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Posts tagged communication
How the ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Color Wheel Explains Humanity
Personalities, organizations, goals, and means can all be thought of in terms of the Magic colors they typify, allowing you to draw interesting connections, make surprisingly useful predictions, identify deficits and growth areas, and increase empathy. I claim that the Magic system, which was designed to be resonant and trope-y and archetypal, does a lot of the same good work that naming things does, and is a richer intuition pump than other popular wrong-but-usefuls like Enneagram or MBTI or chakras or the integral theory colors.
via https://humanparts.medium.com/the-mtg-color-wheel-c9700a7cf36d
“[in 1977] NASA launched Voyager 1, the second of two spacecraft on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of…
“[in 1977] NASA launched Voyager 1, the second of two spacecraft on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. Attached to each spacecraft is a Golden Record containing Earth’s greatest music, spoken greetings, “Sounds of Earth,” and more than 100 images encoded as audio signals, a technological feat at the time. Technical director Frank Drake had always planned to encode the photos in the audio spectrum for the record. The challenge was finding technology capable of the task. While flipping through an electronics catalog, Valentin Boriakoff, Drake’s colleague at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, stumbled upon Colorado Video, a small television equipment firm in Boulder that had built a unique device for encoding television images as audio signals that could be transmitted over telephone lines. Donating their time and expertise to the project, engineers at Colorado Video projected each Voyager slide onto a television camera lens, generating a signal that their machine converted into several seconds of sound per photo. A diagram on the aluminum cover of the Golden Record explains how to play it and decode the images. Four decades later, Ron Barry followed the instructions.”
(via https://boingboing.net/2017/09/05/how-to-decode-the-images-on-th.html )
Aggressively filter what goes to your main email account and don’t give the address to everybody. Same with your phone number….
“Aggressively filter what goes to your main email account and don’t give the address to everybody. Same with your phone number. Also your home address. Don’t tell anyone where you live. Move out of your house. Smash all the security cameras as you travel. Find a cave. Bury your droppings. Wear plastic shopping bags over your hands. Talk only to the sea. Only the sea understands you. Only the sea will keep your secrets.”
–Warren Ellis
The Canonical Artefact
In the second edition of Where is Everybody? I discuss what Gerard Foschini calls the canonical artefact (TCA) — a flag for the presence of an advanced intelligent life-form. I don’t propose to discuss the details of TCA in this post — you can read the book if you’re interested — but I do want to provide an update. I was fairly sure that no-one had constructed an example of TCA, but yesterday Foschini emailed me a photo of it: he built it out of coin stacks with black rubber test tube stoppers as separators. Below, shown with gratitude, is Foschini’s TCA.
Wild Applause: How the Twentieth Century Tamed the Audience.
In the last century in particular, applause has been tamed — abstracted by the technologies of mass media, and constricted by the etiquette of high culture. Learning how to clap appropriately is an essential part of being a good citizen, whether you are applauding the speech of a dictator, or not applauding between the movements of a classical performance.
But we rarely think about why we clap in the way that we do. Applause serves multiple purposes — it gives the crowd a voice of approval (or, in its absence, rejection), it gives artists a feedback loop that they can work with or against in their performance, and it gives those in power — whether cultural entrepreneurs or machiavellian politicians — a tool they can use to turn public opinion in their favour.
In order to tell the story of how applause has been tamed, we first have to notice how it works in our culture at the moment. Because we tend to think of applause as a natural response, the best way to notice it is by looking at what happens when applause goes wrong.
The Great Silence by Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang’s very short story, “The Great Silence” adds another set of questions to these speculations. Why, he asks, are we so interested in finding intelligence in the stars and so deaf to the many species who manifest it here on earth? And also: why have we demanded that, as proof of intelligence, non-human animals communicate to us in human language, and then dismissed those creatures that actually do so?
via https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang-e72e05eb8a0e
The Future Is A Confidence Trick
Prediction is an industry, and its product is a persuasive set of hopes and fears that we’re trained or convinced to agree upon. It’s a confidence trick. And its product comes so thick and fast that, like a plothole in an action movie, we’re carried on past the obvious failures and the things that didn’t even make sense if we had more than five seconds to think about them.
http://morning.computer/2015/05/the-future-is-a-confidence-trick/
Submarine Cable Taps
Documents published on November 25, 2014 by Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed more specific details about submarine cables currently tapped by GCHQ. Previous reporting had made it clear that GCHQ had submarine cable taps created in collusion with companies like Vodafone and BT Cable, but not which specific cables. Seeing Telegeography publishes landing point maps and submarine cable maps it seemed like a worthwhile exercise to better understand what, exactly, the reach of GCHQ’s submarine cable tapping might look like.
RNA trafficking in parasitic plant systems
Certain parasitic plant species form symplastic connections to their hosts and thereby provide an additional system for studying RNA trafficking. The haustorial connections of Cuscuta and Phelipanche species are similar to graft junctions in that they are able to transmit mRNAs, viral RNAs, siRNAs, and proteins from the host plants to the parasite. In contrast to other graft systems, these parasites form connections with host species that span a wide phylogenetic range, such that a high degree of nucleotide sequence divergence may exist between host and parasites and allow confident identification of most host RNAs in the parasite system.
A Rant about ‘Ragnarok 2014’
But Ragnarok is not a joke. It’s a story of terrible fear, annihilation, though with a hope of rebirth. The dread of it runs through many stories in Norse myth - the knowledge that for the gods this destruction will come, inevitably and irrevocably. In Snorri’s Edda, the story is also deeply sad: Ragnarok begins with a family grieving helplessly for their dead son. (Couldn’t fit that in the press release, I guess.) Can we not take that seriously? If nothing else, can we not maintain a basic level of respect for a belief system different from our own? How can we ever hope to understand the Vikings, or any past society, if we turn their mythology into a joke?
http://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/a-rant-about-ragnarok–2014.html
Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites
In this article, I’ll demonstrate a method for modifying a naval telecommunications dish to track moving targets in the sky, such as those in Low Earth Orbit. My dish happily sits in Tennessee, while I direct it using my laptop or cellphone here in Europe. It can also run unattended, tracking moving targets and looking for downlink channels.
http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.be/2013/07/hillbilly-tracking-of-low-earth-orbit.html
On the Empire of the Ants
Science is an exercise in curiosity about nature. It is a process. It sometimes involves complex and costly apparatus, or the resources of giant institutes. Sometimes it involves looking at ants in an ant farm, and knowing some clever math. Many people are gobsmacked by the technological gizmos used to do science. They think the giant S&M dungeons of tokomaks and synchro-cyclotrons are science. Those aren’t science; they’re tools. The end product; the insights into nature -that is what is important. Professors Ryabko and Reznikova did something a kid could understand the implications of, but no kid could actually do. The fact that they did it at all indicates they have the child-like curiosity and love for nature that is the true spirit of scientific enquiry.
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/on-the-empire-of-the-ants/
First Steps Toward Learning the Language of Mycorrhizal Communication
It has been hypothesized that both fungi and bacteria interacting with plant roots do so using similar genetic mechanisms. It has already been shown that rhizobial bacteria – particularly the nitrogen fixing microbes associated with leguminous plants – produce lipochitooligosaccharide (LCO) signals used in the communication with host plants. The authors of this study discovered that the fungus Glomus intraradices, like the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, secretes an array of sulfated and non-sulfated simple LCOs which stimulated the formation of arbuscular mycorrhizae in disparately related plants, such as Medicago (Fabaceae), Daucus carota (Wild Carrot; Apiaceae), and Tagetes patula (French Marigold; Asteraceae). These compounds were found in Glomus intraradices both interacting with plant roots and in free-living resting spores in the soil.
Two sciences separated by a common language
One thing that gets in the way of this communication is jargon. Jargon is shorthand that helps people in a field communicate with each other. Needless to say, it can be a huge problem when communicating with the public. But jargon can also be a problem when you’re talking to other scientists. Not only is some of this niche speak meaningless outside its specific field, but in other fields it can sometimes mean something else entirely.
http://arstechnica.com/staff/2013/04/two-sciences-separated-by-a-common-language/
Photography’s Third Act
When personal photography was first becoming popular, it was mostly used for experimentation and artistic expression, like portraiture. Over time, as costs decreased and fidelity increased, photos gained a second function: they became a system for people to store their memories. And only very recently have we begun to experience the third major function of photography, and I think it’s far more important than the other two: photos for individual communication.
Immaculate Telegraphy
Immaculate Telegraphy was an experiment to build electronic communication from scratch in the wilderness. In summer of 2009, I set out in the mountains of western Montana without any modern tools or materials except information, and constructed a working electric telegraph from materials found on the ground. The experiment showed that electronic communication could have been constructed at any point in history given the right information.
Google Engineer Told Others of Data Collection
Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report. The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000. On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted.