My method of construction has an improvisational and random quality to it, since it is largely driven by the source material I have available. I think of the work as a type of mutation which can haphazardly spawn in numerous and unpredictable directions. pic.twitter.com/K9DpHZ45D5
“In the east they throw shoes, in Greece they practise yaourtama (the act of yoghurt-throwing as a form of protest), and in Ukraine they hang noodles on the gates of the Russian consulate.
Spring bulbs push themselves up into flower far earlier than a century ago. Last August’s heatwave in Britain caused the imprints of long-vanished structures – iron age burial barrows, Neolithic ritual monuments – to shimmer into view as parch marks visible from the air: aridity as x-ray, a drone’s-eye-view back in time. The same month, water levels in the River Elbe dropped so far that “hunger stones” were revealed – carved boulders used since the 1400s to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the stones bears the inscription “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine” (If you see me, weep). In northern Greenland, an American cold war missile base – sealed under the ice 50 years ago with the presumption that snow accumulation would entomb it for ever, and containing huge volumes of toxic chemicals – has begun to move towards the light. This January, polar scientists discovered a gigantic melt cavity – two-thirds the area of Manhattan and up to 300 metres high – growing under the Thwaites glacier in west Antarctica. Thwaites is immense. Its calving face is the juggernaut heading towards us. It holds enough ice to raise ocean levels by more than two feet, and its melt patterns are already responsible for around 4% of global sea-level rise. These Anthropocene unburials, as I have come to think of them, are proliferating around the world. Forces, objects and substances thought safely confined to the underworld are declaring themselves above ground with powerful consequences. It is easy to aestheticise such events, curating them into a Wunderkammer of weirdness. But they are not curios – they are horror shows. Nor are they portents of what is to come – they are the uncanny signs of a crisis that is already here, accelerating around us and experienced most severely by the most vulnerable. These unburials also disrupt simple notions of Earth history as orderly in sequence, with the deepest down being the furthest back. Epochs and periods are mixing and entangling. Our burning of the liquefied remains of carboniferous forests melts glacial ice that fell as snow in the Pleistocene, raising sea levels for a future Anthropocene. Both time and place are undergoing what Amitav Ghosh has called “the great derangement”, torqued into new forms by the scales and speeds of anthropogenic change at a planetary level. “The problem,” writes the archaeologist Þóra Pétursdóttir, “is not that things become buried far down in strata – but that they endure, outlive us, and come back at us with a force we didn’t realise they had, a dark force of ‘sleeping giants’,” roused from their deep-time slumber.
The mystery behind radio signals that have baffled scientists at Australia’s most famous radio telescope for 17 years has finally been solved. The signals’ source? A microwave oven in the kitchen at the Parkes observatory used by staff members to heat up their lunch. Originally researchers assumed the signals – which appeared only once or twice a year – were coming from the atmosphere, possibly linked to lightning strikes. Then on 1 January this year (2015) they installed a new receiver which monitored interference, and detected strong signals at 2.4 GHz, the signature of a microwave oven. Immediate testing of the facility microwave oven did not show up with perytons. Until, that is, they opened the oven door before it had finished heating. “If you set it to heat and pull it open to have a look, it generates interference,” Johnston said. The “suspicious perytons” were only detected during the daytime and as they now knew, not during the evening when all the staff had finished their shift.
The researchers identified the presence of multiple psychoactive compounds—cocaine, benzoylecgonine (the primary metabolite of cocaine), harmine, bufotenin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and possibly psilocin (a compound found in some mushrooms)—from at least three different plant species (likely Erythroxylum coca, a species of Anadenanthera and Banistesteriopsis caani). According to Capriles, the fox-snout pouch likely belonged to a shaman. “Shamans were ritual specialists who had knowledge of plants and how to use them as mechanisms to engage with supernatural beings, including venerated ancestors who were thought to exist in other realms,” said Capriles. “It is possible that the shaman who owned this pouch consumed multiple different plants simultaneously to produce different effects or extend his or her hallucinations.’”
Delighted by the fact that the statue of Tenzing Norgay in Namche Bazar has a ‘Do Not Climb’ sign on it. More or less visible through the clouds behind are Everest on the left and Lhotse (the fourth highest mountain in the world) on the right. pic.twitter.com/MezMpomyGY
Wow - the Wood Wide Web has been globally mapped for the first time! New research published in Nature today plots the c. 500-m-yr-old subterranean “social network of trees” at a planetary scale.
The World-Wide-Wood-Wide-Web, then. Jaw-dropping work. Here: https://t.co/cXHC8Sm7c3pic.twitter.com/k4yOi2cGQh
— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) May 15, 2019
I also say things like: “For the most part [antifa practice is] based on a better philosophical understanding of how fascism proliferates than is held by most liberal centrists demanding civil debate”
“Detroit Electric” all-electric car makes a promotional tour through the Cascade Mountains from “Seattle to Mt. Rainier,” circa 1919. (Library of Congress) pic.twitter.com/FcdgZTMdWJ
There’s a fundamental difference between Ethics and Morality. Spinoza doesn’t make up a morality, for a very simply reason: he never asks what we must do, he always asks what we are capable of, what’s in our power, ethics is a problem of power, never a problem of duty. In this sense Spinoza is profoundly immoral. Regarding the moral problem, good and evil, he has a happy nature because he doesn’t even comprehend what this means. What he comprehends are good encounters, bad encounters, increases and diminutions of power.
“This place is a message… and part of a system of messages …pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, the world’s leading scientists have warned, as they announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken. From coral reefs flickering out beneath the oceans to rainforests desiccating into savannahs, nature is being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10m years, according to the UN global assessment report. The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 82%, natural ecosystems have lost about half their area and a million species are at risk of extinction – all largely as a result of human actions, said the study, compiled over three years by more than 450 scientists and diplomats.
What specific features should visual neurons encode, given the infinity of real-world images and the limited number of neurons available to represent them? We investigated neuronal selectivity in monkey inferotemporal cortex via the vast hypothesis space of a generative deep neural network, avoiding assumptions about features or semantic categories. A genetic algorithm searched this space for stimuli that maximized neuronal firing. This led to the evolution of rich synthetic images of objects with complex combinations of shapes, colors, and textures, sometimes resembling animals or familiar people, other times revealing novel patterns that did not map to any clear semantic category. These results expand our conception of the dictionary of features encoded in the cortex, and the approach can potentially reveal the internal representations of any system whose input can be captured by a generative model.
Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) “The Report also tells us that it is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global,” he said. “Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably – this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.” “The member States of IPBES Plenary have now acknowledged that, by its very nature, transformative change can expect opposition from those with interests vested in the status quo, but also that such opposition can be overcome for the broader public good,” Watson said. The IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is the most comprehensive ever completed. It is the first intergovernmental Report of its kind and builds on the landmark Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, introducing innovative ways of evaluating evidence. Compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries over the past three years, with inputs from another 310 contributing authors, the Report assesses changes over the past five decades, providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between economic development pathways and their impacts on nature. It also offers a range of possible scenarios for the coming decades. Based on the systematic review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources, the Report also draws (for the first time ever at this scale) on indigenous and local knowledge, particularly addressing issues relevant to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
“…the one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope. In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.” Octavia Butler
Almost never share petitions, but this one is about something that is directly affecting the lives and health of people who are absolutely core to FoAM.
Our organisation’s work is suffering, so if you like what we do, please take a moment to sign: https://t.co/jI538UC7j4
Word of the day: “flygskam” - lit. flying-shame; the environmental guilt arising from air-travel (Swedish); cf “vliegschaamte” (Dutch) & “flugscham” (German). See also “smygflyga” (flying in secret) & “tagskryt” (boasting about travelling by train).#LexiconForTheAnthropocenepic.twitter.com/WJv5B3kImZ
“I envisioned an AR app that augments the city-scape to be more environmentally friendly, specially with more biophillia , while still allowing safe navigation. e.g. Replacing cars with something less obnoxious, perhaps a flowing river, perhaps a flock of birds. Originally I dismissed this idea, thinking it would not actually contribute to the overall good of the physical world we do inhabit.“ —Chris Harris
Key to maintaining the Chinese control over the region is the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, which authorities use to spy on the population and each other. IJOP was created by the Hebei Far East Communication System Engineering Company, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation.
Authorities interact with IJOP using an app, and after Human Rights Watch acquired a copy of this app, they contracted with Berlin’s Cure53 to reverse engineer it. Now, they have published a massive, comprehensive, chilling report that provides the most thorough look into the cutting edge of Chinese high-tech totalitarianism ever seen.
This is significant because Xinjiang is a beta-test for the rest of China. Earlier surveillance techniques that were pioneered on Uyghurs have had their rough edges smoothed out and then were rolled out for all Chinese people. And, thanks to the Belt-and-Road initiative, the Chinese state is gradually exporting much of their high-tech totalitarianism to client states around the Pacific Rim, sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere. This is the Chinese version of the shitty technology adoption curve: when you have a terrible, dehumanizing technological idea, you need to try it out first on people whose complaints go unheeded: prisoners, people on welfare, blue-collar and gig-economy workers, migrants and refugees, mental patients, kids. These people are used as involuntary testers for bad ideas, and the technologies that can be refined and normalized eventually find their way into everyone else’s world.
The IJOP app reveals that people in Xinjiang can be flagged for activities as innocuous as “not using the front door” or “not socializing with neighbors,” as well as using any of 51 network tools, including VPNs, Whatsapp and Viber. The system automatically flags residents who use a phone not registered to them, or who use more electricity than their neighbors, or who leave their assigned residential area without police permission. The app dispatches officers to investigate people who get new phone numbers or who socialize with foreigners.
The app also monitors the police, scoring officers on how many people they monitor, and how promptly they perform the tasks the system assigns to them.
Human Rights Watch points out that “many – perhaps all– of the mass surveillance practices described in this report appear to be contrary to Chinese law.” But that isn’t stopping anyone.
I am beginning to *really* dislike appeals-to-better-nature rhetoric of the “do better” and “become good” variety. If you can’t work with people within the 3-sigma natural range of moral variety, you’re almost certainly going to do harm overall trying to work with them at all.
Using Machine Learning for RTM (“Reality Tunnel Management”) is a great opportunity (“show me how cities look like without cars” etc) but even greater challenge (“I’m so deeply invested in virtual reality, i don’t care about climate change etc). The sirens from Greek mythology. https://t.co/JEuYw8TPd0
Please ask your local record store to stock the following Algomech 2019 festival genres: mechanical folk horror, algorithmic Siberian trance, kinetic lowercase, ASCII percussion, procedural Lancashire clog techno, experimental Ancient Greek choral, algorave. Thanks
Mitigation of Shock is our attempt to make the size and complexity of a hyperobject like climate change tangible, relatable and specific. Following extensive research and prototyping, as well as interviews with experts from NASA, the UK Met Office and Forum for the Future, we built an entire future apartment situated in the context of climate change and its consequences on food security. People could step inside this family home and directly experience for themselves what the restrictions of this future might feel like. Instead of leaving visitors scared and unprepared by the challenges of this world, we shared methods and tools for not only surviving, but thriving there. Mitigation of Shock first appeared as an immersive installation in the show ‘After the End of the World’ at CCCB in 2017-18. The future home merges the macabre and the mundane as the social and economic consequences of climate change infiltrate the domestic space. More than fictional possibility, MOS is intended to kindle a sense of actionable hope by introducing a functioning network of tools hacked together from existing resources.
Welcome to year one of Reiwa. The beginning of a new era in Japanese history. The end of Heisei (平成時代). Welcome to the era of the reign of his Royal Highness Emperor Naruhito.
The Reiwa period will start on May 1st 2019 when Prince Naruhito ascends the throne to become the 126th emperor of Japan. 2019 corresponds to Heisei 31 until April 30th, and Reiwa 1 (令和元年 Reiwa gannen, gannen means “first year”) from May 1st.
Reiwa ushers in a new era of significant change in Japanese society. New systems aimed at changing the way people work. The introduction of greater numbers of foreign workers - something that would never have been considered only ten years ago. Major revisions to the Labour Standards law will be implemented to stop the practice of working excessively long hours and to force Japanese people to take more time off work. Companies will be required to force employees to take at least five days of paid leave per year. Regulations with penalties for overtime are being introduced.
In the next five years, with the new visa status of “specified skilled worker” as many as 340,000 foreign workers are expected to move to Japan to work in 14 areas including nursing - and in the biggest shock to Japanese society - agriculture. Imagine that, foreigners tilling the fields and working on farms in Japan. I never thought I’d see that!
Numerous other things will see even more significant changes in Japanese society: the National pension premium will rise by ¥70 to ¥16,410 per month. A tax cut will be introduced for those who purchase electronic cars. Oh, and did I mention more foreigners.
So, what’s in a name?
令和 Reiwa. 令 rei: orders, command, ancient laws, decree, fortunate + 和 wa: harmony, peace, Japan, Japanese style.
Reiwa signifies order and harmony. This is the first time the kanji for nengō have been chosen from Japanese classical literature. The kanji were selected from the ancient Manyōshū (万葉集) - the oldest extant compilation of Japanese poetry, written between 600 and 759 CE. "初春令月、氣淑風和", which means “Nice weather in an auspicious month in spring.“ The two kanji used in nengō have always previously been chosen from ancient classical Chinese literature.
Reiwa is the 248th era in the history of Japan, the worlds oldest monarchy. Reiwa was the first time a new era has been announced while the reigning emperor is still living. Akihito is also the first emperor to abdicate for 200 years.
An era name, nengō (年号) is an indivisible part of public life and shared memory in Japan. Everything that happens in the years to come — births, deaths, natural disasters, cultural and social circumstances, elections and political scandals —all will be connected to the era name.
The proclamation of a new era has happened only twice in nearly a century. Japan has had 247 era names since instituting the system under Emperor Kōtoku in 645. From the Meiji era (1868–1912), there has been one era for each emperor. Previously, however, the name often changed several times during an imperial reign, such as in a spirit of renewal after an inauspicious event like a war, earthquake, epidemic, or major fire.
After his May 1 investiture, the new Emperor Naruhito will bear the new era name Reiwa for the duration of his rule and into death, becoming his official name after he passes.
Since Emperor Akihito announced his intention to abdicate, a highly confidential committee has been scrutinising ancient Japanese documents in search of the quintessential two kanji to describe the new era. The process, like the imperial system itself is steeped in Shintō ritual.
The introduction of the new era name brings with it some immediate conundrums in so much as it affects the printing and manufacturing of everything from government documents to calendars, family history registers, money, train tickets to computer software, official documentation to criminal and police records. Printers and programmers will be hard at work over the coming months bringing everything up to date. City offices and government agencies, which mostly use nengō in their computer systems and paperwork, have been preparing for months to avoid glitches. Car, bike, truck, bus, and boat manufacturers have been creating new VIN tags and Identification plates.
Officials will cross out Heisei on thousands of documents and stamp the new nengō above it until all old documents have been used and the new ones will come into use.
Schools and hospitals have been updating their electronic sign on systems and data bases to accept he new nengō.
The nengō is more than just a way of counting years for many Japanese. The introduction of a new nengō brings a lot of weight with it, it defines a period in history. As the Heisei era ends, it is remembered for all that it has defined in the hearts and minds of the Japanese.
The nengō is a word that captures the national mood of a period, similar to the way "the roaring ‘20s” evokes distinct feelings or images. Nengō gives a certain meaning to a historical period, it’s the same as when historians refer to Britain’s “Victorian” or “Tudor” eras, tying the politics and culture of a period to a monarch.
The 64-year Shōwa era (昭和時代) was a period of extraordinary pandemonium. The reign of the Shōwa Emperor Hirohito (December 25, 1926 until his death on January 7, 1989) saw Japan move from a minor democracy to outright militarism, bringing aggressive colonial expansion. It pursued a war of aggression that killed millions across the Pacific. Something China and South Korea, even after 73 years, can’t ever forgive. Following the end of defeat in the war, Japan’s remarkable economic growth has been called the “Japanese Miracle,” as the economy grew three times faster than other major nations. Shōwa has then generally come to be identified with Japan’s recovery and rising global prominence in the decades after World War II.
The Heisei era (平成時代) the reign of Emperor Akihito (8 January 1989 until abdication on April 30 2019) began on a high with decades of robust economic growth which saw Japan become a world leader in electronics and manufacturing, textiles and fashion, art and science. But the economic bubble soon popped, ushering a long period of stagnation. A series of disasters, the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, have marred the image of the Heisei era. Particularly the governments inability to provide efficient and effective relief during these times has given the Heisei era a gloomy image.
Reiwa is looking already to see major changes in Japanese society. The introduction of more foreigners, the merger of major companies and the closing of others. The, as yet, supposed willingness of the Japanese government to implement better care for the people and a more robust and efficient labour system. Possible changes to the constitution.
With the 2020 Olympics in Japan and the beginning of a new era, Japan is hoping to move beyond the Heisei era, beyond all the turmoil and stagnation. The ascension of a new emperor and the naming of a new era gives the people the sense of a fresh start and it’s certain to have a positive effect on the economy and society as a whole.
“The Ethical Gap: A reference to the difference between what our technology gives us the capacity to do, and what our wisdom is to know what we should do.”
when you wrote something and you look at it and you just know it’s good, that there’s something new in it, with the hum of strange light-machines, subsonic woofers, runic mediums, pleiadean lightworkers, kirlian photographers, awkward theosophists.
1 Fonte des neiges, Pont de Ronet, 01 2017 (fieldrecordings) by Nim Is A Tree
2 Tears of Unicorn (Vibraphone Version) by Masayoshi Fujita
3 The Edge by Douglas Dare
4 Valentine My Funny by F.S. Blumm & Nils Frahm
5 Wood by Seaworthy + Taylor Deupree
6 Jùhachi by ensemble 0
7 Horn by Nick Drake
8 Charles Bukowski’s Blue Bird set to Nick Drake’s Horn
9 20:17 by Olafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm
10 Sometimes by Peter Broderick
11 1979 by Deru
12 Run by Otto A Totland
13 You Wash My Soul (feat. Linda Perhacs) by Mark Pritchard
14 Verndari by Veroníque Vaka
15 Pankalia by Billow Observatory
16 Love, Lay Me Blind by The White Birch
We’re gonna see a new institutional underground of reimagined secret societies, lodges, fraternities, sororities etc. Not like medieval ones associated with universities, religions, or nobility. A cross between those and hacker collectives, hawala networks etc.
I wrote a short essay about the notebooks I kept while writing Underland & the material traces that such journals carry (another kind of archiving).
I’d be v. interested to know what notebooks you like to use – and to see glimpses of their pages…
Here: https://t.co/zGjav3VDtEpic.twitter.com/dl0FfdvRmj
In red places the hot season is the dry season; in blue places, vice versa. Been meaning to make this for a while. (Pearson’s r of prec v. tavg in WorldClim 2.) pic.twitter.com/zkGhisZqbq
Rautio, P. (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: on autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4): 394-408.
tl,dr: Deepfakes on surveillance video will emerge organically if we don’t recognize them as an obvious failure mode. Moon mode is just the harmless expression of semantically meaningful noise, a risk underlying this entire space.
We developed the HLC* Colour Atlas and see it as a new basis for all stages of professional colour communication – from design to the final product. The printed atlas is the central tool. The ring binder contains 2040 CIELAB-HLC colours (over 13.000 in the XL Version), which are systematically arranged by hue/base colour, lightness/brightness and chroma/saturation. The atlas is an exemplary implementation of the CIELAB colour space, which was introduced by the Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage in 1976 and has since established itself worldwide in colour management, colour measurement and colour formulation. The model has great advantages: The project is completely based on open standards – for colour definitions it is the CIELAB colour model, for the production of physical samples it is proof printing systems according to ISO 12647-7 and for the exchange of spectral data it is the CxF file format. All data is published under CreativeCommons license. This means: All users can freely use the developed colour data and samples and further develop them.
“You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen… We must dare to invent the future.””
— Thomas Sankara, President of Burkina Faso, 1983 - 1987.
acnestis (n.): on an animal, the point of the back that lies between the shoulders and the lower back, which cannot be reached to be scratched
advesperate (v.): to approach evening
aerumnous (adj.): full of trouble [‘practically begging to be reintroduced to our vocabulary’, Shea notes]
backfriend (n.): a fake friend; a secret enemy
benedicence (n.): benevolence in speech
cellarhood (n.): the state of being a cellar (cf. tableity)
cimicine (adj.): smelling like bugs
constult (v.): to act stupidly together
dactylodeiktous (adj.) pointed at with a finger
discountenancer (n.): one who discourages with cold looks
elozable (adj.): readily influenced by flattery
epizeuxis (n.): the repetition of a word with vehemence and emphasis
fard (v.): to paint the face with cosmetics, so as to hide blemishes [‘I suspect there is a reason no one ever gets up from the table and says, “Excuse me while I go to the ladies’ room and fard.”’]
felicificability (n.): capacity for happiness
gound (n.): the gunk that collects in the corners of the eyes [‘the type of word I was unaware that I didn’t know, and yet it still felt like a relief when I discovered it’]
grinagog (n.): a person who is constantly grinning
hamartia (n.): the flaw that precipitates the destruction of a tragic hero
happify (v.): to make happy [this one gives me a happy, as they said in Buffy]
heterophemize (v.): to say something different from what you mean to say
impluvious (adj.): ‘wet with rain’ (Thomas Blount, Glossographia, 1656)
insordescent (adj.): growing in filthiness
jentacular (adj.): of or pertaining to breakfast
kankedort (n.): an awkward situation or affair
latibulate (v.): to hide oneself in a corner
letabund (adj.): filled with joy
malesuete (adj.): accustomed to poor habits
misdelight (n.): pleasure in something wrong
nefandous (adj.): too odious to be spoken of
neighbourize (v.): to be or act neighbourly
obganiate (v.): to annoy by repeating over and over and over and over
occasionet (n.): a minor occasion
petecure (n.): modest cooking; cooking on a small scale [‘Very few people eat in an epicurean fashion, yet many of them know what the word epicure means. A great many people eat in a simple fashion, and yet no one knows the word for this.’]
postvide (v.): to make plans for an event only after it has occurred [the antonym of provide, which originally meant ‘exercise foresight; make provision for the future’, per OED]
psithurism (n.): the whispering of leaves moved by the wind
quag (v.): to shake (said of something that is soft or flabby)
remord (n.): a touch of remorse; (v.) to remember with regret [‘when utilized as a verb, remord seems as though it can instantly render poetic any decision made in the past and subsequently regretted’]
residentarian (n.): a person who is given to remaining at table
scringe (v.): to shrug the back or shoulders from cold
scrouge (v.): to inconvenience or discomfort a person by pressing against him or her or by standing too close
subtrist (adj.): slightly sad
sympatetic (n.): a companion one walks with [‘Discoveries like this one are what make reading the OED from cover to cover worthwhile.’]
tacenda (n.): things not to be mentioned; matters that are passed over in silence
unbepissed (adj.): not having been urinated on [‘Is it possible that at some time there was such a profusion of things that had been urinated on that there was a pressing need to distinguish those that had not?’]
undisonant (adj.): making the sound of waves
vicambulist (n.): one who walks about in the streets
vulpeculated (pa. pple.): robbed by a fox
well-woulder (n.): a conditional well-wisher
xenium (n.): a gift given to a guest
yesterneve (n.): yesterday evening
zyxt (v.): to see [‘It is the second-person singular indicative present form of the verb “to see” in the Kentish dialect and has obviously not been in common use for some time.’]
This regional breakdown is what the EU uses to distribute its “catch-up funds,” which is used to fund a subset of a country’s projects in transportation infrastructure, schools, and hospitals, as well as development of small firms, investments in a low-carbon economy, environmental projects, and training and education. The least developed regions get a bigger share of the 50 billion euros distributed annually and, as a result, have to cofund less of total project costs. More developed regions receive less money and pay more toward project costs. Yet how does the EU decide whether a region is less developed? Where are the lines drawn?
We don’t have a good speculative design for planetary-change. The operating model of the business-design pipeline is exploiting the planet at one end and users at the other. The idea that these might in fact be the same thing would mean admitting that an operational focus on individual users and discrete time windows was ineffective design. And large sprawling change over massive time windows and shifting human/non-human interactions does not conform to the way in which revenue is reported. Again, this isn’t the fault of speculative design; designers need to eat. But, under these conditions we can’t to look at it as a catch-all solution for planetary collapse.
Every one of us — citizens, philanthropists, business and government leaders — should be troubled by the enormous gap between how little of our natural world is currently protected and how much should be protected. It is a gap that we must urgently narrow, before our human footprint consumes the earth’s remaining wild places. For my part, I have decided to donate $1 billion over the next decade to help accelerate land and ocean conservation efforts around the world, with the goal of protecting 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. This money will support locally led conservation efforts around the world, push for increased global targets for land and ocean protection, seek to raise public awareness about the importance of this effort, and fund scientific studies to identify the best strategies to reach our target. I believe this ambitious goal is achievable because I’ve seen what can be accomplished.
Part of the point of “post-authenticity” is that whether a thing is “real” or “fake” is not necessarily the most interesting or salient point about it. We’re after that now.
Though a bit idiosyncratic, the shortest definition of intellectual I’ll sign on to is “magical thinker” (ht @bhudgeons for connecting those dots for me). The essence of it is a layer of experimental belief that’s a degree removed from senses, phenomenology, and action feedback
Summit Learning is a nonprofit, high-tech “customized learning” group funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s family charity; under the program, students are equipped with high-surveillance Chromebooks and work on their own “at their own pace” and call on teachers to act as “mentors” when they get stuck.
It’s a high-tech version of student-led education, where a high teacher-to-pupil ratio allows students to pursue self-directed education based on their own proclivities and interests, and mentor one another. But in the Zuck version, students work alone in front of screens, in social isolation, taking automated quizzes to assess their progress.
Many students and parents find this incredibly invasive and frustrating. Students with special needs – exactly the group that you’d expect to benefit most from “customized learning” – find the systems especially troublesome, and for students with screen-triggered epilepsy, the systems are pure torture.
The result is rebellion, with parents withdrawing students from school altogether, or demanding that alternative accommodations be made for them; students in Brooklyn have staged mass walkouts to protest the systems; other districts have canceled the program in the face of student protests, and one University of Pennsylvania study found that 70% of students opposed the program.
US education has been the plaything of billionaires since the GW Bush era, when “accountability” measures like No Child Left Behind began to starve the neediest schools while reorienting education around preparation for high-stakes testing, all thanks to wealthy right-wing ideologues who insisted that education could be improved by “running it like a business.”
Then came the charter schools, which directly integrated for-profit businesses in providing tax-funded education, supported by a coalition that welded together parents’ whose public schools had been so starved that they had degraded beyond hope; religious fanatics who wanted publicly funded parochial education that omitted sexual health, evolution and other evidence-based curriculum; and wealthy people who wanted to opt their kids into racially and class-segregated environments.
Zuckerberg and Chan fit quite neatly into that rogue’s gallery: using their money to elevate their evidence-free pet theories into educational policy that other peoples’ kids have to test out in publicly funded laboratories.
I just boarded an international @JetBlue flight. Instead of scanning my boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera before being allowed down the jet bridge. Did facial recognition replace boarding passes, unbeknownst to me? Did I consent to this?
We need 2 categories 1) #Dravidian pantheism 4 sudra&dalit pagans who reject #Brahmin 2)#Hindu 4 all twice born. All texts &gods of Dravidian should be labelled Dravidian,parts distorted by Brahmins cut out& #Sanskrit recognized as a constructed lang derived from Munda-Dravidian
Idea: doomsday clock that runs on kairos rather than chronos. Every tick-tock is a semantically marked up real-world event that is appended to a live global gaming card feed with some tags and computed metrics like threat points, time horizon, etc. Narrative dice.
Every science is a degenerate habit of thought. Magical thinking is the creative discipline of resisting the lure of that degeneracy. The best way to do that is to convince yourself that science has a general method to it. Methodicity is actually the mark of magical thinking.
Maturity, to me, is learning when it is a virtue to compromise - and when it absolutely is not. The good life is often an unbalanced one, I think - because this enables you to dedicate yourself to the one thing that really brings joy.
Perhaps no human activity has as big a gap between private and public texture as “research”. Research in private is a an endless stream of sketches, vague ideas, random experiments, jokes, nerdy OCD behaviors etc. Research in public is unreadable bureaucratic papers.
For a long time I’ve wondered what I find so alluring and strangely human about Japanese urban scenes, and then someone tweeted it: Japan doesn’t have on-street parking. https://t.co/Zj47euWZQA
“Work is by nature unfree, inhuman, unsocial, activity which is both controlled by private property and which creates it. The abolition of private property, therefore, only becomes reality when it is seen as the abolition of work.” -Marx
Congratulations to Richard Powers for being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his amazing book “The Overstory” a most sophisticated redistribution of agency between trees and people yet understandable by any body attuned to novels. A sign of time if any.
