Hands up if you think the 10,000 Year Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Markers Project (“THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR”) also works as a universal New Yorker cartoon caption in this year 2019.
Wikipedia has a list of gods of time. Damn. 30 years ago this would have been many tedious trips to the library, and *if* you got lucky you might have found a reference work containing such a list. Sometimes you just have to stop and marvel https://t.co/R1Y8oYNsCc
In one year, a single acre of black soldier fly larvae can transform any kind of organic waste (Cafeteria refuse, manure, even toxic algae) into more protein than 3,000 acres of cattle or 130 acres of soybeans!!! pic.twitter.com/Yfid9rsRdg
A new report from the Institute For the Future on “state-sponsored trolling” documents the rise and rise of government-backed troll armies who terrorize journalists and opposition figures with seemingly endless waves of individuals who bombard their targets with vile vitriol, from racial slurs to rape threats.
The report traces the origin of the phenomenon to a series of high-profile social media opposition bids that challenged the world’s most restrictive regimes, from Gezi Park in Turkey to the Arab Spring.
After the initial rebellions were put down, authoritarians studied and adapted the tactics that made them so effective, taking a leaf out of US intelligence agencies’ playbook by buying or developing tools that would allow paid trolls to impersonate enormous crowds of cheering, loyal cyber-warriors.
After being blindsided by social media, the authoritarians found it easy to master it: think of Cambodia, where a bid to challenge the might of the ruling party begat a Facebook-first strategy to suppress dissent, in which government authorities arrest and torture anyone who challenges them using their real name, and then gets Facebook to disconnect anyone who uses a pseudonym to avoid retaliation.
The rise of authoritarian troll armies has been documented before. Google’s Jigsaw division produced a detailed report on the phenomenon, but decided not to publish it. Bloomberg, who have produced an excellent investigative supplement to the IFTF report that draws on a leaked copy of the Google research, implies that something nefarious happened to convince Google to suppress its research.
The IFTF and Bloomberg reports arrive just as Twitter has announced the deletion of 70,000,000 accounts alleged to be linked to authoritarian information control, and just as Facebook announced that it would delete “misinformation that incites violence.”
Implicated in the Bloomberg article and IFTF report are the campaigns of India’s Narendra Modi, Malta’s Labour Party, Argentine president Mauricio Macri, Austria’s Heinz-Christian Strache, Azerbaijan’s ruling families, Bahrain’s ruling elite, China’s Communist Party, the Ethiopian government, the outgoing Mexican president Peña Nieto, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, Russia and Putin, the Saudi royals, Turkey’s Erdogan, the People’s Army of Vietnam, South Korea’s internal spy agency, former Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, and the Venezuelan state.
The campaigns have striking similarities, suggesting that they may have a common contractor or state-sponsored supplier, and/or that they are closely observing one another and learning from each other.
1. Chill, eat, sleep
2. Basic triage ordering to get to minimum functional potential
3. Escapist leisure to more orderly places (TV/fiction)
4. Advanced order restoration, short of OCD
5. Energy reboot with exercise
6. Low-stakes creative work-play (poiesis)
Looking back, landing on the moon wasn’t just our job, it was a historic opportunity to prove to the world America’s can-do spirit. I’m proud to serve the country that gave me this historic opportunity. Today belongs to you. We must hold the memory of #Apollo11 close. #Apollo50th
Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hon’s razor: Never attribute to bureaucratic incompetence that which is adequately explained by executive-driven institutional lack of competency and unwillingness for systemic reform.
The glacier “Ok” used to be a glacier but lost its status as such in 2014 when it had shrunk too much. This is a brand new memorial shield in its honour. #climatechangepic.twitter.com/0YlIewvDJe
For the past nine weeks, the Star’s Undeniable project has brought readers to the frontlines of climate change in Canada. In every region chronicled in the 16-part series, climate change is already affecting people, infrastructure, wildlife and the natural environment. The effects of a warmer climate are, and will continue to be, felt in every facet of Canadian society, from farms, fisheries, schools and hospitals, to municipal, provincial and federal governments, local businesses and the largest corporations.
Canada is getting hotter. Between 1948 and 2016, Canada’s annual average temperature over land increased by 1.7 degrees, about double the global warming rate.
Cities and towns aren’t ready. Across Canada, municipalities are struggling to deal with aging infrastructure built for a different time as temperatures rise and precipitation becomes more intense.
Bad news for the Arctic. Northern Canada is warming faster than the rest of the country. The annual mean temperature in Canada’s north increased by 2.3 degrees between 1948 and 2016, about three times the global rate. This warming trend will continue, even if global greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, with average winter temperatures rising by as much as 4 degrees in the Arctic by 2050.
The way we farm and fish is changing.Climate change is presenting both challenges and opportunities to those who make their living from the land and sea.
Land is disappearing into the sea. While erosion is a natural process, rising ocean temperatures can contribute to increased storminess, resulting in larger and more powerful waves that eat into coastlines.
Indigenous peoples of Canada are being hit hard. Climate change is profoundly affecting Canada’s Indigenous peoples, whose cultures and livelihoods are closely linked to the land, water, snow and ice.
Wildfire seasons are becoming longer and the flames are getting bigger. While no individual event can be fully linked to climate change, wildfires have increased in frequency, intensity, size and duration as the climate has warmed.
Floods will get bigger and more frequent. Climate models are predicting that floods across the country will get larger, more frequent and more destructive.
It’s going to rain a lot more. Climate models predict that precipitation will increase, on average, across Canada. In many areas, precipitation has already increased, with a shift towards more rainfall and less snowfall. Atmospheric rivers, which can dumpintense rainfall in short periods of time, are expected to get a lot bigger, and make landfall on the west coast more often.
Balancing business interests with climate change mitigation will be a challenge. There is an irony of climate change in that while it brings with it a host of negative consequences, it could also present great economic opportunities.
Cornwall Council declared #ClimateEmergency in Jan. & plans a 20,000 acre “Forest For Cornwall”. Good for wildlife, people & climate. I esp. like that it’s distributed planting: new trees “on our streets, in our hedgerows, new woodlands & forested areas”.https://t.co/eksJHPHH5I
Been experimenting with steganographic approaches to image making lately. What are we permitted to See, Know / and what can we conceal in plain sight? pic.twitter.com/2oftvE23LD
I am so thankful and excited to win the incredible #CollideInternational award and residency and cant wait for my time at #Cern, its more than a dream come true.
Besides that, it means so much to me and my research to obtain acknowledgement for my research from this institution. pic.twitter.com/6eJJ0tLZn0
Wonderful tour of @SciGalleryLon by the brilliant @_johnoshea.
Their Dark Matter exhibition is fascinating and beautifully presented.
A topic dear to my heart, intelligently handled. pic.twitter.com/pSDXSBtP7J
“Nearly every book has the same architecture—cover, spine, pages—but you open them onto worlds & gifts far beyond what paper & ink are. Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles…”
(Rebecca Solnit)
The Turing Police, but they don’t go after AI that cross “the Turing line” and become sentient, they go after inappropriate usages of Turing complete languages in domains where doing so is fundamentally insecure
Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini - which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively - but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Reservoirs topped with ‘shade balls’ are my new obsession -their geometrical configuration is always shifting like the sentient ocean in Solaris. ‘How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?’ pic.twitter.com/9waFNCwuIR
I’d like to file a feature request on the English language. For the sake of source code aesthetics one of the word pairs transmit/receive, send/receive, or read/write should be updated such that each word has the same number of letters. Prio 4.
Coded Matter(s): Terra Fiction | Stage II of Worldbuilding
FIBER and Brakke Grond present: Coded Matter(s): Terra Fiction. September 27, 2018, Amsterdam.
Speakers:
• Pippa Goldschmidt
• E.J. Swift
• Jay Springett
• Ivan Henriques
• Miha Turšič
• Maja Kuzmanovic& Nik Gaffney (FoAM)
• Films: Margaux Hendriksen, Matthew C. Wilson
The idea of terraformation was once the domain of writers and artists. We’re entering a new space race to colonise and terraform the universe. Silicon Valley companies like SpaceX, Google and Planetary Resources are in the front seat. As we edge closer towards inevitable environmental collapse these big tech companies are scrambling to colonise new habitable worlds on distant planets. By shooting a cherry-red Tesla car into space, they shape the future narrative of man in space. But what are we leaving behind on Earth? If today’s technological leaps aren’t improving our natural environments than what legacy will we inherit in worlds abroad?
Nicole Prause is a sex researcher who wanted to design a gender-neutral orgasm-measuring tool that would fit in the anus and detect and measure pelvic contractions but all the buttplugs she tried to modify (“We ordered like 20 of these butt plugs off Amazon, and it messed up my recommendation engine for all time”) were designed to be pistoned in and out, and thus had a taper that made it prone to popping out at the moment of orgasm.
Prause tweeted about her troubles and forged a partnership with a German cosplayer who had extensive 3D printing experience; they designed a research-optimized butt-plug they call the “anal pneumatic base for psychophysiology research” and released it as an open source hardware design that you can download from Thingiverse and 3D print at home or work.
Classic contributions includingKingsley the Partick Thistle mascot;‘yer maw’ jokes; ‘yer da sells Avon’ jokes; anything Lewis Capaldi tweets, and “maw bought aldi shower gel that smells like fairy liquid so I’ve been cutting about all day smelling like a fucking plate” (@adamfraser14, August 2015).
For many people both outside Scotland and within, Twitter has provided a brand new view into the Scots language and its varieties in all their sweary, hysterical, sometimes incomprehensible glory. Has the platform spearheaded a resurgence amongst its young users or is this something more profound altogether?
The Scots language has been spoken in Scotland for centuries and still exists across the country today. It’s comprised of numerous different dialects – which can differ from each other quite dramatically – and is one of three official languages in Scotland, alongside English and Gaelic. In 2001 it was officially recognised under theEuropean Charter for Minority Languages.
“Scots was the national language of a country that doesn’t exist anymore,” explains writer and presenter Alistair Heather, who writes a Scots column in Scotland’s The National newspaper. “As Scotland was amalgamated into Great Britain, Scots fell away from being a national language because it didn’t have a nation anymore.
Imperfect but useful therapies have been the rule, even as we refine our understanding of diseases. In spite of criticism, antidepressants are still the best available treatment for depression https://t.co/TkvqyEcvVgpic.twitter.com/W7xYuxPDlW
Slightly annoying that ‘tristinction’ is not a word (it should be, considering 'distinction’ comes from Ancient Greek δίς [dís, “twice”]). 'Threefold distinction’ is a poor alternative.
— Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H (@PeterSjostedtH) July 11, 2019
I’m on a mission today to reconnect / follow up on leads / collaborate - apologies if you’re waiting for a response (it’ll come/ nudge me), and secondly, if you want to reach out to work together, now’s the time (my PhD is over! Disclaimer: cant promise anything, but will reply)
Vladimir Jankélévitch. Wrote a wonderful book on Bergson that influenced the latter’s own thought, and he’s one of the rare philosophers to take music seriously.
All radicals should be encouraged to form institutions. Much moral high-ground posturing and insufferable certitude are rooted in not yet having reproduced pre-ideological institutional pathologies that are the root cause of most things they critique on ideological grounds.
— Venkatesh “Tactical in LA” Rao (@vgr) July 7, 2019
The Facsimile Machine, rejected by multiple publishers in the mid 1960s , before its author finally abandoned the ms, was a shockingly prescient but fundamentally undramatic anticipation of fax technology.
In MobilBye: Attacking ADAS with Camera Spoofing, a group of Ben Gurion security researchers describe how they were able to defeat a Renault Captur’s “Level 0” autopilot (Level 0 systems advise human drivers but do not directly operate cars) by following them with drones that projected images of fake roadsigns for a 100ms instant – too short for human perception, but long enough for the autopilot’s sensors.
Such an attack would leave no physical evidence behind and could be used to trick cars into making maneuvers that compromised the safety or integrity of their passengers and other users of the road – from unexpected swerves to sudden speed-changes to detours into unsafe territory.
As Geoff Manaugh writes on BLDGBLOG, “They are like flickering ghosts only cars can perceive, navigational dazzle imperceptible to humans.”
The “imperceptible to humans” part is the most interesting thing about this: we tend to think of electronic sensors’ ability to exceed human sensory capacity as a feature: but when you’re relying on a “human in the loop” to sanity-check an algorithm’s interpretations of the human-legible world, attackers’ ability to show the computer things that the human can’t see is a really interesting and gnarly problem.
Word of the day: “nefelibata” –– literally a “cloud-walker”; that is, a daydreamer, one who wanders lost in thought or wonder (Portuguese; poetic. From the Ancient Greek νεφελοβάτης, nephelobátēs, “one who walks the clouds”).
Also–– esp. in art or literature––a rule-breaker. pic.twitter.com/bnZg5VvsrO
— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) July 6, 2019
“Spinoza’s system is a white pantheism; that of M. Bataille is a black pantheism.”
– Sartre going for a sick burn but actually making Bataille sound great.
“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
Regarding this “plant forests!” thing: I’m going to plug Joe Mercer’s @RCAarchitecture ADS1 thesis project from 2017/18 which argued a new belt of food infrastructure around London could allow for substantial reforestation and rewilding https://t.co/50gQVYUecvpic.twitter.com/Z7Yymlsgcc
Switching from clay to plastic at the scale of Indian tea-drinking was such an all-round disaster: environment, design/experience, flavor…
I still have these in memoriam. https://t.co/rzSvhLurnVpic.twitter.com/dDlPnAxX2Z
Shit, just realized I operate with an unconscious 2x2 in how I engage with people online. X-axis: harmless to dangerous, Y-axis, can’t take seriously/can take seriously. Dangerous+can’t take seriously is the basic avoidance category if you want to have a good time online.
— Venkatesh “Live from DTLA” Rao (@vgr) July 5, 2019
day 35: the algorithm now correctly identifies human figures and faces, but continues to insist that all brains are clocks 🤔 pic.twitter.com/I78kVTiQf3
“First of all, I am a real Minimalist, because I don’t do very much. I know some minimalists who call themselves minimalist, but they do loads of minimalism. That is cheating. I really don’t do very much.”—Robert Wyatt pic.twitter.com/r3MZMeAMbv
I introduced a remarkable person (Ai Weiwei) to a remarkable tree (the Great Oriental Plane Tree) this afternoon. Unsurprisingly, they got on very well. “It is a family”, said AWW on entering the tree’s green-gold space; just so, a branching, rooting, tangled entity. pic.twitter.com/bxqJhNin7J
— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) July 4, 2019
“The White House allowed staffers to enter a lottery to receive up to 10 tickets per person — a sign of the administration’s rush to fill up that space on the mall” https://t.co/bSeB6l0zP1
Our indoor perma-farm is thriving! Applying the principles of circular farming, reuse of waste, companion planting and soil health for indoor agriculture 🌱🌾 pic.twitter.com/wzZMAItM41
Cool article with some great quotes from @Monica_Gagliano going out to bat for our more than human relatives “Gagliano is having none of it” // https://t.co/Tk30PFiXj4
— Your roots are in the infinite (@thejaymo) July 3, 2019
sound nerds: there’s a new auditory illusion. if you replace a repeating texture with white noise, your ear hallucinates the continuation of the texture (on the scale of seconds). i imagine this explains some nuances behind shoegaze and noise music https://t.co/3yUe2hNFhP
The sense of time I have as a millennial is so weird…
1970: About 30 years ago
1980: About 20 years ago
1990: About 10 years ago
2000: About 10 years ago
2010: About 1,000 years ago
2016: About 10,000 years ago
2018: About 1,000 years ago
Last week: About 1,000 years ago
Ever notice how the humanities and social sciences are expected to understand scientific research method but scientists don’t have to understand ours? In other news, it’s hella difficult writing a conference abstract about discourse analysis that scientists will accept.
— anne would rather be with the 🐑🐑🐑 (@annegalloway) July 1, 2019
Biologists analyzed 150 samples from across the U.K. and concluded that British knotweed was all a clone of that original plant, now one of the world’s largest. The DNA was identical. Not just one species but a single plant had conquered the entire UK. https://t.co/pp5IaMiIFO
vns matrix archive is finally live. coded by the brilliant @francesdath the slime archive has taken over a year to build and has about 120 pgs (so far) of essays, projects, events, exhibitions + a hectic yet restrained palette that will phosphor burn you into the next timejump. pic.twitter.com/POc56GYwkY
People sometimes ask how’d you deal with corporations w/out a state. W/out a state & its legal structure there are no corporations. They’d just be gangs. The Medellín “cartel” isn’t a cartel, it’s precisely that: a corporation outside the legal framework of the state.
