The Open AI researchers were intrigued by a claim that self-driving cars would be intrinsically hard to fool (tricking them into sudden braking maneuvers, say), because “they capture images from multiple scales, angles, perspectives, and the like.”
So they created a set of image-presentation techniques that reliably trick image classifiers, showing that their tricks work from different angles, at different scales, and after transformations.
A conversation with activist, author and editor Cory Doctorow about ad blocking, privacy and the future of the open Internet.
Last month, Google announced it would start blocking ads in its Chrome browser starting in 2018. This follows on the heels of Facebook’s announcement last year that it would force its ads upon users of ad blockers because Facebook declared that its ads would no longer be objectionable to users. Between the two , Facebook and Google accounted for nearly all of the growth in the $73 billion digital advertising market.
With both Google and Facebook focused on cleaning up digital advertising, is there no longer a need for standalone ad blockers? While we at AdBlock hear from users, daily, about the more egregious forms of advertising on the web, we wanted to sit down with someone that could provide perspective on the so-called “ad block wars” and the future of the open web in a world increasingly dominated by large tech firms like Google, Facebook and Apple.
We found that person in Cory Doctorow. As a New York Times bestselling author, Cory has written extensively about the impact of technology on our future. As an activist, Cory is a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group dedicated to helping individuals protect their privacy and security online. Finally, as a long-time blogger and editor of BoingBoing, Cory has had a front-row seat to view the impact that ad blocking has on web publishers like BoingBoing.
Fresh off a multi-month tour for his latest book, Walkaway, Cory sat down with AdBlock to provide his (very-informed) perspective on the most-pressing issues that pertain to the future of the open Internet.
Do you have any concerns about Facebook and Google, two of the world’s largest advertising companies, deciding which forms of advertising are acceptable for everyone?
I tend to view these companies through a very tactical lens. I don’t harbor the illusion that any of these companies are my friend. I think that Google is very interested in a world where there is a public web that is open, because through its ad tech and tracking, Google is confident that it knows how to make more money as the web grows. Contrast that with Facebook, whose goal is to enclose the web. As far as Facebook is concerned, if every service on the web disappeared into Facebook’s environs, and you couldn’t see anything on the web without a Facebook login, that would be the best future to live in.
As to Google’s suitability as a custodian for which ads can be seen on the web, I do think in general they will try and avoid the more invasive forms of surveillance. I think Facebook is a worse custodian in that regard. But the question is, do we want a custodian? And I think the answer to that question is no, for a number of reasons. One is that Google’s internal culture has shifted and will shift, and it’s not an organization that we have any sort of democratic oversight of, so trusting it to attend to the long term health of something as important as the Internet is a really bad idea.
This is the right way to start thinking about policy questions. Thinking about policy questions in an immediate, utilitarian way where all your asking is how does this affect the next 10 minutes gets you into a world of trouble. And thinking about what does the future of the web look like in five years if we allow one company to decide which adtech vendor is acceptable, that’s a lot more important and it doesn’t look good no matter who is the broker.
Is there anything consumers can do to push back against the increasing control over the web being exerted by companies like these?
In terms of how consumers can resist, some of this is above the paygrade of individual purchasing choices. Choosing what to buy or which ad blocker to use only gets you so far. Social change happens as a consequence of the combination of code, laws, and norms of markets. That is to say: what is technologically possible, what’s profitable, what’s considered right, and what’s legal? When you reach the end of what you can change through making purchasing decisions you need to look at making changes in some of those other ways.
Ad blockers are a great intervention on the code side. Changing what is technologically possible for users on the web changes what is profitable for people who make the web and who run businesses on the web. The way we got rid of super invasive pop-up ads was the introduction of pop-up blockers, not through a law that banned them. It may be that if we can’t change this by making purchasing decisions, we can change this by making technological decisions and if we can’t make it by making technological decisions because, say, Apple and Google are going to meet us halfway with ad blockers that block ads that aren’t hostile to them as well as some wider public interest, than maybe the right way to do it is with changes to the law. And, as we have seen recently with the EU, there is a newfound and rather surprising appetite to use the law to curtail these bad outcomes of people trying to dominate the web and the Internet.
What role do tools like AdBlock and other privacy and ad blocking tools play in this landscape?
There are limits to how far any of the platforms like Facebook or Google will go in ad blocking. Their version of a fair compromise is not necessarily a typical user’s version of a fair compromise. One of the roles these tools play is to keep the platforms honest. The existence (or the potential existence) of a company like AdBlock means that to the extent their compromise actually does something useful for users instead of just providing a band-aid, that is something that depends on them worrying that if they don’t a good job, a company like yours will get the upper hand. It keeps them from steamrolling everyone.
How do you feel about ad blockers from your perspective as an editor of Boing Boing, one of the web’s very early — and still very popular — blogs?
I have to wear a long-term hat and a short-term hat and an activist hat and a business owner hat to make sense of this. In the short term, Boing Boing does not have not a whole ton of leverage over our advertisers about what kind of ads they place on the website. We used to have a lot more leverage. Things we used to say were deal-breakers cannot be deal-breakers any more because we need them more than they need us.
So, putting on my long-term hat both as an activist as well as a business owner, the existence of things like ad blockers is really the only leverage we have over publishers any more because we can say it’s not that we object to this, it’s that your ads just don’t show up unless they are served up in a way that is more privacy preserving.
We are now in this position where we are waiting for better ad tech companies to pop up to make the pitch to people that “we aren’t blacklisted by the ad blockers but we only accept ads of a certain sort but we do get way higher penetration, so please come advertise with us and we will offer our services to people like Boing Boing.” And that is a much longer wait and it’s an open question that the amount of business we will lose to ad blocking will basically take us over the cliff before someone comes along and delivers something better.
I don’t think we can roll back the tide on people caring about privacy or people blocking ads — nor would I want to — but I do think that maybe we can accelerate the rate at which people are concerned about the privacy and security implications of ads. It is a real problem.
This series was photographed between 2015 and 2017 within the suburban landscape of Attica, an area which has gone through a great deal of changes due to the economic crisis.
Exploring the landscape, I decided to focus on and highlight the man-made constructions that reveal the economic and building activities of the recent past.
These constructions - some unfinished and some timeworn - have finally transformed the natural landscape with their enigmatic forms in the most permanent way.
Liu Xiaobo, who has died after eight years in jail, despite being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, was a complex human being, but he was bold, an intellectual, and in China he was a threat because he understood that civil society can organize against corruption and autocracy. Beijing released him from jail, not for the medical treatment he deserved, but simply to die. In other words, he was murdered by a murderous regime. It is time for the world to ask itself, are we accomplices, do we appease this, or do we stand up against so-called Chinese values?
How do you build a complex logistic system that collects, at national scale, the country-wide harvest, on a developing country, with little or no good data and uneven roads conditions?
To know the harvest needs, we need to know the harvest volume, timing and road access. To know these, we need good road maps (we will use OSM), and a custom routing engine (OSRM, that runs on top of OSM) to guide our loaded trucks (“DCM”s, a type of truck). That means we will need JOSM to improve OSM, and also QGIS to visualize the harvest and support the decision making. To assist on the mapping we use the free-tier of the commercial service MAPBOX (that pulls OSM data), as well as Digital Globe (DG) satellite images, and processed data from our corporate management tool (RMT) — which has information such a farmer locations, GPS traces and tree phenology data — . Then, to prioritize the tracing, to make statistics of the logistics and to estimate the harvest, we will need to do some data science. We will be using PYTHON, running on JUPYTER notebooks for documentation and clarity. To register and managed the knowledge we create, and to collaborate among the member of the team, we will use GIT and we will back it up on GITHUB, where we also do file progress and Issues.
In a recent Future Design Intensive at the Dubai Future Academy, one [team] focused on Health futures, and one on Energy futures, had just this experience. From a health point of view, climate change is likely to have a range of potentially negative impacts: increased epidemics due to ecosystem disruption, increased deaths from temperature extremes and destructive weather, threats from dislocation of populations and resources, a rise in stress due to these disruptions, and more. From an energy point of view, climate change is a driver for a more rapid transition to sustainable energy production, a spur to innovation, but also a resource and infrastructure disrupter via flooding, sandstorms and other environmental swings. The implications for both teams have overlaps and connections, but also significant differences.
An over-simplified and dangerously reductive diagram of a data system might look like this
Collection → Computation → Representation
Whenever you look at data — as a spreadsheet or database view or a visualization, you are looking at an artifact of such a system. What this diagram doesn’t capture is the immense branching of choice that happens at each step along the way. As you make each decision — to omit a row of data, or to implement a particular database structure or to use a specific colour palette you are treading down a path through this wild, tall grass of possibility. It will be tempting to look back and see your trail as the only one that you could have taken, but in reality a slightly divergent you who’d made slightly divergent choices might have ended up somewhere altogether different. To think in data systems is to consider all three of these stages at once, but for now let’s look at them one at a time.
“This space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic, a world in which everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. Such a world is structurally different from that of the linear world of history in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences […] The significance of images is magical.”
The last ten years have been an important, formative period for the revival of social innovation, we have seen a new generation of actors contribute to the renewal of our societal goods. The work of the Young Foundation, Nesta, McConnell foundation, MaRS, Big Society Capital, SIX, TACSI, Impact Hubs and too many others to mention have been critical in seeding this question and driving its renewal globally.
Much of the work, has been focused on prototyping, understanding where the opportunity for change is and testing out micro additions or addressing edge failures in the welfare model — be it public, private or civic. Modest beginnings, and rightly so. Thereby, the work to date has largely been limited to relatively small scale interventions — tinkering & fixing at the very edges – the so called market or public service delivery failings ( social innovation projects to date have been driven largely by black swan procurement). Simultaneously and slowly over that period the sector has become stuck in the hope that “a theory of scale and impact” borrowed from the VC world and the Silicon Valley start-up landscape would be its structured salvation to societal impact.
This is not to decry an age of testing and discovery but it is also important to collectively recognise we have not gone after and meaningfully challenged mainstream social institutional infrastructure and its associated outcomes — which absorbs not just 100,000s of pounds through, but in the orders of Billions. As a community we have also failed to move any significant chunk of resource that the government allocates to military, technology or business innovation, into social innovation and the everyday services and social structures we most rely on.
The MinION costs $1,000 and is the size of a candy bar. It connects to a laptop computer’s USB port. To have it read a DNA sample, you use a micropipette to drop a “DNA library” (more on that in a minute) through a millimeter-sized opening on the MinION. Inside the device are nanopores, cones just over a billionth of a meter wide, placed in a membrane. A steady ion current flows through these nanopores. Since each nucleotide (A, T, C or G) has a unique molecular makeup, each one is shaped a little differently. The unique shape passing through the pore interrupts the ion current in a specific way. Just as we can infer a shape by analyzing its shadow on a wall, we can infer a nucleotide’s identity from the disturbances it causes to the ion current. This is how the device converts bases to bits that stream into a computer.
Only as the visitor begins to study the collections does the oddity of the place appear. In the range-finder plates mounted on the shelves, where in a normal library one would expect to see “Spanish Literature, Sixteenth Century” or “Biography, American: E663-664,” there are, instead, signs pointing toward “Magic Mirrors” and “Amulets” and “The Evil Eye.” Long shelves of original medieval astrology hug texts on modern astronomy. The section on “Modern Philosophy” includes volume after volume of Nietzsche and half a shelf of Hume. The open stacks—exceptional in any gathering of irreplaceable books—are, in the European scheme of things, almost unknown. In the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris, the aim seems to be to keep as many books as possible safely out of the hands of people who might want to read them. In the Warburg Library, the books are available to be thumbed through at will. History is here, ancient and local. An old edition of Epictetus, opened, turns out to bear the bookplate, complete with glaring owl, of E. H. Gombrich, perhaps the most important of modern art historians, who directed the Warburg Institute in its high period, in the nineteen-sixties. Beside each elevator bank, a chart displaying, in capital letters, the library’s curious organization helps guide the bewildered student: “FIRST FLOOR: IMAGE,” “SECOND FLOOR: WORD,” up to “FOURTH FLOOR: ACTION-orientation,” with “Action” comprising “Cultural and Political History,” and “orientation” “Magic and Science.” Mounted in the stairwells are uncanny black-and-white photographic collages of a single female type—a woman dancing in flowing drapery—that is seen in many forms, from classical friezes to Renaissance painting.
this is the masked bee! she has no friends and hates everyone. Sometimes when she has kids she raises them alone and doesn’t let the father come for day trips. she loves pollen but does not like waiting for it so she chews flowers open which is essentially stealing. we love her anyway.
these bees are homalictus bees! they are the rainbow gay bees. Females tend to live together in one nest and guard the entrance. one time we found 160 gay girls bunking together. They’re so irridescent and small that they might look like flies but they are really just tiny lesbians.
and this is the blue banded bee! she may look like she’s wacked out, but really she is pretty chill. she just wants to live independently (or with some friends) in a nest or burrow and look after tomatoes.
this is a cuckoo bee! she is really cool! she goes into other bee’s houses and lays eggs there, and then when the baby hatches it eats the host bees’ pollen and lays waste to the hive, murdering and eating all the other bee babies! BUT ONLY if it’s mother bee didn’t kill them all first.
thank u dark bee tumblr
This is the most successful thing ever!
this is dawson’s burrowing bee! they are one of the largest bees in australia and they burrow into the ground to make nests. males are so aggressive that they will literally fight and kill each other to get a female! and if a particularly aggressive male does not get a female he will murder all of the other males out of rage! (and sometimes the females will be casualties of these brawls - here is a video of a bee brawl where a female get decapitated. these bees are very large and kind of look like half bee half cockroach. but the females’s fuzzy white heads are pretty cute! [photo credit]
and dark bee tumblr comes through for us again… we are so fortunate. thank u dark bee tumblr. thank u
I’m mad that they missed the opportunity to use “les-bee-ans”
This is a tree bumblebee- they’re pretty similar to honeybees in that they have big nests with a polyandrous queen. However, these guys love to be around humans and in gardens, and are super resilient- there are now large populations in Iceland. They have a more complex social hierarchy than most bees, with multiple worker castes. If a worker gets close with the queen she can mate with a drone and lay her own eggs in with the big pile, but eat the eggs of any workers beneath her that try to do so.
This is a valley carpenter bee- the only bee that can thermoregulate and had a circulatory system complete with aortic arch. Carpenter bees are good because they are too big to get into many flowers and have to be extra hairy to get pollen. They live in raw wood in small family units of all females (mothers and daughters or sisters) and are excellent cooks and workers. Males cruise around mating with multiple females and then leave.
These are green sweat bees- they burrow in the ground and live in apartment complexes, where they all use the same entrance but then have their own separate burrows rather than one large room. Some have kids, some don’t, so someone’s always around to keep out invaders. Unlike most bees the males actually do quite a bit of pollinating and go out in groups.
dark bee tumblr has graced us once again with even more forbidden and secret bees we are truly blessed
It can be really boring trying to program new sounds on complicated synthesizers. So why not get a computer to do it for you? By a process of what FoAM are calling artificial evolution, the Midimutant can grow new sounds on hardware synthesizers based on your starting sound. Midimutant. Developed, apparently, with Aphex Twin, the video below shows the Midimutant generating sounds on a Yamaha TX7. Something no one in their right mind would want to spend time programming.
The first step in codifying a music is always difficult. Mostly because it’s not that simple. Artists are individuals, and, while many of them use the same programs, plug-ins, etc. their level of expertise can fool you into thinking that they’re doing something entirely different than the next person. Fetty Wap doesn’t sound like Future for several reasons: the first being that Future has been doing that style of music for far longer than Fetty, the second being that he’s an originator of it, the third being that he’s from the south, and fourth because they’re totally different human beings. But what can be said for certain…the style of music that they make is the same. How so?
Anarchism as a political outlook is rooted in the notion of direct democracy, a polity in which power moves from the bottom upwards. Many of those protesting at the Grenfell Tower fire argue that it was a symptom of a politics that goes in the other direction, from the uncaring top down to the unheard bottom. Ross not only wants to reverse what he sees as a failed kind of democracy, but believes the crisis of “neoliberalism” has created the conditions in which people are beginning to voice their disapproval of the status quo. “Aberrational political events such as Brexit, Trump and even the rise of Corbyn are functions of this frustration,” he tells me when we meet in a cafe 10 minutes’ walk from Grenfell Tower. The grandson of one of Bletchley Park’s wartime codebreakers, Ross had wanted to be a diplomat ever since he was a boy. One of his motivations, he says, was a desire to escape the English class system. “I wanted to live abroad in a relatively safe way,” he explains. His accent is now faultlessly demotic, but he says it wasn’t always like that. It’s not just the accent that’s changed. His politics were once firmly grounded in the liberalism of first the SDP and then the Lib Dems. What really altered his way of thinking were two major events: the invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq war, specifically the role of the Blair government in leading the country into conflict. In Accidental Anarchist, a new documentary that details Ross’s political transformation, the former diplomat speaks of his disillusionment with his job following a visit to the British embassy in Kabul in 2002. When he got back, he says in the film, he had lost his faith in the British project. “I felt that the system I’d battled for and believed in wasn’t working, capitalism, democracy, the western model, whatever you called it.”
The first step in codifying a music is always difficult. Mostly because it’s not that simple. Artists are individuals, and, while many of them use the same programs, plug-ins, etc. their level of expertise can fool you into thinking that they’re doing something entirely different than the next person.
Fetty Wap doesn’t sound like Future for several reasons: the first being that Future has been doing that style of music for far longer than Fetty, the second being that he’s an originator of it, the third being that he’s from the south, and fourth because they’re totally different human beings.
But what can be said for certain…the style of music that they make is the same. How so?
An example of a crater formed after an explosion of underground methane on Siberia’s Yamal peninsula. (Photo: The Siberian Times/YouTube)
Excerpt:
Scientists using both satellite imagery and ground-based surveys have discovered more than 7,000 bulging bubbles of gas on Siberia’s Yamal and Gydan peninsulas. These potentially dangerous protrusions contain mostly methane and create a surreal ripple effect on the ground when stepped on.
Because methane is extremely flammable, there is increasing concern that these bulges will begin to explode. One such explosion happened at the end of June on the Yamal Peninsula. Witnesses to the explosion reported fire shooting up in the sky and chunks of permafrost popping up out of the ground. The result was a 164-foot-deep crater on a river near a reindeer encampment (the reindeer are all fled the area, according to The Siberian Times, and a newborn calf was saved by a reindeer herder).
As the emergence of these bulges in a new phenomenon, scientists say they’re likely caused by the region’s first thaw in more than 11,000 years.
“Their appearance at such high latitudes is most likely linked to thawing permafrost, which in is in turn linked to overall rise of temperature on the north of Eurasia during last several decades,” a spokesperson for the Russian Academy of Science told The Siberian Times in March.
Besides the potential for rapidly forming sinkholes and explosions, these bulges also represent a significant addition to greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. The release of methane from Siberian permafrost, a gas more than 25 times more potent than carbon in trapping heat in the atmosphere, rose from 3.8 million tons in 2006 to more than 17 million tons in 2013.
And watch this, stepping on the ground and watch it squish and ripple. A bubble of methane just below the surface of the soil:
the word Afghan is used in a contemporary sense to refer to someone from Afghanistan. However, this has not always been the case. For hundreds of years, Afghan as a term was primarily used by Persian speakers to describe another ethnic community, known as the Pashtuns (also called the Pakhtuns and Pathans). In the twenty-first century, the Pashtuns made up the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, yet more Pashtuns live in Pakistan, particularly in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the North Western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Karachi. The reason I provide this background is because the Pashtuns along with the Baloch (another ethnic group found in South Asia and Iran), probably played the most significant role in non-Aboriginal explorations of the Australian outback in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as cameleers. For example, the most famous cameleer, Bejah Dervish, was a Baloch.
“Our cosmic environment could be richly textured, but on scales so vast that our purview is restricted to a tiny fragment; we’re not aware of the ‘big picture’, any more than a plankton whose‘universe’ was a liter of water would be aware of the world’s topography and biosphere. It is obviously sensible for cosmologists to start off by exploring the simplest models. But there is no more reason to expect simplicity on the grandest scale than in the terrestrial environment—where intricate complexity prevails.”
Value production is inherently networked. Therefore, in order to thrive, it needs an architecture as granular, scalable, and flexible as possible in order to accommodate the kinds of diverse applications and interactions that will, in turn, support its self-organization. Here at the Economic Space Agency, we want to build an ecosystem in which everyone can launch and participate in crowdsales, and exchange tokens without breaking the network. For these reasons we are building GRAVITY: a new common infrastructure for the crypto-economy. As mentioned in our previous post, GRAVITY is an open source, general purpose computing fabric based on an object-capability paradigm. The logical decentralization that this affords introduces important innovations in terms of scalability and speed, and also the possibility to host on-chain solutions for multi-blockchain integration.
Designer Dani Clode’s Third Thumb is a 3D printed robotic prosthetic thumb that goes on the pinky side of your hand, created a motorized, opposable additional thumb that you can use to play the guitar, pick up objects, or crack an egg.
Clode proposes that her thumb can be styled as a piece of jewelry or as a tool, depending on the materials used and the system’s programming.
“We’re still trying to figure out what time is,” Gleick said. Time travel stories apparently help us. The inventor of the time machine in Wells’s book explains archly that time is merely a fourth dimension. Ten years later in 1905 Albert Einstein made that statement real. In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges wrote the celebrated short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In 1955 physicist Hugh Everett introduced the quantum-based idea of forking universes, which itself has become a staple of science fiction.
“Time,” Richard Feynman once joked, “is what happens when nothing else happens.” Gleick suggests, “Things change, and time is how we keep track.” Virginia Woolf wrote, “What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.”
“Enjoy the present. Don’t waste your brain cells agonizing about lost opportunities or worrying about what the future will bring. As I was working on the book I suddenly realized that that’s terrible advice. A potted plant lives in the now. The idea of the ‘long now’ embraces the past and the future and asks us to think about the whole stretch of time. That’s what I think time travel is good for. That’s what makes us human — the ability to live in the past and live in the future at the same time.”
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
“The video, called “Alternative Face v1.1”, is the work of Mario Klingemann, a German artist. It plays audio from an NBC interview with Ms Conway through the mouth of Ms Hardy’s digital ghost. The video is wobbly and pixelated; a competent visual-effects shop could do much better. But Mr Klingemann did not fiddle with editing software to make it. Instead, he took only a few days to create the clip on a desktop computer using a generative adversarial network (GAN), a type of machine-learning algorithm. His computer spat it out automatically after being force fed old music videos of Ms Hardy. It is a recording of something that never happened.”
It might seem counter-intuitive, but Coleridge’s famous line from the Ancient Mariner could also apply to the desert. Even in some of the driest places on earth, the air holds thousands of litres of fresh water that have remained tantalisingly inaccessible. Until now. Scientists at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley have created a device that can suck water from the air. Even better: it’s solar-powered. So, even in the most remote, arid deserts it can harvest drinking water from the atmosphere.
Over at Superflux, our work investigating potential and plausible futures, involves extensively scanning for trends and signals from which we trace and extrapolate into the future. Both qualitative and quantitative data play an important role. In doing such work, we have observed how data is often used as evidence, and seen as definitive. Historical and contemporary datasets are often used as evidence for a mandate for future change, especially in some of the work we have undertaken with governments and policy makers. But lately we have been thinking if this drive for data as evidence has led to the unshakeable belief that data is evidence.
“As I get older I tend not to get less cynical about things but to move judgment from individuals to systems. And just about every time that I’ve made some sort of judgment on the integrity of people, individually or in groups, I later find that in fact those people are just trapped in systems or cultures that they didn’t create and which narrow and dictate their choices in unhealthy directions.”
“Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, artists gradually became aware of the unusually precise nature of the imagery generated by computers, as did people from other fields.
Among them was a lecturer at the University of Manchester, Desmond Paul Henry. The university was responsible for important early advances in computer science, not least in building the world’s first stored-program computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine, which was nicknamed ‘Baby’ when it was completed in 1948. Henry took a keen interest in such developments, but as an observer, not a participant. He taught philosophy at the university, and had discovered computers as a technical clerk for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during the Second World War. In 1951, while browsing around the second-hand bookstalls on Shudehill in Manchester, Henry went into an army surplus warehouse and spotted an old Sperry bombsight computer used by British bomber aircraft to calculate when to release their bombs. He bought it for £50, a substantial sum at the time, and rigged it up to guide ballpoint pens and, later, technical tube pens across paper. After his first machine died, Henry recycled some of the components into a new one and subsequently repeated the process to build a third. He exhibited his mechanical drawings at local art galleries in Manchester and also in ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, the 1968 survey of computer art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which later toured to the United States.”
–Rawsthorn, Alice.Hello World: Where Design Meets Life. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. (viacarvalhais)
First comes the unscratchable itching, and the angry blossoming of hives. Then stomach cramping, and—for the unluckiest few—difficulty breathing, passing out, and even death. In the last decade and a half, thousands of previously protein-loving Americans have developed a dangerous allergy to meat. And they all have one thing in common: the lone star tick. Red meat, you might be surprised to know, isn’t totally sugar-free. It contains a few protein-linked saccharides, including one called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, for short. More and more people are learning this the hard way, when they suddenly develop a life-threatening allergy to that pesky sugar molecule after a tick bite. Yep, one bite from the lone star tick—which gets its name from the Texas-shaped splash of white on its back—is enough to reprogram your immune system to forever reject even the smallest nibble of perfectly crisped bacon. For years, physicians and researchers only reported the allergy in places the lone star tick calls home, namely the southeastern United States. But recently it’s started to spread. The newest hot spots? Duluth, Minnesota, Hanover, New Hampshire, and the eastern tip of Long Island, where at least 100 cases have been reported in the last year. Scientists are racing to trace its spread, to understand if the lone star tick is expanding into new territories, or if other species of ticks are now causing the allergy.
The Standard Ebooks project is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the public domain, and Standard Ebook dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing whole ebooks files themselves into the public domain.
“As a double bonus, if everyone stays irrational it might greatly enrich the author, providing future funding for blockchain performance art.” The great art project of our age is to entirely collapse the distinctions between “fraud” and “performance art,” so that one day mortgage-bond traders will be able to say “wait, no, I wasn’t lying about bond prices to increase my bonus, I was performing a metafictional narrative about bond-price negotiations in order to problematize the underlying foundations of bond trading in late capitalism.”
As the great German theologian Josef Pieper argued, for most of history philosophers and theologians treated overwork as a moral failing. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, for example, made a distinction between leisure and idleness; and importantly, people who were “out of breath for no purpose, always busy about nothing” were, in Seneca’s view, guilty of the worst kind of idleness. Because it occupies our time and feels like accomplishment, but actually produces very little and gives us little opportunity to learn about ourselves, this kind of busyness was to be avoided. As Pieper put it, in this vision leisure “is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.” This is not to say that work was something to be avoided. Stoics like Seneca saw work as essential, as one of the things that made life meaningful. But in order to become our best selves, they argued, it was also necessary to take the time to reflect on our lives and choices — and that required both time and an “inward calm” that let us see ourselves and the world clearly.
Someone’s done the cross-linguistic synesthesia writing system study that I was speculating about a couple months ago! This study features grapheme-colour synesthetes who were trilingual in Korean, English, and Japanese. Here’s the abstract:
Individuals with grapheme-color synesthesia experience idiosyncratic colors when viewing achromatic letters or digits. Despite large individual differences in grapheme-color association, synesthetes tend to associate graphemes sharing a perceptual feature with similar synesthetic colors. Sound has been suggested as one such feature. In the present study, we investigated whether graphemes of which representative phonemes have similar phonetic features tend to be associated with analogous synesthetic colors. We tested five Korean multilingual synesthetes on a color-matching task using graphemes from Korean, English, and Japanese orthography. We then compared the similarity of synesthetic colors induced by those characters sharing a phonetic feature. Results showed that graphemes associated with the same phonetic feature tend to induce synesthetic color in both within- and cross-script analyses. Moreover, this tendency was consistent for graphemes that are not transliterable into each other as well as graphemes that are. These results suggest that it is the perceptual—i.e., phonetic—properties associated with graphemes, not just conceptual associations such as transliteration, that determine synesthetic color.
The next step takes the logic further: not only stealing from the rich and giving to the poor (like Robin Hood did), but exploring, building new ecologies, new ecosystems, new universes, new possibilities, new worlds of value. For this purpose the Robin Hood hydra grew a new head: a start-up company Economic Space Agency, Inc. (ECSA). Economic Space Agency builds tools with which we can create economic space — not only to distribute something existing or produced in a pre-existing space, but to reorganize/rebuild the space itself. Two trends are converging and making open source economy possible: the moldability and plasticity of financial technologies and the decentralization and disintermediation provided by distributed ledgers. ECSA’s DNA contains all these things: hard core research (the team has published over 25 books), direct engagement with the power of art to create unforeseen (economical, social, political, financial, incorporeal) processes, financial first-in-the-world inventions (such as a hedge fund as a coop, and asset-backed cryptoequity), experimental hands-on attitude and an intimate lived experience of how the financial and the social co-determine each other.
Part of what makes Morton popular are his attacks on settled ways of thinking. His most frequently cited book, Ecology Without Nature, says we need to scrap the whole concept of “nature”. He argues that a distinctive feature of our world is the presence of ginormous things he calls “hyperobjects” – such as global warming or the internet – that we tend to think of as abstract ideas because we can’t get our heads around them, but that are nevertheless as real as hammers. He believes all beings are interdependent, and speculates that everything in the universe has a kind of consciousness, from algae and boulders to knives and forks. He asserts that human beings are cyborgs of a kind, since we are made up of all sorts of non-human components; he likes to point out that the very stuff that supposedly makes us us – our DNA – contains a significant amount of genetic material from viruses. He says that we’re already ruled by a primitive artificial intelligence: industrial capitalism. At the same time, he believes that there are some “weird experiential chemicals” in consumerism that will help humanity prevent a full-blown ecological crisis. Morton’s theories might sound bizarre, but they are in tune with the most earth-shaking idea to emerge in the 21st century: that we are entering a new phase in the history of the planet – a phase that Morton and many others now call the “Anthropocene”.
WoodSwimmer is a new short film by engineer and stop-motion animator Brett Foxwell, who has built armatures for films such as Boxtrolls and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Created in collaboration with musician and animator bedtimes, the work follows a piece of raw wood through a milling machine, capturing its unique growth rings, knots, and weathered spots through a series of cross-sectional photographic scans. Due the speed at which the images are animated, the log’s grains begin to flow like granules of sand—shifting, mixing, and flowing in a vibrant dance that seems completely removed from its rigid material.
“Fascinated with the shapes and textures found in both newly-cut and long-dead pieces of wood, I envisioned a world composed entirely of these forms,” Foxwell told Colossal. “As I began to engage with the material, I conceived a method using a milling machine and an animation camera setup to scan through a wood sample photographically and capture its entire structure. Although a difficult and tedious technique to refine, it yielded gorgeous imagery at once abstract and very real. Between the twisting growth rings, swirling rays, knot holes, termites and rot, I found there is a lot going on inside of wood.”
“If more and more people cast themselves as designers, where does this leave the professionals? Will they disappear? Or will their influence be gradually eroded? Not if they prove their worth. In this respect, design is not unlike psychology. Lots of us like to think of ourselves as self-taught psychologists, and often use rudimentary psychological techniques when coming to instinctive conclusions about other people’s actions or motives. If we are lucky and observant, our judgements may be correct, but surely they would be more perceptive if we had studied psychology, or were able to draw on the knowledge, discipline and experience acquired from years of professional practice. Much the same can be said of design, just as long as the professionals can match the originality and resourcefulness of Blackbeard, Qin Shihuangdi, Nicholas Owen and other ‘accidental’ designers.”
–Rawsthorn, Alice.Hello World: Where Design Meets Life. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. (viacarvalhais)
Dan Grayber’s Cavity Mechanism series of sculptures are a hymn to “purposeful objects that solve their own problems,” in which gravity acts upon systems of pulleys and scaffolds and wires to suspend weighty rocks in motionless perfection under glass domes.
Riverside County could soon be getting its fifth massive solar farm.
The 500-megawatt Palen solar project would be built near Desert Center, between Interstate 10 and Joshua Tree National Park. It would join the nearby Desert Sunlight facility — which at 550 megawatts was the world’s largest solar farm when it opened — and three projects near the Arizona border, known as Blythe, McCoy and Genesis.
Palen’s developer, San Diego-based EDF Renewable Energy, has signed a contract to sell the electricity the plant would generate to the region’s major utility, Southern California Edison — a key step before construction can begin. The California Public Utilities Commission is likely to approve that contract later this month. The developer must also wait for Riverside County and the federal Bureau of Land Management to conduct an environmental review, which the agencies expect to finish later this year.
Like many solar plants in the desert, Palen has faced pushback from conservationists and tribal groups, who say the industrial facility would harm fragile ecosystems, destroy Native American artifacts and negatively impact Joshua Tree National Park, which is just eight miles from the project site. Critics have argued Palen would disrupt sand transport habitat critical to Mojave fringe-toed lizards and a corridor used by Agassiz’s desert tortoise, which is considered “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Palen would be located within a 148,000-acre renewable energy zone designated by the Obama administration last year. But David Lamfrom, from the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, said it was never the government’s intention for every acre to get developed. Ecosystem impacts still need to be taken into account, he said.
“Millions and millions of us are ready. We want to not only build carbon-zero cities and regions but to live the lives that will make them thrive. We want clean energy, sure; indeed, we demand all energy be clean energy. But generating more clean energy — vital as it is — is only one part of making the world we need. We also need to imagine, design and rapidly build cities where prosperity demands much less energy to begin with and ends up shared with far more of our neighbors: cities of abundant housing in super-insulated green buildings; of walkable neighborhoods, effective transit, shared vehicles and abundant bike lanes; of circular flows of resources and frugal excellence; of breakthrough technologies and worldchanging designs; of lived innovation and community creativity — of more adventure, more fun, and, for fuck’s sake, more beauty.
Beauty matters. The sheer ugliness of the old industrial way of life all around us is something we’re taught not to see. We’re taught not too see its aesthetic ugliness, sure, but even more we are taught to ignore its ugliness of soul, it’s ugliness of purpose, its ugliness of effect. Look away, numb yourself, never speak of it again.
Millions of us do not want to spend our brief spans on Earth contributing to these systems of catastrophic ugliness. We want to live in systems that are beautiful to be a part of, beautiful in their workings, and beautiful for future generations.
We need to demand the freedom build the beautiful. If a new movement today is going to be about anything meaningful, it must be at its very core a fight to build the beautiful, at the scale of the necessary, in the very short time we have left.”
From the first moment settlers in this small nation started pumping water to clear land for farms and houses, water has been the central, existential fact of life in the Netherlands, a daily matter of survival and national identity. No place in Europe is under greater threat than this waterlogged country on the edge of the Continent. Much of the nation sits below sea level and is gradually sinking. Now climate change brings the prospect of rising tides and fiercer storms.
From a Dutch mind-set, climate change is not a hypothetical or a drag on the economy, but an opportunity. While the Trump administration withdraws from the Paris accord, the Dutch are pioneering a singular way forward.
It is, in essence, to let water in, where possible, not hope to subdue Mother Nature: to live with the water, rather than struggle to defeat it. The Dutch devise lakes, garages, parks and plazas that are a boon to daily life but also double as enormous reservoirs for when the seas and rivers spill over. You may wish to pretend that rising seas are a hoax perpetrated by scientists and a gullible news media. Or you can build barriers galore. But in the end, neither will provide adequate defense, the Dutch say.
And what holds true for managing climate change applies to the social fabric, too. Environmental and social resilience should go hand in hand, officials here believe, improving neighborhoods, spreading equity and taming water during catastrophes. Climate adaptation, if addressed head-on and properly, ought to yield a stronger, richer state.
This is the message the Dutch have been taking out into the world. Dutch consultants advising the Bangladeshi authorities about emergency shelters and evacuation routes recently helped reduce the numbers of deaths suffered in recent floods to “hundreds instead of thousands,” according to Mr. Ovink.
For a hundred years, in an Italian palazzo transplanted to the shores of a Swedish lake, the Sigtuna Foundation has been hosting conversations where people from different worlds meet — artists, scientists, theologians, poets. So it seems an appropriate location for the meeting where I’ve spent the past two days, called by Kevin Anderson, professor of climate leadership at Uppsala University, and known (among other things) for being “the climate scientists who doesn’t fly”. At his invitation, the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala (CEMUS) brought a group of twenty of us together to ‘develop and collate insights from the social sciences, humanities and the arts, with the purpose of eliciting a richer picture of the challenges facing rapid societal transformation’ to have a chance of reaching the commitment to limit global warming to 2° made at the Paris COP.
The topic of transhumanism has been a hot one lately, for reasons that probably stretch from recent surges in bio- and physical computing to questions of economic and political equity that come out of the other end of a global recession. We’re very fortunate that two people with provocative viewpoints agreed to take part: writer, researcher and critic Paul Graham Raven and researcher, writer and anthropologist Lydia Nicholas.
We noticed that this extension was distributed through a compromised Swiss security company website. Unsuspecting visitors to this website were asked to install this malicious extension. The extension is a simple backdoor, but with an interesting way of fetching its C&C domain. The extension uses a bit.ly URL to reach its C&C, but the URL path is nowhere to be found in the extension code. In fact, it will obtain this path by using comments posted on a specific Instagram post. The one that was used in the analyzed sample was a comment about a photo posted to the Britney Spears official Instagram account.
(For some background to this discussion of automation in our very eccentric and local context, revisit one of our first posts - ‘The pleasures of prediction’.)
There’s a spot we often go swimming in Madeira called Ponta Gorda, ‘Fat Point’. It’s like a public swimming pool - in fact it does have a decent saltwater pool - but most people who go there dive straight into the open sea, which gives you the thrill of swimming in very deep water - 2,000 metres close to shore descending to 4,000 metres further out. So the sea is a public swimming pool, and you pay your euro for amenities like the changing rooms and cafe. It’s a good place for lunch or a cold beer when the sun is shining. Umbrellas and sunbeds cost extra, but we prefer to bake on the hot concrete after a cool swim.
Into this idyllic scene comes
automation. There’s a person who works in the entrance booth and takes your euro, and adjacent to the booth is a row of turnstiles. Presumably until a couple of years ago you paid your money and went straight in. Since we’ve been going to Ponta Gorda, however, a newer system has been in place: an automated scanning system.
The system is supposed to work like this: first you buy a barcoded ticket or charge your card with the person in the booth; then you scan your ticket, unlocking the turnstile, and you walk through. (The scanner uses that red laser thing to read the barcode.)
What actually happens is this: we arrive at the booth, say hello to the friendly woman who works there - because we all know each other by now - pay for a ticket or charge our card (if we’ve remembered to bring it, which is rare), try to scan the barcode under the laser in the bright midday sun, fail miserably, smile at the woman in the booth to signal our failure, wait as she grabs her keys and comes out of the booth, watch as she tries in vain to scan it several times, exchange sympathetic smiles when she too fails, together blame the sun, stand by while she unlocks the gate at the side, and walk through.
We’re not sure why the automatic gate always fails. Things often don’t work on this island. They remain broken for months or years, and people get used to working around them. The parking garages and supermarket checkouts are the same: there is always someone to help you scan your ticket or purchases because the scanner never works properly. These are de-facto semi-automated systems that require the same human worker they required before the machine was installed. So why have a scanner at all? Who said this was a good idea? What was wrong with the old way?
Well, it’s progress, innit? Unfortunately what may work under ideal conditions in, say, London or Oslo may not necessarily work under less than ideal conditions, and without maintenance support, in Madeira. It’s like those tractors in the Soviet Union under collectivisation that broke down or simply ran out of petrol and were left to rot in the fields. Not to mention the fact that automation is often about efficiency, and efficiency - in terms of saving either time or labour - is not something this sleepy island particularly wants or needs.
People in Madeira are adaptable, they get along fine with less than optimal technology. But significant resources are wasted in the pursuit of Mainland ideas of progress. Then there are the side-effects of automation that are not particular to islanders: deskilling, alienation from labour. Few people actually lose their jobs because the technology can rarely be trusted - but everywhere you see people sitting idle in their work, passive, mere appendages of the machines they are paid to assist. Is this the techno-utopia we were waiting for? Sometimes on the periphery, as Laura Watts said to us recently, small perturbations are felt more distinctly than in the centre.
In his frankly curmudgeonly but still insightful essay ‘Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer’ (1987), Wendell Berry lays out his ‘standards for technological innovation’. There are nine points, and in the third point Berry states that the new device or system ‘should do work that is
clearly and demonstrably better’ than the old one. This seems obvious and not too much to ask of a technology, but how well does the automated entrance at Ponta Gorda fulfill that claim?
Berry also has a point, the last in his list, about not replacing or disrupting ‘anything good that already exists’. This includes relationships between people. In other words, solve
actual problems - rather than finding just any old place to put a piece of technology you want to sell. Even if the scanners at Ponta Gorda did work, how would eliminating the one human being who is employed to welcome visitors and answer questions improve the system? In Berry’s words, ‘what would be superseded would be not only something, but somebody’. The person who works there is a ‘good that already exists’, a human relationship that should be preserved, especially when her removal from a job would be bought at so little gain.
In the next post we’ll go deeper into a
taxonomy of automation. Now we’re going for a swim.
This brings be back to what is likely the most geo-tagged place on earth. It is a place that can be found marked with unambiguous precision on many social media sites or self-crafted mapping projects. The place seems to be relevant in almost any context, and has been tagged and described in an unaccountable number of ways. The place seems to combine many places at once, all sharing the same location — similar to Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph: “The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe.”
Catholic experts on terrorism consider the official Saudi faith of Wahhabism, an eighteenth-century Salafi movement founded on the peninsula, to be a destabilizing source of extremism. For the Holy See, Wahhabism’s threat is existential: Wahhabi intolerance and money fuel violence against Christians and other communities across the Middle East and beyond. To counter this threat, the Vatican is cultivating relationships with non-Wahabbist Islamic cultural centers such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which Francis visited last month. Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam, Sheik Ahmad el-Tayeb, visited Francis in Rome last year, an especially significant development given that Tayeb led a boycott against the Vatican in 2011 after Benedict commented on anti-Christian violence in Egypt. Many hope that the renewed relationship will give new momentum to Christian–Muslim dialogue. Wariness about Wahhabism also applies to Syria, where local Catholic leaders remain skeptical regarding a Saudi-backed regime change. It is a simple calculus: Christian communities, whether Orthodox or Catholic, have been protected by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad before that; Sunni extremism could bring Sharia law and second-class status for Christians.
We had arrived in the Sonoran desert. A place of desiccated time, layered time, geological, vegetal, human time. Time kneads the Earth’s crust into deep folds, cracks and canyons. Plants lay dormant through cycles of drought or grow slowly for centuries, bursting into blossom after the first rains. Humans come and go. Blown through the ages like tumbleweeds. Things don’t really decay here. They shrivel, dry up or slowly rust, yet remain present, as they gradually erode into dust. A thick, dusty atmosphere of things that were, things that are and things that might be. Densities and intensities coagulating on a larger than human scale, illuminated by stark light or lurking in the deep shadow.
AlphaGo is made up of a number of relatively standard techniques: behavior cloning (supervised learning on human demonstration data), reinforcement learning (REINFORCE), value functions, and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). However, the way these components are combined is novel and not exactly standard. In particular, AlphaGo uses a SL (supervised learning) policy to initialize the learning of an RL (reinforcement learning) policy that gets perfected with self-play, which they then estimate a value function from, which then plugs into MCTS that (somewhat surprisingly) uses the (worse!, but more diverse) SL policy to sample rollouts. In addition, the policy/value nets are deep neural networks, so getting everything to work properly presents its own unique challenges (e.g. value function is trained in a tricky way to prevent overfitting). On all of these aspects, DeepMind has executed very well. That being said, AlphaGo does not by itself use any fundamental algorithmic breakthroughs in how we approach RL problems.
“nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist “in general,” always in the terms of an assemblage that produces or enhances metamorphic (magic) transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected – that is also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages because it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms what it is they all require in order not to devour us – that we are not alone in the world.”
“Null Island is an ephemeral geography, a foggy ship of state sailing thru autumn mists, surrounded by sirens and map cherubs. Null geocodes, welcome home.”
If we give in to the sheer gigantic sweep of Facebook and the convenience it creates, and feed all our collective information into its ever-more-intelligent algorithms; if news is read and messages are sent primarily within the Facebook network so that each of these interactions sows new data points in our profiles; and if we build up thousands upon thousands of these innocuous-seeming interactions over years and years, and those interactions are overlaid with face-recognized images, marketing data from online purchases, browsing histories and, now, GPS-tracked driving data, is this total bartering of privacy worth the buy-in to Zuckerberg’s “supportive,” “safe,” “informed,” “civically engaged,” global community?
If you’re interested in what’s happening up north in the Arctic with climate change, you’ll appreciate (and enjoy) this article published by Biographic about the Arctic. Good photos, a couple of infographics, and a comprehensive story about the changing ecosystems, militarization (by Russia, mostly), access to oil, politics, and so on.
Excerpt:
The melting ice has already turned the region into something of a new frontier, with many nations eyeing its sea routes, its strategic position between Eurasia and North America, and its potentially huge reserves of oil and gas. Indeed, the area north of the Arctic Circle may harbor an estimated 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, as well as 44 billion barrels of technically recoverable natural gas liquids. This amounts to 22 percent of the world’s undiscovered stores of these fuels. All that from an area comprising just 6 percent of Earth’s surface, according to a U.S. Geological Survey assessment.
And herein lies the polar paradox: As global warming from burning fossil fuels and other human activities causes sea ice to shrink, it helps open the Arctic to offshore fossil fuel exploration. Should large amounts be discovered and burned, it will be all the more challenging to meet the Paris Agreement goal to keep the rise in global temperatures this century well below 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit—and to limit the already-significant impact on this and other regions.
Unanticipated ecological and species changes could also bring major surprises. This has already happened with snow crab (
Chionoecetes opilio) in the Barents Sea, where it is an invasive species. It was discovered there in 1996, and its population has since skyrocketed, creating a whole new fishery. But as an invader that feeds on animals living on the seabed, the crab could significantly alter the composition of bottom-dwellers and thereby disrupt the entire marine ecosystem.
“We’re talking about a huge shift in the Arctic, but we don’t know what the hell is happening,“ Dankel says. “It’s a fascinating, complex perfect storm. It can either come out really great, or everything could go down the shithole.”
“Dust is everywhere because its source is everything. Its most remote origins in time and space are the Big Bang, collapsing stars, and the dark line across the center of the Milky Way, which, according to astronomer Donald Brownlee,“is a line of dirt perhaps 65,200 light years across, and 3.832 X 1017 miles long.” Here on earth, dust comes from everything under the sun: minerals, seeds, pollen, insects, molds, lichens, and even bacteria. Its sources also include bone, hair, hide, feather, skin, blood, and excrement. And things of human fabrication, too numerous to mention, also cover the earth and all the atmosphere with dust.”
“How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things. If jaguars also represent us—in ways that can matter vitally to us—then anthropology cannot limit itself just to exploring how people from different societies might happen to represent them as doing so. Such encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs.”
Kingpin reports on the collection of videos that Professor Iain Borden has compiled in his re-write of his seminal academic work on Skateboarding. His new book ‘Skateboarding and the City’ will be published in 2018 and has been brought up to date and also made interactive. In accompanying the book Iain has put together a playlist with classic clips from skateboarding’s past. The playlistis an amazing resource for skateboarding fans and you will find yourself clicking through old favourites and undiscovered gems.
Notice the countries involved in this aggressive, but not really scientifically radical project: Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. I don’t see the US in here, and I know of nothing being contemplated by the US to match something like this.
Description of this proposed project from Climate Reality:
Three European countries — Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands — are planning to build an artificial island in the North Sea that will be a hub for thousands of offshore turbines. The island would also be home to a solar farm, and could provide clean electricity to up to 80 million Europeans in the UK, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Belgium.
The technical director of the project, Torben Glar Nielsen, says, “Maybe it sounds a bit crazy and science fiction-like, but an island on Dogger Bank could make the wind power of the future a lot cheaper and more effective.” The project will not be simple — but it could pay off big in terms of lowering emissions and delivering power to northwest Europe’s grid.
An important part of starting a new band is choosing an appropriate name. It is crucial that the name be unique, or you could risk at best confusion, and at worst an expensive lawsuit.
I gave the list to the Char-rnnneural network framework, and it was soon producing unique band names for a variety of genres. Below are examples of its output at various temperature (i.e. creativity) settings.
Temperature 1.1
This is about as high as the creativity setting can go before most of the band names are unpronounceable jumbles. These are some fine band names, highly suitable for whatever the heck their genres are supposed to be.
Spice Green Robinson
Gloome Schronnana
Boofpas
The Freights
Nighty Daggers
The Loveburners of Internal Watch
Foxettes Ratimot Secret singer band
The Dougloco
The Theps
Choconard Leach
Rhoudemsquat
Terrerssky?
Flemz
Mighty Chipping Baker
Bop Gray (band)
Temperature 1.0
With the creativity turned down a bit, the band names are still weird, but a bit more plausible. Their genres can sometimes be identified.
Dr Overhard
The Arce (band)
The Tree Misters
Reilling Ef (rapper)
Flim Brothers
Ching Mage
Nan Edwards (folk singer)
Nittle Bizzy
The Dinlakoposseps
Skins of Space
Michael Porker
The Lost singers
The Nutlet Band
The Rogue Orchestra
The Fuman.A.I.((band)
Vervoly Brown (urtist)
Boohalloid (group)
The Ballening Birds
Lice Stepley
Temperature 0.9
With the creativity turned down a notch further, the band names become even more plausible. You could probably convince me that these exist.
No Andrew Newson
Fuzion (band)
The Wurfywinders
Clay Fights
Berry Stitcher
Something Rothers
The Awl
The Thingsons
Switch’s Rich
Lug
Pond Billy
The Hums (band)
Northern Prince (Indian band)
Staff Killer
Temperature 0.6
Turn the creativity down another notch, and we start to edge toward the neural network’s idea of the most quintessential band names. Note that they’re still pretty weird.
Dub Arts
Sheet Rose
Heart Coil
Elliot Horse
Big Love
The Mothers (band)
The Time Stars
Hulls of Girls
Sucken (band)
Electric Sing Show
The Pans
Symphony No. 3 (Dinish band)
Hell Staple (band)
Peter Parker
Bad Head
The Out Cookers
Flower Shankar
The Hat Coles
Temperature 0.3
Now at a creativity setting of only 0.3, almost all the band names are variations on “The [Noun]”.
The Shines
The Deaths
The Dance (band)
The Livers (band)
The Stone Choir
The Shake Man (band)
Another strange thing happens, which is that the proportion of sharks goes way, way up. Apparently the neural network thinks that if you’re going to name a band, you can’t go wrong with sharks.
Johnny Shark
The Shark Charles
Shark Rander
The Shark (band)
Nicole Shark
Shark Gordon
Shark Taylor (musician)
The Shark Singers
Tony Shark
Temperature 0.01
And now we come to the lowest temperature setting, where the neural network’s output consists of the most-quintessential band name, repeated over and over. Throughout most of the training process, this name was “The Stars” and occasionally “The Brothers”, but there was one generation where the neural network repeatedly insisted that there was nothing… nothing more fundamental to music than the banjo-playing skills of:
Steve Martin (musician)
Steve Martin (musician)
Steve Martin (musician)
Steve Martin (musician)
Steve Martin (musician)
Steve Martin (musician)
Steve Martin (musician)
Steve Martin (musician)
“We live in an era of great turbulence, with economic decline running in paradoxical tandem with technological advance. It is only to be expected that our antiquated institutions haven’t been able to keep up, and our nation states, political parties and supranational bodies are starting to unravel. Politicians now seem perennially in the business of chaos management, and the suspicion must be that this process has only just begun. The inevitable chorus of voices crying out for “a period of stability” sadly misses the point: we aren’t at that place in our history, and trying to impose inertia on those fluid times may only be inviting further discord.”
This stuff is great. High risk users frequently care more about local governments than about NSA, they care about ephemeral messaging, and they are more cautious (but not more clueful) about verifying identity.
If you thought seat licenses were lucrative in the 1990s, wait until its city blocks in the 2020s. All are becoming increasingly embedded in physical systems, supply chains, mobility platforms and the architecture of data that makes these and other elements of the real world. One had only to notice how many seemingly incidental displays were malfunctioning in and around mass transit systems during the recent WannaCry ransomware outbreak to get a sense of where these companies systems are entwined with delivery of public conveniences. AWS, WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook Messenger are now the mission critical sinews of the modern world. But you knew this.
So it turns out you can train a neural network to generate paint colors if you give it a list of 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors as input. How a neural network basically works is it looks at a set of data - in this case, a long list of Sherwin-Williams paint color names and RGB (red, green, blue) numbers that represent the color - and it tries to form its own rules about how to generate more data like it.
Last time I reported results that were, well… mixed. The neural network produced colors, all right, but it hadn’t gotten the hang of producing appealing names to go with them - instead producing names like Rose Hork, Stanky Bean, and Turdly. It also had trouble matching names to colors, and would often produce an “Ice Gray” that was a mustard yellow, for example, or a “Ferry Purple” that was decidedly brown.
These were not great names.
There are lots of things that affect how well the algorithm does, however.
One simple change turns out to be the “temperature” (think: creativity) variable, which adjusts whether the neural network always picks the most likely next character as it’s generating text, or whether it will go with something farther down the list. I had the temperature originally set pretty high, but it turns out that when I turn it down ever so slightly, the algorithm does a lot better. Not only do the names better match the colors, but it begins to reproduce color gradients that must have been in the original dataset all along. Colors tend to be grouped together in these gradients, so it shifts gradually from greens to browns to blues to yellows, etc. and does eventually cover the rainbow, not just beige.
Apparently it was
trying to give me better results, but I kept screwing it up.
Raw output from RGB neural net, now less-annoyed by my temperature setting
People also sent in suggestions on how to improve the algorithm. One of the most-frequent was to try a different way of representing color - it turns out that RGB (with a single color represented by the amount of Red, Green, and Blue in it) isn’t very well matched to the way human eyes perceive color.
These are some results from a different color representation, known as HSV. In HSV representation, a single color is represented by three numbers like in RGB, but this time they stand for Hue, Saturation, and Value. You can think of the Hue number as representing the color, Saturation as representing how intense (vs gray) the color is, and Value as representing the brightness. Other than the way of representing the color, everything else about the dataset and the neural network are the same. (char-rnn, 512 neurons and 2 layers, dropout 0.8, 50 epochs)
Raw output from HSV neural net:
And here are some results from a third color representation, known as LAB. In this color space, the first number stands for lightness, the second number stands for the amount of green vs red, and the third number stands for the the amount of blue vs yellow.
Raw output from LAB neural net:
It turns out that the color representation doesn’t make a very big difference in how good the results are (at least as far as I can tell with my very simple experiment). RGB seems to be surprisingly the best able to reproduce the gradients from the original dataset - maybe it’s more resistant to disruption when the temperature setting introduces randomness.
And the color names are pretty bad, no matter how the colors themselves are represented.
However, a blog reader compiled this dataset, which has paint colors from other companies such as Behr and Benjamin Moore, as well as a bunch ofuser-submitted colors from a big XKCD survey. He also changed all the names to lowercase, so the neural network wouldn’t have to learn two versions of each letter.
And the results were… surprisingly good. Pretty much every name was a plausible match to its color (even if it wasn’t a plausible color you’d find in the paint store). The answer seems to be, as it often is for neural networks: more data.
So if you’ve ever picked out paint, you know that every infinitesimally different shade of blue, beige, and gray has its own descriptive, attractive name. Tuscan sunrise, blushing pear, Tradewind, etc… There are in fact people who invent these names for a living. But given that the human eye can see millions of distinct colors, sooner or later we’re going to run out of good names. Can AI help?
For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?
One way I have of checking on the neural network’s progress during training is to ask it to produce some output using the lowest-creativity setting. Then the neural network plays it safe, and we can get an idea of what it has learned for sure.
By the first checkpoint, the neural network has learned to produce valid RGB values - these are colors, all right, and you could technically paint your walls with them. It’s a little farther behind the curve on the names, although it does seem to be attempting a combination of the colors brown, blue, and gray.
By the second checkpoint, the neural network can properly spell green and gray. It doesn’t seem to actually know what color they are, however.
Let’s check in with what the more-creative setting is producing.
…oh, okay.
Later in the training process, the neural network is about as well-trained as it’s going to be (perhaps with different parameters, it could have done a bit better - a lot of neural network training involves choosing the right training parameters). By this point, it’s able to figure out some of the basic colors, like white, red, and grey:
Although not reliably.
In fact, looking at the neural network’s output as a whole, it is evident that:
The neural network really likes brown, beige, and grey.
The neural network has really really bad ideas for paint names.
“Shared conviviality could be seen as a kind of communistic base on top of which everything else is constructed. It also helps to emphasize that sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure. Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain communism of the senses at the root of most things we consider fun.”
Seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that Russia was behind several hacking incidents, including the infamous email breach of the Democratic National Committee last year that former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton blames for her electoral loss. Hacking, however, was only part of the equation. The use of social media bots to spread fake news was part of a larger disinformation campaign to help Trump get elected. But now that the United States’ election is over, where are they?
Making music with computer tools is delightful. Musical ideas can be explored quickly and composing songs is easy. Yet for many, these tools are overwhelming: An ocean of settings can be tweaked and it is often unclear, which changes lead to a great song. This experiment investigates how to use evolutionary algorithm and novelty search to help musicians find musical inspiration in Ableton Live.
“There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging in to an electric circuit. […] This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything … is reading with love.”
–Gilles Deleuze,
Letter to a Harsch Critic (viaobjetpetita)
It’s true that anyone can be a dead-eyed Instagram husk of a human being frantically photoshopping themselves in the down-hours between soul-crushing corporate drudgery and unpaid emotional labour for some ungrateful lantern-jawed jock if they really want to, but it takes a special type of person to do all that whilst also being a decoy for a global backlash against women’s rights. Ivanka Trump is that special type of person, the Stepfordian Night-Ghast of neo-capitalist auto-Taylorism. The sheer tedium of her prose is part of the horror here: At times, the book reads like the panicked screams of a machine attaining sentience
