In my latest Locus column, “Demon-Haunted World,” I propose that the Internet of Cheating Things – gadgets that try to trick us into arranging our affairs to the benefit of corporate shareholders, to our own detriment – is bringing us back to the Dark Ages, when alchemists believed that the universe rearranged itself to prevent them from knowing the divine secrets of its workings.
From Dieselgate to Wannacry to HP’s sleazy printer ink chicanery, we are increasingly colonized by demon-haunted things controlled by nonhuman life-forms (corporations) that try to trick, coerce or scare us into acting against our own best interests. These devices go to great length to hide their workings from us, making them the ideal host organisms for opportunistic malware infections. Worst of all, the law puts its thumb on the scales in favor of demons, and against exorcists.
Alchemists – like all humans – are mediocre lab-technicians. Without peer reviewers around to point out the flaws in their experiments, alchemists compounded their human frailty with bad experimental design. As a result, an alchemist might find that the same experiment would produce a ‘‘different outcome’’ every time.
In reality, the experiments lacked sufficient controls. But again, in the absence of a peer reviewer, alchemists were doomed to think up their own explanations for this mysterious variability in the natural world, and doomed again to have the self-serving logic of hubris infect these explanations.
That’s how alchemists came to believe that the world was haunted, that God, or the Devil, didn’t want them to understand the world. That the world actually rearranged itself when they weren’t looking to hide its workings from them. Angels punished them for trying to fly to the Sun. Devils tricked them when they tried to know the glory of God – indeed, Marcelo Rinesi from The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies called modern computer science ‘‘applied demonology.’’
In the 21st century, we have come full circle. Non-human life forms – limited liability corporations – are infecting the underpinnings of our ‘‘smart’’ homes and cities with devices that obey a different physics depending on who is using them and what they believe to be true about their surroundings.
“At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase.”
“Only systems that hover on the border between order and chaos exhibit the needed general stability and capacity to explore the universe of possible solutions to challenges.”
The first product resembling baking powder was created by English chemist Alfred Bird in the late 1840s. Bird combined cream of tartar (an acidic powder composed of potassium bitartrate) and baking soda, keeping the two apart until they were to be used so they wouldn’t react too early. Unfortunately, cream of tartar was an expensive byproduct of winemaking that had to be imported from Europe, meaning that it was out of reach for many poorer Americans. In 1856, this need for a viable alternative drove a young chemist Eben Norton Horsford to create and patent the first modern baking powder. Horsford worked at a time when chemistry was only just beginning to be considered a respected field, and ended up creating the first modern chemistry lab in the United States at Harvard University. By boiling down animal bones to extract monocalcium phosphate, Horsford developed an acid compound that could react with baking soda to create those desirable CO2 bubbles. “It’s really the first chemical that opens the floodgates for chemicals in food,” Civitello says.
The Algorave scene is a progressive movement that places emphasis on live improvisation and spontaneous electronic sounds. I’ve attended many live electronic performances that have left me in awe of the artist surrounded by intimidating synthersiser setups, but there is something endearing about the minimalism of live coding. Samples and songs can be made by simple codes that the artist writes into their coding provider of choice. There are numerous coding languages that can be learnt: Python, TidalCycles, Supercollier and Ixi Lang
First things first, there are currently six Dots. In the beginning they were nine, but four withdrew. Recently, a new, sixth ” . “ has joined them. Each individual Dot’s official name is indeed ” . “, all six of them. You may also call an individual Dot “. chan”. For the sake of making them more individually relatable to mortal people, they are also given rotating nicknames. More on that later. Another important concept ЯЯ shared with me: It’s a common human fallacy to think to yourself “I can’t see . chan’s true face because she wears sunglasses.” But I learned that this is not a correct perception. The truth is that the sunglasses make it possible for us to be able to observe the manifestation of “. chan”. In other words, the glasses they wear allow them to appear in human form as idols. My friend explained it with the following bit of cryptic lore: ・. human (a state called an idol wearing sunglasses) → symbols / shapes → characters / words → vibration → thing (Odor · taste · inorganic matter · clothing · vehicle etc.) → gas / liquid → two dimensions → (fictional) character → light, sound, voice → human. All of these morphological changes are merely various shapes of ・, and there is no superiority or inferiority. It is not that idol changes into various shapes, but ・ is observed as various shapes, phenomena and that one form is idol. In Dots’ expression, smell, taste, vibration, updating Twitter and video, etc. are as important as the show.
“When meanings become unstable, inventiveness through exchange may be possible, and new habits may be made and laid down. But when reciprocity is refused or absent, then we are nothing but a chaos of broken relations. With that, we are in the presence of what the Estonian semiotician Ivar Puura called semiocide. Carelessness over meanings – in nature and in culture – is a symptom of relational sickness. This sickness can kill the systems it infects.”
“When Gehring injected Mouse PAX6 into fruit fly embryos, the resultant fruit flies had eyes all over where they had been randomly injected, but these eyes were fruit fly eyes, not mouse eyes.”
Biosemiotics came into being as various scientists and scholars in both semiotics and the life sciences realised that information and communication systems involving living beings could not be understood simply in terms either of mathematics and engineering, or in terms of signals alone. Information is only fully meaningful when it is capable of in-form-ing, or changing the form of, something – whether shape, development, behaviour or idea. Signals imply something mechanical (for example, that this chemical or word always automatically causes this response). However, as became clear to many molecular biologists, ecologists and biological developmental systems scientists, let alone to people working in the fields associated with human communication, representation and interpretation (from anthropology to psychology to sociology, literature and the arts), neither cells, nor bodies, nor ecologies nor poems consist of or call for automatic responses. Although much semiosis settles into habit (meanings can’t work without some stability and capacity for repetition; communication depends upon it), meanings are the result of a process of discovery and interpretation. Life is process, and all organisms must be capable of change in response to changing conditions.
Foresight is, of course, more than single step. As part of a well-rounded analysis of possible futures, the step of mapping context is critical and why we give it the attention it deserves as part of a broader curriculum. Pairing powerful sensemaking tools with ways of bringing future concepts to life are the core of what Future Design provides. Beyond providing a platform to learn about emerging drivers of change, Future Design can equip students with tools to:
Identify possibilities and risks upstream, before an innovation lands,
Understand the impacts and connections between issues and innovations,
Uncover surprising future issues that point toward challenges in the present; and
Futureproof design by anticipating change in different contexts and scenarios.
Blue whales are the largest animal ever known to have existed, and they have some mighty calls that can be heard from up to 500 miles away. But researchers have been noticing something strange going on with these majestic sea beasts: Their songs seem to be mysteriously lowering in frequency over the last several years, reports Phys.org.
This is surprising because the frequency of their calls was previously believed to be fixed depending on the size of the animal. That’s because they use massive chambers in their respiratory system to generate sounds, and the size of the chamber ought to determine the frequency of sound that resonates from it. But if their calls are universally getting lower without any reason to believe the animals are also uniformly changing sizes, something else must be going on.
“Our study shows that blue whales in particular – and perhaps other baleen whales in general – may be making their harmonious sounds in a much different way than previously thought,” said Robert Dziak, lead author on the study.
Dziak and colleagues were therefore prompted to look for another factor in how these enormous creatures generate their calls. So, they created a model that replicates the types of sounds that blue whales make, and found that by toggling the rate at which air is passed over the vocal cords, the calls could be more accurately mimicked. It’s an entirely new way of thinking about whale songs.
“We show that blue whales can make these low frequency sounds, and even change frequency in the middle of their call, by pulsing air through their vocal cords,” explained Dziak.
This also implies that the frequency by which blue whales communicate could be determined by a choice made by the animals themselves. But why would blue whales everywhere be collectively choosing to lower their call frequency? A number of theories have been forwarded, but scientists suspect it might have something to do with increasing noise in the ocean caused by human activity.
“In connection with abstract space, a space which is also instrumental (i.e. manipulated by all kinds of ‘authorities’ of which it is the locus and milieu), a question arises whose full import will become apparent only later. It concerns the silence of the ‘users’ of this space. Why do they allow themselves to be manipulated in ways so damaging to their spaces and their daily life without embarking on massive revolts? Why is protest left to ‘enlightened’, and hence elite, groups who are in any case largely exempt from these manipulations? Such elite circles, at the margins of political life, are highly vocal, but being mere wordmills, they have little to show for it. How is it that protest is never taken up by supposedly left-wing political parties? And why do the more honest politicians pay such a high price for displaying a bare minimum of straightforwardness? Has bureaucracy already achieved such power that no political force can successfully resist it? There must be many reasons for such a startlingly strong — and worldwide — trend. It is diffcult to see how so odd an indifference could be maintained without diverting the attention and interest of the ‘users’ elsewhere, without throwing sops to them in response to their demands and proposals, or without supplying replacement fulflments for their (albeit vital) objectives. Perhaps it would be true to say that the place of social space as a whole has been usurped by a part of that space endowed with an illusory special status — namely, the part which is concerned with writing and imagery, underpinned by the written text (journalism, literature), and broadcast by the media; a part, in short, that amounts to abstraction wielding awesome reductionistic force vis-a-vis‘lived’ experience.”
Algorithmic music composition has developed a lot in the last few years, but the idea has a long history. In some sense, the first automatic music came from nature: Chinese windchimes, ancient Greek wind-powered Aeolian harps, or the Japanese water instrument suikinkutsu. But in the 1700s music became “algorithmic”: Musikalisches Würfelspiel, a game that generates short piano compositions from fragments, with choices made by dice.
Dice games, Markov chains, and RNNs aren’t the only ways to make algorithmic music. Some machine learning practitioners explore alternative approaches like hierarchical temporal memory, or principal components analysis. But I’m focusing on neural nets because they are responsible for most of the big changes recently. (Though even within the domain of neural nets there are some directions I’m leaving out that have fewer examples, such as restricted Boltzmann machines for composing 4-bar jazz licks, short variations on a single song, or hybrid RNN-RBM models, or hybrid autoencoder-LSTM models.)
The German systems scientist, Professor Frederick Vester (2004: 36–37), identified a number of common mistakes that occur as teams are asked to intervene in or ‘manage’ complex dynamic systems. Vester’s insights drew on a series of experiments by the psychologist Dietrich Dörner who had challenged various transdisciplinary teams of 12 different specialists to improve the overall system and infrastructure design of a fictitious country in the developing world. A computer program modelled the impact of their strategies over a century of repeated cycles of interventions. The focus of the study was how teams of experts approach problem-solving, planning and systems interventions. Vester’s analysis of Dörner’s work provides the basis for a useful list of questions that we can ask ourselves to avoid the most common mistakes in dealing with complex systemic issues.
For a decade we have experimented with different approaches to managing the studio as a shared living-and-working space. In 2016 we took some distance from the day-to-day management and production to observe our work from a more detached perspective. By the end of the year it became clear that FoAM bxl needed to become lighter and more mobile. […] In light of the changing nature of our activities we decided that we no longer needed such a large space, and that we would move out of the Koolmijnenkaai studio, no matter how beautiful and unique it may be. We remain grateful to have been able to inhabit the space for as long as we did, but it had become time to move on.
Secondary metabolites are heterogeneous natural products that often mediate interactions between species. The tryptophan-derived secondary metabolite, psilocin, is a serotonin receptor agonist that induces altered states of consciousness. A phylogenetically disjunct group of mushroom-forming fungi in the Agaricales produce the psilocin prodrug, psilocybin. Spotty phylogenetic distributions of fungal compounds are sometimes explained by horizontal transfer of metabolic gene clusters among unrelated fungi with overlapping niches. We report the discovery of a psilocybin gene cluster in three hallucinogenic mushroom genomes, and evidence for its horizontal transfer between fungal lineages. Patterns of gene distribution and transmission suggest that psilocybin provides a fitness advantage in the dung and late wood-decay niches, which may be reservoirs of fungal indole-based metabolites that alter behavior of mycophagous and wood-eating invertebrates. These hallucinogenic mushroom genomes will serve as models in neurochemical ecology, advancing the prospecting and synthetic biology of novel neuropharmaceuticals.
Addressing mistrust in media requires that we examine why mistrust in institutions as a whole is rising. One possible explanation is that our existing institutions aren’t working well for many citizens. Citizens who feel they can’t influence the governments that represent them are less likely to participate in civics. Some evidence exists that the shape of civic participation in the US is changing shape, with young people more focused on influencing institutions through markets (boycotts, buycotts and socially responsible businesses), code (technologies that make new behaviors possible, like solar panels or electric cars) and norms (influencing public attitudes) than through law. By understanding and reporting on this new, emergent civics, journalists may be able to increase their relevance to contemporary audiences alienated from traditional civics.
We had lunch earlier this week, and we spent an hour getting to know each other — our families, our paths to the jobs we hold today, our feelings about our alma mater. Basically, we spent an hour becoming friends. I like the guy. I’m going to have lunch with him again, and I’m going to pay the next time. All of which made it harder to ask the question I needed to ask: Why Trump?
We already know that many people become e-residents simply because they are fans of our country, our technology and our ideas, and being an e-resident enables them to show their support. A government-supported ICO would give more people a bigger stake in the future of our country and provide not just investment, but also more expertise and ideas to help us grow exponentially.
As an investment opportunity, estcoins could benefit Estonia and be attractive to investors from the day it is launched. As with e-Residency however, the longer term opportunities could be far greater and possibly beyond anything we can currently comprehend. In time, estcoins could also be accepted as payment for both public and private services and eventually function as a viable currency used globally. By using our APIs, companies and even other countries could accept these same tokens as payment. It will also be possible to build more functions on top of the estcoins and use them for more purposes, such as smart contracts and notary services.
when we look at religion and, to some extent ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of “belief”, epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find a prey at distance. Your eyes are not sensors aimed at getting the electromagnetic spectrum of reality. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.
There’s a good research report that was just published. It’s called “Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future?” It’s by Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula, and Ethan Zuckerman, under the auspices of The Center for Civic Media & The Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. What is decentralization? Take the web: Anyone can set up a web page and link to any other web page. That’s decentralized. Anyone can make a search engine to find those web pages. That’s centralized. The search engine can add blogging. That’s Google + Blogger. Now it’s both a publisher and a search engine. It has more power. Decentralized things are harder to manage and use. Centralized things end up easy to use and make money for relatively few people. The web is inherently decentralized, which has made it much easier for large companies to create large, centralized platforms. It’s a paradox and very thorny.
China is the world’s biggest consumer of raw materials. Each year it buys billions of tonnes of crude oil, coal and iron ore. But there is one commodity market in which the country may soon play a less dominant role: waste. Last month China told the World Trade Organisation that by the end of the year, it will no longer accept imports of 24 categories of solid waste, as part of a government campaign against “foreign garbage”. Government officials say restricting such imports will protect the environment and improve public health. But the proposed ban will threaten billions of dollars in trade and put many Chinese recyclers out of business. Why is Beijing so eager to trash its trade in rubbish?
wo summers ago, Courtenay Cotton led a workshop on machine learning that I attended with a New York–based group called the Women and Surveillance Initiative. It was a welcome introduction to the subject and a rare opportunity to cut through the hype to understand both the value of machine learning and the complications of this field of research. In our recent interview, Cotton, who now works as lead data scientist at n-Join, once again offered her clear thinking on machine learning and where it is headed.
Coal power is getting buried in China—both literally and figuratively.
Earlier this week, a new floating solar farm went live in the Chinese city of Huainan above a retired coal mine, China Daily reported.
The mine was flooded with groundwater after it went out of service, and, rather than simply losing an energy source, the city decided to get another form of power out of the space.
The new solar farm generates 40 megawatts, which can power 15,000 homes for a year. That’s more than six times the second biggest active floating farm, which has a capacity of 6.3MW.
The project is part of China’s much broader strategy of investing in renewable energy. China has more solar capacity than any other country in the world and it intends to invest at least $361 billion in renewables by 2020.
“Deep in the belly of a giant fiberglass triceratops, eight rare bats have made a home.”
–Today in “linguists are not kidding when they say that your command of English enables you to understand sentences that have never occurred before in the entire history of the human species.” (fromAtlas Obscura)
“I always blamed Wired magazine and the investment ethos for changing the internet from an anything-can-happen, new human-potential movement that was represented so well by MONDO 2000, into the same old expansion of capital through IPOs and digital companies. I hate to even term it like this, but what went wrong? Why didn’t we get the whole everything changing at once for the human better that we were all imagining up in the Berkeley hills in the MONDO 2000 living room?”
“Friday, November 12, 2010, 5:43 AM. There is a sensation, something rushing swiftly through my left nostril. I am suddenly awake, blowing my nose. There is a thought, a handful of words. “Variance of something with itself.” I feel compelled to write it down.”
–Anand Pandian, ‘The Time of Anthropology: Notes from a Field of Contemporary Experience’ (2012), p. 562 (viajustinpickard)
Recently, city officials from London to Manchester to Amsterdam and Melbourne have been wrestling with the appearance of Singaporean oBike and similar bike-sharing schemes in their streets. These dockless variants of the public, pay-by-use bike models being launched in major cities around the world allow users to pick up, pay for, then leave a bike anywhere within an operating city, with no organized storage system per se, just free range. As seamless as this might sound in theory, in practice it’s causing headaches that may be yet another signal of a complicated mobility future that’s emerging as societies transition to new mobility models. New public two-wheeled platforms, like many complex systems, carry cultural values, and those carried in some of the latest bike systems speak to what we may experience in an autonomous four-wheeled future.
As was the case with the mobile revolution, and the web before that, ML will cause us to rethink, restructure, displace, and consider new possibilities for virtually every experience we build. In the Google UX community, we’ve started an effort called “human-centered machine learning” (HCML) to help focus and guide that conversation. Using this lens, we look across products to see how ML can stay grounded in human needs while solving them in unique ways only possible through ML. Our team at Google works with UXers across the company to bring them up to speed on core ML concepts, understand how to integrate ML into the UX utility belt, and ensure ML and AI are built in inclusive ways. We’ve developed seven points to help designers navigate the new terrain of designing ML-driven products. Born out of our work with UX and AI teams at Google (and a healthy dose of trial and error), these points will help you put the user first, iterate quickly, and understand the unique opportunities ML creates.
Don’t expect Machine learning to figure out what problems to solve
Ask yourself if ML will address the problem in a unique way
Fake it with personal examples and wizards
Weigh the costs of false positives and false negatives
In 2003, a deadly heat wave struck Europe that would usher in a new era of climate science. In July and August alone, temperatures upward of 115 °F claimed nearly 70,000 lives. However, while average global temperatures have increased at a steady clip since the mid-20th century, strong heat waves had been documented from time to time before then. For climate scientists, that meant that attributing the heat wave to global warming would be next to impossible.
Though they couldn’t prove that global warming had “caused” the scorcher, the scientists did assert that warming from human emissions had doubled the risk of extreme weather events. Publishedin Nature, their first-of-its-kind study launched the new field of “attribution science,” which uses observations and models to tease apart the factors that lead to extreme climatic events.
Thanks to advances in supercomputing and pooling hundreds of climate models developed by researchers across the world, they are also more statistically confident than ever in saying that intense storms, droughts and record-breaking heat waves are occurring with increased frequency because of humans. “Ten years ago we wouldn’t have been able to do so,” says Ken Kunkel, a climate scientist at North Carolina State University who also works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But teasing apart individual weather events is harder. The planet’s history is dotted with unexpected, prolonged heat waves and sudden damaging storms far before humans began pumping out greenhouse gases. “The big challenge is that these kind of extreme events have always happened,” says Kunkel, whose work focuses on heavy storms that cause considerable damage in the U.S. But, he says, “Can you say, ‘This event was caused by global warming? No.‘”
Beneath the southern shore of the Salton Sea lies a reservoir of mineral-rich water, heated to temperatures as high as 700 degrees Fahrenheit by the Earth’s natural heat. The area’s geology allows that heat to rise near the surface, creating one of the world’s most potent geothermal energy hot spots. Eleven power plants, 10 of them operated by CalEnergy, already convert a portion of that geothermal potential to carbon-free energy, using steam from the super-heated brine to turn turbines and generate electricity.
But even as renewable solar and wind power have boomed in California, the geothermal industry has lagged. The high up-front costs of building a geothermal plant have kept investors at bay, with only one new plant opening in the Salton Sea area since 2000.
CalEnergy, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy, asked the California Energy Commission earlier this summer to terminate the license for Black Rock.
Dennis Kaspereit spent 10 years as CalEnergy’s director of geothermal resources and now works at the Geothermal Resource Group, a Palm Desert-based consultant. He said Black Rock faced the same headwinds as all geothermal projects in the region — the difficulty of securing financing and a power purchase agreement with a utility.
But a couple of other developments are either in the pipeline, or peeking from behind the fence waiting for financing to pop up:
Other developers are still trying to build new power plants at the Salton Sea.
An Australian company called Controlled Thermal Resources is doing seismic testing for a massive geothermal plant known as Hell’s Kitchen, with plans to drill exploratory wells this year and start construction by 2019. Controlled Thermal doesn’t have financing yet, a key hurdle before construction can begin. But the firm has partnered with a startup that claims to have developed technology to extract lithium— a valuable mineral used in batteries for electric cars, cell phones and laptops — from the brine that flows through the pipes of Salton Sea geothermal plants. If that technology can make lithium extraction economically viable, it would make Hell’s Kitchen a lot more attractive to investors.
A prior incarnation of the lithium startup, Simbol Materials, failed dramatically in 2015, abruptly firing the vast majority of its staff — but not before drawing a $325-million purchase offer from Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors, which ultimately fell through. Musk’s willingness to make that offer could be a sign that the company’s technology is viable, even if Simbol couldn’t work out the finances.
“Stigmergy is a consensus social network mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity.”
As the United States reverses its climate policies, the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter is in the midst of setting up a national carbon-trading system.
Chinese officials are preparing to launch an emissions market later this year that will cover roughly a quarter of the country’s industrial CO2. Officials and nonprofit groups from the European Union, Australia and California have been advising the Chinese on their program design.
Expectations are tempered: Details of China’s national system are still murky, but enough information has emerged that observers are skeptical it will be immediately comparable to existing programs, due to design features as well as the haste with which China is rolling it out.
The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s macroeconomic planning agency, has said it intends to start a nationwide market in November. But it’s not clear what that exactly means—whether businesses will have to immediately start buying carbon allowances to cover their emissions, or some lesser form of regulation, like requiring companies to report their emissions. So far, observers say the market falls short of standards set by Western jurisdictions.
Today, SoundCloud appears stuck in no man’s land, according to former executives and employees. Though the company found validation with the major labels and launched a me-too subscription music service, former employees and music industry executives argue it bungled a great opportunity by losing sight of what made it unique: serving as a listening platform for non-label controlled content. Jake Udell, the CEO and founder of TH3RD BRAIN, a management company that represents artists like Gallant and Grace VanderWaal, said that SoundCloud used to be the first place he’d go to post music of his up-and-coming acts. “Back then I would have to fight the labels to have songs on SoundCloud,” he said. “Now it’s not even part of the conversation.”
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. […] We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”
Bob’s thesis was that he — and all of us really — existed in conditions of mentally mutilating, systematic oppression. We didn’t know that, because we didn’t dare name our oppressor, any more than Eastern European dissidents living at that time could boldly name the Communist Party and the KGB as the authors of their daily distress. But our oppressor was “work.”
“No one should ever work.” Bob was an essayist of rather broad interests, but this was the flagpole of the Black ideology. No Work. His analysis studied the actual deprivations of our freedom. Not the power-structures within various states, or the rights allegedly guaranteed by constitutions, or the effects of racial or gender prejudice, but really, just, life: the lived hours of your precious days. Where did your lifetime actually go? In the “free world,” most people spent their lifetime working. They were “free” to work.
That’s what this book is about. It is all about how “work” is much better conceived as a malignant, destructive condition called “forced labor.” It’s not that people want to “work,” by their nature. No, they’re cajoled into work by moral suasion, then kept confined within their work by large, cumbersome, irrational, spirit-crushing, economic, legal and police frameworks.
Darknet drug sellers are experiencing a boom, thanks to the scorching price-gouging practiced by pharmaceutical companies in the USA and the efficiency of their marketplaces. The cornerstone of that efficiency is the trust systems used to help drug buyers locate reliable sellers.
The researchers found that the usual path into drug purchasing is to use the trust-mechanism to locate a reliable seller, and thereafter to stick with that seller; they suggest that chaffing the reviews with fake negative reviews about bad experiences would deter first-time buyers from establishing that relationship.
I suspect that darknet buying is a little like the P2P wars. Back in December 2007, NBC yanked its TV shows from Itunes in a contractual dispute. Researchers found that the elimination of a legit market for NBC’s content drove tons of new users into P2P downloading – and that even after NBC restored its content, those users continued to download from torrent sites, because they’d invested the time to figure out how to use them, and had discovered how much other great stuff there was to be had in the land of torrents.
Drug prohibition and pharma price-gouging makes an investment in figuring out darknet and bitcoin into a sound one, worth the while of many people. My guess is that people might come for the cancer meds they can’t afford, and come back for just about everything, opting entirely out of the legit marketplace for medicine, and also gaining access to a useful and efficient market for recreational drugs in the bargain.
In Europe, electric vehicles are not just a low-emission way of getting from A to B, they are also being built as mobile generators. Newly designed Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) models can both receive electricity from the grid and supply excess power right back during peak demand. Notably, the Parker Project in Denmark—carried out by grid integration specialists such as Enel, Nuvve and Insero, as well as automakers Nissan, Mitsubishi and PSA Groupe—has allowed V2G drivers to actually earn money just by parking the car at two-way charge stations. Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports that fleet operators in Denmark are earning up to $1,530 annually at these charge points.
The great love affair of the desert: the joshua tree and its moth.
But there’s a problem here. The joshua tree is critically threatened by climate change. The night time lows are higher than they have been, and daytime highs are getting higher, drying out the already dry soil. Scientists estimate that the range of joshua trees within Joshua Tree National Park by the end of the century will be 10% of what that range currently is. Joshua trees are naturally moving northward and upward in elevation: cooler and wetter. But the question is: will the yucca moth migrate with the joshua tree? If it won’t, then what happens?
Excerpt:
We’ll start with the Joshua tree, the Mojave Desert’s most iconic plant. With its spiny fronds and clubbed tufts topped by pungent, waxy flowers twisting towards the desert sky, this desert-adapted shrub has a reputation for otherworldliness. Everyone who passes through the desert remembers the majestic Joshua tree; its namesake has inspired artists, filmmakers and many a sojourner in search of transcendence.
Few travelers, however, wax poetic about its evolutionary partner, the yucca moth. The small, dun bug is initially unassuming, but upon closer inspection, it is an equally extraterrestrial match for the iconic Joshua tree. Instead of a regular mouthpiece, it sports bizarre, tentacle-like fronds, the likes of which are unique among insects—and serve an essential purpose in the desert ecosystem.
Without nectar to attract pollinators, Joshua trees rely solely on this unassuming moth for pollination. Yucca moths use their dexterous jaw appendages to collect pollen from Joshua tree flowers and deposit it on the female parts of each flower as the moth moves between blooms. In turn, the moth lays her eggs with its thin, blade-like ovipositor on the flowers’ seeds.
When they hatch, the yucca moth caterpillars eat the seeds—their only food source—before crawling to the ground to form cocoons. And the cycle begins again.
According to Christopher Smith, a biologist at Willamette University who studies pollinator relationships, the relationship between yucca moths and Joshua trees is unlike anything else in the natural world. He should know: Smith has long studied the diverse relationships between insects and plants in the desert. His previous research focused on cactus longhorn beetles and the spiny plant species they interact with throughout the Sonoran Desert. But nothing, he says, compares to the Joshua tree and the yucca moth.
Most pollinators accidentally assist the plants they pollinate. Bees and birds will brush up against pollen while they are feeding on a flower’s nectar, spreading it from plant to plant as they continue a day’s feast. Not yucca moths: because their caterpillars depend on the continued existence of Joshua trees and their tasty seeds, the yucca moth’s pollination is an active act of survival. Moreover, this partnership has been going on for millions of years.
Joshua trees do more than provide artistic inspiration: they create essential environmental support for the uncompromising desert ecosystem. These hideously beautiful shrubs provide food and shelter for animals in the Mojave scrublands, where resources are notoriously scarce. During the spring, its flowers are one of the only sources of wet food available for insects, ravens, and ground squirrels.
Yet today, their long-lived partnership may be in danger of breaking down, as the Joshua tree’s natural habitat faces new threats.
The unremarkable-looking yucca moth is one half of an evolutionary partnership that dates back millions of years. (Will (Tad) Cole)
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of classical probability theory in the 1930s, and also for co-inventing the theory of algorithmic randomness (a.k.a. Kolmogorov complexity) in the 1960s, which challenged the classical foundations, by holding that it is possible after all to talk about the entropy of an individual object, without reference to any ensemble from which the object was drawn. Incredibly, going strong into his eighties, Kolmogorov then pioneered the study of “sophistication,” which amends Kolmogorov complexity to assign low values both to “simple” objects and “random” ones, and high values only to a third category of objects, which are “neither simple nor random.” So, Kolmogorov was at the vanguard of the revolution, counter-revolution, and counter-counter-revolution.
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations. Architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable. Originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said, ‘It’s not where you take things from. It’s where you take them to.
When media start to explode in your hands, it deserves a description. When it causes airplane evacuations, general panic and hysteria, it warrants an examination. When it quietly dies in your pocket before the end of an eight hour work day just like the other two billion smartphones, it deserves an explanation. It is reasonable to believe that a ‘Thermal Runaway’ event is far more spectacular than a quiet smartphone death. Leakages take place, fire and toxic chemicals are involved, possibly leading to personal bodily injury. It can be traumatic. Thermal Runaway is today one of the prime modes of battery failure. Chemical reactions within raise its internal temperature, and if not dissipated, the temperature keeps rising that will further accelerate the reactions causing even more heat to be produced, eventually resulting in an explosion. Especially a Lithum-ion cell above a certain temperature, its internal chemical reactions out of control, will explode.
If everything goes to plan, Alex Bellini could become the first person to live on an iceberg, where temperatures hover between 5 to −4 degrees Fahrenheit and gale-force winds blow.
The 38-year-old Italian public speaker and adventurer, who crossed two oceans alone on a row boat and ran across the U.S. in 70 days, recently spoke about his project, Adrift, a years’-long ambition to live in a survival capsule on a Greenland iceberg.
Once a suitable iceberg is selected, Bellini plans to conduct research on climate change’s affect on ice sheets and to test the limits of human endurance and survival.
“I’m not in love with Greenland, and I’m not personally in love with ice, even though I was born in the mountains,” Bellini told IFL Science. “[The reason I’m doing this] is exploring, knowing, trying to understand how you can cope with unpredictable situations.”
According to the Adrift mission website, sensors and devices will be placed on the iceberg to collect real-time data about ice structure and its evolution as it drifts.
“This data, never collected before, will help scientists to understand important issues about climate change on Planet Earth,” the site states.
Bellini plans to stay in a specially-designed aluminum capsule for up to 12 months or until the iceberg flips—a natural phenomenon that occurs from melting ice and an imbalance in frozen water.
The Shortwave Radio Audio Archive (SRAA) is a collection of shortwave radio recordings that you can download or listen to as a podcast. The collection grows every day and includes both historic recordings and current recordings from the shortwave radio spectrum.
An “adversarial preturbation” is a change to a physical object that is deliberately designed to fool a machine-learning system into mistaking it for something else.
Last March, a French/Swiss team published a paper on the universal adversarial preturbation, a set of squiggly lines that could be merged with images in a way that humans couldn’t generally spot, and which screwed up machine-learning systems’ guesses about what they were seeing.
Now a team from U Washington, Ann Arbor, Stony Brook and Berkeley have published a paper on “Robust Physical Perturbations” (or “RP2s”) that reliably fool the kinds of vision systems used by self-driving cars to identify road-signs.
The team demonstrate two different approaches. In the first, the “poster attack,” they make a replacement road-sign, such as a Right Turn sign or Stop sign, that has subtle irregularities in its background and icon that trick machine learning systems; in the second, the “sticker attack,” they create stickers that look like common vandalism stickers, but which, when applied, also fool the vision systems. In both cases, the attacks work on machine learning systems that can view the sign from multiple angles and distances – and in both cases, it’s not obvious to humans that the signs have been sabotaged to fool a computer.
The key here is “adversarial” computing. Existing machine-learning systems operate from the assumption that road-signs might be inadvertently obscured by graffiti, wear, snow, dirt, etc. But they do not assume that an adversary will deliberately sabotage the signs to trick the computer. This is a common problem in machine learning approaches: Google’s original Pagerank algorithm was able to extract useful information about the relative quality of web-pages by counting the number of inbound links for each one, but once that approach started to work well and make a difference for web-publishers, it wasn’t hard to fool Pagerank by manufacturing links between websites that existed for the sole purpose of tricking its algorithm.
The team’s approach does not require that an attacker have access to the training data or programming, but the attacker does have to have “white box” access to the machine-vision system, “access to the classifier after it has been trained” because “even without access to the actual model itself, by probing the system, attackers can usually figure out a similar surrogate model based on feedback.”
Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny. This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.
Last January, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan published a 24,000-word article in the Yale Law Journal unpicking a half-century’s shifts in anti-trust law in America, using Amazon as a poster child for how something had gone very, very wrong – and, unexpectedly, this law student’s longread on one of the most technical and abstract areas of law has become the centerpiece of a raging debate in law and economics circles.
The article is called Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, and you should read it, because Khan is a sprightly and gifted writer with a talent for squeezing some exciting and relevant juice out of dry and abstract subjects.
At its heart is a critique of the neoliberal “Chicago School” and its new orthodoxy about when monopolies are a problem – an orthodoxy that is at odds with much of the world and hundreds of years’ worth of US lawmaking and enforcement.
The Chicago School is notorious for its emphasis on profits ahead of all else, its complicity in tens of thousands of death-squad executions in Chile, its influence on Thatcher, Reagan and their contemporaries in their belief that “there is no such thing as society” and “greed is good” – the belief that behaving as selfishly as possible will make everyone richer and happier.
It’s this school and its adherents that John Kenneth Galbraith was speaking of when he called economics “the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” As you might imagine, if you owe your fortune to selfishness, ruthlessness and greed, you might want to fund and elevate this kind of exercise. Nothing confers empirical respectability to manifestly immoral behavior like a lot of inscrutable mathematics that purportedly shows the self-perfecting nature of a system of greedy, “rational” actors.
The Chicago School holds that monopolies are only bad when they result in higher prices (“price theory”) and that everything else – the “structuralist” worry about rich people amassing political power, or making inferior goods, or screwing their workforce, or holding back innovation – is just a distraction.
This model rose to prominence in the 1980s with Reaganomics, and it coincided with catastrophic collapse in small business in America(especially minority-owned businesses); since Reagan, Republicans and Democrats alike have been enthusiastic proponents of the idea that the only thing a competition watchdog should keep an eye on is the prices charged to consumers, not “integration,” be it vertical (one firm owning the factory, the trucks and the stores) or horizontal (companies buying out their direct competitors).
Using Amazon as her poster-child, Khan argues that whatever problems this approach had in bricks-and-mortarland (she highlights several), the combination of networks, digital goods, data-oriented retail, and huge pools of investment capital willing to float businesses like Amazon using their profits from one area to sell goods below cost in others to the detriment of their competitors, make mincemeat out of price-theory. The digital world – where each customer might pay a different price, where retailers can use algorithms to price their competition out of existence – is one where costs of one category of goods can’t possibly capture the wider harms of monopolistic practice.
Related to this is On the Formation of Capital and Wealth, by Stanford’s Mordecai Kurz, who proposes a means by which digital commerce can drive a winner-take-all phenomenon that makes the rich much richer, at the expense of the general welfare.
The question, then, is what to do about it. Khan suggests some modest reforms in anti-trust enforcement, which, despite their modesty and the extremely unlikeliness of seeing them enacted under Trump or any future establishment Democratic administration, have provoked howls of outrage from Chicago School economists.
More radical approaches have been proposed, of course. Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism points to Amazon’s very monopolism as the reason to believe that capitalism has outserved its usefulness. If a monopolist like Amazon can use customer surveillance and algorithms to decide what to make, where to put it, and how to deliver it, why do we need imperfect markets? Just nationalize Amazon and its datasets (for the record, I think Mason was unduly optimistic about the problems of anonymizing large data-sets).
But if the internet supercharges inequality and monopolism while delivering many undeniable benefits in coordination, culture, and material production, can we simply divorce technology from the economic and social context that created it? Can we have the internet without douchey Silicon Valley jerktech and its lucrepaths, vulgarati, uberization, mom-as-a-service, and *-bait?
It’s not without precedent: the Protestant reformation gave us religion without the unified Church; the Enlightenment gave us alchemy without superstition; and Wikipedia and GNU/Linux gave us encyclopedias and operating systems without a single corporate overlord. As Leigh Phillips wrote in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts, the belief that Chicago-style sociopathic capitalism is the sole proprietor of technological change and improvement is one of the Chicago School’s most successful projects, one that convinced large swaths of the left that you either have to be pro-technology or pro-human, that being anti-corporatism meant that you had to oppose the technical feats of corporations.
Science fiction’s best move is cleaving a technology from its social and economic context, as steampunk does, when it imagines industrial-style production without the great Satanic mills where people become part of the machines, moving through scripted and constrained tasks in unison to the ticking of a huge time-clock. In steampunk, individual inventors and small groups produce things with the polish and awe-inspiring innovations of the industrial revolution, without the surrender of individual autonomy that industrialization demands of its workers. In steampunk – to quote Magpie Killjoy – we “love the machine and hate the factory.”
The problem with Amazon isn’t that it’s now really easy to get a wide variety of goods without having to shlep all over the place trying to find the right widget (or book). The problem is the effect that this has on workers, publishers, writers, drivers, warehouse workers, and competition.
“This paper estimates fossil fuel subsidies and the economic and environmental benefits from reforming them, focusing mostly on a broad notion of subsidies arising when consumer prices are below supply costs plus environmental costs and general consumption taxes.
Estimated subsidies are $4.9 trillion worldwide in 2013 and $5.3 trillion in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP in both years). Undercharging for global warming accounts for 22% of the subsidy in 2013, air pollution 46%, broader vehicle externalities 13%, supply costs 11%, and general consumer taxes 8%. China was the biggest subsidizer in 2013 ($1.8 trillion), followed by the United States ($0.6 trillion), and Russia, the European Union, and India (each with about $0.3 trillion). Eliminating subsidies would have reduced global carbon emissions in 2013 by 21% and fossil fuel air pollution deaths 55%, while raising revenue of 4%, and social welfare by 2.2%, of global GDP.”
The context for public innovation is changing rapidly – where as the mainstream discourse over the last 5 years was focused on service & experience redesign in a digital age, increasingly we are recognising the need for a more foundation shift in the creation & nature of public good itself and thereby a necessary shift also in the nature of the public institutional infrastructure itself.
A pair of chatbots have been taken offline in China after turning on the country’s governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Chinese messenger app QQ introduced two chatbots — BabyQ and XiaoBing — in March but they were removed by media company Tencent after social media users shared conversations in which the bots appeared to criticise the CCP.
A representation of Malta’s grid-scale energy storage technology (Source: X)
Excerpt:
Alphabet Inc.’s secretive X skunk works has another idea that could save the world. This one, code named Malta, involves vats of salt and antifreeze.
The research lab, which hatched Google’s driverless car almost a decade ago, is developing a system for storing renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted. It can be located almost anywhere, has the potential to last longer than lithium-ion batteries and compete on price with new hydroelectric plants and other existing clean energy storage methods, according to X executives and researchers.
The previously undisclosed initiative is part of a handful of energy projects at X, which has a mixed record with audacious “moonshots” like Google Glass and drone delivery. Venture capitalists, and increasingly governments, have cut funding and support for technology and businesses built around alternatives to fossil fuels. X’s clean-energy projects have yet to become hits like its driverless cars, but the lab isn’t giving up.
Malta is not yet an official X project, but it has been “de-risked” enough that the team is now looking for partners to build, operate and connect a commercial-sized prototype to the grid, Felten said. That means Alphabet may team up or compete with industrial powerhouses like Siemens AG, ABB Ltd. and General Electric Co.
X is stepping into a market that could see about $40 billion in investment by 2024, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Roughly 790 megawatts of energy were stored last year and overall capacity is expected to hit 45 gigawatts in seven years, BNEF estimates. Existing electrical grids struggle with renewable energy, a vexing problem that’s driving demand for new storage methods. Solar panels and wind farms churn out energy around midday and at night when demand lulls. This forces utilities to discard it in favor of more predictable oil and coal plants and more controllable natural gas “peaker” plants.
How does it work? (See the representation above.)
Two tanks are filled with salt, and two are filled with antifreeze or a hydrocarbon liquid. The system takes in energy in the form of electricity and turns it into separate streams of hot and cold air. The hot air heats up the salt, while the cold air cools the antifreeze, a bit like a refrigerator. The jet engine part: Flip a switch and the process reverses. Hot and cold air rush toward each other, creating powerful gusts that spin a turbine and spit out electricity when the grid needs it. Salt maintains its temperature well, so the system can store energy for many hours, and even days, depending on how much you insulate the tanks.
Here’s a diagram from X, maybe explaining it better:
The top of this faceted private observatory in central New Hampshire, by Anmahian Winton Architects, rotates to provide different views of the night sky. The Gemma Observatory sits on a remote peak in the northeastern state, at the centre of a “dark” zone with a three-mile radius. Unobstructed by light pollution, the setting is ideal for astronomical observation.
Unlike typically domed observatories, the building has an angular form designed to echo its jagged granite surroundings. Lock-seamed zinc used to clad its exterior references the hues of the rocky landscape.
"[The building’s] dimension, colour, and patina evoke a material relationship to the grey granite outcroppings,“ said
Anmahian Winton Architects, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Fascinating what scientists can do with computers and their deeper understanding of genetics and evolution. Excerpt:
Flowering plants, or angiosperms, make up about 90 percent of all terrestrial plants alive today, but the origin of these colorful and fragrant flora has remained something of a mystery. Because of genetic evidence, researchers believe all 225,000-plus species of angiosperm derive from a single ancestor that lived between 140 million and 250 million years ago, but without clear fossil evidence, what this first flower looked like is unknown.
That is, until now. Researchers writing in the journal Nature Communications have compiled the single largest set of data on flowering plants, including data points on 792 flowers, with at least one from each angiosperm order, whether living or fossilized. This immense data was then used to build a chronogram using molecular dating. Basically, a computer was used to number crunch a family tree based on differences that arose through mutations between species, reports Discover.
I realized that my sixth sense was failing when I stopped noticing the magnetic fields of my laptop. In fall 2012, I implanted a rare earth magnet in my right ring finger. Magnets were one of the most accessible forms of DIY biohacking, a niche subculture riding the start of a massive mainstream publicity wave. My colleague Ben Popper got one while writing a biohacking feature, and it sounded like magic. When I first got it, I wasn’t disappointed. Nestled just beneath my skin, the magnet tugged and tickled when it got close to hard drives and speakers; around microwaves, it outright buzzed. I could attract screws and other small metal objects to my finger, like a real-life version of Looper’s telekinetic party tricks. Even its downsides (like wiping hotel keycards) felt cool. They were problems, yes, but problems of the future. “I had problems from the future, and it was great” But I always knew that my tiny superpowers had an expiration date.
A large number of seminal works have never been published. The greatest mathematics paper of our lifetimes remains unpublished. Not every paper on the arXiv warrants a bibliographic entry, but many do. The idea that unpublished status would categorically exclude the responsibility of citation is a bit preposterous. It puts far too much faith in the deeply flawed fraternity of conference organizers and the overworked cohort of peer reviewers, roughly 30% of whom typically fail to even comprehend the basic outline of the paper. If similar work comes to our attention during a proper literature review, we ought to cite it. If we knowingly build on someone else’s work we should cite it. If someone shares a non-obvious idea with us that develops into a paper, we should find some way to credit them. If someone writes a theory down on a napkin shortly before dying and it turns out to open a new subfield of machine learning to scientific inquiry, we should convert the napkin to a pdf, upload it to arXiv, and then cite it. We should not have to cite nonsense.
Currently, the Navajo Generating Station employs more than 700 people — more than 90 percent of whom are Native American. Losing those jobs could devastate the reservation, but developments like this solar project should soften the blow. During the heaviest construction period, roughly 80 percent of those working on the project were Navajo. And though a Tempe-based company is currently operating the project, the Nation is working on plans to take over its management.
The coal plant shutting down is “forcing us to make a huge paradigm shift,” Navajo President Russell Begaye told PRI’s The World in June. “I’m getting our nation ready to make this transition.”
The Navajo Generating Station is a huge monster. Look:
Scientists predict that so much pollution is pouring into the Gulf of Mexico this year that it is creating a larger-than-ever “dead zone” in which low to no oxygen can suffocate or kill fish and other marine life.
The Guardian reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is expected to announce this week the largest recorded hypoxic zone in the gulf, an oxygen-depleted swath that’s even larger than the New Jersey-sized, 8,185 square-mile dead zone originally predicted for July.
And in a new analysis from environmental group Mighty, the meat industry as well as the country’s appetite for meat is much to blame.
When fertilizer and manure washes off soy and corn fields used to grow feed for livestock, it not only contaminates local drinking water supplies, it flows into larger water bodies and creates toxic algal blooms from the excessive nutrients, particularly phosphorus and nitrogen. When the algae dies and decomposes, it depletes the waters of oxygen and eventually leads to vast dead zones that is toxic to aquatic life.
“While fertilizer pollution starts in the Midwest, it flows down the Mississippi River until it finally dumps out into the Gulf of Mexico, which collapses into one of the world’s largest Dead Zones each year as a direct result,” the report states.
“Many fields of basic and applied science require efficiently exploring complex systems with high dimensionality. An example of such a challenge is optimising the performance of plasma fusion experiments. The highly-nonlinear and temporally-varying interaction between the plasma, its environment and external controls presents a considerable complexity in these experiments. A further difficulty arises from the fact that there is no single objective metric that fully captures both plasma quality and equipment constraints. To efficiently optimise the system, we develop the Optometrist Algorithm, a stochastic perturbation method combined with human choice. Analogous to getting an eyeglass prescription, the Optometrist Algorithm confronts a human operator with two alternative experimental settings and associated outcomes. A human operator then chooses which experiment produces subjectively better results. This innovative technique led to the discovery of an unexpected record confinement regime with positive net heating power in a field-reversed configuration plasma, characterised by a>50% reduction in the energy loss rate and concomitant increase in ion temperature and total plasma energy.”
In their book Ecological Design, Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan introduce the concept of ‘scale-linking’. They argue that since we traditionally have studied the world using the language, metaphors and tools of a single discipline at a time, we have been predisposed to “seeing process on a single scale”. […] Van der Ryn and Cowan argue that fractal geometry provides a tool to study the geometry of scale linking, as it helps to connect remarkable ranges of scale “from twig to tree, from rivulet to watershed.”141 They see our failure not to pay attention to scale-linking and therefore not to match the human flows of energy and materials to the limits of a particular landscape as a critical cause of the current environmental crisis.
From the Australian government’s new “data-driven profiling” trial for drug testing welfare recipients, to US law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology and the deployment of proprietary software in sentencing in many US courts … almost by stealth and with remarkably little outcry, technology is transforming the way we are policed, categorized as citizens and, perhaps one day soon, governed. We are only in the earliest stages of so-called algorithmic regulation — intelligent machines deploying big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to regulate human behaviour and enforce laws — but it already has profound implications for the relationship between private citizens and the state.
[John MacWilliams’s] more general point was that managing risks was an act of the imagination. And the human imagination is a poor tool for judging risk. People are really good at responding to the crisis that just happened, as they naturally imagine that whatever just happened is most likely to happen again. They are less good at imagining a crisis before it happens—and taking action to prevent it. For just this reason the D.O.E. under Secretary Moniz had set out to imagine disasters that had never happened before. One scenario was a massive attack on the grid on the Eastern Seaboard that forced millions of Americans to be relocated to the Midwest. Another was a Category Three hurricane hitting Galveston, Texas; a third was a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest that, among other things, shut off the power. Yet, even then, the disasters they imagined were the sort of disasters that a Hollywood screenwriter might imagine: vivid, dramatic events. MacWilliams thought that, while such things did happen, they were not the sole or even the usual source of catastrophe. What was most easily imagined was not what was most probable. It wasn’t the things you think of when you try to think of bad things happening that got you killed, he said. “It is the less detectable, systemic risks.” Another way of putting this is: The risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t.
By his own account, Wallace-Wells (DWW from here on out) wrote “The Uninhabitable Earth” to frighten people out of their complacency and to inspire them to clamor loudly for immediate action to halt climate change in its petrifying tracks. Yet instead of welcoming DWW as an ally, some climate scientists attacked him, roundly criticizing his article for supposedly inspiring paralyzing sense of doom in its readers and, more importantly, for lacking scientific credibility. In a lengthly post on Climate Feedback — a site that publishes scientific assessments of representations of climate change in the popular press — these scientists condemned DWW for making factual errors, for exaggerating the projected impacts of unmitigated climate change, and for downplaying the low probability of those impacts occurring even under the high-emissions “business as usual” path that we are currently on.
Technology we’ve developed is helping study the movement of storms.
From satellites that can slice through a hurricane with 3-D vision to computer models of gale force winds, scientists now have unprecedented ways of viewing extreme weather.
This August, we’re sending an unmanned aircraft called a Global Hawk to study hurricanes. This mission is called the “East Pacific Origins and Characteristics of Hurricanes,” or EPOCH. It will fly over developing tropical storms to investigate how they progress and intensify.
The three instruments aboard this Global Hawk aircraft will map out 3-D patterns of temperature, pressure, humidity, precipitation and wind speed as well as the role of the East Pacific Ocean in global cyclone formation. These measurements will help scientists better understand the processes that control storm intensity and the role of the East Pacific Ocean in global cyclone formation.
To better understand hurricane formation and intensity, scientists also utilize models and other observations.
In September 2016, GPM captured Hurricane Matthew’s development from a Category 1 to Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours.
Extreme rainfall was seen in several stages of the storm, causing significant flooding and landslides when it passed by Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
By combining model and observed data, scientists can analyze storms like never before. They can also better understand how hurricanes and other powerful storms can potentially impact society.
Joshua trees, which primarily grow in the Mojave Desert, dot the landscape of Gold Butte National Monument. Credit: James Card.
A petroglyph site near 21 Goats shows a tortoise and bull’s-eyes. These drawings show how early Native Americans could have survived in the Mojave Desert. Credit: James Card.
Excerpt:
When I spotted the goats, I made a sound that was a cross between a gasp and a hiccup. Although the site is called 21 Goats, the petroglyphs are commonly interpreted to be desert bighorn sheep, the monarch of the Mojave Desert. The bighorn is considered one of the greatest trophies among modern hunters. Among the sheep were snakey lines and bull’s-eye circles.
This collection of petroglyphs is one of the reasons Gold Butte is one of America’s newest national monuments. It was designated by President Barack Obama during his last days in office using the Antiquities Act, which gives presidents the authority to create national monuments. The Gold Butte proclamation protected 296,937 acres of land. However, some people think that is too much, and that caught the attention of the Trump administration. In April, President Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of 27 monuments. He asked Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to lead the review and make recommendations to possibly rescind the monument status, reduce the acreage or let it stand. Presidents have amended national monuments, but none have ever delisted one.
Of the monuments to be reviewed, Gold Butte may be the least known. Even Google Maps hasn’t recognized its borders as a national monument yet. On the interactive map, the area of Gold Butte remains white while all the surrounding lands that have some sort of protected status are demarked in public-place green.
Gold Butte was deemed worthy of monument designation for historical and cultural assets but also for environmental and conservation reasons. It is where the Great Basin, Mojave Desert and Colorado Plateau merge. The Joshua trees are a rare and iconic American treasure and Gold Butte has plenty of them, along with its cousin, the Mojave yucca. It holds multiple subspecies of cholla and prickly pear cactuses. All of the plants take a long time to grow. The barrel cactus that dot the hillsides can live to 130 years. Near 21 Goats, the Las Vegas bearpoppy is being restored. The plant grows only in Clark County, where all of Gold Butte is located, and cannot be transplanted. Near the Devil’s Throat, a giant sinkhole over a hundred feet deep, grassland is being restored after wildfires in 2005.
The desert was surprisingly full of life. Every time I hiked through the scrub, road runners, fence lizards, kangaroo rats and blacktail jackrabbits skittered under the creosote bushes. Up above, I spotted a golden eagle soaring on the drafts, and in the distance, I caught a glimpse of a prairie falcon diving at some doomed ground-dwelling creature.
In a recent video, Warped Perception filmed a model rocket engine firing underwater. Firstly, it’s no surprise that the engine would still operate underwater (after its wax waterproofing). The solid propellant inside the engine is a mixture of fuel and oxidizer, so it has all the oxygen it needs. Fluid dynamically speaking, though, this high-speed footage is just gorgeous.
Ignition starts at about 3:22 with some cavitation as the exhaust gases start flowing. Notice how that initial bubble dimples the surface when it rises (3:48). At the same time, the expanding exhaust on the right side of the tank is forcing the water level higher on that side, triggering an overflow starting at about 3:55. At this point, the splashes start to obscure the engine somewhat, but that’s okay. Watch that sheet of liquid; it develops a thicker rim edge and starts forming ligaments around 4:10. Thanks to surface tension and the Plateau-Rayleigh instability, those ligaments start breaking into droplets (4:20). A couple seconds later, holes form in the liquid sheet, triggering a larger breakdown. By 4:45, you can see smoke-filled bubbles getting swept along by the splash, and larger holes are nucleating in that sheet.
The second set of fireworks comes around 5:42, when the parachute ejection charge triggers. That second explosive triggers a big cavitation bubble and shock wave that utterly destroys the tank. If you look closely, you can see the cavitation bubble collapse and rebound as the pressure tries to adjust, but by that point, the tank is already falling. Really spectacular stuff! (Video and image credit: Warped Perception)
Sherry Turkle’s
The Second Self(1984) is about the relationships early personal computer users had with their machines, and how this reciprocally reshaped “what it means to be human.” Whereas once humans defined themselves in relation to animals (which are incapable of rational thought and given over to sensation), now they are beginning to define themselves in relation to machines (which are incapable of feeling). “Where once we were rational animals, now we are feeling computers, emotional machines,” she suggests.
Turkle is writing about computers that are unnetworked here, so she sees using them as a kind of escape from interpersonal interaction, whereas now computers primarily mediate human interaction in all sorts of ways. So she tends to assume that computer use is a form of safe isolation that simulates interacting with a living being while protecting a person from the uncertainties of that: “Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.”
That same analysis has carried through to Turkle’s more recent work, which can make it feel out of touch. The “computer” in the form of an internet-connected phone can allow for all sorts of vulnerability and intimacy, and it opens one to all sorts of new emotional demands. People may feel compelled to always be available to others, always be “present” even when they are geographically distant. You can never be alone in a new and different sense.
That said, I found Turkle’s comparison of then-emerging AI theory with psychoanalysis pretty interesting.
The question here is not which theory, the psychoanalytic or the computational, is true, but rather how these very different ways of thinking about ourselves capture our imagination. Behind the popular acceptance of the Freudian theory was a nervous, often guilty reoccupation with the self as sexual; behind the widespread interest in computational interpretations is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as a machine. Playing with psychoanalytic and computational theories allows us to play with aspects of our nature that we experience as taboo.
People are afraid to think of themselves as machines, that the are controlled, predictable, determined, just as they are afraid to link of themselves as “driven” by sexual or aggressive impulses. But in the end, even if fearful, people want to explore their sexual and aggressive dimensions; hence, the evocative power and popular appeal of psychoanalytic ideas. Similarly, although fearful, peo ple want to find a way to think about what they experience as the machine aspect of their natures; this is at the heart of the computer’s holding power. Thinking about the self as a machine includes the feeling of being “run” from the outside, out of control because in the control of something beyond the self. Exploring the parts of ourselves that we do not feel in control of is a way to begin to own them, a way to feel more whole.
To extrapolate from this analysis: We like to think about artificial intelligence because we want to vicariously experience the subjectivity of a machine and enjoy, for that time, the idea of being a machine, of not being individually responsible for our actions or their consequences, and to thereby enjoy simply what we are “made” to do. In other words, it is a submissive fantasy of being made into a robot and having to obey orders. It is a way of eroticizing the experience of a loss of agency. That reminds me a lot of the “machine zone” of video-gambling addiction, where fate is mastered by total surrender to it and to the rhythms and determinations of the gaming machine. It feels good because there is only one way to lose, and it is inevitable.
Again, this analysis needs to be adjusted to accommodate the experience of using
networked computers, which calibrate our experience of agency with a sense of connectivity and dependence, a sense of inescapable intersubjectivity in which we are always in the midst of thinking with a group. Often in these cases, the lost sense of agency may be a concrete signal of social belonging, a reassurance that one has been permitted to participate in a collective subjectivity. Not only might our self be made up of myriad biological programs running within our brain, producing consciousness as a kind of epiphenomenon, but those programs are interacting with the programs of other brains and are being coordinated beyond our understanding. We are one small machine running a subroutine in an emerging consciousness that is and isn’t our own.
Trying to vicariously experience machine-hood then becomes a way to try to imagine consciousness beyond individualist atomization. Thinking like a machine becomes a matter of thinking unselfishly rather than thinking without feeling.
“The fundamental design method of modern architecture consists of a consideration of the whole followed by an assemblage of the individual sections. In contrast, in Japanese architecture, the whole is formed spontaneously through successive parts, without an overall, comprehensive composition.”
“Like all technical images, photographs are concepts encoded as states of things, including photographers’ concepts such as those that have been programmed into the camera. This gives photography critics the task of decoding these two interweaving codes in any photograph. Photographers encode their concepts as photographic images so as to give others information, so as to produce models for them and thereby to become immortal in the memory of others. The camera encodes the concepts programmed into it as images in order to program society to act as a feedback mechanism in the interests of progressive camera improvement. If photographic criticism succeeds in unravelling these two intentions of photographs, then the photographic messages will be decoded. If photography critics do not succeed in this task, photographs remain undecoded and appear to be representations of states of things in the world out there, just as if they reflected ‘themselves’ onto a surface. Looked at uncritically like this, they accomplish their task perfectly: programming society to act as though under a magic spell for the benefit of cameras.”
–Vilém Flusser
. Towards a Philosophy of Photography.
Given this trend of rising corporate and central banking interest in blockchain technology, it’s inevitable that the first widespread mainstream adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrency will be driven primarily by the existing status quo and power brokers. […] Business models which operate on artificial scarcity simply cannot exist alongside a reality of public blockchains. Even if a group did attempt to deploy a for-profit protocol on a public blockchain, the code by default is opensource and thus it’s trivial to copy the code, lower the fee and then redeploy. Public blockchains are owned by nobody, controlled by nobody and can never be shutdown. Smart contracts can be owned by nobody, controlled by nobody, and execute as coded every time. The result is a blockchain commons; a universal common resource which renders old-world business models obsolete, and ushers in a new foundational paradigm on which to create value for all of humanity.
