Looking fwd to this “slithery philosophical filibuster and experiential scrum”, where @zzkt & I will share our oblique insights, animist techniques & occult ways of doing business @_foam (that helped us survive several tech bubbles, economic crises and other contingencies).
‘The buildings and the instruments at Aragats remain, like ghost ships in the cosmic rain … [waiting] for news that could change the universe: a quantum bullet more powerful than humans can produce, or weirder than their tentative laws can explain.’ https://t.co/Yc6S01Hwmk
When you get near 100% confident in a belief, you internalize it, which means it sinks into the unconscious. To hold a belief consciously is to hold it with non-trivial amounts of doubt. The doubt level of stuff you say tends to be matched. We rarely mix confidence levels.
Here’s one weird trick for improving your life and your politics: whenever you’re ready to condemn or degrade someone, ask yourself, “What can I learn from them?”
— Quinn Norton should be writing right now (@quinnnorton) January 20, 2020
I keep coming back to the Challenger tragedy’s NASA/Norton safety/probability/risk vs political “must-launch” culture, and comparing it to Boeing’s safety/probability/risk vs cost-cutting “must-ship” culture
Oh damn this arrived a lot quicker than expected! Had already highlighted a bunch of pdfs to pieces but nice to be able to read the rest on paper. Looks good @futurystpic.twitter.com/xsSR9AgQXe
Zoöp news, Feb 21st at @NieuweInstituut we will be running a new & improved version of our narrative-immersed workshop Zoönomic Futures, “an immersive training programme aimed at developing a practical ethics for a society that is no longer human-centric”: https://t.co/XIvsyL29cS
Today in #writing: things which unclog the creative flow.
1. Music
I create playlists for each book to set the mood. That’s more helpful than it sounds. It not only blocks street noise, it also becomes pavlovian - I hear the music and immediately feel ready to work.
“Absolute deterritorialization is not defined as a giant accelerator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how fast it goes. It is actually possible to reach the absolute by way of phenomena of relative slowness or delay” (Deleuze & Guattari, ATP 56).
Not sure what’s funnier (and more punk) - the fact that this high-tech clamp replacement was defeated by heated windows and a credit card, or that people then jacked its GPS function to get themselves free internet. https://t.co/4z0OUWFY7i
Cool, this will be a nice distraction: scientists create “Xenobots”, new lifeforms grown from living cells, “completely biological machines from the ground up”…
But wait, what’s this: “They can organise themselves spontaneously & collectively”… 😱https://t.co/jrhS3xImWe
1. The regular first person plural: “we”
2. The monarch’s first person singular: “we”
3. The Borg’s first person plural-is-singular: “we”
4. The football fan’s third person plural possessive (their team): “we”
So basically, if you’re interested, episode one was Ecology without Nature, episode two was Hyperobjects, and episode three (this Thursday at 11:30 on BBC Radio 4) is Dark Ecology. https://t.co/YRXwZy1Wb9
Biosphere: Substrata. Coil: Music to Play in the dark. Jana Winderen: Spring bloom in the marginal Ice Zone. Tanya Tagaq: Submerged. Dead can Dance: De profundis. Phurpa: The Sound of Dakini Laughter. Goran Bregović: Underground (Moonlight, The belly button of the world), etc.
I’m surprised that this post doesn’t contain a link to
turn off all of these settings (maybe another version of this post does, who knows)
Go to https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols and this will take you to a page which states what information Google is currently tracking. Each section has a blue slider next to it. Click it and it will come up with a confirmation box, scroll through it and select “pause” and you should be good to go.
I remember how weirded out I was when I used my gmail to buy a plane ticket, and right away the info appeared in my phone calendar, about day, time of flight etc. To some it might even seem convenient, but it’s creepy. It scanned through my personal mail and acquired confidential info about my private life. It’s not normal. I’ve had all my ‘info storing’ options in the Google setting turned off for a while now, and I still don’t feel safe, knowing it’s up to them to do that.
Don’t forget to also turn of the add personalization!!
It seems that @SiemensDE have the power to stop, delay or at least interrupt the building of the huge Adani coal mine in Australia. On Monday they will announce their decision. Please help pushing them to make the only right decision. #StopAdani
“As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.”
This week, the Communications Workers of America – one of the largest industrial unions in the country – launched the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE), which seeks to unionize people working for game and tech companies.
The CWA forged an alliance with the grassroots labor group Game Workers Unite (a similar deal was struck in Toronto between the CWA and the local GWU chapter). Two fulltime CWA staffers are charged with assisting tech and game company union organizers. The CWA staffers will assist shop organizers with legal and institutional advice.
“Mono-ha (もの派) is the name given to an art movement led by Japanese and Korean artists of 20th-century. The Mono-ha artists explored the encounter between natural and industrial materials, such as stone, steel plates, glass, light bulbs, cotton, sponge, paper, wood, wire, rope, leather, oil, and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states. The works focus as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves.”
I worked on a Haunted Mansion-related project where we regularly re-calibrated echo cancellation by having every ghost talk for 10 seconds, simultaneously. Ghostly cacophony to exorcise the echo demons. https://t.co/tVRGIJYgNJ
“There are some questions in science that can only be answered by strapping a pair of 3D glasses to an unsuspecting cuttlefish and setting it loose in an underwater movie theatre.”
Herders spraying reflective paint on their reindeer’s antlers to avoid road accidents leads to absolute surreal and scary pictures #Lapland#Finlandpic.twitter.com/4PdVslNMjV
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”
I didn’t get through much fiction last year, but from what I did finish three I loved were Infinite Detail by @timmaughan Cygnet by @season_butler and Deaf Republic by @ilya_poet . Hard recommend for all three.
“Minds are basically computers” is wrong if you think of computers as abstract turing machines but spot on if you think of computers as a horrible assemblage of kludges bridging incompatible legacy code which only work because critical bugs are masking other critical bugs.
After 3 years, 83,000 words and 400 footnotes, I’ve finally finished my new book, THE GOOD ANCESTOR: How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World. Look out for it on May 21. Here’s a miniaturized sneak preview… #goodancestorpic.twitter.com/Mo5JDrY05L
“Music is never tragic, music is joy. But there are times it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying happy, being extinguished. […] Peace and exasperation. Music has a thirst for destruction…” (Deleuze & Guattari ATP, 299).
“I’ve always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream. Because the way that light infuses the dream, the way the atmosphere is colored, the way light rains off people with auras and things like that … We don’t normally see light like that. But we all know it. So this is not unfamiliar territory—or not unfamiliar light. I like to have this kind of light that reminds us of this other place we know.”
“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
Concluding the post-solstice fallow fortnight with Volume 8 of the Korean series Ars Vitae on #Rest. It’s an honor to have a revised Thriving in Uncertainty by @_foam included in such a thoughtful and beautifully crafted book. https://t.co/tQ0iG2OJZYpic.twitter.com/QaS3zGhMSo
Born in 1920: Isaac Asimov, Sun Myung Moon, DeForest Kelley, Federico Fellini, Tony Randall, James Doohan, Toshiro Mifune, Ravi Shankar, Peggy Lee, Che Guevara, Yul Brynner, Charles Bukowski, Ray Bradbury, June Foray, Mickey Rooney, Walter Matthau, Timothy Leary, Dave Brubeck
“Brief summary of how it works: When the player takes a photo I duplicate the environment, make it greyscale and slice the meshes to remove anything outside the photo. When they place it into the world I slice the environment’s meshes to make a hole for the photo.“
Fossil fuel related idioms: “full steam ahead”, “cooking on gas”, “gaslighting”, to “blow off steam” or to feel like you’ve “run out of gas”. Can anyone think of any more?
“We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand ‘diviner’ who feels sick at the sight of Hilfiger” https://t.co/7LcYDDdaSl
Time dilation/contraction perceptions are at least 2d, where first dimension is event stream and second dimension is information abstraction level. So you can dilate at one level, contract at another. This idea is ubiquitous in folk wisdom but surprisingly missing in the research
Reminder, again, that the “Y2K wasn’t that bad” campaign is a deliberate effort by climate deniers to attempt to diminish expertise and the ability for collective action to avoid catastrophe.
— Anthony B, oh god we’re all going to die (@swearyanthony) December 30, 2019
“In ‘third nature’, listening is a matter of a more hybrid act of focusing in which the borders between human and environment, human and machine are more fluid. This means that a profound listening experience of environmental sound has to be more than a meter attentive form of listening. The ear is helped, guided or manipulated into a specific direction by technological means. In order to successfully steer a technologically supported and enhanced focus, however, a very conscious choice has to be made beforehand on what to listen for, even if the final result is not entirely predictable. In a way, this also happens with laptop music, when the musician, in the words of Cascone, creates a ‘density of information, multiple channels all turned on at once, whole listeners position themselves in this field’; the artist creates a kind of ‘scene’ for the listener to dwell in.”
— Bosma, Josephine.Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2011.
A year in review, some reflections from FoAM’s rear-view mirror. Weaving robots, bat detectors, jungles and deserts, islands and swamps, plants, robots, food, music, and above all, lots of lovely people! Thank you all for being part of our journeys. ✨💫💥 https://t.co/ovh2Qz7yKq
My new rule is I will 100% debate climate deniers on the air if I can bring ten thousand other scientists, the Argo ocean observing system, at least one satellite, and the reanimated corpses of the 19th century physicists who figured all this out
1. I worked with Anna Zaitsev (Berkely postdoc) to study YouTube recommendation radicalization. We painstakingly collected and grouped channels (768) and recommendations (23M) and found that the algo has a deradicalizing influence.
First art on the Moon: the “Fallen Astronaut” figurine. The sculpture, by Belgian artist Paul van Hoeydonck, was placed on the moon by the crew of the Apollo 15 in 1971 to commemorate astronauts and cosmonauts who had died prior to their mission.
Writing a piece on containment structures. This is the Runit/Cactus Dome (also known as The Tomb) on Enewetak Atoll. It contains radioactive debris from US nuclear detonations throughout the 1940s and ‘50s https://t.co/n6kZ09CPxWpic.twitter.com/BgIoAOPaPV
Opabinia is one of the most bizarre creatures ever to have lived. It had 5 eyes, 30 legs, 30 flippers, a nose like an elephant’s trunk, and a lobster-like claw! pic.twitter.com/IUJKGe1kkj
I think the Great Weirding has finally hit the tech stack. Everything I’m seeing happening to the consumer web experience seems in some way a response to the huge stress test the web 2.0 tech stack endured in 2015-18 due to major pattern failures
Protip: If you don’t use a password manager—or even if you do—you’ll always remember passwords that are expressions of personal disdain specifc to the venue into which you are logging in.
I realize that calendars are arbitrary but all the decade-in-review stuff I’ve been reading has only strengthened my impression that the 2010s have no discernible, specific character whatsoever.
Based on preliminary analysis, yesterday, Australia recorded its hottest day on record. The nationally-averaged maximum daytime temp was 41.9 °C exceeding the record set on Tuesday, 40.9 ºC. You can view the top ten highest daily maximum temps here: https://t.co/Cdqm9vD1cIpic.twitter.com/DRDK9LAvrg
How to beat #Section144 -
Stand in groups of 3 about 50 paces apart.
Don’t interact between groups.
Don’t shout slogans.
Just hold placards with messages.
Don’t disrupt traffic, Stand on sides of roads
By spreading out you also cover a larger area. @SabinaBasha@godavar
Preliminary results suggest that the 17th December was Australia’s hottest day on record at 40.9 ºC, with the average maximum across the country as a whole, exceeding the previous record of 40.3 ºC on the 7th January 2013. https://t.co/TKwWBuFPgJpic.twitter.com/xOFpokoXos
Black Abbeys - a traditional black treacle biscuit made in Repton and named after the ruins of the Black Abbey. Later made on an industrial scale at the biscuit factory in Holcroft Street.
Now that I am retired, I just about only use Lisp languages (Hy (hylang) for deep learning and using other useful Python libraries like spaCy, Common Lisp, Racket). This surprises me because I thought that Pharo would be my retirement language https://t.co/iGdy1hRBnG
