneer at people who get fooled by phishers, but imagine this: you are buying a house. You’ve just gone into escrow. You get an email or a phone call or a text from your bank about your mortgage, telling you that you have to complete another form. It’s probably not even the first time that’s happened — buying a house often requires going back several times to complete new forms! It’s high-stakes, high-tension, and the market is so hot that if you miss a form, the house might go to someone else. Maybe you’ve already given your landlord notice or sold your own house.
Do you triple-check the URL your bank gives you? Does it even matter? Your bank is probably using half a dozen fintech services to close your mortgage and escrow. You’re already routinely transmitting sensitive data to companies you’ve never heard of.
I get dozens of phishing emails like this every day, but I’m not actually buying a house, so I ignore them. But if I got one of these on the morning that I was closing on the deed? While juggling movers and finance and maybe a new job and a new school for the kid in another city? I’m not so sure. If you’re honest, you won’t be so sure, either.
That’s the thing we miss about scams — they’re scattered like dandelion seeds. The cost of adding another email address to an untargeted scam is close to zero, and the scammer doesn’t care whether that email is deleted unread anymore than a dandelion cares whether one of its seeds falls on concrete.
The dandelion’s reproductive strategy isn’t to ensure that every seed takes root — it’s to ensure that every crack in every sidewalk has a dandelion growing out of it.
11 years ago, I got phished. I immediately realized my mistake and changed my Twitter password, but, like many people then (and now!), I’d reused that password elsewhere.
I’d created my Twitter account while standing in line for a Game Developer’s Conference press pass, after Ev Williams sent me an invite to the beta. I didn’t think I needed a good password for it, because it was a toy that sent you updates about other people’s lunches over SMS. Half a decade later, I had tens of thousands of followers and the account was key to my professional life.
The person who phished me hadn’t targeted me. I was fooled by an embarrassingly blunt and transparent ploy. Is there any way I could have avoided this?
Perhaps. But not by maintaining perfect vigilance, or by never being harried or hasty. The blame-the-victim school of unattainable security locates the infosec pandemic’s problem in human frailty, rather than bad systems.
Good security advice transcends this, and Ars Technica has just published an outstanding guide to securing your online life, in two parts, written by Sean Gallagher.
Part One (“The Basics”) lays out both a way of thinking about security (particularly dispelling the notion that criminals won’t target you because you’re no one special), and a set of (mostly) simple steps you can take to defend yourself against opportunistic, untargeted attacks:
Part Two (“The Special Circumstances”) offers advice for people who might be specifically targeted by attackers. That’s not just one percenters and politicians — it can include people whose ex-spouses harass them with stalkerware, middle-schoolers targeted by bullies, and more.
I often get asked what people should do to be more secure, and I offer four basic pieces of advice:
Use a strong, unique password for every service. Get any reputable password manager (including the free one that probably came with your OS) and use it to generate all your passwords. Never use a password that you are capable of remembering — if you can remember it, a computer can guess it (the exception being the password that unlocks your password manager!).
Use two-factor authentication, preferably an authenticator app, like the one that comes with your mobile OS, or an indie like Authy. Turn it on for every account you use regularly, and seek it out when you create a new account. Avoid SMS-based 2FA.
Keep your OS and software up to date. When your OS or app asks you whether you want to update, do it.
Turn on full-disk encryption. It’s free, it came with your device, and it protects your data.
All of this is in Gallagher’s advice, along with something I don’t recommend enough, though I’m obsessive about it myself:
5. Back up your data, offsite, and keep multiple backups.
The easiest way to do this is with an encrypted cloud service. I do some of that, but my first line of defense are cheap, encrypted 1TB thumb drives that I back up to every day. Once a week, I take a disk to an offsite location and swap it with one that’s already there.
Gallagher also offers solid privacy advice:
get a tracker-blocker (like Privacy Badger) and an ad-blocker
change the permission on all of your apps so they can only get your location while you’re using them
change your mobile device’s Bluetooth name to something other than your own (e.g., not “Fred’s phone”)
He’s also got some specific advice I hadn’t really thought about:
beware of a stranger who wants to move a conversation from one app to another (say, from Tinder to Whatsapp), as this is a “signature move” of fraudsters
claim an IRS account for your Social Security Number (warning: this is complicated and I failed in my attempt because my information wasn’t recognized)
One of the most common questions I get is “Which VPN should I use.” Gallagher’s answer? None of them: “for everyday Internetting, you just don’t need VPNs that much anymore. Transport Layer Security now encrypts a vast majority of Internet traffic, and it’s unlikely that someone is going to grab your credit card data or other personal information off a public Wi-Fi network.”
But that’s for “everyday internetting.” If you’re a whistleblower or someone else likely to be targeted, “use Tor.” He also advises using Signal for encrypted chat, which is good advice for everyone, not just people in high-risk situations.
Another piece of advice offered in Part Two that everyone should follow is locking your credit report.
For people at risk of domestic violence and stalkerware (the two are highly correlated), he suggests Operation Safe Escape:
All in all, this is excellent advice. If I’d followed it when I was phished, my recovery would have been a lot simpler. 2FA would have defended me, and if it hadn’t, I would only have needed to change a single password.
But some of the advice is less realistic, even if it’s sound: telling people not to click on email links, or to turn off wifi and Bluetooth when they’re out of the house (especially in an era in which the headphone jack is nearly extinct) may be good advice, but realistically, no one’s going to follow it.
As with much in information security, a sound defense requires both technology and policy. You shouldn’t have to turn off Bluetooth and wifi, because both the standards that define them and the implementations in your device should defend you from information leakage. Likewise, mobile OSes shouldn’t default to naming your device after you, and app vendors shouldn’t be able to get your location when you’re not using their apps, period.
Of course, most of us aren’t in a position to do anything about policy. We’re not FCC commissioners, we don’t work in an EU Information Commissioner’s Office or for a state Attorney General.
But that doesn’t mean that we should ignore policy, or give tech advice that no one will follow. A good deal of the threat to our privacy and security doesn’t come from criminals, it comes from large corporations adhering with bad, or out of date, laws.
America trails the world in privacy law. It is long overdue for a federal privacy law, with a private right of action — something ferociously resisted by telcos, ad-tech, and Googbook:
Before the FDA was founded, people were routinely sickened and killed by “medicine” that was literally poisonous. I imagine that people got advice then that sounds a lot like our infosec advice today: “Only take medicine from doctors you trust,” “read the labels carefully,” etc.
Today, we have a better system: we make it a crime to poison people or lie to them about what’s in medicine or what they can expect of it.
The advice in Gallagher’s guide is essential, and much of it would apply even in a world where we had good tech policy. But even if you follow all that advice, it won’t protect you from the choices made by governments and corporations that put their priorities ahead of your welfare.
Today is Aaron Swartz Day. One of Aaron’s most memorable quotes is from the fight over SOPA, an idiotic, internet-destroying legal proposal that Aaron helped kill a decade ago: “This is the 21st century. It’s not OK for politicians not to understand the internet anymore.”
The awful state of tech policy is a scandal that puts us all at risk. Security is a team sport, after all. No matter how careful you are, you can still be compromised by someone else’s badly configured technology — the emails you send to someone else may leak, a company may suffer a breach and put your home address on the internet forever, etc.
Aaron fought for better tech policy. A lot of orgs do that today: EFF, of course, but also Public Knowledge, Software Freedom Conservancy, FSF, Creative Commons, Internet Archive, Fight for the Future, SFLC, EDRI, Open Rights Group, and many, many others.
We should all take some measure of responsibility for our technological safety and security, sure — but until we get better tech policy, we’ll just be sticking bandaids on tech’s gaping wounds.
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