A defining American trait, and the neatest bit of elite inception in history.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ― Ronald Wright
“Ballooning spiders operate within this planetary electric field. When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the surfaces on which the spiders sit, creating enough force to lift them into the air. “
‘Each record is packaged with dust, sand and detritus collected from the Sonoran, Mojave and Great Basin deserts which can be used for further physical manipulation and divergence from the recorded sound matter.’https://t.co/RpzjBwRwiKhttps://t.co/BT8lxHDRW5
“Our gradual attunement to the desert expanse, its climate, rhythms and scales. Layered time. Material wonder. Being part of the world without romanticising wilderness or drawing hard distinctions between the desert and the cities within it…” https://t.co/707RRkHzKRhttps://t.co/xaGDcF9OFg
IMHO it’s cheap to invoke parallel worlds just to avoid a piddling little yes-and-no time travel paradox. It’s like using an H-bomb to light a joint. There’s always gonna be a tricky way out of any seeming paradox, if you think hard enough.
Pilot project in Stockholm - photo radar cameras measure speed of passing cars. Those above the speed limit receive a fine. Those below are entered into a lottery for a chance to win a portion of the fines from speeders (up to $3000). Average speeds fell from 32km/h to 25 km/h. pic.twitter.com/F3WSTlVVlW
my top 5 research methods:
- make a mixtape
- talk to the bots
- bust a deadline because of a noise gig
- take very long screenshots of apps
- say yes to everything
Ahead of the *.wav, farmers manual und glitches, bleeps und sich wiederholende Schallwellen fließen aus den Yamaha-Türmen. Keine Stimmen. Kühl. Kein Gefühl. Okaygut, le chien qui mange la rue, sowas hat auch Gefühl. https://t.co/SKiicBd04V
The @meaningness model of how meaning fell apart (choiceless –> systematic –> countercultural –> subcultural –> atomized) and how it can be reconstructed (fluidity) rhymes well with my monotemporality –> atemporality –> multitemporality model https://t.co/fPzYVeV36K
The glamorous life of the traveling weave-coder. Cheap hotel debugging last night, today train London -> München via quick stop in Paris @ercpenelopepic.twitter.com/0iZTLFxzJG
Earlier this summer I began noting the troublesome spike in atmospheric methane readings from Barrow AK. Someone commented they were likely in error. Nope. These record high readings over 2000 ppb are real and part of a record spike up in Arctic methane levels this year. pic.twitter.com/7fqw0U7Ft1
“My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know that they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”
Last playtest / rehearsal with live sound and visuals is DONE. Next stop Ruhrtrienniale in Bochum, where we get to do this with a crowd of 75 trainees 😬: https://t.co/R5XjswNFMLhttps://t.co/7hNJPx2SZT
Last tweaks on the new Pattern Matrix prototype for @DeutschesMuseum and @ercpenelope. It’s a tangible programming interface meaning you can programme stuff by moving blocks of wood around rather than coding on a screen. This one is made from felt and conductive thread. pic.twitter.com/7BlebJJWej
The climate crisis demands an urgent, realistic and sustained response from governments around the world: such a response will inevitably require sacrifices from all of us. And there lies the rub for our systems of representative democracy.
How can politicians facing short-term constraints (particularly the need to be re-elected every few years) be expected to take the necessary decisions that require long-term and, probably, quite painful change on the part of the citizens who get to vote for them?
This is where a citizens’ assembly could help, as the experience in Ireland shows. The country’s ban on abortion was an intractable problem that generation after generation of political leaders had failed to resolve. In 2016, under intense domestic and international pressure, the Irish government established a citizens’ assembly and tasked it with coming up with recommendations. It met over the course of five long weekends spread across five months. The 99 citizen members heard from expert witnesses, advocates and women who had been affected by Ireland’s abortion ban. In carefully facilitated roundtable discussions the members deliberated on the subject, producing a series of recommendations that were then sent back to parliament. A special all-party committee of parliament spent a number of months debating the recommendations. The result of this was the decision to have a referendum, which passed by a two-thirds majority in the summer of 2018.
In Britain, the Extinction Rebellion group believes that a citizens’ assemblycould play a similarly important role in addressing the climate emergency. At the heart of a citizens’ assembly is random selection: in much the same way as for jury duty, regular citizens are selected at random. They have not run for office; they are not there to represent special interests. The citizen members are there to represent themselves, and thereby the greater population, of which they are a representative sample.
This is bringing “disorganised society” into the room – giving regular citizens a voice in helping to drive debates on important public policy. These citizens, in turn, are put in the special position of informing and educating the political classes – helping our political leaders to work through the complexities of a difficult issue; informing them of aspects they might not have considered before; giving them a sense of where citizens might be prepared to go; even providing some degree of political cover.
every utterance of a Brand is a tiny mental DDoS attack on humanity
every time you hear one your brain has to pause and go “warning, group of people trying to distort my perception to siphon my life-money” before carrying on
Sigh. LAM came first. then Drexicya in the Bass section of Record Time in the early to mid 90s. then Elecktroids, The Other People Place, Transllusion and so on. those records exposed me to another dimension. Grateful for James Stinson & all of his contributions. 🖤 #DrexciyaDay
I’m on a quest for Hawaiian snails named after Christian missionaries and their descendants. There are just so many! Amongst the Achatinella, my current list includes A. baldwinii, A. stewartii, A. cookei, A. juddii, A. dolei… Please feel free to share other examples. pic.twitter.com/0titj560Oz
“You divide, I choose” remains the single most basic principle of voluntary social organization. It really should be an entire academic subdiscipline by itself, like prisoner’s dilemma
In the late 1960s and early 70s, American photographer Arthur Tress asked children to describe their nightmares, immortalizing them in staged photographs pic.twitter.com/2UvrnwHHXt
“What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
Endland is a collection of cut-up dystopian fables set in a fractured half-hallucinated version of England. The Autumn launch is getting closer. “And the Gods looked down on Endland (sic) and tbh they were pretty unhappy how it all turned out”. https://t.co/UFuem0nY6C
The number began drawing attention in 2018, when the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report describing what it would take to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the Paris climate agreement. The report explained that countries would have to cut their anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, such as from power plants and vehicles, to net zero by around 2050. To reach that goal, it said, CO2 emissions would have to start dropping “well before 2030” and be on a path to fall by about 45 percent by around 2030 (12 years away at that time).
Mid-century is actually the more significant target date in the report, but acting now is crucial to being able to meet that goal, said Duke University climate researcher Drew Shindell, a lead author on the mitigation chapter of the IPCC report.
“We need to get the world on a path to net zero CO2 emissions by mid-century,” Shindell said. “That’s a huge transformation, so that if we don’t make a good start on it during the 2020s, we won’t be able to get there at a reasonable cost.”
Basics physics and climate science allow scientists to calculate how much CO2 it takes to raise the global temperature—and how much CO2 can still be emitted before global warming exceeds 1.5°C (2.7°F) compared to pre-industrial times.
Scientists worked backward from that basic knowledge to come up with timelines for what would have to happen to stay under 1.5°C warming, said Scott Denning, who studies the warming atmosphere at Colorado State University.
“They figured out how much extra heat we can stand. They calculated how much CO2 would produce that much heat, then how much total fuel would produce that much CO2. Then they considered ‘glide paths’ for getting emissions to zero before we burn too much carbon to avoid catastrophe,” he said.
“All this work gets summarized as ‘in order to avoid really bad outcomes, we have to be on a realistic glide path toward a carbon-free global economy by 2030.’ And that gets translated to something like 'emissions have to fall by half in a decade,’ and that gets oversimplified to '12 years left.’
An annoying thing about picking words to use for things is that major uses that came before are often inconsistent. For example, the word “atemporality” means interesting but slightly different things in the ways @bruces@GreatDismal mean it, versus the way Ursula Le Guin used it
We’ve never had a cultural model for an apocalypse that lasts for a century or two. We don’t even know how to make a movie or a pop song about such a slow catastrophe.
The test pressing of Dust & Shadow, FoAM’s first vinyl has arrived! Stay tuned… the release is planned on the 23rd of September. pic.twitter.com/iqjuUix22Z
Really pleased to publish ‘Para-Photo-Mancy’ and an accompanying essay in the latest issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. The issue addresses ‘Interface’ as an agentially charged field. https://t.co/0KGV8aderFpic.twitter.com/k9RKuegQDK
I saw a claim that the Amazon Rainforest provides 20% of the world’s oxygen, so I went to go see if that was correct. My initial query came back flooded w/20% off deals on Amazon, and boy if that ain’t the most perfect, sad crystallization of this cursed moment in human history.
One of the major contributors to greenhouse gases is the methane that cows belch up as they break down cellulose, but five years ago, research from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) found that adding small amounts of a pink seaweed called Asparagopsis to cows’ diets eliminated the gut microbes responsible for methane production and “completely knocks out” cows’ methane emissions.
Asparagopsis grows on the coast of Australia, and cows actually seek it out and eat it without encouragement. Replacing 2% of cows’ feed with Asparagopsis is sufficient to end their methane production.
Researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast are trying to ramp up Asparagopsis production to scale to meet a potential global market for it.
I am so proud of being a real person who enjoys his work in the wonderfully humane Amazon fulfillment centers. I am happy I love box I get so many pee breaks I am so full of organs.
— Joaquin - Amazon FC Ambassador 📦 (@joabaldwin) August 15, 2019
Investors are turning to a new breed of high-tech start-ups that can measure the risk climate change poses to real estate — from an hour to decades into the future.
And these firms count major corporations and cities as clients. One of them is Jupiter.
“We’re essentially physically modeling what’s happening with the atmosphere and the water or the fire at a very specific level of detail, and typically at the asset level, which is now only possible because computers have gotten so powerful and relatively inexpensive,” said Rich Sorkin, CEO of Jupiter.
Launched barely three years ago, the Silicon Valley-based company already has over $40 million in investor capital from firms including Energize Ventures, Ignition Partners and Data Collective. It also receives funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA for work in cloud computing and satellite observations.
The company’s primary goal is to incorporate climate impact data on flood, fire, heat, drought, cold, wind and hail events into risk modeling for real estate assets. Its clients include the coastal cities of New York and Miami.
“We’re seeing a dramatic expansion in large corporations coming to us, unsolicited, and saying, ‘We need to understand the risk to this office complex or the risk to this hotel, or the risk to this power plant, or refinery, or neighborhood where we have hundreds of millions of dollars of mortgages out,’” Sorkin said.
“Markets are just waking up to the need to do this kind of risk assessment,” said Frank Freitas, chief development officer at Four Twenty Seven. “For real estate, what people want to know in addition to the scores and relative exposure, is what is the world going to look like at this location in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Am I going to have five more days of flooding or 10 more days of high heat? What are the physical, observable outcomes?”
Ooh, just found these wonderful diagrams of internal time/alphabet/number structures of people with time-space / sequential synaesthesia in an *1893* issue Popular Science … they’re like concrete poems! 😍😍I see time/letter/numbers like this, do you? (https://t.co/CzTkAuOLDP) pic.twitter.com/m1l4eSB7dh
Question: Is the most effective thing that can happen to decelerate climate change and species extinction, a very severe and prolonged global economic crisis? If we take that to be true, current leaders globally are doing an excellent job crashing the system quickly. #degrowth
Imagine those 80+ Biodiversity observation platforms were all open source and used a common protocol for (data) exchange… cc @carrieseltzerhttps://t.co/q8sPFwSgb5
I have a list of Really Expensive Things That Have Their Own Twitter Accounts - do you have any suggestions?
Note: I haven’t included airports for some reason, but have included bridges, canals, wind farms, ships, aircraft, space probes etchttps://t.co/Zo4xJDwmkg
Very pleased and thoroughly intimidated to be one of the 2019 recipients of the @artfund’s New Collecting Awards to build the @V_and_A’s digital design collection. Among excellent folk, congrats to my fellow awardees! https://t.co/SlXByPTosp
74 years ago today, the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. There are some pictures of this event from the air, and a few from the ground, and many of the aftermath. But this is the one I find most affecting. pic.twitter.com/xPD7DPpkkL
Ongoing attempt at producing GAN imagery without using the generator;
Usually when people make art using GANs they throw out the discriminator after training- i really wanted to throw out the generator instead and see what the discriminator knows about the structure of the body. pic.twitter.com/ALViKWJCxG
Some think people must “believe” in climate change in order to care about the issue, but this study suggests that people can work toward climate adaptations without necessarily “believing in” climate change or seeing the issue through a climate change frame.
“Many people think that belief in climate change is a necessary precursor to action on climate change, that only by understanding the enormous scale of climate change will people develop the sense of urgency to craft solutions quickly and the commitment to carry them through,” Orlove said.
But he and his colleagues found the community frame can also be a way to encourage people who “don’t believe in climate change” to work toward solutions. Orlove found people were inspired to participate in projects to help the community adapt to climate change when they believed these projects would help strengthen their community and advance it.
He also notes the language used in messaging is crucial, and he believes people may feel more connected to the concept of resilience rather than adaptation. “Resilience speaks more directly to the deeply-felt wish that communities will continue to thrive and flourish,” Orlove said. Being aware of language and messaging and what local communities want and need is crucial to successful climate communication.
Shuetso Sato (65) has no formal training as a graphic designer, but his handmade transit signs, made from pieces of colored duct tape, are considered works of art.
The desert libraries of Timbuktu are well known, and have been the subject of global concern. Almost all the manuscripts have now been removed to Bamako. But there’s another, largely forgotten ancient desert library in neighbouring Mauritania, in the ghost town of Chinguetti. 1/7 pic.twitter.com/9giM6OoyHy
“Can machines think?” Surprised to read that #Turing considered telepathy (for which he claimed the evidence was “overwhelming”) to be the strongest possibility against the view that the (retroactively-named) Turing Test could provide an affirmative answer. pic.twitter.com/XDWUvCSeAJ
— Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H (@PeterSjostedtH) July 30, 2019
The top image is a fictitious weather report imagining what the weather would be like in 2050 for a 2014 French TV documentary about climate change.
The bottom image is the real weather report from last week pic.twitter.com/wBpqq08LGN
— Emily ‘Bergson tragic’ Herring (@EtheHerring) July 30, 2019
I recently had the opportunity to visit an Arctic research station. One day we traveled four hours by speedboat to a stretch of exposed permafrost. The ongoing thaw had created a bizarre landscape: spongy terraces, hillocks of soil, disintegrating cliffs & scalloped walls of ice pic.twitter.com/zsezWheIr6
Pynchon on the secularisation of Sloth, as a sin no longer against God but “against a particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible—that is, against clock time, which got everybody early to bed and early to rise.” pic.twitter.com/r9CI67MiHA
I’m so obsessed with mine and @MelanieKKing & @SapphireGoss’s collaboration on micro/macro constellations and flipping the sky and the earth that I can’t even socialise like a normal person I just take a photo of someone’s beer because it looks like the moon pic.twitter.com/Ys5XKytNNf
The opposite of complexity is not simplicity, it’s reductionism. There’s nothing wrong with the reductionist method so long as we don’t confuse the method with how the world actually works.
the area 51 thing but someone makes an event called “Don’t Go To Work, They Can’t Fire All of Us” and then we trick everyone into a general strike by calling it a “meme”
— mike from summeяbruise (the band).com (@summerbruise69) July 27, 2019
Megadroughts – defined as intense droughts that last for decades or longer – once plagued the Desert Southwest. In fact, from the 9th to the 15th centuries, at least a dozen medieval megadroughts occurred across the region, scientists said.
Now, a study suggests that because of the drying influence of climate change, megadroughts could return to the region.
Megadroughts are defined more by their duration than their severity. They are extreme dry spells that can last for a decade or longer, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
They’ve parched the West, including present-day California, long before Europeans settled the region in the 1800s.
How do scientists know how wet or dry it was centuries ago? Though no weather records exist before the late 1800s, scientists can examine paleoclimatic “proxy data,” such as tree rings and lake sediment, to find out how much – or little – rain fell hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
If scientists can understand why megadroughts happened in the past, it can help better predict whether, how and where they might happen in the future, the new study said.
“In our paper, we present the first comprehensive theory for what caused historical megadroughts, which happened during the medieval period but not after about the year 1600,” said study lead author Nathan Stieger of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “We find that they were caused by severe and frequent La Niñas, a warm Atlantic Ocean, and a net increase in energy from the sun.”
The study also suggests an increasing risk of future megadroughts in the American Southwest because of climate change.
“I reflect now that the earth is only a pebble flicked off accidentally from the face of the sun and that there is no life anywhere in the abysses of space.” pic.twitter.com/8BRjkAN0f5
Tens of millions people in the Western Europe are experiencing the heat of the #climatecrisis as temperature records are being shattered across Europe.
Yesterday was the 65th anniversary of Operation Moon Bounce. In 1954, James Trexler spoke into a microphone at our Stump Neck radio antenna facility, and his words “bounced” back 2.5 seconds later after traveling 500k miles. First transmit and return beyond the ionosphere. 🌕🎧 pic.twitter.com/rKRrYnSyZV
— U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (@USNRL) July 25, 2019
