Biodiversity of insects is threatened worldwide. Here, we present a comprehensive review of 73 historical reports of insect declines from across the globe, and systematically assess the underlying drivers. Our work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world’s insect species over the next few decades. […] The main drivers of species declines appear to be in order of importance: i) habitat loss and conversion to intensive agriculture and urbanisation; ii) pollution, mainly that by synthetic pesticides and fertilisers; iii) biological factors, including pathogens and introduced species; and iv) climate change
Terrapattern provides an open-ended interface for visual query-by-example. Simply click an interesting spot on Terrapattern’s map, and it will find other locations that look similar. Our tool is ideal for locating specialized ‘nonbuilding structures’ and other forms of soft infrastructure that aren’t usually indicated on maps. It’s an open-source tool for discovering “patterns of interest” in unlabeled satellite imagery—a prototype for exploring the unmapped, and the unmappable.
GPT-2 displays a broad set of capabilities, including the ability to generate conditional synthetic text samples of unprecedented quality, where we prime the model with an input and have it generate a lengthy continuation. In addition, GPT-2 outperforms other language models trained on specific domains (like Wikipedia, news, or books) without needing to use these domain-specific training datasets. On language tasks like question answering, reading comprehension, summarization, and translation, GPT-2 begins to learn these tasks from the raw text, using no task-specific training data. While scores on these downstream tasks are far from state-of-the-art, they suggest that the tasks can benefit from unsupervised techniques, given sufficient (unlabeled) data and compute.
tuning youtube algo to serve wholesome “polyglot surprises old woman by speaking her rare language” videos instead of “cringe fails and public freakouts compilation #666.” moving past hatred and disgust one day at a time
Y’ALL. Intersectionality is not about the intersection of identities, its about the intersection of institutions of oppression. Making that distinction is verrrrrry important.
This article uses an annotation tool so that we don’t have to define cultural terms in the article. We’re doing this because we want the people who already understand those terms to feel like our target audience. https://t.co/X7QUuuUKaK
The central question raised by these insect apocalypse stories is one that goes way beyond the fate of insects: How should we act upon imperfect knowledge? https://t.co/XULTG9cbz5
Climate scientists are too alarmist, say people who claim a carbon tax will destroy the economy, crush freedom, and turn the US into a communist dictatorship
How can science fiction help us confront environmental crisis? @grist investigates, with a particular emphasis on climate fiction (including our recent Everything Change, Volume II anthology!) and interviews with experts and editors. Dig it: https://t.co/HQsAAe7rFw
“Afforestation” (brand new forest) programs such as the “great green walls” planned across the Sahel and NW China have also had pretty terrible tree survival rates.
We delivered a talk on “exit and salvagepatch” strategy to a group of young militants and polipunks in the inner city today. Their message back to me: show us what to smash and we’ll help you build from the ruins. Deal.
how large a city could you build (how many people) in which 1) the only forms of transportation are walking (or chairs/electric scooters for the disabled) and elevators; and 2) max travel time within 30 mins? walking need not be at surface level (eg pedestrian bridges btw towers)
imma let you finish, but… what if this was our pop cultural high point? kinda haunted by that thought lately for some reason pic.twitter.com/bBsCKnwD7r
The other night I found myself sitting in my dark car in the Vroman’s parking lot, laptop actually in lap, listening to old Art Bell Area 51 shows and writing clojure to analyze 6.5 billion aircraft transponder pings I’ve picked up over the years.
Your tweets hint at an intuition I had about the human experience (qualia) of time. It seems to me that *frequency* is the way we perceive time. Repetition forms reality. I once posed the odd provocation, “Is it possible for humans to perceive something that only happens *once*?”
“Now it is true that we very proudly killed Cook, who brought VD & Tuberculosis to the Hawaiian people with his disease-ridden men. In fact, we Hawaiians still celebrate every 14 February as Hauʻoli Lā Hoʻomake iā Kapena Kuke!” https://t.co/pBmNEKcRvs
Anyway it’s quite something, I guess, to be the generation to ride the peak, to be the ones who can look back at the long rise behind us, like the smooth flank of a gigantic ocean swell, and forward, at the precipitous and chaotic drop to come, seeing even the rocky ocean floor.
“The data behind it isn’t anything new, but the public-friendly repackaging of that data, known as climate-analog mapping, represents a shift in how science reaches the public.” https://t.co/cqrSwsaBOR via @WIRED
I’m going to refer to the ideal as “Interdependent Music” from now on. Seems sticky & illustrative. Independence without mutual support + obligation = hellscape. A re-reading of what made the original indies special was the interdependence + resiliency of artist led networks..
“my battery is low and it’s getting dark” is so hauntingly human, so crushingly lonely. I can’t articulate the deep, profound ache that sentence evokes. It’s acceptance and defeat and terror and sadness all at once, all from one tiny machine we asked to explore the stars for us.
Most of Sun Ra’s albums were pressed in units of 100. They rarely sold out. About the same amount of people who supported experimental music then, support it now
Today, we’re expressing gratitude for the opportunity to rove on Mars (#ThanksOppy) as we mark the completion of a successful mission that exceeded our expectations.
Our Opportunity Rover’s last communication with Earth was received on June 10, 2018, as a planet-wide dust storm blanketed the solar-powered rover’s location on the western rim of Perseverance Valley, eventually blocking out so much sunlight that the rover could no longer charge its batteries. Although the skies over Perseverance cleared, the rover did not respond to a final communication attempt on Feb. 12, 2019.
As the rover’s mission comes to an end, here are a few things to know about its opportunity to explore the Red Planet.
90 days turned into 15 years!
Opportunity launched on July 7, 2003 and landed on Mars on Jan. 24, 2004 for a planned mission of 90 Martian days, which is equivalent to 92.4 Earth days. While we did not expect the golf-cart-sized rover to survive through a Martian winter, Opportunity defied all odds as a 90-day mission turned into 15 years!
The Opportunity caught its own silhouette in this late-afternoon image taken in March 2014 by the rover’s rear hazard avoidance camera. This camera is mounted low on the rover and has a wide-angle lens.
Opportunity Set Out-Of-This-World Records
Opportunity’s achievements, including confirmation water once flowed on Mars. Opportunity was, by far, the longest-lasting lander on Mars. Besides endurance, the six-wheeled rover set a roaming record of 28 miles.
This chart illustrates comparisons among the distances driven by various wheeled vehicles on the surface of Earth’s moon and Mars. Opportunity holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) of driving on Mars.
It’s Just Like Having a Geologist on Mars
Opportunity was created to be the mechanical equivalent of a geologist walking from place to place on the Red Planet. Its mast-mounted cameras are 5 feet high and provided 360-degree two-eyed, human-like views of the terrain. The robotic arm moved like a human arm with an elbow and wrist, and can place instruments directly up against rock and soil targets of interest. The mechanical “hand” of the arm holds a microscopic camera that served the same purpose as a geologist’s handheld magnifying lens.
There’s Lots to See on Mars
After an airbag-protected landing craft settled onto the Red Planet’s surface and opened, Opportunity rolled out to take panoramic images. These images gave scientists the information they need to select promising geological targets that tell part of the story of water in Mars’ past. Since landing in 2004, Opportunity has captured more than
200,000 images. Take a look in this photo gallery.
From its perch high on a ridge, the Opportunity rover recorded this image on March 31, 2016 of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. The view looks back at the rover’s tracks leading up the north-facing slope of “Knudsen Ridge,” which forms part of the southern edge of “Marathon Valley
There Was Once Water on Mars?!
Among the mission’s scientific goals was to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils for clues to past water activity on Mars. In its time on the Red Planet, Opportunity discovered small spheres of the mineral hematite, which typically forms in water. In addition to these spheres that a scientist nicknamed “blueberries,” the rover also found signs of liquid water flowing across the surface in the past: brightly colored veins of the mineral gypsum in rocks, for instance, which indicated water flowing through underground fractures.
“when removed from the circumstances for which it was designed, WaveNet can “speak” on its own. […] speechlike sounds are accompanied by the irregular clicking of digital teeth and smacking of synthetic lips. […]What human mouth might produce such uncanny abjection?”
Ever had one of those bugs that makes you want to study really hard, apply to grad school, get a doctorate in physics, spend the rest of your life in deep research, invent a time machine, go back in time, kill Charles Babbage and prevent the computer from coming into existence?
Mileva Maric was the only woman in the physics program w Einstein. She failed her exams a few weeks after discovering she was pregnant and then dropped out. They both were working on 2 papers each. A few years later he published 4 papers that became known as a miracle. No
That’s what I normally use, but in this case I need to be able to differentiate those people as a clump from the other people who happen to be science researchers :) unless we decide that science researchers aren’t people, which is fine by me
Bold of you to assume the AI programed by supremacist idiots won’t train itself on the corporations’ attempts to use the occult for profit https://t.co/mtnbIXYfWD
— Damien saw the Time-Knife once. Highly Recommended (@Wolven) February 12, 2019
I put my Antarctic “emulation” code on a website where you can run it at the push of a button, no knowledge or installation needed. I think this is the future: https://t.co/ORVzLvpScy
1. chaos magic wasn’t a mistake. it’s just…like kesey said about acid (paraphrasing) “you can’t just keep opening & closing the door; eventually you have to walk through.”
“What happens to us
Is irrelevant to the world’s geology
But what happens to the world’s geology
Is not irrelevant to us.
We must reconcile ourselves to the stones,
Not the stones to us.”
Great text on a great painter. Everything and nothing at the same time. “It has to look easy,” he said, “That feeling like it just happened.” That quote is something to write up somewhere as a constant reminder no matter what medium you’re working in. https://t.co/ShQGOSsgpZ
On the 19th @ 1900 I’ll be at @Futures_Design London meet-up talking about the failure of speculative design to achieve anything of substantial human value beyond ‘hm interesting’ or profit https://t.co/cNmHf9GTHl
In the “Machine Learning for Art” scene there is “before GAN” and “after GAN” (2015 > now). The vast variety of methods & ideas of the early period, got homogenized into a endless stream of GANerated pixels, that tether on nihilism and yet are sold as magic. Artificial Progress?
The Wondering Earth was a box office hit during the spring festival in China. And Chinese showing their ticket , printed Only Communist Party Can Save The Earth. No I am not kidding @BaldingsWorld@Jkylebasspic.twitter.com/KjO3EXmcpW
‘Seek out the faceted moments of geomediation at the Hermits Rest, after staring down The Abyss. Layers upon layers, Bright Angel Shale, Vishnu Schist and Zoroaster Granite. The Great Unconformity (an absence, a non-layer).’ https://t.co/KOEP6nantK
You know what’s the problem with Singlish’s street cred? Every joker who has ever heard it before thinks he or she can speak it. Just ask that angmo who’s been in Singapore for a few weeks, and you may hear him or her boast: “You think I cannot speak lah?” Actually, angmo, I dun think hor, I
know – because that use of “lah” is so salah.
Poor, poor “lah”! It has kena so much abuse that sometimes we wonder whether we’re still a Western colony. Come on, show some respect! “Is ‘lah’ a note to follow ‘soh’?” isn’t funny – we’ve
heardit a gazillion times. Such wilful ignorance isn’t cute. “How go to Orchard Road lah?” “Lah your friend is so beautiful.” “The chicken rice nice-nice leh lah!”
What the fiak. (Yes, that’s how we say it.) “Lah” has to be like among the most abused words in the history of abused words. So let’s get the rules right for the sake of our sanity. “Lah” is firstly used at the end of a sentence or a main clause – nowhere else. No “Lah you is so funny” or “I take lah the bus home”. This isn’t French. But you can say “Dun care him lah, let’s go!” or use it with a filler like “OK”, as in “Please lah, OK?” (By the way, this “OK” doesn’t mean OK; it means “for God’s sake”. Surprise.)
Secondly, there’s no need to use “lah” to end every sentence. Once is enough to set the tone – unless you want to change this tone or to be irritating. So it makes sense when you cry, for example, “Help me lah! Lend me money lah!” Otherwise, dun lah-lah-lah please.
Thirdly, “lah” isn’t exactly meaningless. And it doesn’t mean “dude” or “babe”, and you shouldn’t say “How are you lah?” when you mean “How are you,
bro?” There are even multiple meanings to it, and each meaning is defined by the context in play. I can identify three main types:
The pleading “lah”, as in “Go away lah!” or “Go and die lah!”, and both of these mean “Please get lost”.
The emphatic “lah”, as when you hear “You see lah!” The emphasis here is on you seeing – which presumably you haven’t been – and the line therefore means “Didn’t I tell you to watch out?”
The affirmative “lah”, as in “Steady lah!” or “Solid lah!”, both of which mean “You’re impressive! Keep it up!”
These three “lahs” are also differentiated by tone, and so you need to learn to enunciate right too. None of them involves the sing-song “lah” of
The Sound of Music. The pleading “lah” sounds like a deflating balloon: “laaah”. The emphatic “lah” is a spurt ending on a higher pitch, like when something drops on your foot. The affirmative “lah” is also a spurt, but it pulls downwards after going up, thus showing the very control of feeling it signals.
So, everyone, please lah, OK? Dun simi sai also go lah. Use your “lahs” sparingly and accurately, and you will win over the easily wounded hearts of native Singaporeans faster than HDB upgrading!
– Gwee Li Sui is a poet, a graphic novelist, and a lite-ra-rary critic who also likes to talk cock sing song.
Seriously, if we can’t make up words willy-nilly, or borrow them from random languages and underground emoji codes wtf did we even build the internet for? The whole point of the internet was to act as a complexifier of language 🤬
Prompted by a conversation with @infovore@instagram.com about our separate experiments with timelapses over many years (given the timelapse machine I’m currently building, which is right now taped to the win…https://t.co/xDYlf9dkzgpic.twitter.com/95McEF6s6Q
Word of the day: “slipshape” - in contrast to “shipshape” (tidy, ordered, regulated), that which is “slipshape” is characterised by fluidity, uncertainty, shape-shift & flow.
Coined by Alice Oswald in her book-length river-poem Dart, “a songline from the source to the sea”. pic.twitter.com/fH0cNo2K2U
New research finds Australia is installing renewable energy faster than any other country, a trend that will allow Australia to meet its economy-wide Paris targets five years ahead of schedule if politics doesn’t derail the trend. https://t.co/pFanmeaTIo
Senior EU officials have told me bluntly they know Brexit was won through illegality and cheating by Leave. Leaving the EU is not the ‘will of the people’. Brexit is the will of a British government complicit in ignoring data crime, electoral crime and Russian interference. https://t.co/G1HdqBPCzw
Srinivas: Anthropology cannot be satisfied to train students for a crumbling world, but rather should allow them to imagine a world that could be and then give them the imagination to build a future that only they can see.’
Complexity concept of the day: The greatest challenge today is building collaborations among people who don’t understand each other for collective benefit.
Just learned the amazing word “apophany” from apophenia, the tendency to see patterns when they aren’t there, i.e. faces in clouds, nonexistent patterns on the roulette wheel. So an apophany is like an epiphany except you’re wrong.
Within the past 24 hours, France, Russia, & the US have all conducted test launches of unarmed nuclear missiles.
France: 1 missile launch from a warplane
Russia: 1 ICBM Yars from Plesetsk Cosmodrome
US: 1 Minuteman III from Vandenberg AFB
This is a picture of the far side of the Moon and Earth beyond, captured on Feb. 4 by a camera on board the student-built Chinese DSLWP-B/Longjiang-2 satellite and received by the amateur-operated Dwingeloo Telescope in The Netherlands. (HT @AJ_FI@radiotelescoop) pic.twitter.com/pQAJaszEH3
Here’s @tobias_revell and I’s most recent work ‘Augury’, an installation that parodies the faith in algorithmic prediction by combining machine learning technologies to create a new form of divination based on the flight patterns of planes: https://t.co/Lg8OQXXuXl
The first ever simulated image of a black hole, by astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet (1978). The surrounding accretion disk was calculated on punched cards, then drawn dot-by-dot “directly on negative Canson paper with black India ink.” Complete story: https://t.co/EF7ekbeIBVpic.twitter.com/okDfmIa4XS
“Magic is insidious, and therein lies its danger… In magical rites the inversion of letters serves the diabolical purpose of turning the divine order into an infernal disorder.”
For professional reasons, got a new phone & been testing the Google Assistant. Out-of-the-box, if you say “good morning” it will start to read Reuters & CNN news. This is the exact opposite of what I perceive as a “good morning”. Overall, it feels designed for a alien race.
I admire @GretaThunberg, I respect her, I find her courage inspirational, and I also recognize that having these feelings won’t change the political inequalities, structural economic and social inertia, and climate feedback dynamics that are going to kill us all.
US and UK bring to mind the words of Panait Istrati when visiting the 1930s USSR: “All right, I can see the broken eggs,” he said. “Where is this omelette of yours?” @mrjamesob
Forest supercomputers, computational landscape architecture, and WiFi’s passage through trees—“landscapes sown specifically for their electromagnetic-propagation effects.” https://t.co/arQVqK2XGWpic.twitter.com/GfZubqLk8w
’[E]veryone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence and the good life.’
“A huge Chinese middle class that is thought to number 400 million has brought about a fast-moving extinction crisis for many animal species.” https://t.co/tOMsPrDQmp
Three leaves from a Tibetan musical score used in Buddhist monastic ritual with the notation for voice, drums, trumpets, horns and cymbals.
From the collection of the U.S. Library of Congress pic.twitter.com/TFWXQfbbab
How is our business preparing for pointless brexit? Cancelled travel in April, applied for export licence, stocked up on materials in studio, have the FoAM international network as backup for contracts in EU & loving the sudden horrified awareness of invisible infrastructures.
The crossword are probably the only mainstream puzzle format that requires a full-blown postrational civilizational OODA loop running in your head. You can solve sudokus with pure rationality, but crosswords require you to understand both the zeitgeist, and others’ maps of it.
