The Greenland ice sheet is currently going through a major melting this week, covering almost half its surface — unprecedented in its extent for this early in the year.
bought a Chinese SIM card from some guys who snuck onto the containership when we were in port in Ningbo (after convincing them I wasn’t the captain), used it to upload this video of mobile cranes that I’d dubbed techno over using my iPad https://t.co/K7RHJpaJwihttps://t.co/9tG46KQbjy
By implication: by killing off RSS aggregation, Google are responsible for Trump, Brexit, and the rise of neo-nazi revanchism on a global scale (not to mention sundry other derangements caused by poisoning the well of discourse on the net). https://t.co/UQnMy0aNsC
a brief history of bits of Chongqing urbanism “going viral” - common themes: verticality, density, disturbance of living conditions, speculation, speed of circulation.
When you choose to drive a stick-shift or knit socks or use medium and pigment instead of digital images (or plate-film instead of CCDs) or any number of other things, you’re not just longing for some irretrievable past. You are using the materials of the past in the present.
Object recognition algorithms sold by tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, perform worse when asked to identify items from lower-income countries.
These are the findings of a new study conducted by Facebook’s AI lab, which shows that AI bias can not only reproduce inequalities within countries, but also between them.
In the study (which we spotted via Jack Clark’s Import AI newsletter), researchers tested five popular off-the-shelf object recognition algorithms — Microsoft Azure, Clarifai, Google Cloud Vision, Amazon Rekognition, and IBM Watson — to see how well each program identified household items collected from a global dataset.
The dataset included 117 categories (everything from shoes to soap to sofas) and a diverse array of household incomes and geographic locations (from a family in Burundi making $27 a month to a family in Ukraine with a monthly income of $10,090).
The researchers found that the object recognition algorithms made around 10 percent more errors when asked to identify items from a household with a $50 monthly income compared to those from a household making more than $3,500. The absolute difference in accuracy was even greater: the algorithms were 15 to 20 percent better at identifying items from the US compared to items from Somalia and Burkina Faso.
These findings were “consistent across a range of commercial cloud services for image recognition,” write the authors….
Data from facial recognition scans performed by US Customs and Border Patrol on travelers crossing at an unnamed lander border point (an anonymous source says it’s a US-Canada crossing) have been stolen by hacker or hackers unknown.
The CBP doesn’t know how many records were leaked, but estimates the number at less than 100k. The CBP refused to state which contractor breached the data, but the memo it sent to the Washington Post about the breach was titled “CBP Perceptics Public Statement” and since Perceptics is a CBP contractor that does facial recognition (as well as license plate cameras and other forms of surveillance), it’s a good bet that Perceptics is the culprit – especially since Perceptics had hundreds of gigs of data breached and dumped last month by a person or persons going by “Boris the Bullet-Dodger” (it’s possible that the facial recognition database was part of that dump.
The CBP says the stolen facial recognition data isn’t circulating, so maybe it wasn’t part of the Boris the Bullet-Dodger dump, or maybe they’re just lying or incompetent (see above, re: a memo entitled “CBP Perceptics Public Statement”).
As Brian Barrett points out on Wired, the fact that this was a contractor breach shouldn’t make you feel any more secure – the most sensitive data being collected by US government agencies is being stored insecurely by grifty Beltway Bandits who are leaking it all over the fucking internet.
CBP collects tons of facial recognition data at border crossings, airports, etc, both overtly (by making you scan your face) and covertly (using CCTV footage to feed its databases).
You can always opt out by simply not having a face.
Growing up, Subgenius tropes were a secret recognition symbol for identifying fellow mutants, and I consumed their materials voraciously – I not only memorized the Brag of the Subgenius, I also laboriously transcribed it to a set of my bedsheets using fabric crayons so I could sleep under the holy writ.
The kit arrived last week and it did not disappoint. Naturally, it included a signed, personalized copy of the Book of the Subgenius:
And then there was the folder full of goodies, including a minister’s card and a handsome badge:
Owning this material makes you an official, paid-up priest of the Church of the Subgenius, though you need to send away to the Universal Life Church before you can start officiating weddings:
(If you’re too impatient to wait for the ULC, you can perform unofficial, short term marriages right away)
Once you’re fully clergified, the kit has you covered, with a ministerial guide:
A Doktorate to fill in and frame and display:
And a ton of small ads and other missionary materials to take down to the photocopy shop, cut and start leaving under peoples’ windshield wipers, etc (I’ve packed a supply in my travel bag to slip into the pages of Gideon bibles and Books of Mormon at the Marriott):
The kit also includes some holy relics, like the first and second Subgenius pamphlets (the little brochures that started it all):
Your official church vehicle and laptop will benefit from a selection of religious stickers:
And you can decorate your religious chapel with some swanky Dobbsart:
As well as a fine selection of inspirational broadsides, including The Brag (!):
If you’re going door-to-door to spread the good word about “Bob,” be sure to take these with you:
Look, we are living in some genuinely awful, fucked up, terrifying times. The fact that the Church of the Subgenius is still around and that Rev Stang is still deriving his living from the sale of this High Weirdness By Mail makes me as happy as anything in this world. Everyone should own a copy of the Book of Subgenius and all the other stuff that comes with it is such a fine and generous lagniappe that it restores my faith in humanity.
Saddam Hussein’s superyacht becomes marine research vessel
Saddam Hussein’s 82 metre superyacht Basrah Breeze is now being used by Iraqi marine researchers from the University of Basrah’s Marine Science Center. The scientists are using the yacht to explore the changing Persian Gulf. Built in 1981 by Danish shipyard Helsingor Vaerft for then president of Iraq Saddam Hussein, the luxury yacht was originally called the Qadissiyat Saddam. It cost $25 million to build but the yachts current captain, Hussein Ghazi Khalifa, said it would now it would cost four times that. The Basrah Breeze is not the first luxury yacht to be used for a different purpose and there is an increasing demand for expedition yachts among superyacht owners. With ocean conservation becoming more of a talking point, Fleet Miami have even offered the chance for guests to take part in a scientific learning experience while on charter.
Salamanders as rich prey for carnivorous plants in a nutrient‐poor northern bog ecosystem
“It was previously thought only tropical pitcher plants ate vertebrates. However, in the new paper published in the journal Ecology, biologists at the University of Guelph in Ontario describe finding Sarracenia pitcher plants in Algonquin Provincial Park that devour vertebrates, specifically salamanders.”
SATANS TORNADE LIVE = 01, 03, 05: DAT recording by Darryl Moore, using CASIO DA7 portable DAT recorder; 02, 04, 06: tape recording by Jules Leach, using a SONY TCM-77v portable tape recorder; @ Rough Trade Shop, Covent
Garden, London. June 12th 1999 https://t.co/2D5rkGBi8Q
A professor who advocates for sex with robots and ran as a candidate for Fraser Anning’s far-right micro-party at the May election, has been awarded a Queen’s birthday honour. Adrian Cheok was made a member of the Order of Australia for “significant service to international education”. Cheok initially joined the Palmer United party but quit to join Fraser Anning’s Conservative National party after he was told to “dumb down” his policies.
It sounds harsh, however we don’t need more people living marginally greener/more sustainable lifestyles. Now is not the time for ‘we have to start somewhere’, its time for identifying our most powerful leverage points and putting everything we each have behind those. https://t.co/SaWPxOqOQu
SIM swapping attacks involve tricking or bribing a phone company into assigning someone else’s phone number to you; once you have the number, you can intercept SMS-based two-factor authentication messages and use them to take over accounts.
Though SIM-swapping is laughably easy (thanks to lax security in the mobile phone industry), it’s still not fully automatable, and so SIM-swapping attacks usually target higher-value accounts, such as valuable social media handles, domain takeovers, and cryptocurrency wallet hacks.
Last weekend, parties unknown launched a wave of SIM-swap attacks against US cryptocurrency owners, succeeding in some cases, with at least one $100k score.
Some of the targets were saved by their use of hardware tokens or mobile apps for their two-factor authentication. 2Fa is generally very effective, even against targeted attacks; using a separate app or token is an extremely powerful form of security.
The “car wash” scandal that shook up Brazil’s politics led to the imprisonment of the beloved president Lula, followed swiftly by his neoliberal/looter successor Michael Temer, creating the political chaos that paved the way for the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a violent, homophobic, racist autocrat who advocates for torture/murder of his political opponents.
Despite all this, the car wash task-force was widely praised in Brazil and abroad for its apolitical devotion to rooting out corruption (and indeed, the task-force’s prosecutions also jailed some of the country’s richest, most powerful oligarchs).
But a new trove of leaked Telegram group-chats between federal prosecutors and judges (including the judge who put Lula in jail and went on to serve as Bolsonaro’s justice minister) reveal that the prosecutions were political, and were designed to keep Lula out of office and deliver political victories to far-right parties that had promised wealth-friendly policies of the sort that Bolsonaro has gone on to deliver.
Through the leaks, we learn that during Lula’s trials, the judge (now justice minister Sergio Moro) engaged in grossly improper secret conversations with the prosecutors, giving them advice on how to improve their chances of securing a guilty verdict. Subsequent to Lula’s conviction – after he was put into a secretive prison and held incommunicado – prosecutors conspired to undermine a court order granting an interview with Lula, seeking to either delay the interview until after elections (to help deliver a victory to Bolsonaro) or to add so many other reporters to the interview that nothing of substance could emerge.
It’s an incredibly important political scandal in one of the world’s largest countries, where a dictator is making ready to torch the planet by cutting down the Amazon to make way for his friends in agribusiness.
Today, I would like to commemorate an event which has laid a very profound impact on the internet.
Ten years ago on this day (
06/08/09), a forum website called
SomethingAwful held a photoshop contest titled “create paranormal images”. The contest would require participants to edit ordinary photographs into creepy-looking images, and then try to pass them off as authentic photos on other paranormal forums.
Two days later, on June 10th, a user by the name Victor Surge would find this thread, and become inspired. He submitted the two pictures above, featuring a tall, faceless monster which would stalk children, who would then disappear. He called his monster “the
Slender Man”.
After this initial post, Surge and others would expand on the character and the story, creating one of the internet’s most famous monsters. The Slender Man proved to be popular enough to spread to other websites, with 4chan, Deviantart, and TV Tropes all having their own Slender-Mania.
On June 20th of that same year, another user on the SomethingAwful forums found the Slender Man, and also wanted to contribute. Noticing nobody had made any videos yet of the monster, he sat down with some of his friends and planned out a video webseries involving a former college film student discovering and unravelling the mysteries surrounding Slender Man; this would become
Marble Hornets, one of the first horror-themed ARG’s of the internet.
That all happened ten years ago. Ten years of haunting the darkest corners of the internet, and Slender Man has built up a surprisingly dense resume, for a fictional monster. Several popular webseries, a couple hit games, at least two movies, even inspiring other characters in seperate series like the Silence in
Dr Who and the Enderman in
Minecraft. And all this within a ten-year period.
I think this just attests to how much humans can be inspired by an idea. From a small handful of edited photographs, we collectively constructed a new monster which lurks in our nightmares, and now it almost seems as natural as the horror mythos he was based on. For better or worse, the Slender Man seems to be here to stay.
Happy Birthday, Slendy! Here’s to hoping you continue to be both terrifying and terrific!
Huh. Been a while since I’ve seen monotonically increasing compressed file size tell a story. Last time was when it became clear the easiest way to see which of a group of photos was in focus, was to find the biggest JPEG. Focus blur is quite compressible! pic.twitter.com/7WRRcQmUmu
“Time is out of joint. Dispersed. Diffracted. Time is diffracted through itself. It is not only the nature of time in its disjointedness that is at stake, but
also disjointedness itself.” (Karen Barad 2010)
The ultimate limit of human endurance has been worked out by scientists analysing a 3,000 mile run, the Tour de France and other elite events. They showed the cap was 2.5 times the body’s resting metabolic rate, or 4,000 calories a day for an average person. Anything higher than that was not sustainable in the long term. The research, by Duke University, also showed pregnant women were endurance specialists, living at nearly the limit of what the human body can cope with. The study started with the Race Across the USA in which athletes ran 3,080 miles from California to Washington DC in 140 days. The study found a pattern between the length of a sporting event and energy expenditure - the longer the event, the harder it is to burn through the calories. So people can go far beyond their base metabolic rate while doing a short bout of exercise, it becomes unsustainable in the long term. The study also shows that while running a marathon may be beyond many, it is nowhere near the limit of human endurance. Marathon (just the one) runners used 15.6 times their resting metabolic rate. Cyclists during the 23 days of the Tour de France used 4.9 times their resting metabolic rate. A 95-day Antarctic trekker used 3.5 times the resting metabolic rate. During pregnancy, women’s energy use peaks at 2.2 times their resting metabolic rate. “You can do really intense stuff for a couple of days, but if you want to last longer then you have to dial it back,” Dr Herman Pontzer, from Duke University, told BBC News. “Every data point, for every event, is all mapped onto this beautifully crisp barrier of human endurance. "Nobody we know of has ever pushed through it.” The researchers argue the 2.5 figure may be down to the human digestive system, rather than anything to do with the heart, lungs or muscles. They found the body cannot digest, absorb and process enough calories and nutrients to sustain a higher level of energy use. The body can use up its own resources burning through fat or muscle mass - which can be recovered afterwards - in shorter events. But in extreme events - at the limits of human exhaustion - the body has to balance its energy use, the researchers argue.
When the renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado took over family land in the state of Minas Gerais, instead of the tropical paradise that he remembered as a child, he found the trees cut down and the wildlife gone. He was devastated. It was 1994 and he had just returned from a traumatic assignment reporting on the genocide in Rwanda, he told a meeting of religious leaders discussing climate change in Paris last week. “The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed,” said Salgado. “Only about 0.5% of the land was covered in trees. Then my wife had a fabulous idea to replant this forest. And when we began to do that, then all the insects and birds and fish returned and, thanks to this increase of the trees I, too, was reborn – this was the most important moment.” Salgado and his family set up the Instituto Terra and have now planted more than 2 million trees, transforming the environment. In doing so, he says, he has found one answer to climate change – as well as creative inspiration.
In the spring of 2017, immediately after the release of the Australian band Cloud Control’s third album, Zone, the band’s keyboard player, Heidi Lenffer, was contemplating what their upcoming tour would cost. But this time she wasn’t just thinking about the money; she was thinking about emissions. Independent bands are used to running on a shoestring budget – a carbon-conscious Lenffer wanted Cloud Control to run a more environmentally efficient operation, too. She began asking climate scientists in the field, and connected with Dr Chris Dey from Areté Sustainability. Dey crunched the numbers for Cloud Control’s two-week tour, playing 15 clubs and theatres from Byron Bay to Perth. He found that it would produce about 28 tonnes of emissions – roughly equivalent to what an average household produces in a year. And that was just the national leg of an album tour that would take the band to the US three times. “I had suspected that all of this flying, and all of the energy that goes into tours, can’t be very good for the environment – but there was no solution that existed beyond carbon offsetting,” Lenffer says. Offsetting is essentially an attempt at equalisation: when you offset your flights, you try to compensate for the carbon by donating to a program to suck it out of the atmosphere, via tree planting or sequestration someplace else. Lenffer wanted to aim higher. Partnering with the superannuation fund Future Super, and the developer Impact Investment Group, Lenffer has established FEAT. (Future Energy Artists): a platform that officially launches on Wednesday and will allow musicians to build and invest in their own solar farms.
Started in 2012 and overseen primarily by Archive employee Jake Johnson, the internetarchive client (which is generally just called “ia”) is both a set of libraries and a command-line program for doing a wide range of activities and actions with the archive without having to come in through the website. There’s a range of advantages and differences from using the web interface, mostly that it can be called as a command-line request, and return the results (success, failure, other information) right into your scripts. It is coded to be in lock-step with our APIs and system, and does its best to respect capacity as well as return informative messages about success or errors.
Defined as: experiences viscerally revealing the reality of dukkha to you for the first time (in both everyday Hindi sense of sadness, and Buddhist theology sense of existential suffering).
I also considered indukhtrination.
— Venkatesh “is moving to LA in a few weeks” Rao (@vgr) June 7, 2019
DeepSteward, an unsupervised field agent. Built by humans but left to interpret local trees, local plants, local animals, local geographcal features as it sees fit. Part of the ongoing Zoöp experiment: https://t.co/VOQyI83DfFhttps://t.co/nQXNaZFm8U
It was cloudy with a chance of ladybugs on Tuesday evening, according to radar footage from the National Weather Service, which showed a swarm of the colorful beetles heading south through San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
The weather service’s San Diego office posted a series of images on Tuesday night, showing a mass moving southward from San Bernardino County towards the western tip of Riverside County.
The movement, one official said, was a swarm of ladybugs.
“If you look at the satellite for that area, there weren’t a lot of clouds,” said Casey Oswant, a weather service meteorologist in the San Diego office. “This radar return was much larger than what those clouds could’ve been producing.”
Oswant said weather spotters in the San Bernardino area verified that the radar returns were coming from ladybugs rather than clouds. The “swarm,” she said, was not very dense.
Oswant said she was not able to verify where the ladybugs came from or where they were heading. She said, however, she saw the ladybugs moving southward as of Wednesday morning. They were off the radar’s perimeters before noon on Wednesday.
i did a long write up of everything i tried, including stuff that didn’t make it in. UMAP, triplet loss, RNNs.. it’s such a joy to work with sound + ML to encounter these aliens who have been around for millions of years https://t.co/Tf6Bbry7fl
‘Vinyl records these days amount to one of two extremes: either dusty, embarrassing garbage or advanced-level consumables. If a record isn’t something so valueless you can’t give it away, it’s the signifier of taste and an ambitious, highly tailored social life.’
There is a low production quality Australian spy comedy film called DEBS where the main character has a lesbian affair with the hot villain. In the end she quits spy school to run away with the villain to be a gay artist.
“Omnicide examines the potential for every idea, without exception, to undergo this deadly extrapolation—to be wielded not as truth, but as a nascent compulsion which, at the limit, will command the razing of everything in its path” pic.twitter.com/vdsNUwiprS
This is the mass damper of the Taipei 101 skyscraper: it has a mass of 728 tons and a diameter of 5.4 meters. It helps stabilize the building in high winds and this is the record movement realized during typhoon Soudelor with 160 km/h winds https://t.co/e0MxA0iOG5pic.twitter.com/riHgXD4Csr
It’s weird how the term futurist went from meaning an Italian proto-fascist huffing petrol fumes and dying at 28 when they crash a Maserati into a wall to a Silicon Valley computer toucher with BoingBoing on their RSS feed that rides an e-bike
“The possibility that our grandchildren could be living forever among the ruins of a much wealthier and more peaceful world seems almost inconceivable from the vantage point of the present day, so much do we still live within the propaganda of human progress.” - @dwallacewellshttps://t.co/OyhAao0wiF
‘Criminalizing Compassion’: Trial Begins for Humanitarian Facing 20 Years in Prison for Giving Water to Migrants in Arizona Desert - https://t.co/OlVmOQ3Yvj via @commondreams
Exhibit A: Zuckerberg announces ‘THE FUTURE IS PRIVATE’ in front of large crowd
Exhibit B: Facebook’s official response to class action over Cambridge Analytica breach - “No expectation of privacy” on Facebook because “it’s the opposite of private.” 🤔 https://t.co/gj4e7XzRXn
From Google’s AI Guidebook, but relevant to any design process: “The most important decisions you’ll make are: Who are your users? What are their values? Which problem should you solve for them? How will you solve that problem? How will you know when the experience is “done”?”
“We are here by the grace of trees & forests. They make our atmosphere, clean our water & sustain the cycles of life that permit us. Just begin to see them. Notice the million complex beautiful behaviors that have slipped right past you.” (Richard Powers) https://t.co/o5kRg18FCLpic.twitter.com/xPHFZOT7Qb
— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) May 29, 2019
Commuted home by boat today and the stinky harbour fish store has been emptied and filled with print outs of all the climate change research references from the IPCC report, with a future tide marker nonchalantly placed outside. (Bonus boat dog) pic.twitter.com/BOlNqYD3jf
UK-based speculative designers: As part of a project with @nesta_uk we’re looking for 5 of you to turn scenarios of community resilience in emergencies into reality thru artefacts. Deadline for application: 10 June. See call for designers here: https://t.co/IkbqXTqbXD Pls RT
Following guidance from the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy and the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the AWG have completed a binding vote to affirm some of the key questions that were voted on and agreed at the IGC Cape Town meeting in 2016. The details are as follows:
No. of potential voting members: 34 No. required to be quorate (60%): 21 No. of votes received: 33 (97% of voting membership)
Q1. Should the Anthropocene be treated as a formal chrono-stratigraphic unit defined by a GSSP?
29 voted in favour (88% of votes cast); 4 voted against; no abstentions
Q2. Should the primary guide for the base of the Anthropocene be one of the stratigraphic signals around the mid-twentieth century of the Common Era?
29 voted in favour (88% of votes cast); 4 voted against; no abstentions
Both votes exceed the 60% supermajority of cast votes required to be agreed by the Anthropocene Working Group as the official stance of the group and will guide their subsequent analysis.
The ‘Anthropocene’ has developed a range of meanings among vastly different scholarly communities. Here we examine the Anthropocene as a geological time (chronostratigraphic) unit and potential addition to the Geological Time Scale, consistent with Crutzen and Stoermer’s original proposal. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is charged with this task as a component body of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) which is itself a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS).
Future-predicting life hack: find people who are interested in similar things as you, but orbiting the void closer-in than you. Put them in your superforecasting SIGINT portfolio and then just wait.
Authoritarian Right: Seeing Like a State
Authoritarian Left: Seeing Like a Cell
Libertarian Right: Seeing Like a Token
Libertarian Left: Seeing Like a Network
You - we - could organise the human race to save itself fairly easily. We have the technology, or we are reasonably close. Plenty of matter, plenty of brains.
But our command and control systems are completely hosed. It’s like trying to build a boat during an anaphylactic shock.
Times of execution: the schedulings, timings, predictions and augurs, all of the temporalities which have to do with execution, and the ‘times’ the current era or aeon of the executable, the sentence. pic.twitter.com/YZti1g9Hoe
Hey weirdos, I feel like surely someone here has the answer. I’m trying to clean a lot of congealed lubricant from a fish tank, it says it’s water soluble but so far - nothings really cutting it. What cleaning product would be best for such a task?
I really want to have a github-like service, dedicated exclusively to ecological/regenerative open-source projects. If that sounds interesting to you, lets talk. https://t.co/tRQeJoS4rv
GB has now gone over 8 days without burning coal to generate our electricity. Another record & longest ever!
Love this graphic from @guardian demonstrating how quickly coal has been coming off the grid. All the green lines are 0% coal days - the first was just two years ago. pic.twitter.com/61sfJlNwFO
“How to be Here and There at the Same Time”. Something I wrote for the Nordic Pavilion catalogue at #VeniceBiennale and their theme Weather Report. https://t.co/MyIS7oY5hw
I have frankly an enormous amount of time for an ambiguously worded Dezeen editorial appearing to describe Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher’s world cup stadium for Qatar as a “3D printed suicide machine” pic.twitter.com/aT2OCkIigx
Its the same mesh generation system i used to generate the parts for the insects I was generating a month or so ago. #Unity3Dpic.twitter.com/AqH6NgOZ8m
Satellite photographs of lithium evaporation ponds in Salar de Atacama, Chile, the world’s largest and purest active reserve of the mineral (used in lithium-ion batteries that power smartphones, laptops and electric vehicles)https://t.co/aIL4yH6GsCpic.twitter.com/04r6lFsLKW
The world of espionage is facing tremendous technological, political, legal, social, and commercial changes. The winners will be those who break the old rules of the spy game and work out new ones. They will need to be nimble and collaborative and—paradoxically—to shed much of the secrecy that has cloaked their trade since its inception. The balance of power in the spy world is shifting; closed societies now have the edge over open ones. It has become harder for Western countries to spy on places such as China, Iran, and Russia and easier for those countries’ intelligence services to spy on the rest of the world. Technical prowess is also shifting. Much like manned spaceflight, human-based intelligence is starting to look costly and anachronistic. Meanwhile, a gulf is growing between the cryptographic superpowers—the United States, United Kingdom, France, Israel, China, and Russia—and everyone else. Technical expertise, rather than human sleuthing, will hold the key to future success.
We’re sorry to announce the passing of @NobelPrize Laureate and complexity giant Murray Gell-Mann, one of the 20th Century’s greatest physicists – pioneer, SFI co-founder, prophet of the quark.
About eight million farmed salmon have suffocated in northern Norway over the past week as a result of persistent algae bloom, an industry body estimated on Thursday, a blight that some experts suggest has been aggravated by climate change.
Norway is a dominant producer of farmed salmon, and the economic impact of the bloom is significant.
Astatement from the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries estimated the amount of salmon lost at 11,600 metric tons, worth about 720 million kroner, or more than $82 million. An industry group, the Norwegian Seafood Council, suggested the total could be much higher.
“Preliminary numbers point to eight million dead fish — corresponding to 40,000 metric tons of salmon that won’t reach markets,” Dag Sorli, a spokesman for the council, said in an email on Thursday. He put the value of the losses at 2.2 billion kroner.
Marine algae, microscopic plant-like organisms that are a form of phytoplankton, are usually not noticeable in normal concentrations. But under certain circumstances — when currents slow and water warms, for example — the population of algae can explode. Some algae blooms are visible from space.
Though the algae bloom is a natural event, Mr. Balteskard said, it is rare for it to be as concentrated and as lethal as it is this year.
Peter Jones, a reader in environmental governance at University College London, said, “The blooms are being exacerbated.” He noted that an algae bloom had hit salmon farming in Scotland last month.
Mr. Jones, from University College London, said that it would be unwise to say with certainty that climate change had played a role in the outbreak, but that there was a significant probability.
“The mortalities were mostly in northern Norway, so you’re heading towards the Arctic Circle,” he said. “And we know that seas are warming particularly rapidly in the Arctic.”
Part of our family tradition is to drive around town delivering meat after a successful hunt. I grew up with a single mother and I know how hard it can be to make ends meet, especially when it comes to feeding your household. This is why the majority of my catch goes to single mothers in the community. It gives me great pride to be able to provide much cherished country food. That evening when we did our rounds of deliveries it was from my son’s first seal. He was the one taking portions of meat from the back of our truck, walking up to people’s doors and handing out bags. The joy on people’s faces was priceless. Of course his mother and grandmother got the best cuts and they gave out several kuniks (kisses) to my boy in return. No culture has ever stood still in time. Although we may use boats, snowmobiles, guns and even cellphones, my traditions remain. They are rooted in the ways of my ancestors going back millennia, but they are not stuck there. I am proud of who I am and for our understanding and respect for animals, our hard work, our need to share. And I make no apologies ever for the food I catch and share. For years I’ve tried to instill in my son a sense of duty—to serve your community members and to carry on the tradition of sharing.
Instead, the stories could become worlds inhabited by things that keep slipping beyond our grasp. Things which lurk at the back of our mind, on the tip of our tongue, just out of reach. Stories with protagonists that can only be known as gaps in being. The spaces they leave. Not here and not quite there yet. Dwelling on the peripheries of the sensible, speaking in glimmers, shimmers, suggestions.
These stories may not even have words. They might be felt rather than told. In sound, scent, touch and light. The stories might be experienced at the limits of the visible spectrum, pulsing at ultraviolet or infrared frequencies. They might inhabit the radio spectrum or create divergencies across the spectrum of acceptable behaviours. Spectral stories, stories of cosmic spectra and planetary spectres. The folk tales of unquiet matter.
“I have sought to show how the terms ‘mind’ and 'matter’ are abstractions which in their concreteness are identical” —Peter Sjöstedt-H
Recorded and composed in the Sonoran Desert, Seili, the Kii peninsula, Istria, Helsinki, Brussels and Elsewhere during 02018 and 02019 by Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney
Lots of people are like “Trees will save us!” but the ecological effects and overall effort needed to plant (and maintain) anything like as many trees as we need, as fast as we’d need, is on a scale pretty similar to any of our other options. https://t.co/p9bdsQOzDx
First, environmental groups and the Tohono O’odham Nation, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the Hopi Tribe have sued to stop a copper mine in Arizona from starting up until the issues in an underlying lawsuit have been resolved. Excerpt from a story in the
Washington Post about the litigation:
Scenic State Highway 83 gently curves through southeastern Arizona’s wine country, past waves of blond grass dotted with orange-tipped ocotillo plants before the dark Santa Rita Mountains loom into view.
The Milepost 44 pullout offers a panorama of the range in the Coronado National Forest where a Canadian firm wants to carve out a massive copper mine near Tucson. The $1.9 billion Rosemont Mine, at a half-mile deep and a mile wide, would sprawl across federal, state and private land, leaving a waste pile the height of skyscraper.
Native American tribes and environmental groups have sued to stop Hudbay Minerals Inc. of Toronto, arguing its mine could desecrate sacred, ancestral lands and dry up wells and waterways while ravaging habitat for endangered jaguar and other species. Last week, they asked a federal judge to prevent the project from proceeding until the lawsuits are decided.
Here’s an interesting tidbit about the Rosemont Mine, which supports allegation of trump administration corruption and the ethical problems of our new secretary of the interior, david bernhardt. This is from the media source,
Arizona Central:
The lobbying firm that has represented Rosemont and Hudbay is Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. Records show one of the lobbyists who worked for Rosemont from 2011 through 2015 was David Bernhardt, who joined the Trump administration and was confirmed by the Senate in April as Interior secretary.
In a 2017 letter, Bernhardt recused himself from participating in matters involving his former employer or clients for a one-year period. He listed Hudbay and Rosemont Copper among his former clients. Bernhardt is now facing an ethics investigation after Democratic lawmakers voiced concerns about potential conflicts of interest during his time as deputy secretary in 2017 and 2018.
Then, environmental groups have sued to enjoin the development of an oil shale mine in Utah. Excerpt from a story about this in
The Salt Lake Tribune:
A proposed oil shale mine and ore-processing project in the Uinta Basin is under legal fire from several environmental groups that are seeking to invalidate a recent Bureau of Land Management decision to let the developer cut a 14-mile utility corridor across public land.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Salt Lake City’s U.S. District Court, the groups say the BLM’s environmental review should have considered the impacts to air, water, wildlife and climate from the massive strip mine proposed on private land byEnefit American Oil.
The BLM had declined to conduct the wider analysis, opting instead to look only at the direct impacts associated with the construction of pipelines, roads and transmission lines to the project, which is angling to be the first oil shale mine in North America to produce commercial quantities of crude oil.
A subsidiary of a large state-run Estonian energy firm, Enefit hopes to develop a mine on 9,000 acresnear the White River, along with a 320-acre processing plant that would “retort” ore known as kerogen. This rockbound hydrocarbon can be converted to crude if subjected to intense heat and pressure. As a result, this form of energy extraction uses large amounts of energy and water.
The company hopes to produce up to 50,000 barrels a day, extracted from 28 million tons of ore mined each year for up to 30 years. It is seeking rights to nearly 11,000 acre-feet of water that would be needed to extract and process the ore. Spent ore would then be returned to the mine pit.
I don’t use a camera. My whole process is about harvesting visual data, chopping it up and recombining it into something else. It is essentially ‘collage’ but the tools are entirely digital. Since I can find all my material online, I never have to leave the studio. pic.twitter.com/kmUbI7pjG0
I increasingly judge people via negativa. By the things they pointedly ignore or are silent about. It’s the opposite of political correctness. It’s Conveniently Silent. CS.
Kiwi is a graphical programming environment dedicated to music and sound creation, such as Max or Pure Data softwares, but offering a real-time collaborative approach: Kiwi allows several distant users to work simultaneously on the same patch hosted online.
ok the Addams Family dancing to Joy Division’s Digital (thanks to @Ian__Curtis___) is the best I’ve seen since someone put the Nicholas Brothers dancing to Little Dragon’s Ritual Union pic.twitter.com/HmhLIoSmUI
