This news has been way under the radar. This observation from Climate Home News:
Geoengineering, or manipulating the weather, is one of the most contentious topics in the fight against climate change. So it’s a bit of a jaw-dropper that China is carrying out a large-scale experiment to boost rainfall over the Tibetan plateau, with no apparent international oversight. The system involves a network of cloud-seeding burners over an area three times the size of Spain.
A map of of the Tibetan Plateau. Note that several really important and fundamentally “life-giving” rivers are sourced in the Plateau:
Excerpt:
China is testing cutting-edge defence technology to develop a powerful yet relatively low-cost weather modification system to bring substantially more rain to the Tibetan plateau, Asia’s biggest freshwater reserve.
The system, which involves an enormous network of fuel-burning chambers installed high up on the Tibetan mountains, could increase rainfall in the region by up to 10 billion cubic metres a year – about 7 per cent of China’s total water consumption – according to researchers involved in the project.
Tens of thousands of chambers will be built at selected locations across the Tibetan plateau to produce rainfall over a total area of about 1.6 million square kilometres (620,000 square miles), or three times the size of Spain. It will be the world’s biggest such project.
The chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide, a cloud-seeding agent with a crystalline structure much like ice. The chambers stand on steep mountain ridges facing the moist monsoon from south Asia. As wind hits the mountain, it produces an upward draft and sweeps the particles into the clouds to induce rain and snow.
Each of the chambers looks like this:
“[So far,] more than 500 burners have been deployed on alpine slopes in Tibet, Xinjiang and other areas for experimental use. The data we have collected show very promising results,” a researcher working on the system told the South China Morning Post.
The ground-based network will also employ other cloud-seeding methods using planes, drones and artillery to maximise the effect of the weather modification system.
The ground-based network also comes at a relatively low price – each burning unit costs about 50,000 yuan (US$8,000) to build and install. Costs are likely to drop further due to mass production.
This infographic gives us a rough idea how it works:
Last month, the attorney of Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault at a long-ago high school party, revealed that Blasey Ford and her family were in hiding and had hired private security after Blasey Ford received death threats over email and social media. Among those cheering on the hate-trollers were many familiar faces from the sewers of the modern far-right disinformation metropolis: dandified Republican rogue (and likely Mueller investigee) Roger Stone, his alt-media protégés Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, anarchist turned Kremlin propaganda employee turned Bernie backer turned Trump backer Cassandra Fairbanks, and breathless Infowars conspiracist-in-chief Alex Jones. And not surprisingly, alt-right super-troll and white nationalist fund-raiser Chuck Johnson had his own connection to players in the scandal.
This is an operational unit of information terrorists helping to transform the way Americans consume news in the age of Trump—some of the central nodes that give order to the information deluge and around which bot armies and human amplification networks can be organized, wiped out, reconstituted, and armed for attack.
Humans did not accelerate the decline of the ‘Green Sahara’ and may have managed to hold back the onset of the Sahara desert by around 500 years, according to new research led by UCL.
The study by a team of geographers and archaeologists from UCL and King’s College London, published in
Nature Communications, suggests that early pastoralists in North Africa combined detailed knowledge of the environment with newly domesticated species to deal with the long-term drying trend.
It is thought that early pastoralists in North Africa developed intricate ways to efficiently manage sparse vegetation and relatively dry and low fertility soils.
Dr. Chris Brierley (UCL Geography), lead author, said: “The possibility that humans could have had a stabilizing influence on the environment has significant implications. We contest the common narrative that past human-environment interactions must always be one of over-exploitation and degradation. Read more.
Elysia chlorotica is a sea slug that can capture energy directly from light, as most plants do, through the process of photosynthesis and during time periods where algae is not readily available as a food supply, it can survive for months https://t.co/Ql9RHcLaW2pic.twitter.com/4x1yNTDhvW
The work of care in the Anthropocene is a struggle with scale and scope and sentience. What does care for a dying forest look like? For an unstoppable flood? For the endless migration of humans and other animals? https://t.co/F42jXOV2aR [Terrific piece by @deziluzija@zzkt]
If your thing can’t provide at least half the value when half-assed, (or worse: actually makes things worse if applied with less than 100% conscientiousness), it is actually a liability. Almost no frameworks and methodologies more complex than 2x2s pass this test.
I’ve been to Slab City four times, and during and after each visit, I’m impressed with the ingenuity in reforming junk into shelters and “art,” but also wondering if the whole thing is just one giant Disney-esque tourist trap. I dunno. The residents are off-the-grid (allegedly) and appear to be pure libertarians, but how much of that is show? Again dunno. The people I’ve chatted with who live there are just like most of us, with one big exception: they are truly squatters, but they all have regular people problems: health, spats with spouses or lovers, kids that run away, how to afford the tricycle, food, the air stinks and is polluted, and so on.
“Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place” is a new book that explores a one-square-mile patch of desert in Imperial County, California, that once served as a military base. Seen here is a sentry box that once guarded Camp Dunlap’s southwest perimeter. (Donovan Wiley)
Ha! I’m with a group that visited Slab City for photography purposes back in April 2018.
Excerpt:
On a map, Slab City looks like Anytown, U.S.A. Streets intersect in a grid-like fashion and have names like Dully’s Lane, Tank Road and Fred Road. But it’s not until you have “boots on the ground” that the reality of this squatters’ paradise in the desert sinks in.
Situated on 640 acres of public land located about 50 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border in Imperial County, California, Slab City sits on the site of Camp Dunlap, a former U.S. Marine Corps base. During its peak in the 1940s, the camp housed a laboratory for testing how well concrete survived in the harsh climate of the Sonoran Desert, but by the end of World War II, the government shut down operations. Noticing an opportunity, squatters soon staked their claim on the area, building a hodgepodge of residences using the concrete slabs that remained coupled with whatever materials they could find.
Intrigued, author and architect Charlie Hailey and photographer Donovan Wylie set out to delve deeper and explore what has come to be known as the country’s “last free place.” The result is their new book Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place.
Under the unforgiving sun of southern California’s Colorado Desert lies Slab City, a community of squatters, artists, snowbirds, migrants, survivalists, and homeless people. Called by some “the last free place” and by others “an enclave of anarchy,” Slab City is also the end of the road for many. Without official electricity, running water, sewers, or trash pickup, Slab City dwellers also live without law enforcement, taxation, or administration. Built on the concrete slabs of Camp Dunlap, an abandoned Marine training base, the settlement maintains its off-grid aspirations within the site’s residual military perimeters and gridded street layout; off-grid is really in-grid. In this book, architect Charlie Hailey and photographer Donovan Wylie explore the contradictions of Slab City.
These are some of the most amazing generated images I’ve ever seen. Introducing BigGAN, a neural network that generates high-resolution, sometimes photorealistic, imitations of photos it’s seen. None of the images below are real - they’re all generated by BigGAN.
The BigGAN paper is still in review so we don’t know who the authors are, but as part of the review process a preprint and some data were posted online. It’s been causing a buzz in the machine learning community. For generated images, their 512x512 pixel resolution is high, and they scored impressively well on a standard benchmark known as Inception. They were able to scale up to huge processing power (512 TPUv3′s), and they’ve also introduced some strategies that help them achieve both photorealism and variety. (They also told us what *didn’t* work, which was nice of them.) Some of the images are so good that the researchers had to check the original ImageNet dataset to make sure it hadn’t simply copied one of its training images - it hadn’t.
Now, the images above were selected for the paper because they’re especially impressive. BigGAN does well on common objects like dogs and simple landscapes where the pose is pretty consistent, and less well on rarer, more-varied things like crowds. But the researchers also posted a huge set of example BigGAN images and some of the less photorealistic ones are the most interesting.
I’m pretty sure this is how clocks look in my dreams. BigGAN’s writing generally looks like this, maybe an attempt to reconcile the variety of alphabets and characters in its dataset. And Generative Adversarial Networks (and BigGAN is no exception) have trouble counting things. So clocks end up with too many hands, spiders and frogs end up with too many eyes and legs, and the occasional train has two ends.
And its humans… the problem is that we’re really attuned to look for things that are slightly “off” in the faces and bodies of other humans. Even though BigGAN did a comparatively “good job” with these, we are so deep in the uncanny valley that the effect is utterly distressing.
So let’s quickly scroll past BigGAN’s humans and look at some of its other generated images, many of which I find strangely, gloriously beautiful.
Its landscapes and cityscapes, for example, often follow rules of composition and lighting that it learned from the dataset, and the result is both familiar and deeply weird.
Its attempts to reproduce human devices (washing machines? furnaces?) often result in an aesthetic I find very compelling. I would totally watch a movie that looked like this.
It even manages to imitate macro-like soft focus. I don’t know what these tiny objects are, and they’re possibly haunted, but I want them.
Even the most ordinary of objects become interesting and otherworldly. These are a shopping cart, a spiderweb, and socks.
Some of these pictures are definitely beautiful, or haunting, or weirdly appealing. Is this art? BigGAN isn’t creating these with any sort of intent - it’s just imitating the data it sees. And although some artists curate their own datasets so that they can produce GANs with carefully designed artistic results, BigGAN’s training dataset was simply ImageNet, a huge all-purpose utilitarian dataset used to train all kinds of image-handling algorithms.
But the human endeavor of going through BigGAN’s output and looking for compelling images, or collecting them to tell a story or send a message - like I’ve done here - that’s definitely an artistic act. You could illustrate a story this way, or make a hauntingly beautiful movie set. It all depends on the dataset you collect, and the outputs you choose. And that, I think, is where algorithms like BigGAN are going to change human art - not by replacing human artists, but by becoming a powerful new collaborative tool.
The BigGAN authors have posted over 1GB of these images, and it’s so fun to go through them. I’ve collected a few more of my favorites - you can read them (and optionally get bonus material every time I post) by entering your email here.
Universal Basic Income = Universal Basic Insanity: everybody is allowed a basic life budget for being crazy. For most people, solving for “good life” works out to less than 100% sanity. It is insane to want everybody to be 100% sane.
1 You personally, get to decide where you put your attention
2 By acknowledging this fact you have to take full responsibility for where you have put your attention in the past & where you will put it in the futurehttps://t.co/NmIkH8tSHU
The trump people are telling us that we are going to be totally fucked by the consequences of climate change and global warming, so we might as well keep on burning gasoline in our vehicles without further limitations because the additional carbon spewed into the atmosphere won’t make any difference. That is the sad policy of the trump administration: have fun now, while you can, and let the oil companies make tons of money, because your little car that runs on electricity or sips gasoline won’t make any difference. Make no mistake about how pervasive this attitude is: the republicans are solidly behind this “fiddle while Rome burns” attitude and approach.
A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.
But the administration did not offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.
The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.
“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.
The world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming, the analysis states. And that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
David Pettit, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who testified against Trump’s freeze of car mileage standard Monday in Fresno, Calif., said his organization is prepared to use the administration’s own numbers to challenge their regulatory rollbacks. He noted that NHTSA document projects that if the world takes no action to curb emissions, current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide would rise from 410 parts per million to 789 ppm by 2100.
Next, we’ll delve into the mythic & sensual dimensions of panpsychism with a lecture-performance by @_foam co-founders Maja @deziluzija Kuzmanovic & Nik @zzkt Gaffney, contemplating time, microbial contamination, non-corvid interaction & death alongside audiovisual atmospheres.. pic.twitter.com/SI66VGZcTf
“Almost every country has a vessel monitoring system, and usually it’s totally top secret. Indonesia has decided to give all that data to publish for free.” https://t.co/0Rwgmp9bP3 cc @PulseLabJakarta@pa_wela
We still tune the dead channel. Every morning, the nuclear imaging gamma camera is tested, by imaging a flat, homogeneous source of radioactive cesium-57. Should always give the look of dead channel noise. If any perturbations, there is a problem in the system. pic.twitter.com/VZsW9aqpJ1
An ancient banyan tree spread over 3 acres near Takht Hazara (between the villages Abal and Mori wal) in the Punjab. Said to have been planted by Buzurg Murtaza Shah with his student Malang Baba Rohray Shah a few centuries ago. #LegendaryTrees#Celebritreehttps://t.co/y3JEuz1BmE
We are sorry we have kept you waiting! MINERVA-II1 consists of two rovers, 1a & 1b. Both rovers are confirmed to have landed on the surface of Ryugu. They are in good condition and have transmitted photos & data. We also confirmed they are moving on the surface. #asteroidlanding
I suppose it’s okay to admit after three years of linguistics blogging that I actually am one of those linguists who speaks quite a few languages, and I’ve studied even more at various levels. Here are some of my favourite posts about language learning:
There are a lot of strange courses that make it into a college course catalog. What would artificial intelligence make of them?
I train machine learning programs called neural networks to try to imitate human things - human things they are absolutely are not prepared to understand. I’ve trained them to generate paint colors (Shy Bather or Stanky Bean, anyone?) and cat names (Mr. Tinkles is very affectionate) and even pie (please have a slice of Cromberry Yas). Could it have similar “success” at inventing new college courses?
UC San Diego’s Triton alumni magazine gave me UCSD’s entire course catalog, from “A Glimpse into Acting” to “Zionism and Post Zionism”, a few of which I recognized from when I was a grad student at UCSD. (Apparently I totally missed my opportunity to take “What the *#!?: An uncensored introduction to language”) I gave the course catalog to a neural network framework called textgenrnn which took a look at all the existing courses and tried its best to figure out how to make more like them.
It did come up with some intriguing courses. I’m not sure what these are, but I would at least read the course description.
Strange and Modern Biology
Marine Writing
General Almosts of Anthropology
Werestory
Deathchip Study
Advanced Smiling Equations
Genies and Engineering
Language of Circus Processing
Practicum Geology-Love
Electronics of Faces
Marine Structures
Devilogy
Psychology of Pictures in Archaeology
Melodic Studies in Collegine Mathematics
These next ones definitely sound as if they were written by a computer. Since this algorithm learns by example, any phrase, word, or even part of word that it sees repeatedly is likely to become one of its favorites. It knows that “istics” and “ing” both go at the end of words. But it doesn’t know which words, since it doesn’t know what words actually mean. It’s hard to tell if it’s trying to invent new college courses, or trying to make fun of them.
Advanced Computational Collegy
The Papering II
The Special Research
Introduction to Oceanies
Biologrative Studies
Professional Professional Pattering II
Every Methods
Introduction study to the Advanced Practices
Computer Programmic Mathematics of Paths
Paperistics Media I
Full Sciences
Chemistry of Chemistry
Internship to the Great
The Sciences of Prettyniss
Secrets Health
Survivery
Introduction to Economic Projects and Advanced Care and Station Amazies
Geophing and Braining
Marine Computational Secretites
It’s anyone’s guess what these next courses are, though, or what their prerequisites could possibly be. At least when you’re out looking for a job, you’ll be the only one with experience in programpineerstance.
Ancient Anthlographychology
Design and Equilitistry
The Boplecters
Numbling Hiss I
Advanced Indeptics and Techniques
Introduction in the Nano Care Practice of Planetical Stories
Ethemishing Health Analysis in Several Special Computer Plantinary III
Field Complexity in Computational Electrical Marketineering and Biology
Applechology: Media
The Conseminacy
The Sun Programpineerstance and Development
Egglish Computational Human Analysis
Advanced A World Globbilian Applications
Ethrography in Topics in the Chin Seminar
Seminar and Contemporary & Archase Acoa-Bloop African Computational for Project
Laboration and Market for Plun: Oceanography
Remember, artificial intelligence is the future! And without a strong background in Globbilian Applications, you’ll be left totally behind.
Just to see what would happen, I also did an experiment where I trained the neural net both on UCSD courses and on Dungeons and Dragons spells. The result was indeed quite weird. To read that set of courses (as well as optionally to get bonus material every time I post), enter your email here.
The radiosynthesizing Cryptococcus neoformans. Microbiologist ‘Ekaterina Dadachova suggested such fungi could serve as a food supply and source of radiation protection for interplanetary astronauts, who would be exposed to cosmic rays’ https://t.co/1Tq2zlv8Zr
‘The dinosaurs never die outright, and the new age of abundance never quite gains its inviolable foothold. The future just keeps arriving, mutating, bowing to the fickle pressures of advertising markets and quarterly earnings reports.’
the precise moment at which @pennyred asks the leading lights of Bitcoin “what the hell is wrong with you people” (if phrased more politely) https://t.co/7FImcslwRZ
1. Pre-nihilist: humans are a miracle.
2. Nihilist: humans have no intrinsic value.
3. Post-nihilist: let’s just see where this human thing goes, just for fun.
RT @bruces: *Tomorrow’s future-shock is not that we’re swanning around all posthuman. It’s that the planet’s ecosystems are grotesquely scorched and flooded, genuinely monstrous
— The Prepaid Economy: Sustainable Edition (@prepaid_africa) September 16, 2018
I missed this last month: The New York Public Library lets people check out ties, briefcases and handbags for important meetings and job interviews. https://t.co/IdiSdtuPks
“What do I believe in? Imagination, gardens, science, poetry, love and a variety of nonviolent consolations. I suspect that in aggregate all this isn’t enough, but it’s where I am for now.” - Teju Cole
“what is an object? Philosophers are always saying, “Well, just take a chair for example.” The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about any more. What is a chair? Well, a chair is a certain thing over there … certain?, how certain? The atoms are evaporating from it from time to time—not many atoms, but a few—dirt falls on it and gets dissolved in the paint; so to define a chair precisely, to say exactly which atoms are chair, and which atoms are air, or which atoms are dirt, or which atoms are paint that belongs to the chair is impossible. So the mass of a chair can be defined only approximately. In the same way, to define the mass of a single object is impossible, because there are not any single, left-alone objects in the world—every object is a mixture of a lot of things, so we can deal with it only as a series of approximations and idealizations.”
if you could accurately predict fMRI activity for a given image+person, maybe you could synthesize images that induce a specific kind of neural activity. images that synchronize two people. images that force a reboot. https://t.co/a6BsO4XjZP
One of the world’s leading plasma physicists, Anthony Peratt, not too long ago declassified his discovery that he could reproduce 40% of the most fundamental petroglyph types in the plasma laboratory. pic.twitter.com/0ryI1hv1oO
One of the world’s most haunting ruined places is the ghost town of Kolmanskop, in the desert of Southern Namibia.
Once a thriving mining town, it now sits in an enormous “restricted zone” where people are still forbidden to enter, and is slowly being reclaimed by the sands. pic.twitter.com/MoXQLIsSnp
My central preoccupation has always been coping. How do sentient beings cope and how could they cope better? That’s led me to an awareness of Hadot’s philosophy as a way of life, Foucault’s care of the self, and Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnical training
The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.
Agree with the conclusion. But: our blood is red primarily because of the aromatic ring of protoporphyrin IX, the iron ions bound to it shift only slightly the visible absorption maximum. Blood would be red even without iron.
Your blood is red because of the iron you inherited from the Earth. You need the iron to help bind the oxygen you receive from plants and trees. Our blood and breath are hand-me-downs. The landscape is not decoration. Not scenery. It’s family.
Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia oscillates between a strange theory-fiction exploring oil as a sentient entity and ‘lubricant’ of political conspiracies and a near impenetrable brick wall of desert-based occult mythological correspondences. pic.twitter.com/cY2kk6P1GA
Geneticists have figured out the chemical pathway mushrooms use to make psilocybin - meaning they can now culture it artificially
https://t.co/nTkKrp2Or2
in the age of algorithmic desires, art becomes geology. it is not memory or computation. it becomes an identity with no reflection or rotation. it is an abstract symmetry of operations we cannot yet comprehend, perceive. Let alone, experience.
Today I used Wikipedia’s OAbot to add a link to an #OA version of an article cited on the “Greenland shark” page. The OAbot finds a green OA version of an article cited on Wikipedia and asks you to verify and add the link. Try it out at https://t.co/JtpmgZsaoM#openaccess365
My essay ‘The Algorithmic Writing of Stones: A Cybernetics of Geology’, published in SubStance Journal, is now online: https://t.co/TqNYX9em4c Taking Roger Caillois’ 'The Writing of Stones" [1970] as an trigger for lithic scrying in the age of cybernetics & algorithms. pic.twitter.com/ARjh0s6YOi
Computer vision to see around corners; LHC detects Higgs boson decay; dark matter debate heats up anew, and more. Cocktail Party Physics: Physics Week in Review, September 1, 2018 pic.twitter.com/xS2aC6pLdE
Civilization: a stage of evolution that begins when a species first makes a pocket out of some kind of dough, stuffs it with some sort of filling and deep fries or bakes it. That’s the first step away from barbarism. pic.twitter.com/FvEVBJsVQR
For the first time, all the international bubbles of @_foam are coming together for a single open studio event, with guest appearances from our #invisibleworlds residents -> https://t.co/mgQoW8LXFG
The more attention you pay to NASA, the more it becomes an extremely clever project to turn aeronautics funding into radical ecology research and transcendentalist-ish spiritual tracts. https://t.co/OezAYONZ1z
Answers to FAQs:
1) Yes, the sun’s output varies slightly
2) Yes, the climate has changed before
3) Yes, we’ve considered that
4) Physics
5) No, we’re not getting rich from this
The answer is still: humans are responsible for nearly all of the warming over the past 150 years
‘Kalashnikov has been looking to take its brand in different directions and recently launched a clothing line and a catalogue of personal items ranging from umbrellas to smartphone covers.’ https://t.co/8UvKIgkrov
Right up until the 1980s there was a British Atomic Gardening society, who would expose seeds to radiation to generate amazing genetic novelties & share them with their members.
Members of Special Forces Cavalry—one of them with a snake around his neck—walk in front of Paraguay’s new president during a military parade in Asunción, Paraguay, on Aug. 15 (Marcos Brindicci) pic.twitter.com/pXCcoTmBxY
The next @_foam/@edenproject Invisible Worlds residency begins 2 Sept: ’…and then we see if we will be friends’ by Katharina Hauke & Till Bovermann @LFTri. Tiny networked music making systems will be installed around Eden allowing organisms to make experimental music together. pic.twitter.com/d3PaQqA8kl
A space ship landed. An alien emerged. “Greetings,” it said, “do you have a leader?”
“We have many.”
“Then I will wait.”
“For what?” people asked. “For us to have one, or none?”
But the alien would not say.
All imagined futures lacking recognition of anthropogenic climate-change will increasingly seem absurdly shortsighted. Virtually the entire genre will be seen to have utterly missed the single most important thing we were doing with technology.
“if just one unorganized voting segment, the 60 million bird-watchers of America, sent a unified political message this fall, you’d have a political block with more than 10 times the membership of the NRA” #GreenWavehttps://t.co/lGmPCTKm2Y
