“I’ve often struggled to pinpoint the difference between a tool and a machine; it’s not simply a question of scale or complexity. Still, the tool and the machine constitute two different branches in the philosophy of technology. For instance Heidegger wrote about tools but had much less to say about machines. Deleuze, for his part, was obsessed with machines, leaving tools by the wayside. Overall, ergodic machines are interesting from a philosophical point of view, given how philosophy tends to privilege presence and being. Categories like energy, heat, power, change, motion, evolution, or process tend to get second billing in philosophy, if they’re addressed at all. To promote them to primary billing, as Foucault did, or Whitehead, or Nietzsche, is something of a radical gesture.”
Part of each of us died yesterday when Sudan died. We can’t expect anything to be the same as our co-inhabitants move toward extinction. This is a sad story, but with potentially good outcomes if the efforts to preserve the northern white rhino sperm and eggs are successful.
Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhino, grazes at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya in May 2017. The 45-year-old rhino’s health started deteriorating in late February. STR/AP.
Wildlife ranger Zacharia Mutai comforts Sudan, the last living male Northern White Rhino left on the planet, moments before he passed away March 19, 2018 at Ol Pejeta Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya. National Geographic.
Excerpt:
Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhinoceros, died in Kenya on Monday, leaving his species one step closer to extinction, even as a group of scientists undertake an unprecedented effort to try to keep this animal from vanishing entirely.
Sudan was 45 years old, and his health had deteriorated in recent weeks after a severe leg infection. In a statement, the Ol Pejeta Conservancy said that his condition worsened and that he was no longer able to stand up, so his veterinary team decided to euthanize him.
Sudan was captured in Sudan in 1975, when he was just 2 years old, and was taken to Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic. But as that zoo fell into financial troubles and rhinos failed to breed, Sudan was relocated in 2009 to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, in Laikipia County, Kenya,along with two northern white rhino females named Najin and Fatu.
The thinking was that in a place closely resembling their homeland, they would thrive. Northern white rhinos used to be found in an area spanning Uganda, Chad, southwestern Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some 2,000 existed in 1960, according to the World Wildlife Fund, but war and the poaching that funded the fighting drove them to extinction in the wild.
Joseph Thaida, who took care of Sudan at the conservancy since 2012, remembers him as an affectionate and gentle rhino who had his picture taken with tourists and served as the centerpiece of publicity stunts. The most famous was when Sudan got his own Tinder profile last year to bring attention to the plight of his subspecies and to direct donations to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy for research on assisted reproductive technologies for rhinos.
Dr. Steve Ngulu, the veterinarian who was in charge of Sudan, said the animal’s death is sad and shocking — and a testament to human failure.
“But then, as far as their propagation is concerned, we are happy that at least we collected some sperm from him and the other males,” Ngulu said.
One of the huge hurdles facing scientists is that the two remaining female northern white rhinos cannot gestate the next generation — one is sterile and the other is not physically capable of carrying a calf to full term.
“So, natural reproduction cannot take place, artificial insemination is not possible, so the only other option that we have to have a pure northern white rhino baby is to retrieve or to do something we call ovum pick-up, collect eggs from the females,” Ngulu said.
“Notation is not sketching, and its products are not “sketches.” I avoid the word “sketch,” detest the French equivalent, croquis. The words reek of Beaux-Arts esthetizing ideology. “Sketch” suggests something that will be followed by a more elaborate version of the same, and then by schematic drawings, design development drawings and, likely, many forms of conventional representation. What I am doing here is thoughts on paper. The current state of technology still requires the hand. But I could imagine using emerging technologies or the movement of my eyes alone, providing thought could somehow materialize itself in front of the eyes.”
— Bernard Tschumi, Notations, Diagrams & Sequences
An Uber self-driving car hit and killed a woman crossing the street in Arizona, police said on Monday, marking the first fatality involving an autonomous vehicle and a potential blow to the technology expected to transform transportation.
Sutton and Rao analyzed countless cases of scaling and expansion, both successful ones and those that ended in disaster. In reviewing the most spectacular failures, they identified three key factors that resulted in the kind of expensive, embarrassing, late-stage collapse that is the hallmark of a clusterfuck.
We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of ‘raw materials’, and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technological means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining.
- Wendell Berry, ‘The Total Economy’ (2000)
The condition in which some of us now live—and have lived for decades—is undeniably a luxurious one, energy-wise, comfort-wise. No one in human history has had what some of us now have; but equally there is a growing sense that if things don’t change neither will anyone have it again—we are rapidly depriving future generations of energy resources and a clean, stable environment, both of which have too long been taken for granted.
A piece of coal provides roughly eight kilowatt hours of energy per kilogram, which in one sense is extremely efficient. But the coal takes hundreds of millions of years to form. This almost unimaginable quantity of time is consumed with the flick of a switch, or at the press of a button—all dissipated, all devoured in an instant, to light a room or power a computer. When time is factored in, therefore, fossil fuels actually provide surprisingly low efficiency, low yield in terms of a time-energy ratio. A gravity battery, while seemingly of negligible energy storage value compared to fossil fuels, becomes much more powerful when time is factored into the equation.
The ideas underpinning our current exhibition (as the Reconstrained Design Group, until 15 April) at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) represent a radically different philosophy of energy storage and consumption. They indicate a shift away from quick, thoughtless consumption of ancient resources, towards visible, tangible, real-time consumption. Of course, at this stage the
Newton Machine is more of an intervention than a practical solution—it is not designed to be an instant fix for the world’s energy problems, which are complex and multifaceted.
But before our prototypes and the thinking behind them are dismissed on grounds of impracticality, it is worth noting that our everyday relationship with energy is also a dream, an illusion of through-the-wall magic. It is unsustainable, based on a fantasy of unlimited supply, when in fact it has long been operating on a system of sleight of hand and perpetual deferral. When oil supplies are dwindling, the short-term answer is new technologies of extraction or batteries made from lithium and other non-renewable materials. What the Newton Machine offers is a new way of thinking about energy—a gesture, however rough, towards the seismic paradigm shift that is urgently needed to bring about a more responsible future.
Time is at the centre of this proposed shift in thinking. So is our relationship with nature, which must become balanced rather than extractive and exploitative. Even the generic and ubiquitous electrical sockets in our homes are anything but harmless. The apparent banality of the plug and socket has masked a century of unprecedented environmental destruction. By hiding energy, we have made it seem free of both limitations and consequences. A temporal convenience such as a hot bath or a flash of light releases potential (stored) energy irreversibly. Buttons, switches and plugs conceal enormous infrastructures and exploitation of existing resources on a truly sublime scale.
Design influences desire. If in the past design has been used to encourage consumption, to make consumer goods desirable, then in the future we must enlist design in the fight to bring our desires more closely in line with our needs. A shift is required to preserve what has taken millions or billions of years to form in the past, and to avoid a legacy of waste stretching forward into the future. We have to adjust the scope of our consumption. Reconstraining time means shifting away from the behaviours that brought us into the nightmare of the Anthropocene, and living sustainably within our own modest scale as an animal species on Earth.
Images:
James Auger (top): Gathering black sand for casting at Praia Formosa, Madeira; Miguel Taverna: Images from CCCB exhibition
Plastic washed ashore on a beach in the proximity of Rome “Leonardo da Vinci” Airport
Washed out on our coasts, the plastic pollution spectacle blatantly unveiling on our beaches is only the prelude of the greater story that unfolds further away in the world’s oceans, yet mostly originating from the land we stand on.
It is estimated that 8.8 million metric tons of plastic waste is dumped in the world’s oceans each year. A lot of plastic debris in the ocean breaks down into smaller pieces, it is ingested by marine life, and it is thought that a significant amount sinks to the seabed. But a lot of it just floats around, accumulate at the center of gyres and on coastlines, frequently washing aground.
A wide variety of anthropogenic artefacts can become marine debris; bottles, plastic bags, fishnets, clothing, lighters, tires, polystyrene, containers, plastics shoes and various wastes from cruise ships and oil rigs are among a myriad of man-made items commonly found to have washed ashore, all sharing a common origin: us.
A walk on a beach, anywhere, and the plastic waste spectacle is present. All over the world, the statistics are growing, staggeringly. Tons of plastic that can vary in size are discarded every year, everywhere, polluting lands, rivers, coasts, beaches, and oceans.
The plastic waste tide we are faced with is not only obvious for us to clearly see washed up on shore or floating at sea. Most disconcertingly, the overwhelming amount and mass of marine plastic debris are made of microscopic debris that cannot be just scooped out of the ocean. They are not absorbed into the natural system, they just float around within it, and ultimately are ingested by marine animals and zooplankton. This plastic micro-pollution, with its inherent toxicity, bears grave consequences on the food chain.
“A painting or drawing is judged a fake when it turns out not to be by the artist to whom it has been attributed. A photograph […] is judged a fake when it turns out to be deceiving the viewer about the scene it purports to depict.”
In late February, a large portion of the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole experienced an alarming string of extremely warm winter days, with the surface temperature exceeding 25 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
These conditions capped nearly three months of unusually warm weather in a region that has seen temperatures rising over the past century as greenhouse gas concentrations (mostly carbon dioxide and methane) have increased in the atmosphere. At the same time, the extent of frozen seawater floating in the Arctic Ocean reached new lows in January and February in 40 years of satellite monitoring.
In recent years, the air at the Arctic Ocean surface during winter has warmed by over 5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. So was this recent spate of warm weather linked to longer-term climate change, or was it, well, just the weather?
What we can say is this: Weather patterns that generate extreme warm Arctic days are now occurring in combination with a warming climate, which makes extremes more likely and more severe. What’s more, these extreme temperatures have had a profound influence on sea ice, which has become thinner and smaller in extent, enabling ships to venture more often and deeper into the Arctic.
This sea ice loss, in turn, has created a feedback loop. Thinner, receding ice allows the ocean’s heat to escape more readily into the atmosphere, which the Arctic’s highly stable lower atmosphere traps near the surface during the polar night. As a result, winter surface air temperatures have warmed more in the Arctic compared with the global average.
“Humanity dreams of going to space for many of the same reasons some people went to the desert: because it is there, because they hope to get rich extracting natural resources they find there, and because they suspect mysterious, new terrains can’t be any worse than the irredeemable wreckage of the landscape they’re leaving behind.”
CURRENT WORK in the Energy Humanities insists that we must understand “modernity” as an experience informed by fossil fuels: our use (or abuse) of specific energy resources defines the shape of our culture and society. We can take this equation of energy types and socio-cultural characteristics — an iteration, roughly, of that old adage that we are what we eat or, better, that we are what and how we eat — as a general claim: petro-modernity in all its grimy grandeur is the current iteration of a longer historical relation between energy consumption and social life.
Given this relation, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer argue that we need to “map out other ways of being, behaving, and belonging” in relation to energy in order to “reimagine modernity” in the face of global warming. It’s possible that a shift to renewables will spell the end of capitalism; that alternative forms of energy are not compatible with capital’s grail of profit and growth. On the other hand, however, where there’s a capitalist will there’s usually a capitalist way. The necessity of energy transition provides us with a historical moment of crisis in which opposing ideologies are wrestling over the future not only of energy, but of society. The point is less whether renewable energy automatically equals a fairer society, and more that the massive infrastructural changes ahead provide leverage to institute something better.
It seems important today to find, question, and celebrate narratives that are striving to meet the challenges facing us and that provide persuasive visions of a better future. As Amitav Ghosh and others have argued, however, literary realism runs out of steam in the face of the climate crisis and its increasingly commonplace impossible events. Realism relies on an unspoken reliability of the social and material world for its verisimilitude, yet when the world refuses to function as the stable background for our kitchen-sink dramas, a realism which ignores the growing instability of the Earth’s climate increasingly feels like escapist fantasy.
This is why the most interesting literary work that addresses the Anthropocene and its attendant crises is emerging from speculative (rather than realistic) genres: science fiction, fantasy, and the weird. Speculative genres provide a means to think beyond the constraints of what we have inherited as “reasonable” — they reveal the fragility and contingency of such reasonableness, gesturing instead toward seemingly unreasonable alternatives that we desperately need.
Over the last few years, a promising new speculative subgenre, Solarpunk, has emerged from a small online community to become a movement with a recognizable aesthetic and a preliminary manifesto.
Another fantastic article on Solarpunk in a major outlet. Written by Rhys Williams Research Fellow from Glasgow University it is well worth your time. He covers and provokes with some thoughtful criticism but perhaps in future could go further.
“If there exists a place where the ownership of capital is not a source of pride and valorization, it is surely this zone. Many things are free here; you can use tractors, tools or books without ever reaching for your wallet. This doesn’t mean that, like anywhere else, there isn’t any money circulating. But it’s the use made of it and its symbolism, that differs: we would want that paying for something is not an easy reimbursement for a lack of involvement in common life, a way of exempting oneself. If there is little money here, there is however a fierce daily fight against the economic logic that wants to measure the value of every gesture. Instead, we are trying to replace it with our bonds, our attachments, our trust in each other, and a certain sense of commitment.”
An English translation of a statement by several groups of La ZAD’s residents, offering an up-close look at the tensions, prospects, and challenges presently faced by the West’s largest autonomous zone now that the airport has finally been ‘officially’ canceled. (via Ill Will Editions)
“La ZAD (Zone A Défendre) is Europe’s largest postcapitalist land occupation, a rural protest camp on the outskirts of Brittany in Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
Ever since 2009, this 4,000-acre space comprised of farms, woodland and abandoned properties has been inhabited by environmentalists opposing the construction of an international airport. The airport project is a long-term development that threatens to turn the surrounding countryside into a sprawling metropolis.
Authorities have repeatedly tried to evict the protesters and clear the land only for the ‘ZADists’ to remain steadfast in their presence, using permaculture strategies to harness the land while turning makeshift structures into a thriving community – one with its own theatre spaces, bakery, bike workshops and even a pirate radio station.” (via Huck)
“We would want that paying for something is not an easy reimbursement for a lack of involvement in common life.”
“I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.”
“Yet all of this, as powerful as it is, remains secondary to the everyday experience of living in our cities. Art lags behind, unable to capture the visceral quotidian experience of Uber, TaskRabbit, Snapchat, Giphy, Pokémon Go (which has already Been and Pokémon Gone), Helsinki’s autonomous shuttles and Singapore’s self-driving taxis, Japanese sushi-delivery robots and Domino’s Pizza delivery drones, American security-guard robots upended in shopping-mall fountains, South Korean robotic mannequins, ‘conversations’ with AI personal assistants over email, shouting at Amazon Alexa, ‘holographic’ assistants at airports, Microsoft chatbots becoming racist and genocidal on Twitter, Chinese chatbots vanishing after spurning the Communist Party, 4Chan, 3D printed handguns and Google Tango phones 3D-mapping spaces, Russian election-hacking multiplied by Cambridge Analytica and the Macedonian Fake-News Complex, Icelandic crowdsourced constitutions, Dutch police training eagles to take down illegal drones, Bitcoin hard forks, Ethereum hacks … In other words, a quick flick across the home page of The Verge or TechCrunch. Art in general has not found a foothold in these new times.”
“Inspired by Australian flora and fauna. It is nature digitized. Sounds recorded in nature have been run through computers and electronically manipulated. Computer generated 3D imagery swirls and contorts to the sounds creating semi-abstract interpretations of native plants.”
Aino, a typeface by Estonian Design Team and Anton Koovit, is the official typeface of Estonia. It is the most widespread and recognisable element of the brand as it communicates our ideas in all mediums. In print and on screens; in long and short texts.
So, how do we become not just passengers, but possible co-designers of the space experiences that impact—or involve—us as individuals? The technologies, roadmaps, and regulatory frameworks are unfolding now, but the early stages of future service, product and policy design are still just a curious glint of light in the distance. If we don’t (or do) want a future shaped by floating sports cars or wealthy tourist flights only, now is as good a time as any to sketch other possibilities.
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
— Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, in context: “A society committed to the institutionalization of values identifies the production of goods and services with the demand for such. Education which makes you need the product is included in the price of the product. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. In such a society marginal value has become constantly self-transcendent. It forces the few largest consumers to compete for the power to deplete the earth, to fill their own swelling bellies, to discipline smaller consumers, and to deactivate those who still find satisfaction in making do with what they have. The ethos of nonsatiety is thus at the root of physical depredation, social polarization, and psychological passivity.”
We reached Shadow Belmont. A place deeply familiar with shade. Shade architecture, shaded transport, sheltered time. A cityscape layered with a latticework of porches, pergolas, verandas, galleries, awnings, canopies, umbrellas and trees. From above the city looks like a desert garden. The shade of the high canopy stands on cactimorphic succulent pillars, doubling as public water sources. Closer to the ground, multi-trunked mesquite marquees diffuse light across outdoor kitchens and intimate courtyards. The ubiquitous antennae of the place mingle with soaring ocotillo vines, their cabling protected by dessicated saguaro skeletons. Solar-powered screens radiate the shadow forecast and a cooling breeze. The STA (Shade Traversal Association) maps show real-time shade developments, with roads in direct sun coloured flaming red. The droning of traffic blends into the murmur of slowly adjusting shade structures, punctuating the continuous background hum of insects, psychic noise and ambient communication.
Scientists have figured out how to use nuclear waste as an energy source, converting radioactive gas into artificial diamonds that could be used as batteries.
These diamonds, which are able to generate their own electrical current, could potentially provide a power source for thousands of years, due to the longstanding half-life of the radioactive substances they’re made from.
“There are no moving parts involved, no emissions generated, and no maintenance required, just direct electricity generation,” says geochemist Tom Scott from the University of Bristol in the UK.
“By encapsulating radioactive material inside diamonds, we turn a long-term problem of nuclear waste into a nuclear-powered battery and a long-term supply of clean energy.”
Pointing seems to be in our nature: When people want to draw attention to something, we instinctively extend an index finger. This gesture has been observed across the globe, suggesting that it’s a universal human impulse, perhaps like yawning or laughing.
But research my collaborators and I recently published shows that pointing is not simply a matter of human nature. How we point is also a matter of culture. These findings suggest that cognitive scientists still have a lot to learn from other cultures about why humans behave in the ways that they do.
In 2009, my collaborator, Rafael Núñez, and I joined a fieldwork project in Papua New Guinea’s remote interior. The goal was to study the language and culture of the Yupno, an indigenous group of some 8,000 people.
While conducting our interviews, we noticed a distinct way the Yupno would point: They would scrunch their noses while looking toward wherever they wanted to direct your attention. To outsiders, it could easily look like an expression of disgust. But there’s nothing negative about it.
This “nose-pointing” gesture, it turned out, was essentially undocumented. After we returned to the U.S., we published some preliminary observations using examples from our videos. But the study left a bunch of questions unanswered. One in particular kept popping up: Was facial pointing just an infrequent quirk, or did the Yupno use it as much – or even more than – hand-pointing? We didn’t have a good answer. […]
We devised a simple communication game that’s played in pairs. One person sits down with five square cloths on the ground in front of them, forming a plus sign. Off to one side is a tray with a number of small, colorful objects on it – beanbags, cylinders and cubes. The person is shown a photo with eight of the objects arranged on the square cloths in a particular way. Their task is to tell their partner how to arrange the objects to match the photo. The instructions don’t mention pointing. It’s assumed that the players will spontaneously point to instruct their partner.
We played this game with 16 Yupno adults and then, later, 16 undergraduates in California. The Yupno and Americans pointed at about the same rate. But how they pointed was a different story. As you might guess, the Americans almost always used their hands – 95 percent of the time, in fact. But the Yupno participants used their hands much less – only 34 percent of the time. The rest of the time they pointed with the scrunched nose gesture or just a toss of the head.
In the Yupno, at least, pointing with the face is not just an “occasional alternative.” Our experiment shows it’s how they respond to the impulse to point.
The Asia Paranormal Investigators (API) is a paranormal research based Society (ROS Ref. No. 2081/2007) based in Singapore that strives to systematically analyze any strange occurrences happening in Singapore and around the region. It was founded in 2005 by Charles Goh.
“I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look at where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.”
Today, the three classical biological explanations of the individual self––the immune system, the brain, the genome––are being challenged by the new field of microbiome research. Evidence shows that our resident microbes orchestrate the adaptive immune system, influence the brain, and contribute more gene functions than our own genome. The realization that humans are not individual, discrete entities but rather the outcome of ever-changing interactions with microorganisms has consequences beyond the biological disciplines. In particular, it calls into question the assumption that distinctive human traits set us apart from all other animals––and therefore also the traditional disciplinary divisions between the arts and the sciences.
LAKE POOPÓ The dry, salt-crusted Bolivian lake bed unfurls into the distance. Boats are stranded; the fish and waterfowl are gone. Fishermen who depended on the lake are moving else - where. It’s a diaspora born of drought.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MAURICIO LIMA
Excerpt:
Round the globe, climate change is warming many lakes faster than it’s warming the oceans and the air. This heat accelerates evaporation, conspiring with human mismanagement to intensify water shortages, pollution, and loss of habitat for birds and fish. But while “the fingerprints of climate change are everywhere, they don’t look the same in every lake,” says Catherine O’Reilly, an aquatic ecologist at Illinois State University and co-leader of a worldwide lake survey by 64 scientists.
In eastern China’s Lake Tai, for example, farm runoff and sewage stimulate cyanobacterial blooms, and warm water encourages growth. The organisms threaten drinking-water supplies for two million people. East Africa’s Lake Tanganyika has warmed so much that fish catches that feed millions of poor people in four surrounding countries are at risk. The water behind Venezuela’s massive Guri hydroelectric dam has reached such critically low levels in recent years that the government has had to cancel classes for schoolchildren in an effort to ration electricity. Even the Panama Canal, with its locks recently widened and deepened to accommodate supersize cargo vessels, is troubled by El Niño–related rainfall shortages affecting man-made Gatun Lake, which supplies not only water to run the locks but also fresh drinking water for much of the country. Low water levels have also forced limits on the draft of ships so the ships don’t run aground in the lake.
Of all the challenges lakes face in a warming world, the starkest examples are in closed drainage basins where waters flow into lakes but don’t exit into rivers or a sea. These terminal, or endorheic, lakes tend to be shallow, salty, and hypersensitive to disturbance. The vanishing act of the Aral Sea in Central Asia is a disastrous example of what can happen to such inland waters. In its case the main culprits were ambitious Soviet irrigation projects that diverted its nourishing rivers.
Similar scenarios are playing out in terminal lakes on nearly every continent, a combination of overuse and worsening drought. Side-by-side satellite images reveal the shocking toll. Lake Chad in Africa has shrunk to a sliver of its former self since the 1960s, heightening shortages of fish and irrigation water. Displaced people and refugees who now depend on the lake put an additional strain on resources. Shortages as well as tensions in the hot, dry Sahel are driving conflict and mass migration. Utah’s Great Salt Lake and California’s Salton Sea and Mono Lake have undergone periods of recession too, diminishing critical breeding and nesting areas for birds as well as playgrounds for recreational boaters.
Cybernetics is the science or the art of manipulating defensible metaphors; showing how they may be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence.
Summary of the research and what the web site is telling us, from reporter John Schwartz at the
New York Times:
After looking at data on quality of life and use of resources from some 150 countries, they found that no nation currently meets the basic needs of its citizens in a sustainable way. The nations of the world either don’t provide the basics of a good life or they do it at excessive cost in resources, or they fail at both.
To Dr. O’Neill, an economist, this was something of a surprise. “When we started, we kind of thought, ‘surely, out of 150 different countries, there will be some shining star’” with a high quality of life and moderate resource use. “We really didn’t find that,” he said, pointing only to Vietnam as coming close to meeting both measures.
The United States, on the other hand, provides a relatively high quality of life but fails on every measure of sustainability in the study. For example, it emits 21.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person per year, while the study’s sustainability threshold is 1.6 metric tons.
Providing a good quality of life to everyone on the planet would require “two to six times the sustainable level for resources,” Dr. O’Neill said. “Something has to change.”
He did not say, however, that these findings doom humanity to poverty or environmental ruin. “It doesn’t tell us what’s theoretically possible,” he said, noting that the study only projects the results of continuing with business as usual.
The conclusions have caused a stir, especially in conservative circles. National Review denounced the paper as a call for “global wealth distribution,” saying “the goal clearly is a technocracy that will undermine freedom, constrain opportunity, not truly benefit the poor, and materially harm societies that have moved beyond the struggle for survival.”
Dr. O’Neill said that that reading of the paper missed the point — redistribution cannot solve the problem. Whoever owns the wealth, he said, “We need to improve both physical and social provisioning systems.”
At the same time, global income inequality is an issue, he added wryly. “I am all for taking away yachts and providing food, clean water and access to electricity to people in sub-Saharan Africa.”
“Oligarchic rule, as Aristotle pointed out, is a deviant form of government. Oligarchs care nothing for competency, intelligence, honesty, rationality, self-sacrifice or the common good. They pervert, deform and dismantle systems of power to serve their immediate interests, squandering the future for short-term personal gain. “The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments that rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, of the few or of the many, are perversions,” Aristotle wrote. The classicist Peter L.P. Simpson calls these perversions the “sophistry of oligarchs,” meaning that once oligarchs take power, rational, prudent and thoughtful responses to social, economic and political problems are ignored to feed insatiable greed. The late stage of every civilization is characterized by the sophistry of oligarchs, who ravage the decaying carcass of the state.”
Mario Klingemann: Cameraless Photography with Neural Networks
Video of talk from @mario-klingemann at The Photographers Gallery, London, on the subject of making Art with neural networks:
Coinciding with his current project on our Media Wall, Mario Klingemann will be in conversation with Daniel Rourke discussing his recent work which employs machine learning to create visual imagery in a process he calls “Neurography”. In recent months, attention has been drawn to the use of adversarial neural networks to produce entirely fictitious photographic images and their potential use and mis-use in a post-truth age. Reflecting on the ways in which machines are being trained at an increasing rate to learn new skills - from creating to interpreting images - Mario will unpack the creative possibilities presented by neural networks.
Some of Mario’s work is currently being shown at the gallery - you can find out more here
technologists in general (and recently and in particular, the strain of technology centered around the West Coast of the United States), have operated on general idea that as technologists we’re apart from society. That, like scientists, we discover and invent new things and then it’s up to “them” — society, government, and so on — to figure out and deal with the implications and results. This argument isn’t entirely wrong: it is society and our government’s job to “figure out” and “deal with” the implications and results of technology, but it’s disingenuous of the technological class (and to be more accurate, its flag-wavers and leaders) to sidestep participation and responsiblity. In other words: nobody, not even technologists, is apart from society. Society is all of us, and we all have a responsibility to it.
“Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance,” author and historian Jill Lepore wrote for the New Yorker in June, “[now] it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen 21st century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness.” Lepore continues: “[Dystopia] cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own.”
A fungus called Prototaxites towered more than 24 feet (8m) over most of the land plants of the Silurian Period and was as much as three feet (1m) wide.
A surprising thing about Haid [the CEO of Roam, a hostel startup] is the range of leftist flourishes he adds to any discussion,
referencing everything from radical economists and the British filmmaker Adam Curtis to Verso Books and the state of “late capitalism.” In his mouth, they seemed less a coherent politics than a business plan, a means of predicting and profiting from the incipient future. Traditional careers began disintegrating after the financial crisis, Haid theorized, and soon advances in A.I. and robotics will cause further disruption. “There is not necessarily work there for everyone,” he said. If jobs are no longer static or stable, then the notion of a permanent home must also be rethought. Nomadism, Haid argued, allows the discontented or disenfranchised to design new, sustainable lifestyles in the global marketplace. It’s a means of letting human capital find the path of least resistance, wherever it may be.
I was surprised
A Thousand Plateauswasn’t mentioned, given that it is all about lines of flight and escapes from territoriality and that sort of thing and has 90 or so pages about literal nomads. This passage is also a perfect illustration of how strategies for escaping the “system” often end up recapitulating it. Digitality here doesn’t produce opportunities to live in new or alternative ways so much as it grids up and assimilates all possible space-time, eradicating the “outside” in which a nomadic way of life (set in opposition to the established order) could occur.
Digitization is a system of capture — a way of homogenizing experience and singularities into commensurate measures, into numbers — it’s just surprising how effectively it is sold as a kind of inherent freedom.
Barlow (that’s what most of his friends called him) flaunted his complexity. He advertised himself as a Republican Deadhead, as a cowboy hacker, a spiritual rationalist, a womanizing feminist, a technological hippy. He had a remarkable gift of conforming himself to the contours of whomever he was arguing with, so both sides could violently agree and civilly disagree. His full embrace of his own cognitive dissonance allowed him to craft outrageous statements and manifestos that he truly believed to be true and also knew were wholly fictional.
It may be truer to say the most of what he wrote and said was less an attempt to nail reality as it was to reshape reality. He was an unashamed aspirationalist. In that regard, Barlow had much in common with many prophets, gurus, visionaries, magicians, innovators, charlatans, and politicians in that he placed greater emphasis on what could be rather than what is. And he believed, as those just mentioned do and most journalists and scientists don’t, that you can create reality with your words.
I always thought of Barlow as the Mayor of the Internet. He saw very early that the internet was a political artifact that would require the same kind of idealism, compromise, and civics that prosperous and free societies needed. Nobody elected him, but if we did vote for a Mayor of the Internet, he would have won because everyone – no matter their stripe or color – thought of him as a good friend (and he was a good friend to thousands). I think he would have done a decent job as Mayor, rallying our better natures to make a better internet city on the hill.
If there had been no Barlow, I believe the internet would still be hunting for its own identity, it would have far fewer heroes guarding fragile rights and responsibilities in this new realm, it would lack some of the most poetic descriptions of technology written, and we would not have had the rawhide character of Barlow, the free-spirit no one could domesticate, always ready with a satisfying turn of phrase to illuminate the horror and glories of our new world.
One thing certain you can say about him: He out Barlow’d everyone to become singular and original. There was no one else like him. In the digital calculus of infinite possibilities, that is the highest form of success.
“Barlow, best known prior to his co-founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, was writing to inspire activism, not to prescribe a new world order, and his goal was to be lyrical and aspirational, not legislative. Barlow wrote and published his “Declaration” in the short days and weeks after Congress passed, and President Clinton signed into law, a telecommunications bill that aimed, in part, to censor the internet. No serious person – and certainly not the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations that successfully challenged the Communications Decency Act provisions of that bill – believed that cyberspace would be “automagically” independent of the terrestrial world and its governments. Barlow’s “Declaration” is best understood, as Wired described it two decades later, as a “rallying cry.” Similarly, nobody thinks “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful” or “This Land Is Your Land” is a constitution. (And of course the original Declaration of Independence isn’t one either.)”
TheUniversity Climate Change Coalition, dubbed UC3, is writing a roadmap for university-level action on climate change. Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California and former Homeland Security secretary under Barack Obama, announced the coalition on Tuesday.
The participating research institutions from the United States, Canada, and Mexico have pledged to reduce their carbon footprints and foster climate change action in their local communities:
Arizona State University
California Institute of Technology
Tecnológico de Monterrey
La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
The Ohio State University
The State University of New York
The University of British Columbia
The University of California
University of Colorado, Boulder
University of Maryland, College Park
The University of New Mexico
The University of Toronto
The University of Washington
UC3 will operate in tandem with the Climate Leadership Network, a group of colleges and universities working to provide students with the tools they need to tackle climate change.
“The UC3 coalition believes that addressing climate change is an area where some of the world’s greatest research institutions can, and must, lead,” Napolitano said.
“All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd. But people don’t draw the obvious conclusion: it must also mean then that our present situation is absurd.”
“Aggressively filter what goes to your main email account and don’t give the address to everybody. Same with your phone number. Also your home address. Don’t tell anyone where you live. Move out of your house. Smash all the security cameras as you travel. Find a cave. Bury your droppings. Wear plastic shopping bags over your hands. Talk only to the sea. Only the sea understands you. Only the sea will keep your secrets.”
To any headphone jack, all audio is raw in the sense that it exists as a series of voltages that ultimately began as measurements by some tool, like a microphone or an electric guitar pickup or an EKG. There is no encryption or rights management, no special encoding or secret keys. It’s just data in the shape of the sound itself, as a record of voltages over time. When you play back a sound file, you feed that record of voltages to your headphone jack. It applies those voltages to, say, the coil in your speaker, which then pushes or pulls against a permanent magnet to move the air in the same way it originally moved the microphone whenever the sound was recorded.
Smartphone manufacturers are broadly eliminating headphone jacks going forward, replacing them with wireless headphones or BlueTooth. We’re going to all lose touch with something, and to me it feels like something important.
The series of voltages a headphone jack creates is immediately understandable and usable with the most basic tools. If you coil up some copper, and put a magnet in the middle, and then hook each side of the coil up to your phone’s headphone jack, it would make sounds. They would not be pleasant or loud, but they would be tangible and human-scale and understandable. It’s a part of your phone that can read and produce electrical vibrations.
Rocket Lab said the Humanity Star was supposed to be a “reminder to all on Earth about our fragile place in the universe”, and the company’s chief executive and founder, Peter Beck, said the sphere would “create a shared experience for everyone on the planet”. But many astrophysicists disagree. Richard Easther from the University of Auckland told the Guardian that Rocket Lab may have unintentionally hit on a particularly sore point for his profession. Light pollution is already a serious concern for scientists whose focus is on the stars, and the introduction of a glinting disco ball in space has not been widely welcomed.
Strictly speaking, panpsychism is contrary to scientism rather than to science (if we take science to be a method rather than a dogma). Regardless, panpsychism, as well as transgressing the general scientific paradigm, transgresses the Christian one. Living under the shadow of both science and Christianity should make us wise to the legacy and interaction between the two, which is not always as antagonistic as is often believed. Descartes’ explicit aim in his Meditations on First Philosophy – wherein he divided nature into human souls and the mechanistic environment in which they found themselves – was to carry out the call of Pope Leo X to logically prove that the soul (which Descartes equated to mind) be distinct to the material body, so that life after death (in heaven or hell) be a logical view. Panpsychism per se does not need to make this afterlife claim: the death of the body implies the dissolution of the unifying sentience (the dominant monad, the holon) into its still unified smaller components – but the self as such dies. In panpsychism, mankind has no special status distinct to the other organisms, and as such is generally opposed to Christianity [64] and other Abrahamic religions. Moreover, panpsychism is more akin to the animistic, pagan religions that worshipped nature. Thus in Christendom, panpsychism has been contrary to both the religious and mechanistic ethos, resulting in its being shunned, disdained, and perhaps even purposefully suppressed: the Roman Inquisition burned the panpsychist Bruno on the stake in 1600.
Amazon Echo’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Cortana are always listening to obey your commands. Utter the wake word – Alexa, Cortana or Hey Google, and they spring into life. But what if you don’t want your voice recorded and stored on Amazon’s servers forevermore?
Thankfully, all these services give you the option of deleting your data. Here’s how to remove your voice data collected by the Amazon Echo, Google Home, Siri and Cortana….
*Well, it had to happen sometime. All women are mortal, Ursula K. Le Guin is a woman, therefore Ursula is mortal. So long Ursula, you weird, Taoist creature, you.
“And in the Center there is no time past and no time to come. In all time past it is. In all time to come it is. It has not been nor yet will it be. It is. It is all.”
In Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen has held power since 1998, a reign characterized by systematic looting, political patronage and violent suppression of human rights; when opposition parties used Facebook to organize a strong showing in the 2013 elections, Hun Sen turned to the tool to consolidate his slipping hold on power.
In this he was greatly aided by Fresh News, a Facebook-based political tabloid that is analogous to far-right partisan US news sources like Breitbart; which acted as a literal stenographer for Sen, transcribing his remarks in “scoops” that vilify opposition figures and dissidents without evidence. Sen and Fresh News successfully forced an opposition leader into exile in France, and mined Facebook for the identities of political opponents, who were targeted for raids and arrests.
The Cambodian government has cultivated a deep expertise in Facebook’s baroque acceptable conduct rules, and they use this expertise to paint opposition speech as in violation of Facebook’s policies, using the company’s anti-abuse systems to purge their rivals from the platform.
Offline, the government has targeted the independent press with raids and arrests, shutting down most of the media it does not control, making Facebook – where the government is able to silence people with its rules-lawyering – the only place for independent analysis and criticism of the state.
Then, last October, Facebook used Cambodia in an experiment to de-emphasize news sources in peoples’ feeds – a change it will now roll out worldwide – and hid those remaining independent reporters from the nation’s view.
Opposition figures have worked with independent researchers to show that the government is buying Facebook likes from clickfarms in the Philippines and India, racking up thousands of likes for Khmer-language posts in territories where Khmer isn’t spoken. They reported these abuses to Facebook, hoping to get government posts downranked, but Facebook executives gave them the runaround or refused to talk to them. No action was taken on these violations of Facebook’s rules.
Among other things, the situation in Cambodia is a cautionary tale on the risks of “anti-abuse” policies, which are often disproportionately useful to trolls who devote long hours and careful study to staying on the right side of the lines that companies draw up, and scour systems for people they taunt into violations of these rules, getting the platforms to terminate them.
Two interesting solutions to deer on the railroad tracks, excerpted from this story:
Ultrasonic waves:
Deer collisions have been on the rise for many of Kintetsu’s mountainous rail lines, the Asahi Shimbun reports, noting the total grew from 57 in 2004 to 288 in 2015.
Hikita began to study the deer, finding hoof prints and dung along both sides of the tracks. He came up with an idea, and two years later, that idea won a 2017 Good Design Award from the Japan Institute of Design Promotion.
It’s already in use on part of the Osaka Line, where netting rises 2 meters high (about 6.5 feet) alongside the tracks, except for periodic 20- to 50-meter gaps (about 65 to 165 feet). In those gaps, ultrasonic waves form temporary barriers at the riskiest times around dawn and dusk, but not when trains are offline overnight. And since humans can’t hear the sound, it’s less upsetting in residential areas than lion dung.
Three of these crossings have been set up on the Osaka Line in a mountainous area of Tsu, the capital of Mie Prefecture, according to the Asahi Shimbun. That section of track suffered 17 deer collisions in fiscal 2015, but only one has been reported there since the deer crossings were installed more than a year ago.
Trains that bark and snort:
In another inventive approach, researchers with the Railway Technical Research Institute (RTRI) have been testing trains that snort like a deer and bark like a dog.This combination of sounds turns out to be a good way to scare deer, the BBC reports. First, a three-second blast of deer-snort noises gets their attention, followed by a 20-second clip of barking dogs, which is apparently enough to make them flee.
RTRI officials say the results have been encouraging so far, with deer sightings down about 45 percent on trains that snort and bark
If we want to empathise, we must always question who really ‘benefits’ from our ‘empathy’. But VR empathy machines, especially slick UN-sponsored empathy productions built to milk donations from millionaires at Davos, definitely do not foster any type of critical reflection. To quote Wendy H. K. Chun’s excellent talk at Weird Reality: if you ‘walk in someone else’s shoes then you’ve taken their shoes’.8 If you won’t believe someone’s pain unless they wrap an expensive 360 video around you, then perhaps you don’t actually care about their pain. I think empathy machine apologists are lying to themselves. The ‘embodied’ ‘transparent immediacy’ of virtual reality (or much less, 360 video) does not obliterate political divisions. Even a culturally advanced medium like books can barely chip away at the problem, so VR definitely can not. In this political sense, VR can’t actually offer any embodiment, transparency or immediacy to anyone. At best, VR can only offer the illusion of empathy.
For people who want their computer, networking and information history ready to go, Ted Nelson’s 1977 work “Selected Papers” is now up. It contains various writings from 1965-1977 and convinced Autodesk to fund the Xanadu Project.
Hypothesis: All technology is intended to make humans more like octopuses. Octopus is the end state. After which, all the octopus-humans migrate to the oceans of the moons of Jupiter.
Luna is a WYSIWYG visual and textual, purely functional data processing language. Its goal is to revolutionize the way people are able to gather, understand and manipulate data. Luna targets domains where data processing is the primary focus, including data science, machine learning, IoT, bioinformatics, computer graphics or architecture. Each domain requires a highly tailored data processing toolbox and Luna provides both an unified foundation for building such toolboxes as well as growing library of existing ones. At its core, Luna delivers a powerful data flow modeling environment and an extensive data visualization and manipulation framework.
Heraud researched the scourges of agriculture: hypoxic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and Baltic Sea, the colony collapse of bees, soil degradation, and human health problems from allergies to cancers. “Everything tied back to the blind, rampant, broadcast spraying of chemicals,” Heraud says. He and Redden figured they could teach machines to differentiate between crops and weeds, then eliminate the weeds mechanically or with targeted doses of nontoxic substances. The two first considered hot foam, laser beams, electric currents, and boiling water. They’d market the robot to organic farmers, who spend heavily on chemical-free weeding methods including mechanical tillage, which can be both fuel-intensive and damaging to soil. After months of research, they faced a disappointing truth: There was no way around herbicides. “Turns out zapping weeds with electricity or hot liquid requires far more time and energy than chemicals—and it isn’t guaranteed to work,” Heraud says. Those methods might eliminate the visible part of a weed, but not the root. And pulling weeds with mechanical pincers is a far more time-intensive task for a robot than delivering microsquirts of poison. Their challenge became applying the chemicals with precision.
I used to believe that storytelling was the most powerful tool for expression and was therefore frustrated with photography’s limited narrative capacity. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gradually become less enamored with storytelling. These days, I’m not even sure I care that much about expression. Mostly I’m interested in simply paying attention.
“I used to believe that storytelling was the most powerful tool for expression and was therefore frustrated with photography’s limited narrative capacity. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gradually become less enamored with storytelling. These days, I’m not even sure I care that much about expression. Mostly I’m interested in simply paying attention.”
Recently, driven primarily by institutional pressures to “globalize,” something called “world literature” has surfaced on literary curricula with confounding aplomb. In its wake, scholars and students alike have been left to wonder about “world” and “literature”. How do we teach something so vague and well-meaning when the world remains unequal and literature elusive? It seems to me that this question about the relation between the world and literature, made newly urgent, may indeed be a gift. In a framework that is perhaps a tad too glib, “world literature” requires us to place English literature in the world and read (translations from) other languages. But seeking the worlds within English can also lead us to the unexpected and inexhaustible mother tongues of Englishes. Here, we may hear the language a lot of us share but none of us speaks. Here, we may note the complex relations of precarity and survival in a language of blustering parochialism. That seems like a good place to begin.
UPDATE:Timed toilet breaks, impossible targets and workers falling asleep on feet: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse
Alan Selby went undercover at the firm’s Tilbury warehouse in Essex where ambulances are regularly called and where workers face the sack if they fail to pack at least two items per minute
kb 6 éve, rövid ideig kezdésként én is dolgoztam egy hasonló helyen (ocado) éjszakai műszakban, “emergency” túlórákkal 14 órát, időzített pisiszünet, hajcsárolás, lelkiterror, recsegő rádióból egész éjjel ugyanaz a top 10 szám üvölt és tilos a fülhallgató, csak megfagyás és megsülés részlegek vannak, agyhalál… és tényleg kicsinált :) de nem is vártam tőle mást.
viszont ismerek olyat, aki azóta is ott van és elégedett ………………
Four stars in the night sky have been formally recognised by their Australian Aboriginal names. The names include three from the Wardaman people of the Northern Territory and one from the Boorong people of western Victoria. The Wardaman star names are Larawag, Wurren and Ginan in the Western constellations Scorpius, Phoenix and Crux (the Southern Cross). The Boorong star name is Unurgunite in Canis Majoris (the Great Dog). They are among 86 new star names drawn from Chinese, Coptic, Hindu, Mayan, Polynesian, South African and Aboriginal Australian cultures.
The International Astronomical Union’s Working Group on Star Names formally approved 86 new names for stars, which are now in the IAU stellar name catalogue. The catalogue now contains the approved names of 313 stars. Traditionally, most star names used by astronomers have come from Arabic, Greek, or Latin origins. Now, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Division C Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) has formally approved 86 new names for stars drawn from those used by other cultures, namely Australian Aboriginal, Chinese, Coptic, Hindu, Mayan, Polynesian, and South African.
“The political task is to operate with two horizons: that of the immediate aim, the shorter-term, potential gain, the moment-by-moment; and that further, the utter, unsayable.”
