A large crater lies underneath Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier—a well-known, but little-studied part of the planet. Now scientists hope to determine if it could be linked to a controversial extinction theory.https://t.co/sjp6uSq9Au
… in progress performance for 300 linghzi mushrooms, 17 humans and 25 pyramidal transmitters - 16/11 TFAM Taipei Biennal post nature mycelium network society pic.twitter.com/sPk8r7SZVs
And so it goes. Goodnight #StanLee. I’ll just say again: May we all be so fortunate as to live so long and see as much of our work and the work of the people we love have as wide an impact on the world as Stanley Lieber did. Poor Jewish kid from NYC made it about as big as it get
— Damien But No Spoopier Than Usual, Which is Fairly (@Wolven) November 12, 2018
post-shanzhai arises at the intersection of big tech marketing and bad urban design, becoming the perfect carrier for state surveillance: if you add enough screens and traditional culture, face recognition cameras become an acceptable externality https://t.co/DLxLmVryQV
wondering if it makes sense of identifying a “post-shanzhai” trend emerging in Chinese tech, as copycatting and cloning low/mid-tier consumer electronics give way to shitty and uncanny tech demos https://t.co/P5zWzc5WpI
“A house must be like a small city if it’s to be a real house; a city like a large house if it’s to be a real city? In fact, what is large without being small has no more real size than what is small without being large. If there is no real size, there will be no human size.”
Re-reading #AaronSwartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, on what would have been his 32nd birthday, and in the middle of the final #AccessLab sessions for 2018. As relevant now as it was ten years ago - keep fighting, in any way you can. https://t.co/r583ZtxGLq
Our autumn digest has just been published. this time it’s “economic experiments, citizen science games, artistic explorations and speculative forays into animist territories” from the @_foam outposts. https://t.co/08FAcEgqbXpic.twitter.com/nyQJbR9oB3
Word of the day: “xanthophylls” - the class of pigments responsible for the yellows in both autumn leaves & egg-yolks. Xanthophylls are present year-round, but as chlorophyll breaks down each fall, many-splendoured yellows – gold, ochre, lemon, amber – are disclosed by decay. pic.twitter.com/URTRTYYe3a
I guess it was only a matter of time before @gregeganSF came up with a stunning insight that would ripple through a particular branch of the tree of mathematics. So, his recent work on superpermutation seem most apt.https://t.co/R2pQxIXT85https://t.co/IxABAwt0K4
Fascists in a democracy demand the right of free speech, but once in power will absolutely, definitively, not grant it to anyone other than themselves. That’s their trick and they know it perfectly well.
In Hungary, Latvia, and Greece, travelers will be given an automated lie-detection test—by an animated AI border agent. The system, called iBorderCtrl, is part of a six-month pilot led by the Hungarian National Police at four different border crossing points. “We’re employing existing and proven technologies—as well as novel ones—to empower border agents to increase the accuracy and efficiency of border checks,” project coordinator George Boultadakis of European Dynamics in Luxembourg told the European Commission. “iBorderCtrl’s system will collect data that will move beyond biometrics and on to biomarkers of deceit.”
Eric Edsinger is an octopus researcher at the University of Chicago who recently helped sequence the genome of Octopus bimaculoides—the California two-spot octopus. Like most octopuses, this color-changing cephalopod is asocial, meaning it likes to be alone most of the time, unless it’s trying to mate. But when given MDMA, a drug well known for boosting emotional empathy and prosocial behavior in humans (i.e. making you really, really want to fraternize), these octopuses also seemed to want to hang out with each other, even if they weren’t trying to find a mate.
Bots and Russian trolls spread misinformation about vaccines on Twitter to sow division and distribute malicious content before and during the American presidential election, according to a new study. Scientists at George Washington University, in Washington DC, made the discovery while trying to improve social media communications for public health workers, researchers said. Instead, they found trolls and bots skewing online debate and upending consensus about vaccine safety. The study discovered several accounts, now known to belong to the same Russian trolls who interfered in the US election, as well as marketing and malware bots, tweeting about vaccines. Russian trolls played both sides, the researchers said, tweeting pro- and anti-vaccine content in a politically charged context. “These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society,” Mark Dredze, a team member and professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, which was also involved in the study, said.
Ramdev has been compared to Billy Graham, the Southern Baptist firebrand who advised several American presidents and energized the Christian right. The parallel makes some sense: Ramdev has been a prominent voice on the Hindu right, and his tacit endorsement during the landmark 2014 campaign helped bring Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power. He appeared alongside Modi on several occasions, singing the leader’s praises and urging Indians to turn out for him. Ramdev has called Modi “a close friend,” and the prime minister publicly lauds Patanjali’s array of ayurvedic products — medicines, cosmetics and foodstuffs. Although Modi campaigned heavily on promises to reform India’s economy and fight corruption, there were frequent dog whistles to the Hindu nationalist base, some of them coordinated with Ramdev. A month before Modi’s landslide victory, a trust controlled by Ramdev released a video in which senior leaders of Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), including the current ministers of foreign affairs, internal security, finance and transportation, appeared alongside him with a signed document setting out nine pledges. These included the protection of cows — animals held sacred in Hinduism — and a broad call for Hindu nationalist reforms of the government, the courts, cultural institutions and education. After Modi won, Ramdev claimed to have “prepared the ground for the big political changes that occurred.”
Through a mix of design and accident, we’ve created a novel environment that is at once strongly shaped by human behaviors and highly opaque to normal human sensory modalities. But we haven’t instrumented this environment well enough to make up for our sensory deficits. Worse, we seem to collectively lack the instrument rating to fly this civilizational airplane. So we are flying blind into the anthropocene, without the appropriate instrument rating, on a wing and a prayer.
Larvae are creatures in a process of becoming or development that have not yet actualized themselves in a specific form. This space is a space for the incubation of philosophical larvae that are yet without determinate positions or commitments but which are in a process of unfolding.
Yesterday, the European Parliament approved amendments to the controversial Copyright Directive, a piece of legislation intended to update copyright for the internet age. Few pieces of legislation have polarized Europe this much in recent years. Critics said the vote heralded the death of the internet, while supporters congratulated themselves for saving the livelihoods of starving artists and giving US tech giants a poke in the eye.
There’s evidence that this four-person limit on conversations has been in place for about as long as humans have been having chatting with one another. Shakespeare rarely allowed more than four speaking characters in any scene; ensemble films rarely have more than four actors interacting at once. But why do we max out at four?
The Zuni maps, says Jim, contain something very important: a different way of looking and knowing. “To assume that people would look at the earth only from a vantage point that is above and looking straight down doesn’t consider the humanity of living on the landscape. Saying that there’s a pond, there are cattails, there are turtles in that water—that is a different view that expands the human experience of a place.” This different view is what Jim, the committee, and the artists hope the Zuni people will recognize when they encounter these maps and consider their place in the cosmos—not a world that is constructed from GPS waypoints or one that was decreed in an executive order—but a particularly Zuni world, infused with the prayers and histories that created it. The Zuni maps have a memory, a particular truth. They convey a relationship to place grounded in ancestral knowledge and sustained presence on the land. That such a relationship consistently fails to appear on modern maps has been the impetus for creating and sharing the Zuni maps—both with the A:shiwi people and with a wider audience. They remind all of us of the ancient names, voices, and stories that reside within the landscape, inviting us to examine our assumptions about what it is that makes up a place and the role that we play in that long and layered story.
the advent of the mass-produced graphite pencil in the second half of the 19th century coincided with profound changes in the way a performer engaged with a musical text. The generation of musicians who benefited from the new tool — capable of making durable, but erasable, markings that didn’t harm paper — were, he wrote, “the first where practice was aimed at perfection of execution, and not developing the skills for real-time extemporization on the material in front of them, or improvisation ‘off book.’” What changes does the new digital technology reflect or enable? Conversations with some of classical music’s most passionate advocates of the gadgets and with developers like forScore and Tonara that write applications for them reveal a number of developments. The traditional top-down structure of teaching has been shaken loose. The line between scholarly and practical spheres of influence is becoming blurred. And the very notion of a definitive text is quickly losing traction — and with it, the ideal of that “perfection of execution.”
Wherever the infraordinary is taken away, wherever civilians are targeted, not only in Paris, Perec’s manifesto rings true. “Question your teaspoons,” he urges us. “What is there under your wallpaper?” he asks. Perec’s parents were killed in the Second World War, his father in the army, his mother in a concentration camp. He had firsthand experience of the eruption of evil into the everyday, so while in some ways An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is a comically Parisian text—oh, the French and their wine at lunch—on some level, it is the diary of an orphaned child who can never accept that the world is the way it is. Why is the world put together this way? This si parisien elevation of the ordinary into something compelling knows that in its peripheral vision lurks the menace of evil, and purposefully, radically chooses to focus, instead, on the fabric of peace.
Some of these skilled lawyers did question whether their profession could ever entirely trust automation to make skilled legal decisions. For a small number, they suggested they would be sticking to “reliable” manual processes for the immediate future. However, most of the participants stressed that high-volume and low-risk contracts took up too much of their time, and felt it was incumbent on lawyers to automate work when, and where, possible. For them, the study was also a simple, practical demonstration of a not-so-scary AI future. However, lawyers also stressed that undue weight should not be put on legal AI alone. One participant, Justin Brown, stressed that humans must use new technology alongside their lawyerly instincts. He says: “Either working alone is inferior to the combination of both.”
At its most fundamental level the movie asks: Can we live ethically in a cursed world? And if so, how? Princess Mononoke offers two related possible solutions. The first is simply to “Live!” (Ikiro!), the catchphrase emblazoned on the movie posters and uttered by the movie’s protagonist, Ashitaka, to the desperate wolf princess San as she struggles to deal with her fear and resentment of humanity. In context, it tells us we cannot give up, no matter what, a message that Miyazaki felt imperative in the emotionally apathetic landscape of nineties Japan. The second is “to see with eyes unclouded”—a challenge, as the movie presents both bloodthirsty beast attacks and relentless human industrialization, and asks us to observe all sides with clarity and objectivity.
“Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Oh, it’s another assessment of Donald Tump and what he does to hold onto his power.”
It is totally reasonable that you would think that, but you would be wrong. This quote is from the USOSS (predecessor to the CIA and NSA) assessment of Adolph Hitler during his rise to power.
Words of the day: “empty forest” - a forest or jungle ecosystem that has lost its large mammals due to defaunation, while its vegetation remains intact. A habitat hollowed from the inside out.
Coined by Kent H. Redford, 1992. #LexiconForTheAnthropocenepic.twitter.com/Kc8L5uXSzv
Word of the day: “dree” - to endure, bear with fortitude that which is wearisome, to last out (Scots). A “dree” is both a hard task and also a long, drawn-out melody. “To dree one’s weird” is - unforgettably - to endure one’s fate, suffer the consequences of one’s actions. pic.twitter.com/EjdRuNhLcb
“What kind of political, social and economic system would I want — and what would I fight for — if I knew I was coming back somewhere in the world but didn’t know where and didn’t know who I’d be?” https://t.co/aVJs3c4abm#GoverningForFutureGenerations
A new Cretaceous period would see the loss of most coastal cities, might be home to reptiles in place of mammals, and could not support human life https://t.co/KQ4DKcwrTYpic.twitter.com/Vka382cd7M
The world’s first exhibition of interplanetary spacecraft and mechanisms in Moscow, USSR, 1927. The exhibition featured models of rocket vehicles and “interplanetary language of logical concepts” with an alphabet of eleven letters depicted by algebraic signs. pic.twitter.com/BsczEzOhB0
Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook and is now at Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arm, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”
There’s something similar with Japanese. Usually non-gendered (people are referred to by name), but the “being/is” verb is divided (vaguely) into living/non-living. For living we use いる (iru) and non-living we use ある (aru). Plants and robots are grouped as non-living.
It depends for plants. I think the plants themselves are animate but the parts of them are inanimate. Like a branch or flower is inanimate but the whole tree is animate. Idk about germs. Robots are animate (as are cars).
A couple more from my recent series ‘Abominations’, a projection 300 years into the future where alchemy and transhumanism converge. pic.twitter.com/ocU6DshIC9
From yesterday’s #IceBridge flight: A tabular iceberg can be seen on the right, floating among sea ice just off of the Larsen C ice shelf. The iceberg’s sharp angles and flat surface indicate that it probably recently calved from the ice shelf. pic.twitter.com/XhgTrf642Z
“Automatic acoustic identification of individual animals: Improving generalisation across species and recording conditions”https://t.co/YZw1nl8MoI - a #bioacoustics collaboration with @IDsignaling and others
I’m working on a paper about ethnographic failures. Can anyone recommend good ethnographers where the fieldworker was kicked out of a field site and/or asked to leave early?
I explored the future beyond cyberpunk:
1. Chaohuan, the “Ultra-Unreal”
2. Afrofuturism
3. Gulf Futurism
4. Cli-fi
5. Solarpunk
6. Water Crisis Thrillers
7. Kitchen Sink Dystopia
8. Woke Space Opera
9. The New Weird https://t.co/HyKpeJfXW8
“On the other hand, because my basic image of the planet is of a household rather than a spaceship, I have some confidence in a long-run process of mutual attunement within this household that will survive revolutionary destruction.” Elise Boulding [2/2]
In 2020, we will launch our next Mars rover. It will journey more than 33 million miles to the Red Planet where it will land, explore and search for signs of ancient microbial life. But how do we pinpoint the perfect location to complete this science…when we’re a million miles away on Earth?
We utilize data sent to us by spacecraft on and orbiting Mars. That includes spacecraft that have recorded data in the past.
This week, hundreds of scientists and Mars enthusiasts are gathering to deliberate the four remaining options for where we’re going to land the Mars 2020 rover on the Red Planet.
The landing site for Mars 2020 is of great interest to the planetary community because, among the rover’s new science gear for surface exploration, it carries a sample system that will collect rock and soil samples and set them aside in a “cache” on the surface of Mars. A future mission could potentially return these samples to Earth. The next Mars landing, after Mars 2020, could very well be a vehicle which would retrieve these Mars 2020 samples.
Here’s an overview of the potential landing sites for our Mars 2020 rover…
Northeast Syrtis
This area was once warmed by volcanic activity. Underground heat sources made hot springs flow and surface ice melt. Microbes could have flourished here in liquid water that was in contact with minerals. The layered terrain there holds a rich record of interactions between water and minerals over successive periods of early Mars history.
Jezero Crater
This area tells a story of the on-again, off-again nature of the wet past of Mars. Water filled and drained away from the crater on at least two occasions. More than 3.5 billion years ago, river channels spilled over the crater wall and created a lake. Scientists see evidence that water carried clay minerals from the surrounding area into the crater after the lake dried up. Conceivably, microbial life could have lived in Jezero during one or more of these wet times. If so, signs of their remains might be found in lakebed sediments.
Columbia Hills
At this site, mineral springs once bubbled up from the rocks. The discovery that hot springs flowed here was a major achievement of the Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit. The rover’s discovery was an especially welcome surprise because Spirit had not found signs of water anywhere else in the 100-mile-wide Gusev Crater. After the rover stopped working in 2010, studies of its older data records showed evidence that past floods may have formed a shallow lake in Gusev.
Midway
Candidate landing sites Jezero and Northeast Syrtis are approximately 37 km apart…which is close enough for regional geologic similarities to be present, but probably too far for the Mars 2020 rover to travel. This midway point allows exploration of areas of both landing sites.
How Will We Select a Site?
The team is gathered this week for the fourth time to discuss these locations. It’ll be the final workshop in a series designed to ensure we receive the best and most diverse range of information and opinion from the scientific community before deciding where to send our newest rover.
The Mars 2020 mission is tasked with not only seeking signs of ancient habitable conditions on Mars, but also searching for signs of past microbial life itself. So how do we choose a landing site that will optimize these goals? Since InSight is stationary and needs a flat surface to deploy its instruments, we’re basically looking for a flat, parking lot area on Mars to land the spacecraft.
The first workshop started with about 30 candidate landing sites and was narrowed down to eight locations to evaluate further. At the end of the third workshop in February 2017, there were only three sites on the radar as potential landing locations…
…but in the ensuing months, a proposal came forward for a landing site that is in between Jezero and Northeast Syrtis – The Midway site. Since our goal is to get to the right site that provides the maximum science, this fourth site was viewed as worthy of being included in the discussions.
Now, with four sites remaining, champions for each option will take their turn at the podium, presenting and defending their favorite spot on the Red Planet.
On the final day, after all presentations have concluded, workshop participants will weigh the pros and cons of each site. The results of these deliberations will be provided to the Mars 2020 Team, which will incorporate them into a recommendation to NASA Headquarters. A final selection will be made and will likely be announced by the end of the year.
I, for one - have great hope in the future because a complete ecological collapse is the closest we’ll get to an alien invasion; it too will challenge the age-old arrogance of power structures, and who knows from that rubble may spawn the seeds of a more responsible civilization.
“At the center of the Anthropocene lies what the PNAS scientists refer to as the “present dominant socioeconomic system.” Capitalism as we know it has not simply steered the global human ecological niche off course; it has driven us completely into a ditch. “High-carbon economic growth” and “exploitative resource use” are constitutive of this system, not incidental to it. And this resource exploitation is not limited to fossil fuels and rare-earth metals. Everything from the augmented mental health regimes of white-collar workers in the Global North to increasingly destabilized and dispossessed farmers and fishermen in the Global South are part of its extractive circuit. Its causal tendrils snake back through the history of colonization, of coal and oil, of geopolitics, and, of course, profit.”
“When Puerto Rico experienced the effects of Maria,” Resilient Power Puerto Rico, a grassroots relief effort that began hours after Maria hit the island, promotes energy democracy in post-Maria Puerto Rico by distributing solar-powered generators to remote parts of the island. The Just Transition Alliance, Climate Justice Alliance, and Greenpeace have also sent brigades to install solar panels across the island.
Solar energy reduces the carbon emissions that fueled Maria’s intensity and makes Puerto Rico more resilient against the next climate-charged storm. A decentralized, renewable energy grid—which allows solar users to plug into or remain independent of the larger grid as necessary—combats Puerto Rico’s dependence on mainland fossil fuels. It also democratizes Puerto Rico’s energy supply, placing power (literally and metaphorically) in the hands of Puerto Ricans rather than fossil-fuel corporations.
We need to quit looking for leaders and be our own leaders. We need to find ways to sidestep power we cannot directly challenge, to dance around it, to make it irrelevant, until it’s time to burn.
The poet and soldier Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was fascinated by the magical beliefs and practices he witnessed in the trenches, and referred to secular humanoid charms, like Fumsup, as, “the first gods born in the twentieth century.” pic.twitter.com/ZUmQdOkgTm
Thought-provoking essay, which asks each of us five questions.
Excerpt:
New York proposes a $20 billion project of floodwalls, levees, and bulkheads to protect the city from storms. Rotterdam announces its “Rotterdam Climate Proof” plan to make the city “fully” resilient to climate-change impacts by 2025, a plan that includes floating bubble-pavilions. More than a hundred US cities now have climate adaptation plans in place, and who can count the special commissions, committees, agency teams, and experts charged with figuring out how their own homes and industries will weather the storms? Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, reassures a world alarmed by warnings of global warming: “As a species…we have spent our entire existence adapting, so we will adapt to this.”
I am not reassured. I want to call attention to the danger that the same moral failings that characterize climate change itself are being replicated and amplified in many of the plans to adapt to it—as if storm and extinction had taught us nothing about justice or reverence for life. In the end, I will suggest that we can armor shorelines, modify the genetics of trout, build giant dams, and in countless ways change the Earth, but effective and honorable adaptation will begin to take place only when we change ourselves.
As global warming forces a fundamental re-imagining of how we live on Earth, we have the chance to choose adaptive strategies that create justice and honor life, and refuse those that protect and perpetuate injustice and destruction. To that end, I offer five essentially moral questions that I believe we should ask of every plan for adaptation to climate change:
1. Does the adaptation effort take urgency or resources away from the immediate, overriding moral necessity of stopping the fossil fuel-based destabilization of the climate? If so, it doesn’t pencil out on any utilitarian calculus. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is especially true when what’s being prevented is irretrievable damage to the natural systems that support life.
2. Does the adaptation plan impose unjustified costs on future generations?Dikes, floodwalls, floating convention centers—the infrastructure of adaptation will have enormous carbon costs. Unless we’re careful, adaptation will foist onto future generations, not only the costs of our profligate use of fossil fuels, but the additional costs of our hapless efforts to adapt to the global warming that results.
3. Does the adaptation effort privilege the wealthy and powerful, at unjustified cost to the poor and dispossessed? When Rex Tillerson says, “we will adapt,” is he referring to Somali children on failing farms? Northern people on melting ice? Or is he thinking of himself and the society he lives in?
4. Does the adaptation effort protect and honor species other than human? What shall we say when adaptation projects protect humans and human industry, but actively damage or fail to protect the abundance and variety of other lives? Plants and animals are challenged to adapt not only to climate change itself, but now to the bulwarks and dams and diversions humans are erecting to protect themselves.
5. What does Earth ask of us? Many adaptation plans draw up blueprints to change the Earth and the built environment, so that humans do not have to change.
“We spent an entire Saturday choreographing [this] one shot,” said creator and executive producer David Holstein. “We brought it down from three minutes to a minute and 42 seconds. It involved 50 crew members, a special built set with walls that flipped, and it’s just this continuous shot of a woman over five years going from drug addict to better person.”
Happy #AdaLovelaceDay ! This year, some of my favourite female artists and designers sticking a knife into and around technological systems; do check them out and support them ▲△▼▽
“The tragedy is that our own times not only could not produce such a building, but cannot even maintain it.”
— Ada Huxtable, 1963 pic.twitter.com/Du6CSF33pp
SEEKING: Story (books, movies, tv) recommendations in xeno-anthropology. Anything to do with anthropologists encountering nonhumans/aliens. Also, is there such a thing as a feminist Ender’s Game / Speaker for the Dead?
“Things don’t mean anything. Birds don’t mean anything. Trees don’t mean anything. Words mean something, yes. Because they point to something beyond themselves. They’re signs. But if you take words too seriously, you’re like a person who climbs a signpost instead of going where it points.”
“an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty”
You can see it as an opportunity for unprecedented global innovation, or protect the pensions of a few old guys so they can golf in a carbon monoxide cloud protected by armed guards. “Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040” https://t.co/Xcbvw4gS3j
I think the Banksy thing is pretty badass but never forget that in 1998 Chris Burden installed a battering ram connected to the turnstile so that if enough people visited his show the entire museum would collapse. pic.twitter.com/8RWOoOKDVi
Hey friends, I need some good book recommendations. Something engrossing and preferably written by a woman.
Examples:
- Gone Girl
- Ancillary Justice
- The Fifth Season
- old school Anne Rice
- mysteries, southern gothic, something that keeps me glued to the page
The earthquake and tsunami caused an immense damage in Palu, Indonesia. But few people have seen or really understand the process of liquefaction, here caught on satellite in a time lapse https://t.co/fCIONUK1rxpic.twitter.com/82cUyV6YnK
To suffix things “-punk” now guarantees them a cozy sub-genre status, thereby protecting the status quo from whatever genuine conceptual threat they might otherwise have posed. Punk is sheer conceptual threat, punching up. https://t.co/cnnK6dBH3V
