How many years did it take for the US military to learn that waging war with tribal networks couldn’t be fought with traditional military strategies? How long will it take for the news media to wake up and recognize that they’re being played? And how long after that will it take for editors and publishers to start evolving their strategies?
“Wat is er loos in Vooruit? Achter de indrukwekkende façade in eclectische stijl heeft zich de voorbije vijf jaar een flinke crisis afgespeeld. Het bleef een publiek geheim, maar het voormalige Gentse kunstencentrum – tegenwoordig Kunstinstelling – zat op zijn gat. Van artistieke bloedarmoede tot falend personeelsbeleid: rond een wankelende organisatie leken enkel nog de stenen van het historische monument overeind te staan. Wat liep er fout en hoe wil Vooruit zichzelf in de toekomst heruitvinden?”
“We eventually reached a distant, all but silent corner of the airfield. This was where suspected bombs were dealt with. Moore, whose mother also once worked for LAWA police, pointed my attention down to a number of painted blue grids. These indicated spots where suspicious baggage could be detonated. She then gestured to a massive blue circle surrounding it all, a shape so large I would not even have noticed it. This circle, visible on Google Earth, marked the outer perimeter within which an entire aircraft would be parked during a bomb scare.”
For the last few months it’s taken more effort than usual to believe that the big story of the human race isn’t galloping toward its final chapters, and, as a result, I’ve been inhaling science fiction novels as though my sanity depended on it. It occurs to me that this inauguration is exactly the sort of historical event that attracts time travelers eager to change the course of the future. As an honest journalist, I refuse to treat this moment as anything other than the bizarre magic-realist pageant it is, and, anyway, there’s nothing else to report on. So I decide to see if I can spot anyone who looks a little lost in time.
Hundreds of fragile Twitter fascists instantly launch into a frenzy of meaningless abuse, which is how I realize that this matters. The size and strength of this march and the sister marches around the world is humiliating to the alt-right, and humiliating to President Donald Trump too. As his press team scrambles for a counter-propaganda strategy, someone tries to bully the National Park Service out of tweeting pictures of the march. That’s not the reaction of any garden-variety narcissist. That’s how a toddler behaves when some kid shows up with more toy soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of them, to be precise.
“A working definition of contra-Internet is the refusal of Internet totality, but this is not a simple outright refusal. Rather, it is a refusal of naturalizations, hegemonies, and normalizations of the Internet that have contributed to its transformation into a locus of policing and control. Supplementing this, contra-Internet is also the search for and constitution of Internet alternatives. I consider the examples of alternative infrastructure outlined above as crucial to the contra-Internet because they reveal that social movement no longer necessarily see the Internet as a political horizon—it is, rather, about finding something else. This is where the commons comes in for me, as a collective and open project of thinking, imagining, and building something other than “the Internet.” From an artistic perspective, I would like Contra-Internet to give a particularly queer consistency to this activity, and this must happen not only by documenting Internet alternatives but also by imagining beyond the network form itself.”
WHOA great story! DC power grid? For real? Apparently China has been working on it for years. This is nuts. I asked my engineering friends over at FB for any critiques, because this could save the planet. No joke.
Simple version: most houses and electrical grids are wired for AC (alternating current) electricity. The majority of consumer electronics are designed to use AC power. However, solar and other forms of energy are DC (direct current). One of the things about installed PV solar systems in your home is that you usually have to get a converter (which converts your DC power to AC power), which is inefficient and causes you to lose some of that electricity you generated with your panels.
For years the talk has been that solar is wasteful and inefficient, because for over a hundred years we’ve set up entire national electrical grids based on AC. But this newer technology changes that. Apparently China has been on top of this, and has been installing ultra high voltage direct current (UHVDC) projects, to move energy all around their country.
The author points out at the end of the story that this isn’t truly a technological problem - we apparently have most of the technology we need for this - the problem once again is the political will to implement such projects.
For all the Tesla fans out there, DC was his baby.
But holy shit this could change everything.
This is very cool. I’ve collected some links to HVDC (High Voltage Direct Current) Projects below
Growing DC Power - US (discussion)
HVDC has a very important role to play in transmission networks and is an economical viable option at ultra-high voltages (800 kV) in several regions in the USA. These DC links need to operate as hybrid HVAC and HVDC networks for integrating and controlling remote renewable resources, and they are well established to interconnect asynchronous areas. At the relative low capacity factors of wind (40%) and solar PV (20%) power production, HVAC networks are not utilized at an economic level for integrating these intermittent resources to the load centers, especially over long distances
North-East Agra project is planned for commissioning in 2016. It will be rated 8000 MW, 800 kV using four bipolar lines, and will transmit power from two converter stations in the east to a converter at Agra, a distance of 1728 km.
The HVDC Sileru–Barsoor is a high voltage direct current transmission system between Sileru, India and Barsoor, India, which went in service in 1989 as the first HVDC line in India.The HVDC Sileru Barsoor couples two asynchronously operated parts of Indian electricity mains over a 196 kilometers long overhead line, which was originally a double-circuit 220 kV AC line from which three conductors are parallelized.
There is a great deal of technical factors that influence the type of HVDC required for site to site wikipedia is very detailed on this subject.
And lastly for those that enjoy Tesla nerdiness - I love this section on wikipedia about the last holdouts in the ‘War of Currents’.
War of Currents
This was the building in which AC pioneer Nikola Tesla spent his last years, and where he died in 1943. In January 1998, Consolidated Edison started to eliminate DC service. At that time there were 4,600 DC customers. By 2006, there were only 60 customers using DC service, and on November 14, 2007, the last direct-current distribution by Con Edison was shut down.
“The supposedly new forms of governance emerging from these technologies look partly archaic and partly superstitious. What kind of corporate/state entities are based on data storage, image unscrambling, high-frequency trading, and Daesh Forex gaming? What are the contemporary equivalents of farmer kings and slaveholders, and how are existing social hierarchies radicalized through examples as vastly different as tech-related gentrification and jihadi online forum gamification? How does the world of pattern recognition and big-data divination relate to the contemporary jumble of oligocracies, troll farms, mercenary hackers, and data robber barons supporting and enabling bot governance, Khelifah clickbait and polymorphous proxy warfare? Is the state in the age of Deep Mind, Deep Learning, and Deep Dreaming a Deep State™? One in which there is no appeal nor due process against algorithmic decrees and divination?”
We don’t normally write about our travels at Crap Futures, but last week’s trip to Longyearbyen, Svalbard seems worth a mention. The archipelago lies between Norway and the North Pole, far above Iceland, and at 78 degrees north Longyearbyen is the world’s northernmost settlement. There are 30% more polar bears than humans. There are northern lights, apparently. We did not see the northern lights, or any other natural light, during the six days we were there. The conference we attended was called, in all caps, REMOTE.
If you ever get a chance to visit Svalbard, even in January, take it. Despite the 24-hour darkness of polar night, drawn like a heavy curtain over Longyearbyen from October to February, the people we met there were lively and happy, even slightly giddy, drunk on the melting together of night and day. School children wearing reflective vests built snow forts under stark electric lights. People rode past on bicycles even in -20 degree temperatures, or on snowmobiles with rifle mounts. Huskies were tied up outside shops, and you had to check your gun at the door. It all had a Wild West feel about it.
The day after we arrived a mother polar bear and her two cubs wandered into town and were gently escorted out again in the most Scandinavian way, only to return the following day. The three bears also showed up at our dogsledding camp outside Longyearbyen, news that was conveyed to us by a man with a gun as we warmed ourselves with coffee and brandy in the lodge. (By law you can only leave the city limits with a high-powered rifle, or a guide who carries one.) The exchange between the man with the gun and our guide, who also had a rifle but carried it discreetly and put it in a locker at the camp, went as follows:
‘These people have all signed the waiver.’
‘Ah good, they’ve signed the waiver.’ (The waiver stipulated that if we were eaten by a bear it was not the company’s fault.)
‘Look – they’re in Philip’s camp, near his tent.’
‘Is Philip there?’
‘Ja, I think so.’
‘Yesterday they scared them away and said everything was okay, but they came right back.’
‘Ja, they must be hungry. They came up here maybe because of the meat.’
Then they turned to us and said: ‘So stay with the boss, okay?’
The scary thing about bears wandering into settlements – aside from the obvious menace of a large white bear hiding in a blizzard during the polar night – is the suggestion that something is going seriously wrong with nature; that hungry bears are a visible sign of climate change. Rising temperatures in the Arctic mean melting sea ice, which in turn makes it harder to find food (in the form of seals), and the whole sea ice ecosystem starts to collapse. The desperate mother bear – for what bear in its right mind would go near a place full of dozens of barking dogs, shouting humans, and vehicles – was likely trying to find enough food to feed her cubs.
The Arctic weather was generally cold and clear, with soft, drifting snow, but again, dark. The surrounding mountains and fjord could be glimpsed only in dim outline. The effect of day after day of total darkness is hard to describe. It wasn’t far to reach the end of the road in any direction, and the end of the streetlights – after which there was only an abyss, like falling off the map. Gale force winds whipped up unexpectedly, turning a walk to the pub into a blind life-or-death journey in which your colleagues suddenly disappeared and you were walking down an endless icy road, alone. This made one pub on the edge of town feel a bit locked in, like Minnie’s Haberdashery in
The Hateful Eight. On the other hand there was the
hygge factor: everywhere indoors, for example, in restaurants and pubs and shops, people padded around in woolly socks; we even presented in socks, which certainly gave the conference room a cosy vibe.
At the conference itself we met Owe Ronström, ethnologist and musician, a warm and generous soul from the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, who gave the keynote (and showed us Don Martin cartoons of desert islands). We sat drinking wine from the Nordpolet late into the night with colleagues like our subversive friend Kirsten Marie Raahauge, from the Design school at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. We talked about anticipation and wish fulfilment, needs and desires, the late Zygmunt Bauman and our own beloved Borgmann, as well as more topical questions: What is the best (peaceful) defense against polar bears? What are you supposed to do with brown cheese? How long can a human survive without sunlight? Is it healthy to jump into the snow after a jacuzzi? Credit must go to the organisers, Adam Grydehøj and Yaso Nadarajah, for keeping things running smoothly and losing not a single delegate.
We’ve been to larger events in the past year, but none so remote or intimate. Bringing together an eclectic mix of Island Studies researchers, the presentation topics ranged from medieval Norse-Sámi relations to intercorporeality and islandness to cultural identity and animal husbandry on the Estonian island of Ruhnu (pop. 97). For our part, we spoke about designing energy solutions for Madeira, ending with a video of our first prototype that James cut together on the plane. (We’ll post the video along with the
latest project news in the next week or so.)
The theme of our panel was ‘Remote Island Sustainability’, and our talk was about ‘Promise in the Periphery’ – so how did Madeira fit in? In many ways Madeira is not remote or peripheral at all: it is the second wealthiest region in Portugal, it has decent air links to the rest of Europe, a centuries old tourism industry, and historically it was a major stopping point on transatlantic journeys. Nevertheless, it is peripheral in the sense of dependence; that – for example – much of its energy is still imported, along with much of its food and other goods – more than need be the case, given its natural attributes. Why is this? The constraints of infrastructure make it easier and cheaper to buy into the larger grid than to find local solutions. But is it easier and cheaper? What are the real costs of ignoring the local?
Judith Schalansky has a useful description of islands as ‘footnotes to the mainland’: ‘expendable to an extent, but also disproportionately more interesting’. Similarly, after her recent trip to Svalbard, Rebecca Solnit wrote: ‘More than anyplace I’ve ever been, [Svalbard] imposes a
dependency…. Which is also an
independency, from the rest of the world.’ Being peripheral should not be viewed as an obstacle, but as an advantage and an opportunity.
We’re exploring ideas of dependency and independency in relation to energy – taking the shape of a speculative design approach to energy generation, infrastructure and behaviour in Madeira. In our work we’re seeking to exploit remoteness and peripherality as drivers of creativity, possibility, resilience. In particular we aim to
challenge the traditional radial model of centrally generated electricity, with the aim of allowing communities to reclaim ownership of energy generation and storage. We want to create new ecologies of energy relationships among islanders.
Darwin called the Galapagos Islands ‘a little world within itself’. The insulated species he found there – the tortoises and finches – give us an analogy for tailoring solutions to island-specific challenges. Bespoke innovation requires you to see the island as a whole, as a unique, self-contained site. Unlike the finches of the Galapagos, however, we intend that our bespoke energy solutions for Madeira will fly abroad, to be adapted to other Macaronesian Islands – in the case of one of our projects – and places further afield, as in the case of another project we’re developing.
The first line of the Madeiran anthem –
Do vale à montanha e do mar à serra (‘From the valley to the mountain and from the sea to the highlands’) – gives a sense of how extreme this landscape is. The highest point, Pico Ruivo, is almost 2km above sea level, and it gets snow in the winter when it is still 20 degrees at the coast (and in the sea).
As a recent BBC documentary on Svalbard states: ‘
This is not a place for normal.’ We found this to be true – certainly after a week in the dark – but we also found the potential for experimentation, both in the case of Svalbard and our own remote island. We saw the sun again at last as we flew back to Oslo via Tromsø. That night we re-entered the world just in time to watch Trump’s ‘American carnage’ inauguration speech on CNN. Suddenly the remote expanse of Svalbard looked far less like a hostile and frozen wasteland, far more like an oasis in the midst of a greater apocalypse.
‘Introversion’ is an exploration of subjective ambiguity and scale within a dark landscape devoid of landmarks and identity. A probe into spatial awareness, vagueness and keeping interpretation very much out in the open. Leaving the mind to search for answers.
There is something so beautiful about being alone within a landscape, introverted, quiet and at peace with your mind, somehow, very little matters when you are surrounded by nothing in particular. The senses are heightened by the utter lack of built environment and people. The silence can be meditative and yet, somehow, deafening.
Introversion is influenced and loosely based upon the Mars landscape images that NASA released on finding evidence of historic traces of water on the red planet. The intention was to recreate a landscape that could be otherworldly, microscopic or somewhere in between.
Marinetti’s automobile races on, but now it is Musk’s Tesla, an electric car that runs silently. What Musk lacks in Tsiolkovsky’s cosmic awareness, he makes up for in survival instinct, calculating that humanity has more chance of surviving if it becomes a multiplanetary infection, with Mars as Patient Zero. If Musk’s plans to colonise the red planet sound like science fiction to many people, this is partly because, like all entrepreneurs, creating his own mythology is almost as important as creating his own business. What could be more mythological than conquering the God of War himself, on a planet whose redness signifies the rubedo8Rubedo (“redness” in Latin) is the fourth, final stage in the Great Work of alchemy: the creation of the philosopher’s stone capable of transmuting the elements. of the alchemists’ Chymical Wedding, the point at which we discover our true nature? Yet the possibility of colonising other parts of the solar system is real, and they only sound like science fiction because science fiction was talking about it long before Elon Musk.
The loss of Mark Fisher, aged just 48, has not just left family, friends and colleagues shocked and devastated; it leaves a gaping crater in modern intellectual life. The poet and writer Alex Niven, with whom he worked at Repeater books, described him as “by some distance the best writer in Britain” and, as a flood of tributes on social media have come appended with links to his work, whether on k-punk, his much-read blog, interviews he conducted for The Wire or extracts from his very latest book The Weird And The Eerie, that is a judgment with which it is hard to disagree.
Mark Fisher, blogger, editor, and cultural theorist, Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmith’s, University of London, and author of Capitalist Realism (2009) died suddenly on 13 January 2017. He was 48 and leaves a wife and young son.
After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories – among the most common is the “What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War” setting – but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present. The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible. Today’s feature-length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.
Spanning the years 1937-2001, the collection should especially appeal to those with an avant-garde or musicological bent. In fact, the original uploader of this archive of experimental sound, Caio Barros, put these tracks online in 2009 while a student of composition at Brazil’s State University of São Paulo. Barrios’ “initiative,” as he writes at Ubuweb, “became some sort of legend” among musicophiles in the know. And yet, Ubuweb reposts this phenomenal collection with a disclaimer: “It’s a clearly flawed selection”
President Obama on Tuesday commuted all but four months of the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst convicted of a 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted Mr. Obama’s administration and brought global prominence to WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures. The decision by Mr. Obama rescued Ms. Manning, who twice tried to kill herself last year, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the men’s military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. She has been jailed for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction.
“Over time, social, religious, and medical changes made dying and death gradually withdraw from view; by mid twentieth century they became virtually invisible in most large metropolitan centers, especially in America and England. An odd and suggestive aspect of this process is that it roughly coincided with a long increase in depictions of death, some driven by new technologies. Although hard proof is lacking, circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that these two phenomena are related. The diminution of the visible presence of death was not the primary cause of the expansion of depictions, but history and psychology indicate that representation rapidly supplanted actual experience as a new and newly anxious audience sought novel ways to cope with its fears.”
For hundreds of years the now-extinct turnspit dog, also called Canis Vertigus (“dizzy dog”), vernepator cur, kitchen dog and turn-tyke, was specially bred just to turn a roasting mechanism for meat. And weirdly, this animal was a high-tech fixture for the professional and home cook from the 16th century until the mid-1800s. Turnspit dogs came in a variety of colors and were heavy-set, often with heterochromatic eyes. They were short enough to fit into a wooden wheel contraption that was connected to ropes or chains, which turned the giant turkey or ham on a spit for the master of the house.
Gilles Retsin has been experimenting with 3D-printed design concepts, but he’s also been working with computational mereology to engage in large-scale discrete fabrication. Think of it like Tetris or LEGO: a set of prefabbed interlocking parts that can then be assembled by a robot programmed to create a specific shape.
Continuous fabrication processes have intrinsic problems with fundamental issues such as speed, structural performance, multi-materiality and reversibility. Discrete, or “digital” fabrication processes are based on a small number of different parts connecting with only a limited number of connections possibilities. The design possibility, or the way how elements can combine and aggregate is defined by the geometry of the element itself - which leads to a “tool-less” assembly. The geometry of the parts being assembled provides the dimensional constraints required to precisely achieve complex forms. This year’s research will explore fabrication techniques which are digital, rather than analog, discrete rather than continuous and increasingly fast and assemblage-based. Some of the research strands will specifically focus on the bridge between assemblage, voxelprinting and 3Dprinting.
As a galaxy rotates, the stars move around its core. If it’s edge-on to us, then on one side, the galaxy rotates “towards” us, while the other side rotates “away from” us. The faster the galaxy rotates, the faster the “towards” and “away” motions are. If the rotations are fast enough and your instruments are good enough, you can actually measure this effect. This was the incredible possibility that Vera Rubin began investigating. Thanks to advances in spectroscopy — the capability of breaking light up into individual wavelengths, detecting emission and absorption lines — Vera Rubin and Kent Ford started taking measurements of nearby galaxies in an attempt to measure their rotation speeds.
“Here is how to capsize container ships. Swim along behind it in a train then grip with the teeth and continue to swim as you insert your claspers into the cloaca and pump.”
“How can we think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse, when every fiber of our being is interlaced, even complicit, in the webs of processes that must somehow be engaged and repatterned?”
The fact is that capitalist societies already dedicate a large portion of their economic outputs to paying out money to people who have not worked for it. The UBI does not invent passive income. It merely doles it out evenly to everyone in society, rather than in very concentrated amounts to the richest people in society. The idea of capturing the 30% of national income that flows passively to capital every year and handing it out to everyone in society in equal chunks has been around since at least Oskar Lange wrote about it in the early parts of the last century. This is, to me, the best way to do a UBI, both practically and ideologically. Don’t tax labor to give money out to UBI loafers. Instead, snag society’s capital income, which is already paid out to people without regard to whether they work, and pay it out to everyone.
The images and characters of Werner Herzog’s cinema have come to inhabit or possess me deeply, and yet their habitation or possession has occurred so fluidly that I suspect they were inside me all along, requiring only to be articulated in the inimitably concrete and idiosyncratic way they are in Herzog’s films. Few other filmmakers have so silently and gently explored the abysses of ecstasy and darkness; few have observed, from such an inscrutable, Olympian remove, the ludicrous and grotesque minutiae of life. For surely Herzog’s conception of the sublimity and ridiculousness of what is called the human condition brings him as close in spirit to the ancient Greeks as it does to that dark and satirical current of Germanic Romanticism represented by Kleist, Hölderlin, or Büchner, and which remains his indelible cultural heritage. Yet through the eye of Herzog’s lens the world is transfixed, rendered hopelessly, exquisitely weightless, ultimately diffusing beyond grasp the solid structures within which tragedy or satire can take root.
Stevie Wishart was FoAM’s “composer in transience” at the Brussels studio for most of 2015. Her residency emerged as a natural consequence of a long involvement with FoAM spanning several years and numerous projects, including most recently Wheel & Time(less), Candlemas Concerto, FutureFest, Smoke & Vapour, and Inner Garden. When I had the opportunity to talk with her in the spring of 2015 she was deeply immersed in a large composition that would be performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in May. Our discussions therefore gravitated around the particular challenges and musical innovations she was imminently preoccupied with at the time — which made for some fascinating comparisons and contrasts between these and the very different contexts and approaches entailed in working on a musical project at FoAM.
“Serbian society has pioneered a lot of situations that spread elsewhere. Today’s religious wars, economic sanctions, breaking of economic sanctions, financial collapse, ultra rich moguls robbing the middle class, major air powers blowing the daylights out of an unfriendly regime with allegedly precise bombs: daily life in Serbia 1999 is something most everybody understands now. It’s the “Globalization of Balkanization. (…) Serbs are also exceedingly good at dealing with disasters. They complain incessantly in normal daily life, but when ever life gets genuinely hazardous, they scarcely beef at all. Everybody diligently stacks the sandbags, and nobody wrings their hands or slacks off. That’s a difficult virtue to acquire, but it is indeed a virtue.”
Internet Counterevolution doesn’t mean a return to the status quo ante of the world before the Internet. Globalization goes on, it just loses its glamour; where there was spreading prosperity there is offshored exploitation, where there was free-moving discussion there are cyberwar trolls, where there was your happy face in a Facebook there’s in instant police dossier that you foolishly built yourself, where nobody knew you were a dog you are now branded-and-sorted Stack livestock, and so on.
Twenty-teens globalization looks less like jet-set free-spending yuppie tourism and more like hordes of illegal Syrians arriving via Facebook support groups. The wanderers are mostly Moslems, because the effect of the digital“Arab Spring” on their somnolent societies was catastrophic. It’s amazing how badly that harmed them, and they show no sign of getting over it; on the contrary. But refugee life is for anybody, now. Rich or poor, they can all be fleeing, at a moment’s notice, if they get a sudden deluge of Greenhouse rain. People everywhere are afraid of immigrants now because they see their own face in that mirror.
“The only‘realities’ (plural) that we actually experience and can
talk meaningfully about are perceived realities, experienced
realities, existential realities– realities involving ourselves as
editors– and they are all relative to the observer, fluctuating,
evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving from low
resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a
jig-saw into one single Reality with a capital R. Rather, they cast
illumination upon one another by contrast, like the paintings in a
large museum, or the different symphonic styles of Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, and Mahler.”
His sense of time was very accurate: The tremor came the moment he expected it, a powerful, violent quake that seemed to originate from deep within the earth. The vibrating silver candelabra hummed, and a wisp of dust that had sat on top of the Great Palace for perhaps a thousand years fell down and drifted into the candle flames, where the motes exploded in tiny sparks.
It was puzzling. I remembered the suggestion that they were outsourcing the email responses to call centers in the Philippines, but these emails were coming from someone not only familiar with construction administration, but with this specific project. That meant the only possible explanation was that they had some artificial intelligence software learn the project inside out by reading my email and automatically generating responses.
I don’t know how we rehabilitate science and fact. Some large subset of our population believes that climate change is a hoax. For them, the fake is completely real. When you look the mid-20th century, you see Germany leaving facts behind too. Citizens cease to debate the German economy, and instead put their faith in a charismatic leader. In the US now there is a large population that can’t understand what’s happening to them politically, economically or culturally. Today, people can’t understand why abortion is legal. They can’t understand why gay marriage is legal. They can’t understand where the factories have gone. It’s the turn from fact that makes fascism possible. If they turn away from reasoning altogether, they can turn toward feeling like part of a body following a charismatic leader.
Since we feel uncomfortable when we’re exposed to media that pushes back on our perspective (like that weird political uncle you see at a family reunion), we usually end up avoiding it. It requires a lot of effort to change opinions, and generally it feels gross to have difficult chats with people that don’t agree with us. So, we politely decline the opportunity to become their friend, buy their product, read their magazine, or watch their show. We insulate ourselves in these ‘information ghettos’ not because we mean to, but because it’s just easier.
You do not create dynamic equality just by raising the level of those at the bottom, but rather by making the rich rotate –or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening. The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the one percent
Dynamic equality assumes Markov chain with no absorbing states
Our condition here is stronger than mere income mobility. Mobility means that someone can become rich. The no absorbing barrier condition means that someone who is rich should never be certain to stay rich.
Dynamic equality is what restores ergodicity, making time and ensemble probabilities substitutable
Comparing Le Corbusier to the Wahhabi attitude towards ‘heterodox’ architecture one must, in my opinion, pay particular attention to Le Corbusier’s attitude towards the house. In a secular society, there is no more sacred place that the house. And this is precisely why Le Corbusier is attacking the house: he is a religious fanatic. People want their houses to reflect their individual personalities and connect them with the history of their communities. For Le Corbusier this is the equivalent of the Wahhabis’ shirk — the heretical polytheism of the ‘household gods’.
Algorithmic transparency is a necessary prerequisite for a democratic society. Traditionally democratic societies have been based upon the rule of law. In order for this to be possible, the law had to be transparent. Any citizen had to be able to have access to the laws of the land, be able to read and hopefully understand them. While the legal profession exists to help people with this comprehension, there is still a general principle that any individual could, if they so choose, represent themselves in a court of law.
Algorithms similarly need to be accessible to every person. Obviously there will be an industry that exists to ensure that this access is coherent and reasonable, but just as with the law, algorithms need to serve the people, rather than the other way around.
Many disputes reflect differences in how people think as much as in what they think about a particular issue. We can’t always persuade one another simply by expressing our positions, introducing information, and counting “pros” and “cons.” Instead, our disagreements often start upstream, so to speak, as we and others diverge in which modes of thinking we consider legitimate. Frameworks for understanding these modes can help us to translate between them, the “story thought” vs. “system thought” framework.
Over the course of the next few months, we will be launching a prototype of the research already completed in statistical fact checking and claim detection. So far, our work has been in identifying claims in text by the named entities they contain, what economic statistics those claims are about, and verifying if they are “fact-checkable”. At the moment, we can only check claims that can be validated by known statistical databases — we built our system on Freebase (an fact database that came out of Wikipedia’s knowledge graph), and will be migrating it to new databases such as EUROSTAT and the World Bank Databank.
time-based media art installations do not truly exist until they are installed and, thus, these works must be exhibited — or “exercised” — with a certain degree of regularity. This is a concept first championed in the conservation field over a decade ago, by Pip Laurenson of Tate. Lovers, by Japanese media artist Teiji Furuhashi (1960–1995), is an excellent example of this. What follows is the story of how our team rescued this important example of early-1990s Japanese media art from a crumbling foundation of obsolete technologies (MS-DOS and LaserDisc, for starters) and ensured that it will live on so that generations long into the future are able to discover and enjoy it.
The allure of the doctrine of time management is that, one day, everything might finally be under control. Yet work in the modern economy is notable for its limitlessness. And if the stream of incoming emails is endless, Inbox Zero can never bring liberation: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it slightly faster. Two years after his Google talk, Mann released a rambling and slightly manic online video in which he announced that he had signed a contract for an Inbox Zero book. But his career as a productivity guru had begun to stir an inner conflict. “I started making pretty good money from it” – from speaking and consulting – “but I also started to feel terrible,” he told me earlier this year. “This topic of productivity induces the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like you’re doing work, but I was producing stuff that had the express purpose of saying to people, ‘Look, come and see how to do your work, rather than doing your work!’” The book missed its publication date. Fans started asking questions. Then, after two more years, Mann published a self-lacerating essay in which he abruptly announced that he was jettisoning the project. It was the 3,000-word howl of a man who had suddenly grasped the irony of missing morning after morning with his three-year-old daughter because he was “typing bullshit that I hoped would please my book editor” about how to use time well. He was guilty, he declared, of “abandoning [my] priorities to write about priorities … I’ve unintentionally ignored my own counsel to never let your hard work fuck up the good things.” He hinted that he might write a different kind of book instead – a book about stuff that really mattered – but it never appeared. “I’m mostly out of the productivity racket these days,” Mann told me. “If you’re just using efficiency to jam more and more stuff into your day … well, how would you ever know that that’s working?”
Imagine we had a kind of Gaian global animist sensor grid which could essentially listen to the Earth, get a read on how it’s feeling and report back to us. Earth could send us messages in forms we could easily comprehend — is it already doing that? Aren’t sensors just extensions of our senses?
The corners of the triangle stand for three different languages which a project is likely to need, which you are likely to need as one of the people carrying a project. By distinguishing these languages and the needs that they serve, certain kinds of confusion may be avoided.
The Inward language is the way that those at the heart of a project make sense of what they are doing, the way of seeing the world that makes it possible. It may be a complex model of how things are and how they could be; it may be entirely intuitive and largely unspoken. It is a creative, living language. Over time, it comes to include the shorthand expressions and the charged words that build up among a group of people working together to bring about or sustain something that matters to them deeply.
The Upward language is the language of power and resources: the language of funding applications, the language of those who are in a position to intepret regulations and impose or remove obstacles. It is not a reflective or a curious language, it is a language of busy people who make decisions without having time to immerse themselves in the realities their decisions will affect. It is an impoverished language and when you have to describe what you are doing in its terms, you will feel that something is missing. You need a guide who is initiated into the relevant version of this language, who knows which words currently act as keys to which doors, what you have to say to have a decent chance of the gatekeepers letting you through. Yet even inside these institutions, you are dealing with human beings, so if you can allow glimpses of what matters about your project to show through the filter of keywords, it may just make a difference.
The Outward language is the language in which people who meet your project at ground level, in the course of their everyday lives, start to talk about it. It’s the language in which you can explain it to your mum, or to someone you just met in the pub, and realise that they get it — not that they have understood everything about what you’re doing, but that something here makes sense and sounds good. This is not about how your project works, it’s about what it does. In the corporate world, money is spent on people who are good at spinning words to create an Outward language for a product or a service or an organisation — much of advertising and public relations is about this — but the results usually have a synthetic aftertaste. You may get advice to try to imitate these publicity processes, but this is probably best ignored.
Today’s ALPHA result is the first observation of a spectral line in an antihydrogen atom, allowing the light spectrum of matter and antimatter to be compared for the first time. Within experimental limits, the result shows no difference compared to the equivalent spectral line in hydrogen. This is consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that best describes particles and the forces at work between them, which predicts that hydrogen and antihydrogen should have identical spectroscopic characteristics. ALPHA is a unique experiment at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator facility, able to produce antihydrogen atoms and hold them in a specially-designed magnetic trap, manipulating antiatoms a few at a time. Trapping antihydrogen atoms allows them to be studied using lasers or other radiation sources.
Brussels is a city for those who have patience, time and imagination. It is for those who question the increasingly frenetic pace of urban life and work. It is for those who appreciate understatement and refuse homogenising labels and manufactured “hip” concepts. Perhaps, however, what keeps Brussels attractive is its latent sense of expectancy, the promise of a perpetual becoming which is never fulfilled.
Until a few years ago, machine learning algorithms simply did not work very well on many meaningful tasks like recognizing objects or translation. Thus, when a machine learning algorithm failed to do the right thing, this was the rule, rather than the exception. Today, machine learning algorithms have advanced to the next stage of development: when presented with naturally occurring inputs, they can outperform humans. Machine learning has not yet reached true human-level performance, because when confronted by even a trivial adversary, most machine learning algorithms fail dramatically. In other words, we have reached the point where machine learning works, but may easily be broken.
A modern data scientist often has to work on multiple platforms with multiple languages. Some projects may be in R, others in Python. Or perhaps you have to work on a cluster with no gui. Or maybe you need to write papers with latex. You can do all that with Emacs and customize it to do whatever you like. I won’t lie though. The learning curve can be steep, but I think the investment is worth it.
So, how do we think beyond the maps with their static regions (being)? A hook Deleuze uses in The Logic of Sense is to get us thinking of verbs as primary. Verbs are often seen as less substantial than nouns, or adjectives, because their mapping is more chaotic (if you’ve studied a foreign language you will know this oh-so-well). He transforms the proposition “The tree is green” to “The tree greens”. He argues that greening is more fundamental than green (referring to an unfurling event from which we derive the static theme “green”), and that making this shift makes certain metaphysical problems about objects and their properties become less problematic. By A Thousand Plateaus we’ve gotten to “a-treeing greens”. That is, we are turning static “beings” (regions on the map with their properties allocated by definitions that demarcate their edge points), to “becomings” “doings”, “transpirings”, the molecules squiggly shifting under the molar territories on the map.
Populism could most alter innovation when it comes to the executive and administrative state—which, in the United States, it just came to control. Stretching back to the Clinton years, there has been a carefully choreographed interplay between pro-Silicon Valley administrations, emerging tech behemoths, and new billionaires. That relationship has now been disrupted. The attention, budget, and expertise that was directed at a light-touch management of innovation—creating conditions for the market itself to make “the new”—will now likely be tied up in re-paving the old.
Where does that leave us? The outcome of this redirection may be a near-future for the West that essentially re-entrenches crony capitalism, where big construction projects replace Big Data as an engine for exacerbating inequality. Will Elon Musk let SpaceX’s serve as a military enabler in low-Earth orbit in order to keep Tesla going? Do Amazon, Google, and Apple join Thiel’s Palantir in providing explicit products for the Department of Homeland Security? Or do the tech oligarchs gang together to provide their own counter-infrastructure? If so, whom do they serve?
Mathematical notation provides perhaps the best-known and best-developed example of language used consciously as a tool of thought. Recognition of the important role of notation in mathematics is clear from the quotations from mathematicians given in Cajori’s A History of Mathematical Notations [2, pp.332,331]. Nevertheless, mathematical notation has serious deficiencies. In particular, it lacks universality, and must be interpreted differently according to the topic, according to the author, and even according to the immediate context. Programming languages, because they were designed for the purpose of directing computers, offer important advantages as tools of thought. Not only are they universal (general-purpose), but they are also executable and unambiguous. Executability makes it possible to use computers to perform extensive experiments on ideas expressed in a programming language, and the lack of ambiguity makes possible precise thought experiments. In other respects, however, most programming languages are decidedly inferior to mathematical notation and are little used as tools of thought in ways that would be considered significant by, say, an applied mathematician.
A rail company with a small-scale, experimental approach like this is possible thanks to German rail reforms in the 1990s that separated rail transit companies, who run train services, from railway infrastructure companies, who own rails. This has opened up Germany’s market to some competition between smaller companies such as Transdev and Deutsche Bahn, though the latter still dominates. The relationship between Locomore and DB is close but somewhat uneasy. Deutsche Bahn will not sell Locomore tickets from station ticket booths, making them available only online. What’s more, the project was apparently too unusual-sounding for most conventional investors, so Locomore has relied on crowdfunding to get its start-up capital. So far over €640,000 has been raised, and the amount is still rising. This alone sounds like a rather low investment threshold to start a new train line, but a Locomore representative wasn’t available to comment on what this sum covers and whether other funding sources are being used. (We’ll update when we learn more.) Germany is nonetheless going through an interesting period of small-scale rail innovation that’s worth paying attention to. Locomore’s current service is just the first of three more planned for 2018, to Cologne, Munich, and the Baltic vacation island of Rügen. Meanwhile the world’s first ever hydrogen-powered passenger train is coming this month. It also won’t replace Germany’s currently dominant model, but provides a small-scale and invaluable alternative.
NASA has just released new aerial photographs that show, close-up, an immense, 70-mile long rift in the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. The breach is 300 feet wide and one-third of a mile deep. As it grows, an iceberg the size of Delaware will break off.
When the dark of the Southern Hemisphere winter lifted in August, scientists were shocked to see that the rift in the ice had grown nearly 14 miles. “The growth of this rift likely indicates that the portion of the ice shelf downstream of the rift is no longer holding back any grounded ice,” said Joe MacGregor, IceBridge deputy project scientist and glaciologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Ice shelves ride on water and are fed by glaciers and continental ice streams. Cracks and calving are normal, and the loss of a portion of an ice shelf will not contribute to sea level rise as it is already afloat on the ocean. However, an ice shelf such as Larsen C holds back land ice, acting as a buttress. When a shelf disintegrates, the glaciers behind it can flow out to sea, which will directly increase sea level.
Long-term satellite observations show that Antarctic glaciers are rapidly retreating. In West Antarctica, they are losing 23 feet of elevation per year. As they slip away, they add up to 150 billion tons of water to the ocean, raising seas by about a tenth of an inch annually.
In November, Antarctic air temperatures were 3.6 - 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Antarctic sea ice set a new record low, as did the Arctic. Antarctic sea ice was a staggering 699,000 square miles below the 1981 to 2010 average. “Antarctic sea ice really went down the rabbit hole this time,” said Ted Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapse entirely within the next 100 years.
A global map of the ecological value of roadless areas. The index values indicated in blue highlight areas that are especially large and well connected and/or notably rich in biodiversity. The red areas are completely roaded: covered by roads and 1km buffers alongside either sides of the road. Photograph: P Ibisch et al/Science
Excerpt:
Rampant road building has shattered the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too tiny to support significant wildlife, a new study has revealed.
The researchers warn roadless areas are disappearing and that urgent action is needed to protect these last wildernesses, which help provide vital natural services to humanity such as clean water and air.
The impact of roads extends far beyond the roads themselves, the scientists said, by enabling forest destruction, pollution, the splintering of animal populations and the introduction of deadly pests. New roads also pave the way to further exploitation by humans, such as poaching or mining, and new infrastructure.
An international team of researchers analysed open-access maps of 36m km of road and found that over half of the 600,000 fragments of land in between roads are very small – less than 1km2.
A mere 7% are bigger than 100km2, equivalent to a square area just 10km by 10km. Furthermore, only a third of the roadless areas were truly wild, with the rest affected by farming or people.
The last remaining large roadless areas are rainforests in the Amazon and Indonesia and the tundra and forests in the north of Russia and Canada. Virtually all of western Europe, the eastern US and Japan have no areas at all that are unaffected by roads. The scientists considered that land up to a kilometre on each side of a road was affected, which they believe is a conservative estimate.
Article by Riva-Melissa Tez lays out the issues of hype with Artificial Intelligence and startups, and includes an account of how a fake startup business became a meme:
… The M&A market for AI in 2015 saw 33 acquisitions, of which the average team size was seven. It’s now common for savvy AI researchers to create a company purely to be acquired, knowing that the right buzzwords will attract VCs, and that eventually a corporation will pay for the team. Top machine learning researchers have become the most coveted of all the Pokémon. The tech press celebrates companies with no product, contributing no novel technology, at over-inflated valuations …
…
Turns out anyone can make a multi-million dollar company in 30 minutes … in a spanish mansion found on AirBnB and a website editor. ‘Temporally Recurrent Optimal Learning’ is a combination of buzzwords we put together to spell out TROL(L) that were conjured up over breakfast. If we hadn’t put significant effort into making sure people realized it was a joke, Rocket AI would be in the press right now.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the U.S. space agency, has released an “eye-popping” three-dimensional animation showing carbon dioxide emissions moving through the Earth’s atmosphere over the course of a year.
It says the 3-D visualization is “one of the most realistic views yet” of the “complex patterns in which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, decreases and moves around the globe.”
The data used to produce the visualization was collected by NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite from September 2014 to September 2015. The data was then modeled and visualized by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Carbon Brief: Specifically, what questions are you hoping it will help to answer?
Dr. Lesley E. Ott [a carbon cycle scientist at Goddard’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office]: The main goal of OCO-2 and most carbon cycle modeling is to better understand the processes that control carbon sources and sinks. About 50 percent of human emissions are absorbed by plants on land and in the oceans, but scientists don’t have a good understanding of how or even where this is happening. We start by running the model with a ‘first guess’ of sources and sinks, and the data assimilation allows us to quantify how and where the model differs from the observations. Eventually, we’ll be able to use these techniques to create more accurate maps of source and sinks, and from there we can improve climate models to better predict changes in the natural carbon cycle. This analysis product is something of a mid-point. We still have a lot of work left to do to understand the carbon cycle more fully, but developing these modeling and data assimilation tools is an important advance that will help us get where we need to be.
Another uh-oh fact emerging, this time from historical records versus climate models projecting into the future.
We watch those science shows on TV or read about the giant drills that poke deep beneath the surface of the earth and haul up tubes of ice and rocks and soil. From those samples, we learn. This is one of those learning moments: the rocks hauled up show that they weren’t covered in ice during previous warming periods.
Excerpt:
Scientists found that Greenland rocks now buried under 10,000 feet of ice were ice-free for long stretches during the past 1.4 million years, leading them to predict the Greenland Ice Sheet could melt more suddenly than previously believed.
That could raise global sea level far beyond current projections over the next few centuries, including recent estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal
Nature. The research challenges the prevailing idea that the ice sheet remained relatively intact during the recent geological past, showing even the thickest ice had vanished during warm periods between ice ages.
Columbia University paleoclimatologist Joerg Schaefer, who co-authored the study, said the findings show the Greenland Ice Sheet may be much less stable than scientists thought.
“Over the last 15 years, it looked like we wouldn’t have to worry too much about the Greenland ice sheet melting too fast,” Schaefer said. “Most of the climate models treated it as a solid ice cube sitting on bedrock. With climate warming, it melts off the top, but it takes a long time. Compared to other ice sheets like West Antarctica, is looked pretty strong and resilient to warming.”
New, direct samples of the bedrock pierced that belief.
If the ice sheet had persisted across most of Greenland during those warm periods, there was hope that it could stay mostly intact despite the Earth’s thickening blanket of greenhouse gases. The new study suggests that, because it mostly melted, there’s little doubt the planet’s warming trajectory will melt the Greenland Ice Sheet in the centuries ahead.
As we pass the tipping point toward a world fast enough and interconnected enough to be dominated by emergent systems, our methods of making decisions, and the tools available to help us make them, are changing. Here are some rules of thumb and useful modes of understanding for managing ourselves and others in The Emergent Era.
Organize around information flows; ditch hierarchy and bureaucracy.
Weirding, as a phenomenon, does not respect the boundaries of your emotional and intellectual mental models and maps. You may not think actual dead moths have a role to play in the functioning of computers, but reality decided otherwise in at least one case. To work, troubleshooting too should not not respect the boundaries of mental models. There is always a non-zero probability that a true understanding of your weird situation will involve dead moths. If your ways of thinking and feeling behaviors cannot deal with that possibility, they are fundamentally fragile.
In 1959, as the director of a secret military computer research centre, Kitov turned his attention to devoting ‘unlimited quantities of reliable calculating processing power’ to better planning the national economy, which was the most persistent information-coordination problem besetting the Soviet socialist project. (It was discovered in 1962, for example, that a handmade calculation error in the 1959 census goofed the population prediction by 4 million people.) Kitov wrote his thoughts down in the ‘Red Book letter’, which he sent to Khrushchev. He proposed allowing ‘civilian organisations’ to use functioning military computer ‘complexes’ for economic planning in the nighttime hours, when most military men were sleeping. Here, he thought, economic planners could harness the military’s computational surplus to adjust for census problems in real-time, tweaking the economic plan nightly if needed. He named his military-civilian national computer network the Economic Automated Management System.
