...Mauritius lost between 2 and 56 percent of its living coral cover across the lagoons from 2001 to 2016. Seventy-five percent of these animals have turned to white bone in the heat.
Zinger ...First, a refresher on definitions. A state, as I'm using the term here, is a legal entity that has sovereign privileges over its land and citizens. A nation is a group of people who recognize a shared bond—an identity. Israel is the Jewish state, while the Jewish nation includes me and excludes Palestinians. Everyone is part of more than one nation, in this sense. Political citizenship can define a nation, but so can ethnicity, creed, or voluntary association, and those are often more salient. Boyarin and Mamdani often use the Arabic word ummah to refer to this sense of nation.
A "nation-state," then, is a setup where the two are kept in lockstep—we have a nation in mind, and we ensure that full state citizenship extends to all those, and only those, who belong to said nation. Anyone subject to the laws of the state, but not part of the nation, is at best a resident alien and at worst an invader.
That's where the violence comes in. To achieve, or even work towards, this setup, you need to identify the foreigners on your soil and do something about them. Deport them, relocate them to a reservation, create a lower tier of rights for them, or forcibly assimilate them into your nation. Or murder them, of course. Traditionally, one murders them. But all of these solutions are coercive and beget more violence.
...Vance doesn't pretend to have a fully coherent definition in mind for the American nation. He just has a few ingredients that he's pretty sure we need, among others. Nation membership must be considered identical with state membership, he says: being an American requires sovereignty, putting other Americans above foreigners, and denying at least some legal privileges to foreigners on U.S. soil—how can it be an American right if we're okay granting it to non-Americans? But none of those really help with the basic problem of definition. That's why he names two more ingredients. One is participation in shared goals. The Apollo Program was "a national project in the truest sense of the phrase." The other is a sense of America as a (very complicated) ethnicity:
...But even this wholesome and inclusive definition, Vance says, leaves people out, so those people ("illegal aliens who don't have the right to be here") have to go, and be kept out.
Now, part of the solution, I think the most important part of the solution, is you first got to stop the bleeding. And that's why President Trump's immigration policies are, I believe, the most important part of the successful first six months in the Oval Office. Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we're doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It's hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.
It's all well and good to say you're going to be a melting pot, per this school of thought. But sometimes you're going to get a lot of immigration at once, too much for the majority to quickly assimilate, and then you're right back to having foreigners in the country, who don't belong because they don't have preexisting bonds
The Ultimate Cure for Anxiety: What Quantum Physics is Telling Us Oğuz Birinci at Medium
...The closer we look, the more the solid world begins to shimmer and dance. Atoms, once imagined as tiny solar systems, reveal themselves as mostly empty space punctuated by quantum possibilities. And those possibilities, the building blocks we thought were finally "rea"”, turn out to be even stranger.An electron doesn't just travel from point A to point B. According to quantum mechanics, it explores every possible path simultaneously, as if reality itself is far more fluid and interconnected than our everyday experience suggests. The particle exists in what physicists call "superposition", a state where it can be multiple things at once until the moment of observation collapses it into a single outcome.
...Brian Cox beautifully describes how three fundamental constants, the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and Planck's constant, combine to create what's called the Planck length: a distance so tiny (10^-35 meters) that it may represent the very pixels of reality itself. It's a length scale so fundamental that if you tried to observe anything smaller, you'd pump so much energy into the system that you'd create a black hole.
Think about that for a moment. There appears to be a built-in limit to how finely the universe can examine itself, as if reality has a natural resolution, like the pixels on a screen. Below this scale, the very act of looking changes what's being looked at so dramatically that observation becomes impossible.
Isn't this remarkably similar to what happens when awareness tries to examine its own source? The closer we look for the "observer" behind our experience, the more it seems to dissolve into the very looking itself.
…Consider how thoughts arise in awareness. Do they follow definite paths, like classical particles? Or do they seem to emerge from a field of possibilities, collapsing into specific thoughts only when attention focuses on them? Have you ever noticed how the act of observing your own thinking changes the thoughts themselves?
…From one perspective, you and the stars you observe at night are separate things connected only by photons of light. But from another perspective, the perspective that quantum mechanics hints at, you and those stars are aspects of a single, seamlessly interconnected whole. The light that left a distant star millions of years ago and the awareness that receives it now are part of one continuous dance of experiencing
Madness, Masquerading as Policy The Contrarian
They pile up, one incomprehensible decision after another. Indeed, on occasion, a decision ascribed to President Trump leaves an aging observer (me) utterly speechless. But only for a brief moment....It seems senior officials will now prioritize how a policy decision might affect their personal relationship with Trump before they consider the impact of their decision on the nation's wellbeing.
...The Pentagon explained, with a straight face, that it considers the Aspen Security Forum to be hostile, propagating "the evil of globalization, a disdain for our great country and a hatred for the president of the United States." Spokesman Sean Parnell took the Pentagon's explanation one cockeyed step further, arguing that participation in such “think tanks” does not advance Hegseth's efforts "to increase the lethality of our fighters, revitalize the warrior ethos and project peace through strength on the world stage." No, it wouldn't
Why a serious, academic discussion of major policy issues would impair the "lethality" or "warrior ethos" of America's military machine was not explained. Perhaps because there is no explanation..
The Warped Idealism of Trump's Trade Policy David A Graham at The Atlantic
...Trump has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows him to impose tariffs in response to an "unusual and extraordinary threat," on the basis that Congress cannot act quickly enough. This use of the law is, as Conor Friedersdorf and Ilya Somin wrote in The Atlantic in May, absurd. The White House's months of vacillation on its tariff threats since make the idea of any emergency even less credible.
How Portrait Photography's 'Grand-Scale' Origins Changed History PetaPixel
The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery's latest exhibit, From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography's Formative Years, explores portrait photography's grand-scale origins and showcases the museum's incredible, diverse collection of very early photographs.
"Everybody is vulnerable": Your eroding rights at the border under Trump Boing Boing
The Musician Bringing the Bagpipes Into the Avant-Garde The New Yorker re: Brìghde Chaimbeul
When the Federal Government Eats Itself E Tammy Kim at The New Yorker
...Musk was a hype man for layoffs, overstating various DOGE achievements on X; the DOGE he left behind has assumed a wilier pose. At the helm is Russell Vought, an author of Project 2025 and Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the government's finances and personnel. Last year, in a speech Vought gave at an event hosted by his think tank, he said, "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected... viewed as the villains." A few weeks ago, Vought told members of Congress that he intended for DOGE to become "far more institutionalized," akin to "in-house consultants at individual agencies....The ups and downs of litigation have plunged many federal workers into a kind of purgatory: employed but banned from doing their jobs; rehired into a wasteful rubber room of paid administrative leave. In the first half of 2025, the federal civilian workforce shrank by sixty thousand people. Thousands more have retired, quit, or been dismissed but remain on payroll for the time being. "The loss of expertise is breathtaking," a fired financial regulator told me. And two Supreme Court decisions from July will allow blanket cuts to move forward at agencies including the Departments of Education, State, and Environmental Protection, meaning that we will likely see another big drop in federal employment—unless recent layoffs at the Office of Personnel Management, the Feds' human-resources department, make it impossible to process the necessary termination paperwork.
...In many areas of the country, masked ICE officers have become the new face of the federal government. I was in Southern California in early June, when Homeland Security accelerated raids on courthouses and street corners. National Guardsmen and marines conducted complementary patrols. A vast, interlocking security apparatus was starting to feel like an instrument of one man's desires. Policies were set through an endless scroll of executive orders and posts to Truth Social.
...There continues to be widespread disarray, burnout, and pressure to quit. Many of the civil servants who remain are pushing against their limits. Steven, a Social Security customer-service representative I wrote about in March, now sees going to work every day as an act of civil disobedience. "The fear has changed," he told me. "Before, it was mainly about losing our jobs. ‘Don't say this, don't do that.' My fear now is, some people flat-out don't care if they get fired."
calypso sesquiotic
...Calypso music, you see, is descended from kaiso music; both are from Trinidad, the southernmost Caribbean country, just off the shores of Venezuela. Kaiso comes from Ibibio and Efik phrases meaning 'come on' or 'get on', which are said as encouragement, sort of like "Bravo!" And, as far as we can tell, the word kaiso got so encour' that it got on and wandered and grew until it became calypso.
The Planet Is Warming, But Our Speech Has Chilled John Battelle
More than a decade ago I was working on a book about the impact of data on society. I was obsessed with a maddening and seemingly impossible idea: What if we could track every single piece of data that mattered in the world, and from that data, gain unimaginable insights that would shake us into an entirely new age — the equivalent of moving from Medieval times to the Renaissance?Of course, I was struggling with this thesis well before AI became mainstream. I knew that the compute and algorithms needed to turn my musings into reality were on the horizon, but I simply could not find a way to realize the concepts I sensed were playing out all around me. I felt like Captain Ahab, madly chasing a spectral leviathan of data. I spent days staring out at the ocean from a rented cottage on the beach, imagining every molecule of water as information dancing across sentient processors. It was about this time that I made an uneasy peace with my ambitions to be the next Gleick or McPhee. Rather than submit to the insanity of the matrix, I abandoned the project, and it has haunted me ever since.
I relate this literary failure to give context to news of an extraordinary project announced this week. Google launched "AlphaEarth Foundations," an ambitious platform that maps our planet in "unprecedented detail," integrating “petabytes of Earth observation data to generate a unified data representation that revolutionizes global mapping and monitoring.” This is exactly the kind of story I would have killed to include in my erstwhile book — unimaginable reams of data, a years-long quest to make sense of it all, a breakthrough that yields untold insights and opportunities.
...I devoured Google's description of AlphaEarth, but as I read through it, something seemed to be missing. Given its ability to accurately portray changes across our planet's surface, isn't the most "critical issue" it might address our terrifyingly present and entirely existential problem of climate change?
Not according to Google. I re-read Google's post — and while there are brief mentions of how AlphaFold might help us understand "environmental changes," there's no overt mention of global warming or climate change.
The omission is clearly intentional. With the EPA now in charge of killing the science that proves climate change, and a President whose punitive proclivities are haphazard and autocratic, Google, a company squarely in the crosshairs of government shakedowns, does not want to poke the bear.
In Cameroon, truth-telling spiders untangle the future David Zeitlyn at Aeon Essays
...I have been studying Mambila divination on and off for 40 years. In that time, through the guidance of my teachers, I have come to recognise that what first appeared as a local, esoteric practice reveals a broader, even universal, logic: a practical and sophisticated system for making decisions and managing uncertainty in contexts where definitive knowledge is elusive. Each time I return to the Somié, I find new connections extending outward, linking the particularities of divinatory practice in the village to wider questions of truth, interpretation and decision-making.
Let me tell you about my journey through 35 years of Zen practice Anshi Zachary Smith at Aeon Essays
...I first encountered Zen in the late 1960s when my mother, hoping to make me a better, or at least more bearable, person than the obnoxious middle-school boy I undoubtedly was, dragged me to a group meditation session, known as a 'sit', at a community preschool in our hometown of Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco. The sit was hosted by a student of Suzuki's named Jakusho Kwong.
The hilarious but sad life of Kristi Noem boing boing
Tariff tracking by country boing boing
Our Chaos-Monkey, Dementia-Suffering, Cognitively-Addled President, & the Bureau of Labor Statistics Brad DeLong
...The integrity of America's economic data is now gone. The United States just crossed a new Rubicon in the politicization of economic facts. When official data are recast as political liabilities rather than neutral facts, the consequences ripple outward: from financial markets to the Federal Reserve, from policymakers to the public.
I spent decades at Columbia. I'm withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump Rashid Khalidi at The Guardian
...These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia. Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a "special lecturer", but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.
The Armenian genocide, the nature of the absolute monarchies and military dictatorships that blight most of the Arab world, the undemocratic theocracy in Iran, the incipient dictatorial regime in Türkiye, the fanaticism of Wahhabism: all of these are subject to detailed analysis in my course lectures and readings. However, a simple description of the discriminatory nature of Israel's 2018 Nation State Law — which states that only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in Israel, half of whose subjects are Palestinian &mdash or of the apartheid nature of its control over millions of Palestinians who have been under military occupation for 58 years would be impossible in a Middle East history course under the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.
Commissioner of Labor Statistics fired, because labor statistics were not to president's liking flowing data
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Is Shutting Down gizmodo
things I'm watching as a learning technologies and design leaderD'Arcy Norman
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A Speculative Atlas of Climate Disaster Maps Mania
Sharing our rebooted national story — and why we need one — on PBS's "Story in the Public Square" Colin Woodard
..."We actually had an insurrection against our government, and the person who encouraged it and was to benefit from it and was facing criminal indictments for it has been reelected president and pardoned the violent people who attacked our Capitol building," Woodard noted. "That alone — just that fact — shows that your country, your western or liberal democracy, is in a bit of a crisis."
Flux of Life Andy Ilachinski
Two new kinds of tea Victor Mair at Language Log
Still got DVDs? That's adorable. Let's digitize them all for $30 boing boing
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Jane Mayer on John Hersey's "Hiroshima" New Yorker (31viii1945 for the original)
One of the Most Influential Books You've (likely) Never Read Vincent Halles at Medium
A Thousand Plateaus (ATP), by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is a paradox. It isn't read, or rarely, yet it's all over the place. It's hard to find people who have read the book in its entirety, if at all. At the same time, the book's fingerprints are scattered throughout art, philosophy, politics, pop culture and even more. It's the book that's connecting The Matrix, Radiohead, Alain Damasio, The House of Leaves, Mr Robot, Westworld, Marxism, Queer culture and French Theory in a 600 pages mess...the book can be read in any order and isn't meant to have a single entry point. There is no beginning and no end. Shall you decide to start from the final chapter is up to you and will make an equally interesting and valid experience as starting from the first. There is no core idea nor theory. It's about movement. A book with a rhizomic pattern.
The rhizome, which is the concept on which the book is based, is a model of thought that is non-hierarchical, decentralized, and multiplicitous. Unlike a tree, which has a root, a trunk, branches, and a structure of authority, a rhizome has no center, no beginning, no end. You can enter it anywhere, and it connects everything to everything.
...The rhizome is more like a network, mycelium, grass, diasporas or neurodivergent thoughts. With this concept, the book rejects hierarchies, linear logic, and fixed identities.
The very concept of a network is a refusal of simplicity, essentialism and rigid structures.
...The rhizome makes the read quite difficult. It jumps from subject to subject, each treated with care and sometimes poetic madness.
...To me, this book is a reminder that simplicity is a trap. It reminds me to let go, and embrace the chaos of living and thinking. It invites my pen to move more freely, and my mind to wander without structure.
I strongly recommend you take a step into this chaos. I'm almost certain that you'll find something lying in the rhizome. One doesn't get out of this kind of radicality empty handed.
A Case for Ontolophemes: Icosikaihexagon and Icosihenagon: English's alphabet as a sacred geometrical ontology of graphemes (Linguistics): Dinkelman, Daniel, Aesden, Diohka
Icosihexagon Handwiki
The Second Tower Principle: Lessons from crisis in the age of Trump Charlie Angus
Perhaps political pundits don't take Trump seriously because he seems more buffoon than strongman. While they are willing to run after his daily statements of outrage and provocation, they rarely seem to consider how the circus act is part of the larger assault on the rule of law.The Beet As Carrot Trick
It's a distraction tactic perfected by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. In the article, "The Talented Mr. Chávez" that appeared in The Atlantic, author Franklin Foer explained how it worked:
"On his TV show, he might pick up a carrot and call it a beet. His opponents will begin laughing at him: 'What an idiot! He can't even distinguish a carrot from a beet.'We look to our pundits and experts to differentiate the carrots from the beets in times of political uncertainty. We count on them to advise on what steps we should take. But with the rise of American fascism, our pundits, like us, don't have a clue. We are all in uncharted waters.But after the show, I guarantee you that Chávez will be the one laughing.
He will think to himself, 'I can't believe I fooled them into talking about carrots and beets all week.'"
Impossibly Intricate Tattoos Found on 2,000-Year-Old 'Ice Mummy' gizmodo
Radio Garden Victor Mair at Language Log
Radio Garden, part 2 Victor Mair at Language Log
The Politics of Fear David Remnick at The New Yorker
The young Donald Trump was the Nelson Muntz of Jamaica Estates. (Or was he its Draco Malfoy? Scholars will debate such questions for generations.)In any case, Trump was, from his formative years, a spoiled bully. The Trump family, whose fortune was made in outer-borough real estate, had a cook and a chauffeur, and "Little Donny" was a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York. This was just the sort of place, it was hoped, where Donald would mature into a young man of rectitude and self-regulation.
That, in fact, did not happen. Trump made it plain that his delight in domination was the immutable core of him. Marc Fisher, who co-authored Trump Revealed, an astute early biography and character analysis, once told PBS that, as a cadet, Trump "used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn't listen to him when he told them what to do. He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump."
At home, Trump apprenticed with his father, collecting rents and learning the finer points of discriminatory housing. He eventually came under the tutelage of the attorney and sybarite Roy Cohn. What lessons Trump learned from Cohn were entirely malevolent: Never show weakness. Never apologize, never explain. Attack, never defend. Engender loyalty through intimidation. With his curious coif and self-satisfied expression, Trump made himself a presence in Page Six. Indecency and aggression were his brand. Cruel, narcissistic, duplicitous—the list is long and by now so familiar that even some of Trump's supporters concede that his most poisonous attributes are, to use the D.C. lingo, baked into the cake.
Restaurant Review: Pancakes at Hellbender, S&P Lunch, and Pitt's Helen Rosner at The New Yorker
Canonical circles Mark Liberman at Language Log
Ontic Terms and Metaontology-—or, On What There Actually Is Ted Parent
September 2014 Philosophical Studies 170(2)
Mox Nix and When "Bully" Was a Fine Fellow and Spurtle, Couthie Spurtle, Thivel, and Other Utensils for Stirring Your Porridge waywordradio.org
Corrupt DoJ Shields Trump on Epstein, Extorts CBS and Columbia U. in Protection Racket Dan Dinello at Informed Comment
The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture
...What is a "performative male?"The term "performative male" is an insult young men throw at other young men whose tastes, hobbies, and lifestyle are seen as a performance aimed at obtaining societal approval, especially the approval of young women. It differs from "normie" in that the performative male isn't just boring; he's boring on purpose.
The kinds of people who make memes about men they don't like have offered the following specific markers of performative maleness:
Matcha lattes (A beverage made with green tea and steamed milk)
Labubu Toys: (Labubus are extremely popular monster dolls/collectibles)
Listening to Clairo (Clairo is a lo-fi singer/songwriter)
Tote bags
Reading in public (especially books about feminism.)Performative maleism is becoming such a widespread things, kids are holding contest to determine which male is the most performative
Boat shuttle Victor Mair at Language Log
...The treadle loom seems to have been invented in China during the Han dynasties (206 BC-220 AD) — I can find no more than that. Don't know when some genius added the boat-shaped shuttle that floats the weft bobbin across the loom, riding atop the lower half of the warp.The treadle loom then somehow spread across Central Asia till it reached Europe. The earliest European representation (with a rather odd change of perspective here and there) that I can hear tell of is an English manuscript from about 1100
The Best Open Earbuds You Can Buy Aren't Actually Earbuds at All gizmodo
The Rabbi's Son's Hebrew languagehad
Utah Telescopes Intercept Ultra-Powerful Cosmic Ray gizmodo
A Terrible Five Days for the Truth Trump's latest moves represent an assault on reporting, statistics, and the historical record. David A. Graham at The Atlantic
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Dual-circulation: travels through China in the summer of 2025 Adam Tooze (see also Adam Tooze at CGC)
...This is all of fossil fuel history as summarised by the coal variable, and you can see what China did to that history in the last 25 years. It's a sudden, utterly radical break with all previous human history. It's a break with China's previous history. China had heavy industrial development in the Mao period, which was heavy; it was large; it was incredibly inefficient. In the early phase of “opening up and reform” under Deng Xiaoping, there were two radical policies: one-child policy, and the other radical policy was energy efficiency. ...in that period, China grows without exploding the fossil fuel envelope through the late 1990s. And then, within all our lifetimes, something completely mind-blowing begins to happen in China. Heavy industrial production and energy consumption go vertical in a manner unlike any previous moment in recorded human history.Well-meaning people in the West will often say: "Oh but China's emissions are actually down to the West offshoring its pollution". Of course there was some of that. But it is a minor part. That's maybe 10 to 15 per cent of the Chinese growth. Most of it is Chinese urbanisation. It is the building of buildings like this—the office building we are currently in. … It is the construction of China's massive new cities, the urbanisation of new migrants—of 500 million people—and the modernisation of the entire Chinese housing stock in the course of 30 years. ... the remaking of Chinese society as urban society has world historic dimensions … almost 90% of the apartments that Chinese people live in today, all of you lived in and grew up in, were built since the 1980s. As a European, that's unimaginable. ... In China, everyone is living in a churned, remade urban modernity. And the basic argument of this paper—what I'm going to say—is that that changes the climate policy game.
...when you look in detail at Western discourse, again and again and again, you see folks shying away from this realization. There's an unwillingness to face this reality. Why? Because it's disempowering, right? I mean, what it really means is this is the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history. This is really what the provincialization of the West looks like. And you don't have to spend a lot of time in China or go to a lot of places to see what that means in terms of physical manifestation, just the footprint, physical infrastructure here across the vast spaces of this country, the massive population.
...A lot of us working on China, we go through a confidence curve of sorts. We start out very unsure, with a lot of epistemic humility, I would hope, then we become kind of dangerously confident. And eventually I think we arrive at or we ideally arrive at an informed humility. Where are you now on this arc when it comes to making strong claims about China? Where do you feel like you are? (Kayseri asks Tooze)
...the idea that but for the prohibitions of the Chinese regime, there would be one "flat" internet and that it would look like the Western version, is deeply implausible. First and foremost the Chinese internet is the Chinese internet due to self-closure. That self-closure is driven by language barriers and the inward turned "gravitational pull" of a gigantic, fast-moving and endlessly fascinating national media system
...The massive Chinese nation state has been progressively forged out of the maelstrom of violent experimentation between 1911 and 1949 by the PRC. In material terms it was given huge new energy by the extraordinary scale of economic development since the 1980s (at which point the train of thought connects to the idea of Chinese national economic development I sketched in the Whither China piece of June ahead of the trip).
YKK the global zipper company. Hit over the head by scale. The global history of the Tortilla. Adam Tooze
...To show how vulnerable US manufacturers would be in the event of an all-out trade war with Mexico and Canada, Reed explained the back-and-forth border crossings necessary for getting YKK's hook-and-loop system inside American car seats. "The upholstery industry is in Mexico, so we sew the loop in Mexico," he said. "We sell the loop to vendors who sew it onto the upholstery in Mexico, then that upholstery gets shipped to Mexico, Canada and the United States, where it waits for the seats to arrive." The seats themselves often come from China. Meanwhile, the hook portion—the nonfuzzy half of the Velcro-like system—is made by YKK in the US using raw materials procured from Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere. From there the hook side goes to seat manufacturers in Canada and the US so it can be installed. "Those naked seats get shipped to other factories in Canada and the United States, where the upholstery meets the naked seat and the hook meets the loop," he continued. "And then those finished seats go to Canada, the US and Mexico, where the automakers install the seats into the cars."...Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha, or Yoshida Manufacturing Corp., was founded by Tadao Yoshida in Tokyo in 1934. Its signature product, the slide fastener, had first been produced by Universal Fastener Co. in New Jersey in 1893, as a means of closing up boots. The American company's initial design sold poorly, however, and didn't evolve into a modern zipper until 1913, when a Swedish American engineer improved on it. After the US entered World War I, the government placed large orders with the company, which eventually became Talon International Inc., for zippers to be used in aviation suits and life vests. When Yoshida first came across the slide fastener in the early 1930s while working in the import and export business, it was still a novelty in the fashion world. He was convinced of its potential, however, given Japan's embrace of Western-style clothing in place of the belted kimono. For years he made YKK zippers by hand, hammering down the individual "elements" (what most of us would call the teeth). In 1950 he imported four expensive chain machines to automate this part of the process
Photographer Captures Grateful Dead Fans Then and Now on Same Large Format Camera PetaPixel
D'oh Victor Mair at Language Log
Beginning in 2006, "meh" studies were a staple of Intellectual inquiry at Language Log. For a virtuoso variorum, see Ben Zimmer's "Three scenes in the life of 'meh'" (2/26/12). Herewith, relying on "d'oh", another (in)famous Simpsonsism, I will partially resurrect meh studies.
What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The Disappearance of Julian Brown lifehacker
PBS Mark Liberman at Language Log
(A recent Jesse Welles song, inspired by the defunding of Public Broadcasting)
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Medicare, Imperiled by Trump, Turns 60 F Douglas Stephenson at Informed Comment
An Ailing Old American Empire Lashes Out<.a> William J Astore at Informed Comment
MAGA's war on the American economy Matthew Yglesias
He's avoided stock market backlash to his trade policies by ensuring that whatever else gets trampled amidst the tariff wars, the AI investment boom is still on track. He's spinning economic numbers where he can and moving to suppress data where he can't.
Dæmon (His Dark Materials) Wikipedia
His Dark Materials Illuminated Google Books
It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be a Tom Lehrer Fan David Hinckley
Cigarette butts move from road litter to road strengthener Anthropocene Magazine
Conventional and electronic cigarette butts not only contain plastic, they are loaded with nicotine salts, heavy metals, and lead. When disposed improperly, cigarette waste leaches that toxic waste into the environment.
Some uninformed anti-American peeving
Mark Liberman at Language Log
80 Years On, The Photos of the Hiroshima Bombing Still Shock PetaPixel
Habeas Corpus and other provisions removed from official website of U.S. Constitution boing boing
'Wednesday' Season 2 Is a Delightful Mix of Gothic Whimsy and Brutal Horror gizmodo
Topologically Speaking Andy Ilachinski
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When You Recognize Yourself Oguz Birinci at Medium
There's no longer someone having an experience of everything. There's just experiencing itself, with no separate experiencer. Like a wave suddenly recognizing it was never separate from the ocean, the wave doesn't disappear, but the sense of being isolated, surrounded by other separate waves, just ends.
When the boundaries of separate selfhood relax, what remains is pure awareness, and awareness has no limits, no edges, no center. You recognize yourself as the very capacity for experience itself. Not someone who has awareness, but awareness appearing as this temporary human adventure.
Information: from art to entropy Francisco Rodrigues at Medium
...Although the concept of entropy was already used in data analysis and probability theory, it had originally been introduced to physics by Ludwig Boltzmann in 1872 within thermodynamic theory and was known as Boltzmann entropy. In this context, entropy measures the degree of disorder or randomness in a physical system. More specifically, it quantifies the number of possible microstates — that is, the different ways in which the particles of a system can organise themselves — that correspond to the same observable macrostate, such as temperature and pressure.
The seven ages of information Francisco Rodrigues at Medium
...the second great revolution in the way we process information: the birth of writing.
...the invention of the movable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg at the end of the Middle Ages marked the third major revolution in the way we process and store information.
...The fourth information revolution began in the 19th century with the invention of Morse code and the development of the electric telegraph in 1837
...Computers have made it possible to store and transmit large amounts of information quickly and efficiently, ushering in the fifth information revolution
...the sixth information revolution, which began with the rise of social networks in the early 2000s
...The seventh informational leap is represented by artificial intelligence (AI) in the 21st century
8viii25
Secretive, Peter Thiel-Founded 'Tech Bilderberg" Group Is Moving Up in the World gizmodo
Soul Stripping Sarah Kendzior
What would a ChatGPT LLM trained on Finnegans Wake produce?
Trump Turns 401(k)s Into Crypto Machines gizmodo
...Until now, federal guidance effectively warned retirement plan administrators to stay away from crypto, citing high volatility, fraud risks, and a lack of regulation. That caution dates back to March 2022, when the Labor Department issued guidance telling wealth managers to "exercise extreme care" before offering crypto in 401(k) menus. The Trump administration withdrew that guidance in May, but Thursday's executive order goes a step further. It actively invites crypto into the country's $12 trillion retirement savings market.
Gnomon Wikipedia
Abusing Powell. Greenhushing. Global Forest Watch, Vegemite in space Adam Tooze
Trump as Gulliver ... with no clothes Adam Tooze
Morror canon Wikipedia and The Musical Offering Wikipedia
9viii25
Don't we all want to be happy? Satie against Solemnity Jonathan Coe at LRB
...the artistic and human virtues that Satie embodies: delicacy, irreverence, lightness; the improvised, the throwaway, the frivolous and the aleatory.
Things Become Other Things: Walking, Forgiveness, and Belonging in the Mountains of Japan Marginalian
POW! Right in the kisser Other Sides of a Nobody
Ghost Signs: Phantoms of the Past maps mania
Quantum Computers Are Here and They're Real. You Just Haven't Noticed Yet gizmodo
The Futility of Simulating Nature Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker, re: Zed Nelson's new book, The Anthropocene Illusion
Compensatory Puffing Nicholas Hopkinson at LRB
There is no possible mitigation strategy for plastic waste from tobacco products. Clean up programmes, a form of greenwashing for the tobacco industry, collect only a trivial proportion of the trillions of discarded butts. The material is too toxic to be reused or recycled.
In any case, cigarette filters are a fraudulent product, providing no protection to people who smoke, while giving the false impression that they are doing something to reduce the risk. International survey data suggests that around three-quarters of smokers believe erroneously that filters make smoking safer.
Tobacco industry documents make clear that they knew filters didn't work in the 1950s, when they introduced them along with ‘low tar' brands to give false reassurance to smokers who were anxious in the face of growing evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. Some material accumulates in the filter, but smokers tend to adjust the way they inhale so they receive the same effective dose of nicotine. This compensatory puffing may explain the shift in the pattern of lung cancer prevalence, from squamous cell carcinoma in the larger airways to adenocarcinomas deeper in the lung.
Cigarette filters are clearly a problematic single-use plastic – a high-volume item, providing no benefit but instead promoting substantial human harm. Action on smoking, as outlined in the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, has already been identified as an accelerator for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
In October 2024, Santa Cruz, California became the first jurisdiction to ban the sale of filtered cigarettes. It is to be hoped that negotiations in Geneva will deliver global action to eliminate them completely.
The Future of Farming Magnus Kristianson on Medium
Sacred Maya Blue Sandee Oster at Medioum
China's Clean Energy Boom Could Win the Race to Power the Future David Gelles et al. The New York Times
At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest "trillions of dollars" in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.
The race is on to define the future of energy. Even as the dangers of global warming hang ominously over the planet, two of the most powerful countries in the world, the United States and China, are pursuing energy strategies defined mainly by economic and national security concerns, as opposed to the climate crisis. Entire industries are at stake, along with the economic and geopolitical alliances that shape the modern world.
Psycho-Physical Events Andy Ilachinski
Wild Pigs in California Are Turning Neon Blue on the Inside, Officials Warn gizmodo
The Big Winners of the Trump-Era Crypto Boom gizmodo
Do You Understand Quantum Computing? Oguz Birinci at Medium
...A qubit doesn't just store 0 or 1; it stores both simultaneously, with complex probability amplitudes that enable quantum interference effects impossible in classical systems.
The engineering breakthrough: Two classical bits represent four states sequentially. Two qubits in superposition represent all four states at once. This scales exponentially; n qubits can explore 2^n possibilities simultaneously, creating computational parallelism that would require exponentially many classical processors.
If superposition is quantum computing's parallelism, entanglement is its networking protocol. When qubits become entangled, they form a unified quantum system where measuring one instantly determines the others' states, not through communication, but through the fundamental structure of reality itself.
...Superconducting Qubits: The Current Champions
These artificial atoms, created from Josephson junctions, operate in refrigerators colder than deep space. They represent the triumph of engineering over physics: creating quantum systems that can be controlled with the precision of microwave electronics.
Current reality: IBM's latest processors achieve 99.9% single-qubit fidelity with systems exceeding 1,000 qubits. The engineering is extraordinary, controlling quantum states with timing precision measured in nanoseconds, in environments isolated from all external interference.
Trapped Ions: Quantum Precision Instruments
Individual atoms suspended in electromagnetic fields, controlled by lasers with frequency precision that would make atomic clock engineers proud. These systems achieve the highest fidelities in quantum computing over 99.9% for two-qubit gates by leveraging atoms as nature's perfectly identical qubits.
The Photonic Revolution
Xanadu's recent breakthrough, connecting 35 separate photonic chips into an 86.4 billion mode quantum network demonstrates the potential for room-temperature quantum computing using light itself as the information carrier. This approach could revolutionize how quantum computers integrate with existing telecommunications infrastructure.
...quantum parallelism can solve problems that would take classical computers longer than the age of the universe. By finding periods in modular arithmetic through quantum interference, it transforms an exponentially hard problem into a polynomial one.
...Grover's Search: Quantum Intuition
Rather than searching databases item by item, Grover's algorithm rotates quantum state vectors in abstract mathematical space, gradually amplifying the amplitude of target items while suppressing others. It's search reimagined as geometric rotation in quantum probability space.
Humanizing the Text languagehat
Humanising the text: Walter Benjamin and machine translation Overland literary journal
10viii25
This blog of mine, now 16 years old
...There's not much life here. I see little sign of likes and reblogs these days and new followers are, for me, an endangered, possibly extinct species. Or perhaps it is nothing more than the fatal error of including a too-recent, too accurate avatar of myself in the banner atop my blog. I think I may take a little break and maybe just embrace my own irrelevance here. Not a bang, not a whimper, merely a great big yawn.
Process of Perceiving Andy Ilachinski
Meta ... mucil? IS Survivor
So, now FACEBOOK has changed it's [sic!] identity to meta
Jobs are more than work Michael Dain
11viii25
City, Biofilm of Humans Small Things Considered Part 1 and Journal of Bacteriology Paula Watnick and Roberto Kolter (2000)
The Great Acceleration Globaïa, Stockholm Resilience Centre
DHS is a Menace Jennifer Rubin at Contrarian
Africa and The Diplomacy of Abjection
The Evidence of Things Barely Unsaid
Timothy Burke
...Black countries... have been on the receiving end of performative, almost operatic, diplomatic loathing. Trumpism is going out of its way to show that it likes no one in the world, that it is building a Fortress America which welcomes no visitors and which basks in the thought of the world's antipathy. Trump himself isn't even sucking up to dictators with the same verve as he did in his first term: his only diplomatic pleasure is in making foreign dignitaries crawl before him to lick his boot. But he and his people have gone out of their way to let Africans know they have nothing that Trumpist America needs or wants, that they are not a target of soft or hard power. They are good for nothing in the eyes of Trumpism except to define the lower bound of its nearly bottomless hostility to the rest of the world.
How Much Is Trump Profiting Off the Presidency? David D Kirkpatrick at New Yorker
Trump's militarization of DC already causing disruption and chaos and 'This will go further.' Trump says D.C. is just the start NYC and Baltimore are next boingboing
Cory Doctorow on FanFiction Brad DeLong and Noah Smith
And FORTRAN and IBM System 360 bestrode the world like the giants of the Nephilim, and Babbage saw it, and it was good. And there was nibbling around the edges from Digital Equipment and Data General.
Yea, until one day out of Silicon Valley, there emerged crystallized sand doped with germanium atoms, and everything was upset as out of CERN and there emerged the http protocol. All the companies that had been construct their own walled information gardens, and requiring you to sign up with AOL and CompuServe and Genie and four or five others in order to access databases through gopher and whatever—they found themselves overwhelmed by the interoperability tide of the internet.
And for fifteen years there was interoperability and openness and http and rss, and everyone frantically trying to make their things as interoperable as possible so that they could get their share of this absolutely exploding network of human creativity and ideas.
And then it all stopped. People turned on a dime. They began building their own walled gardens again.
Noah: I feel like we did just get Neal Stephenson on this podcast…
Brad: Sub-Turing! It's a sub-Turing instantiation of a Neal Stephenson imago!
12viii25
How Zuckerberg, Musk, and the technobility became the Police Order by Bas Wallet Bas Wallet at Medium
However, do the tech lords truly mean what they say? Are governments the ones who take away your freedom, or does big tech want to be the arbiter of what should appear in the online world itself?
Jacques Rancière argues that political life is not only shaped by governments. For the French philosopher, a much broader police force is operational and decides who is allowed to speak, who should be heard, and who matters.
In this article, I will explore Rancière's political thoughts and connect them to the tech world. I hope this will help make sense of social media, censorship, and online activism.
...Rancière sees "The police" as those who exercise any form of power that controls the social order. Journalism, science, education, entertainment, and the church are everyday examples of institutions involved in policing. They are concerned with the allocation and legitimation of social roles. What is included in the vocabulary of these institutions is what exists.
Trump's Eptein Problem Fintan O'Toole at NYRB
Why a mysterious group of ancient humans doesn't have a species name Michael Marshall at New Scientist, re: Denisovans
Lapham's Quarterly (seems to include all...)
Ontology of Materialism Andy Ilachinski
13viii25
Scientists prove Extensive Viking Silver Trade with Abbasid Empire from British Silver Hoard Juan Cole
Terminal for an Open Ring Brooch Metropolitan Museum of Art
Daniel Ellsberg Papers U Mass Special Collections & University Archives
What Do We Forget When We Remember Hiroshima? Tom Dispatch at Informed Comment
Lacking Hitler, Sagan suggested, Washington and Moscow imposed his image on each other. This was necessary because "nuclear weapons represent such a surpassing evil that they can be justified only by an equally evil adversary." Humanity, he warned, was then locked in a downward spiral into a moral abyss reminiscent of a Greek tragedy. "When we engage in a death struggle with a monster, there is a real danger that we ourselves will, by slow and imperceptible changes, become transmogrified into monsters. We may be the last to notice what is happening to us."
The Revenge of Millennial Cringe Kyle Chayka at New Yorker
...Their music provided a suitably self-important soundtrack as Great Recession-era artisanal hipsterdom faded into the careerist hopefulness of the latter Obama years, when Everlane minimalism supplanted lumberjack plaid.
...Millennial commenters express a desire to rewind to that era of their lives; younger posters wish that they could have lived through it in the first place
Coming of Age in Panic Mode Emily Witt at New Yorker
Adam Friedland's Comedy of Discomforts Brady Brickner-Wood at The New Yorker
25 Award-Winning Images Show the Power of Black-and-White Photography PetaPixel
Forget the Crypto Bros. Wall Street Is Driving the New Crypto Boom gizmodo
Merauke
In the Shadow of the Palms Duke UP
Map of Merauke District Research Gate
UN calls out Indonesia's Merauke food estate for displacing Indigenous communities
Indonesia's Race for Rice: A Gamble in Merauke's Wetlands Nusantara Atlas...The upshot of all of this is that Trump is obsessed with superficial indicators of success.
... "the plastic problem that no one is talking about." They mean cigarette butts, the most common type of plastic litter globally. Per the WHO, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are thrown in the environment every year.
(quoting George Will): Today's most promiscuously used word is "vibe." It probably is used so often by so many because trying to decipher its meaning is like trying to nail applesauce to smoke.
...For your entire life, you've lived as "someone in here" looking at a “world out there.” Subject and object. Observer and observed. Me and everything else. But in the moment of recognition, this fundamental division simply ... dissolves.
Immanuel Kant's philosophy. In his work, “Critique of Pure Reason”, he argues that we do not have direct access to the world itself (the noumenon) — that is, reality as it exists independently of our perception — but only to the representations that our mind constructs from sensory experience. In other words, we do not perceive the world objectively; rather, it is presented to us through cognitive structures that shape our perception.
...the emergence of language was the first major revolution in human information processing.
AI can't get to my yellow pads… but CAN get to my html text, and whatever I commit to email. Spooky thought for a Friday morning.
...President Donald Trump, who has rebranded himself as one of the world's most powerful crypto advocates, has just signed an executive order that could reshape Americans' retirement investing. For the first time, cryptocurrencies can be included in 401(k) plans, the workplace retirement accounts used by roughly 100 million Americans.
...three miniature piano pieces, to which he gave the mysterious title Gymnopédies (it refers to a dance performed by naked young Spartan men). They are works of radical, pellucid naivety. In the first and most celebrated, the wistful main theme unfolds over simple (but, for their time, unusual) major seventh chords. This theme never develops: instead, it is repeated. The atmosphere is one of perfect calm and melancholy serenity. There are no changes in dynamics. The tune is stated, and then it's gone. It's all over in about two and a half perfect minutes.
..."Today, social media and the internet's ceaseless flow of visual stimulation and information have birthed a state of unreality, where we are no longer looking for truth, but only a kind of amazement," Nelson writes.
(via Other Sides of a Nobody)Single-use plastics are a clear focus for action to end pollution, and policies are already in place to discourage the use of plastic bags, stirrers and drinking straws. One target for the upcoming treaty must be an end to the production of cigarette filters. The main component is a plastic, cellulose acetate, and trillions of butts are discarded into the environment every year, making cigarette filters the most common single item of plastic pollution. Each filter contains more than twelve thousand strands of cellulose acetate, which break down into microfibres and particles. Toxic chemicals from discarded cigarette butts, including nicotine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals leach out, polluting rivers and seas and harming vertebrates, invertebrates, micro-organisms and plants.
...33 palygorskite samples were collected by Arnold and Bohor between 1965 and 1997 from various Maya sites. Using instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). They were able to show that palygorskite from different sources had different compositions, allowing researchers to test where Maya Blue came from and if it was typical for Maya Blue to be made from widespread or limited sources.
In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China's clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.
...Burton was one of the first trappers to discover that local wild pigs had turned blue on the inside. A subsequent investigation by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) found that the pigs had consumed the anticoagulant rodenticide diphacinone, a poison used by farmers to control populations of unwanted rats, mice, squirrels, and other small animals. These substances often contain dye to identify them as poison, the CDFW reported, which likely explains how the pigs ended up with blue-colored muscle and fat.
...This isn't just faster computing; it's computing reborn. While classical computers process information like a methodical librarian checking books one by one, quantum computers operate like consciousness itself: exploring all possibilities simultaneously, with answers emerging from the interference patterns of infinite potential paths.
...seems to have meandered into a cul-de-sac of irrelevance, in the land of the shrug, a backwater of indifference—a ghost town. I've carried on for a bit because I love bringing this stuff together, to see how it all interacts on the page. And so it does. Sadly, it all seems to pass by mostly unnoticed, hardly ever remarked upon— "mo tai nai" as my Japanese friends would say. ["what a waste!"]
"Meta" is slang for ironic self-awareness, which I guess would make it trendy, except that if Mark Zuckerberg is capable of ironic self-awareness he's kept it well-hidden.
... a term used to describe the rapid and widespread increase in human activity and its impact on Earth's natural systems, which began around the mid-20th century. It is often associated with the Anthropocene epoch, a proposed geological era marked by significant human influence on the Earth's ecosystems and climate. The Great Acceleration encompasses various social, economic, and environmental changes that have occurred on a global scale since the 1950s.
...The only thing DHS is safeguarding these days is the massive egos of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump and the noxious brand of White nationalism that justifies the reign of brutality and terror utterly at odds with American values. (Just a small point, but notice that while DHS claims to "safeguard" transparency, transparency is absent from the list of things it promises to "uphold." One suspects someone has been cutting and pasting words with no understanding or commitment to the ideas they reflect.)
...One of the consequences of flooding the zone is that everybody is so busy staying afloat that they have no time to take stock of the damage, let alone imagine mitigating it. For me, one of the issues I can barely apprehend despite following the depressing chain of news items since November 2024 is the extraordinary degree of substantive malice the Trump Administration is showing towards all of sub-Saharan Africa.
...Although the notion that Trump is making colossal sums off the Presidency has become commonplace, nobody could tell me how much he's made.
(via Bruce Sterling)...Brad: Let me back up: In the beginning, the spirit of Charles Babbage moved upon the face of the waters, and Babbage said: "Let there be electromechanical calculating devices". And there was IBM. And IBM then bred with DARPA in the form of the Sage Air Defense, and begat generation upon generation of programmers. And from them was born FORTRAN and System 360.
Technovangelists and free-market preachers repeatedly spread worries that the government should not be concerned about what happens in Silicon Valley. The technocrats will sort everything out on your behalf and will ensure freedom of speech and all other freedoms you can imagine. Washington and Brussels shouldn't have the audacity to influence what social media platforms can and can't show.
...For Trump, the great problem of the Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. It is a hybrid of fevered conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. It lives at once in a gothic horror movie he has helped to script and in the all-too-tangible world of untrammeled power and merciless exploitation he actually inhabits. It provokes both wild surmises and entirely rational questions. This is a combustible mix that Trump does not know how to control.
...While the Viking state was a complex phenomenon, it seems to me striking that it coincided with the medieval warm period in the North Atlantic around 800-1250 CE, which would have made Norway and Sweden, their home turf, more agriculturally productive. Many Vikings were notables with estates in Scandinavia. The subsequent long little ice age would have thrown up economic and transportation difficulties for them that likely contributed to their decline
...In a 1986 keynote address before the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, "The Final Solution to the Human Problem," Sagan argued that Hitler "haunts our century...[as] he has shattered our confidence that civilized societies can impose limits on human destructiveness." In their mutually reinforcing preparations to annihilate one another, erase the past, and foreclose the possibility of future generations, he concluded, "the superpowers have dutifully embraced this legacy...Adolf Hitler lives on."
...Driving the clip's virality is a simultaneous disgust at and attraction to the artifacts and styles now known as millennial cringe. The disgust stems both from that aura of obliviousness and from a retrospective knowledge that the sincerity of late-two-thousands indie music was quickly co-opted into a more commercial version of itself
[Thinking of age cohorts telling the story of THEIR times, 1974 being the perspective of the cohort behind us... Caroline's]
...the demise of the late-night talk show, writ large, was likely inevitable with or without suspected Presidential intervention. What the medium once exclusively produced in a single, glamorous package—standup monologues, current-events coverage, celebrity interviews, cheap pranks and game-show segments, live musical performances—can now be found in hyperspecific, often better-executed abundance on the internet. The variety show has less value in this marketplace of choice, where tastes and preferences can be algorithmically delivered to us at a moment's notice. Why would an A-list comic even want to host a late-night show now, anyway? Operating under the umbrella of corporate cable television, resigned to presenting material within a narrow, formulaic model, and forced to interview industry-mandated guests—why not instead land some Netflix standup specials and host a podcast, avenues that offer similar salaries and far more creative license?
The World's Largest Deforestation Project Douglas Gerrard at LRB blog
Since formalising its control of West Papua in a fraudulent 1969 referendum, Indonesia has carried out genocidal military assaults — up to a quarter of West Papuans have been killed under occupation — and ‘transmigration' settlement programmes that have reduced the Indigenous population to a minority.
...Sophie Chao examines the multispecies entanglements of oil palm plantations in West Papua, Indonesia, showing how Indigenous Marind communities understand and navigate the social, political, and environmental demands of the oil palm plant. As Chao notes, it is no secret that the palm oil sector has destructive environmental impacts: it greatly contributes to tropical deforestation and is a major driver of global warming. Situating the plant and the transformations it has brought within the context of West Papua's volatile history of colonization, ethnic domination, and capitalist incursion, Chao traces how Marind attribute environmental destruction not just to humans, technologies, and capitalism but also to the volition and actions of the oil palm plant itself. By approaching cash crops as both drivers of destruction and subjects of human exploitation, Chao rethinks capitalist violence as a multispecies act. In the process, Chao centers how Marind fashion their own changing worlds and foreground Indigenous creativity and decolonial approaches to anthropology.
World's biggest deforestation project gets underway in Papua for sugarcane Mongabay.com
New Details Emerge About Ancient Inca Counting Technology
Everything Dreams Andy Ilachinski
14viii25
Dawn: A Watercolor Ode to the Primeval Conversation Between Our Living Planet and Its Dying Star Marginalian
...The experience of waking — that phase transition between the liquid phantasmagoria of the unconscious and the solidity of conscious life — reveals the mind to itself
(via Bruce Sterling)
The Journal of Word Play (pdf)
The proteome of the late Middle Pleistocene Harbin individual
15viii25
August update Charlie Stross
...Cataracts are pretty much the commonest cause of blindness, they can be fixed permanently by surgically replacing the lens of the eye—I gather the op takes 15-20 minutes and can be carried out with only local anaesthesia: I'm having my first eye done next Tuesday—but it creeps up on you slowly. Even fast-developing cataracts take months.In my case what I noticed first was the stars going out, then the headlights of oncoming vehicles at night twinkling annoyingly. Cataracts diffuse the light entering your eye, so that starlight (which is pretty dim to begin with) is spread across too wide an area of your retina to register. Similarly, the car headlights had the same blurring but remained bright enough to be annoying.
The next thing I noticed (or didn't) was my reading throughput diminishing. I read a lot and I read fast, eye problems aside: but last spring and summer I noticed I'd dropped from reading about 5 novels a week to fewer than 3. And for some reason, I wasn't as productive at writing. The ideas were still there, but staring at a computer screen was curiously fatiguing, so I found myself demotivated, and unconsciously taking any excuse to do something else.
Then I went for my regular annual ophthalmology check-up and was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes.
16viii25
Psychopathocracy 3.0 Juan Cole (originally 2017... It seems even more prescient 8 and a half years later)
...We are now on the brink of a new form of government, undreamed of by Aristotle, who spoke of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. We are headed to a psychopathocracy, which has something in common with the degraded form of classical regime types that Aristotle warned against (he thought monarchy can deteriorate into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into demagoguery). Psychopathocracy is the rule of persons who lack a basic ability to empathize with others, to feel their pain or to feel guilty about harming them.
Mono No Aware Photo-Eye
Mono No Aware Kenro Izu The phrase "Mono No Aware" translates to "the pathos of things" and reflects a Japanese concept recognizing the impermanence of life and expressing an appreciation of the fleeting beauty of ephemeral objects. In some 100 images, Izu examines this concept in three themes: Yugen (profundity), Sabi (beauty with aging), and Wabi (austere beauty), each speaking to "the beauty of impermanence" found in his subjects.
16viii25
Tomat trade wars Adam Tooze, quoting Financial Times
...In the 1990s, tomato fields covered more than 60,000 acres of Florida, with hundreds of bustling family farms producing the fruit. Today, less than half of that land is in cultivation, and growers point the finger at one country: Mexico. In July, President Donald Trump sided with Florida farmers, imposing a 17 per cent anti-dumping duty on Mexican tomatoes and accusing producers of selling at less than the cost of production. US growers see the levy, which took effect in July and is separate from broader trade tariff negotiations, as a lifeline for their declining industry. ...Mexico now supplies more than 60 per cent of the fresh tomatoes consumed in the US, a stark example of how the country has won market share across sectors to become the US's top trading partner since the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect in 1994. That has also made it a prime target for Trump since his first presidential campaign. The duty is part of a glut of allegations of trade violations he has thrown at Mexico, alongside broader pressure on security and migration. The tomato duty, which uses a different legal instrument to regular tariffs, is the first Trump trade levy to directly target a fresh food staple. For Mexico, most others are currently tariff-free under a carve-out for the updated US-Mexico-Canada pact, which was extended on Thursday. ... the duty will profoundly disrupt the more than $7bn industry that employs half a million people in Mexico. ...It is also compounding existing challenges from an ongoing cartel war in Sinaloa, Mexico's biggest tomato producing state — where local identity is so enmeshed with the sector that its capital's baseball team is called the tomateros. The US has no replacement for Mexican tomatoes in the short term, though — particularly in winter. At the centre of any debate over Trump's trade measures is who will bear the cost.
Evolution on the vine: A history of tomato domestication in Latin America EurekAlert!
The common cultivated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L. var. lycopersicum; or (SLL)) is among the world's most widely grown vegetable crops, from big agricultural farms to heirloom grown varieties.In 2012, the domesticated 'Heinz 1706' tomato, an SLL, became the very first tomato to have its whole genome sequenced in an effort to better understand the world's highest value vegetable crop.
Since then, scientists from around the world have been adding to our rich understanding of the evolutionary variation responsible for the changes within the tomato's 12 chromosomes.
The Tragedy of Umami: When Depth Becomes Default" Food and Wine Aesthetics
Umami was once a revelation—an elegant discovery of a fifth taste that illuminated the subtle synergy of fermented soy, aged cheese, and slow-cooked broth. But in today's kitchen discourse, umami increasingly is not a nuance but a cliché: the default shortcut to "depth," used so ubiquitously it now flattens difference under the banner of savory saturation.Discovered in 1908 by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda, umami identified glutamates in dashi as a distinct taste, separate from salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. Initially, this insight enriched our vocabulary for savoriness, especially in Japanese cooking where it was harnessed with restraint and terroir-based subtlety. But as Western home cooks and chefs embraced the concept, umami became shorthand for "culinary sophistication"—and sometimes the only note in the harmony.
Shawn Monaghan, via Warren Ellis
...bot: broad root term for automated agents.
cyranoid: human relaying another human's words.
echoborg: cyranoid with Al as the source.
wireborn:Al born in digital space.
clanker: epithet for robots, drones, and Al agents.
robophobia: fear or aversion to Al and robots.
Al psychosis: human mental breakdown from Al exposure.
also via Warren Ellis:
...The future is a weatherfront, and attempting to predict single lightning strikes is stupid and wasteful. Understand the future as weather, and yourself as standing on the shore looking out to the horizon. Breathe the air and watch the water. There are unpredictable riptides, and ancient trackways on the mud that flood and murder the unwary. There are dozens of different systems acting on the approach of the future. In order to get a handle on what's coming, you need to be talking to and working with and keeping an eye on many different fields. Not just "technology." The future is also always social, and economic, and political, and many other things besides, and those things act on the path of the storm. And, if you're standing on the shore, you know that there are a lot of storms out there, and any one of them could hit like a hurricane.
17viii25
State of Climate: Earth Hottest on Record again, as CO2 still Climbs and Glaciers Wilt Juan Cole
New data shows No Kings was One of the largest Days of Protest in US history Waging Nonviolence at Informed Comment
Story of Eau Steven Shapin at LRB
on The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialised Beverage by Christy Spackman....In ancient Greek thought, water was one of the four elements; in modern science, water is H2O, a compound of two elements, but the water in rivers, lakes, seas and wells, let alone the stuff that flows from household taps, is never pure. Water dissolves and contains bits of all the things it has passed through over millions of years: inorganic minerals like the salts (chlorides, sulphates, carbonates) of calcium, potassium, magnesium and sodium. Even rainwater, reckoned especially pristine, contains dissolved atmospheric gases, so its purity is of the not-quite variety. These dissolved minerals are one signature of the water's provenance — its terroir, as they say in the wine world.
Trump Just Scared the World's Most Powerful Into Silence Blockfuturist at Medium
You may think of BRICS as friends who have decided to leave the high-end restaurants where they always eat (the dollar system) and set up their own. They were all in the mood, making plans, and inviting more friends to join.Then it was as if the owner of the restaurant stepped over and said, "Anyone who tries to compete with me gets banned from my place forever — and I'll make sure all the other restaurants in town ban you too."
And that's basically what happened when Trump went on social media to say, "Any country that creates a new BRICS currency or backs an alternative to the dollar faces 100% tariffs."
That means increasing everything you want to sell to America twofold. For most countries, that would be economic suicide.
...90 percent of trade between BRICS countries now takes place in their own currencies instead of dollars.
This has increased from 65 percent just two years ago. They're setting up payment systems that will handle potentially 40 times more transactions than the current systems.
It's not revolutionary change that will overthrow the dollar tomorrow. But, piece by piece, they're building a world where the dollar isn't the only option on the menu.
This Shouldn't Be Happening In The Stock Market Shubhransh Rai at Medium
Something Big Is Happening$7.2 trillion.
That's how much cash is sitting outside the stock market right now. Not invested. Not working. Just parked.
To give you a sense of how massive that number is, it's more than the entire GDP of the UK and France. Combined.
That's not a random pile of money. That's a mountain. A fast-growing one too.
In just the last two years, this "waiting cash" has jumped by $2 trillion. That same $2 trillion growth took twenty years between 1981 and 2001.
So yeah, something's shifting.
...Most of it is sitting in money market funds. These are basically safe zones. Super low risk. Mostly short-term debt and government bonds. Think cash with a slightly better return.
People and institutions park their money there when they're not sure where else to go.
It's like financial limbo. The money isn't doing much. It's just ... waiting. But here's the kicker — every time in the past when we've seen cash pile up this fast in these funds, it's been right before a major crash.
...Back in 2021, inflation was over 5%, and cash earned nothing. So keeping your money "safe" meant losing value every single day.
Today? The opposite.
Cash is winning.
Major Plastics Treaty Ends in Failure gizmodo
Metamorphosing Machine Andy Ilachinski
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California Strikes Back: Trump Poked the Golden Bear H. Scott Prosterman at Informed Comment
The West's Long Struggle Against Genocide Prevention Dan Steinbock at Informed Comment
"I Have a Nightmare:" How Trump Is Spitting on the Grave of Martin Luther King Jr. Clarence Lusane at Informed Comment
City, Biofilm of Humans (Part II) Small Things Considered
Since you are a microbiologist, you cannot but get goose bumps as you perceive the similarity of Paris to a large colony biofilm at the center of a Petri plate, surrounded by satellite colonies of varying sizes and morphologies. No doubt that for you, from this high up, cities take on the semblance of biofilms of humans. Akin to how bacterial colonies on a plate are interconnected through myriad chemical signals, all those light clusters are interconnected through a network that goes way beyond the lights. The social network is an indispensable feature of humankind.
Strange thing is, if you had the privilege of seeing Europe at night from 400 km up in the sky, a mere one hundred years ago, you would have seen no city lights at all. They were too few and far between. How fast the social network has grown! Exponential economic growth, the current sine qua non of the world's economies, manifests today as unprecedented urban growth. Yet, just like those colony biofilms in the Petri plate eventually stop growing, cities must also eventually stop growing.
Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass PubMed
Dementia-Ridden Cognitively-Addled Chaos-Monkey Causes Chaos at Alaska Summit Brad DeLong
The Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin was all about creating an image of Trump standing astride the world stage. Trump's mindset is frozen in amber in the 1980s. He pictured himself playing the role of Ronald Reagan at the major summits with Mikhail Gorbachev.
From Trump's narrow perspective, he got what he wanted from the meeting. Images of Trump standing with Putin in front of Air Force One were all over the news and emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers (something only people employed in the newspaper industry should care about). He dominated the conversation on social media.
But, as with most things related to Trump, it was a stylistic win and a massive substantive loss.
As we learned early yesterday morning, Trump got totally played by Putin (again!).
...I understand the Muscovite narrative here, what "justifies" not just the current war but the 2014 Crimea blitzkrieg and the grinding in the Donbas from then until now. There is a clear, if historically distorted, narrative rooted in grievance and nostalgia.
The first core claim was simple: Crimea had been "stolen." In the 1950s Khrushchev transferred it from the Russian to the Ukrainian SSR as a political-bureaucratic stunt. "Some fool stole it from us in the 1950s," went the refrain.
The second core claim made the case for backing separatists in eastern Ukraine—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv. These were Russified regions, settled from the north and east during the tsarist and Soviet periods. Russian language, labor, and culture predominated. Why weren't they part of Russia? The Kremlin's answer reaches back to Lenin and Stalin. Under early Soviet nationalities policy, Moscow created republics with ethnic identities—Ukraine among them—to manage diversity and buy loyalty. Lenin insisted Ukraine exist as a distinct republic. Stalin followed.
This policy was always double-edged. It promoted ethnicity, but only under central control. It created nations—not to empower them, but to keep them quiet.
...After 1991, Ukraine kept its Soviet borders. Over time, it leaned west. Language laws changed. EU and NATO ties grew. To Putin, this was betrayal. His response: to claim Ukraine was never a real country—just a Soviet administrative error, now manipulated by the West.
So what we've seen is not just war, but an imperial state trying to rewrite its borders—and history. A century-old nationality policy, meant to manage difference, now serves as the script for undoing sovereignty.
Exploring the Strange and Luxurious World of Swiss Cameras Jonathan Jacoby at PetaPixel
Don't blame the algorithm: Polarization may be inherent in social media Hannah Richter at Science
Zuckermuskian solipsism Cory Doctorow
...there's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit lots of people. You have to be willing to cheat your investors by lying about "full-self driving," you have to be willing to maim your workers, you have to be willing to rain space debris down on people near your launchpad. If you think of those people as truly real — as being just as capable as you are of experiencing stress, sorrow, fear and anxiety — you couldn't possibly set these crimes in motion. You have to view these people as NPCs, devoid of the rich interiority that you marinate in.
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Introvert, extravert, otrovert? There's a new personality type in town New Scientist
Being unable to adopt a group identity can have social consequences in a culture that is designed for joining. However, it can also be quite advantageous. When you don't belong to any group, you aren't subject to the group's implicit rules or swayed by its influence. This confers two beneficial traits: originality and emotional independence.
Being outside the hive, so to speak, allows you to think and create freely: to come up with unique ideas, untainted by groupthink or by what has come before. Able to distinguish between the gravitational pull of the group consensus and your own inner, personal centre of gravity, you are free to think whatever you want and to be flexible when situations change, without fear of subverting collective notions about what makes an idea "good".
Given that you can't be cast out of a group to which you don't belong, you have no fear of such social rejection. You don't seek external validation, nor do you rely on others for emotional support. You don't feel the need to convince anyone of anything, least of all your own worth.
An Unknowable UnfoldingAndy Ilachinski
Copyleft Wikipedia
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A thought about tagging, one that's been niggling for a while: when I first encountered de.licio.us, I happily forged tags to suit myself, in my own idiosyncratic style (bloggery, culturewars, cyberia, geekery, memery, metastuff, musics, knowledge_web, to name a few tags that have caught a lot of items), thus insuring that I wouldn't be contributing to tag clouds, since I was using terminology that nobody else was using. I set myself up to be an isolate, with the implicit notion that it's desirable to do things in unique/idiosyncratic ways. That's a stance I've occupied in many other realms: not many others play mandocello, few kick against the pricks of conventional "assessment", being an anthropologist allows one to do whatever and it counts... call it all 'personal style'. Anyhow, in the context of social software, my strategies are pretty anti-social. Goes back to Third Grade: ("content to play with like-minded others..."). Thus, my blogging activities, like my logfile activities, have very small audiences, often just the one...
Extremely stripped supernova reveals a silicon and sulfur formation site Nature
The Importance of Counter-Clockwise Dance Rituals Ted Gioia
And the most vital circle dances move in a counter-clockwise direction. When this happens, the participants are typically guided by their left eye and left foot, which tap into the right hemisphere of the brain.
Bulldozing Gaza: (Thanatocene mini-series #4) Adam Tooze
Survival of the Richest Douglas Rushkoff at Medium
I've never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I'm asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.
They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.
Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?"
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
Experimenting with Writer's Notebook Approaches Melissa Pilakowski at Medium
2001: A Space Odyssey — The Film That Rewires How You Think Oguz Birinci at Medium
Your analytical mind will initially resist. It wants plot points, dialogue, clear explanations. But stay with the discomfort. Let those long, hypnotic sequences wash over you without trying to “figure them out.” Notice when your mind starts creating narratives to fill the silence, then gently return to simply watching.
This is where the magic begins.
he film becomes a mirror. Those pristine, sterile spacecraft environments reflect our over-sanitized, over-analyzed modern lives. HAL's cold logic represents what happens when we trust only our thinking minds while disconnecting from deeper wisdom. The mysterious monolith embodies everything our analytical intelligence can't grasp but our deeper knowing recognizes as significant.
...The film doesn't give you answers. It gives you the capacity to sit comfortably with questions that matter.
Most people watch movies to escape. This one teaches you how to return to the present moment, to wordless knowing, to the intelligence that operates when thinking stops trying to control everything.
Authenticate thyself Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy at Aeon.co
The Retribution Phase of Trump's Presidency Has Begun Susan B Glasser at The New Yorker
What killed the waterside breastaurant? Not wokeness or political correctness or DEI (or whatever they're calling it these days) but something a canny Baffler reader might have already guessed: private equity. In 2019, the chain was bought by Nord Bay Capital and TriArtisan Capital Advisors, which loaded it with millions more in debt, shuttered locations, and left themselves richer than when they started.
Financialization isn't just coming for shitty restaurants: it's coming for your job, your home, and your life. On our site, Michael Friedrich reviews Bench Ansfield's Born in Flames, a history that implicates the financialized economy in the string of arsons that gutted the Bronx in the 1970s, displacing black and brown families en masse. These fires weren't accidental, or the result of rioters or irresponsible tenants—they were often set by landlords who knew an insurance payout could be more lucrative than collecting rent.
Create your Google Sitemap Online XML Sitemaps Generator
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Vietnamese bananas Adam Tooze, from Nikkei Asia
The Universe's Autograph Andy Ilachinski
Ancient Nomadic Scythians Found to be Ethnically Diverse Juan Cole
Say it, don't show it Neal Stephernson
Some Inconvenient Truths Other Sides of a Nobody
Boden identifies three aspects of creativity: First there is tessellating familiar ideas into unfamiliar combinations. Arthur Koestler, who greatly influenced Boden, termed this "bisociation" in his pioneering model of creativity. Gianni Rodari echoed in his notion of "the fantastic binomial" key to great storytelling. For such a combination to be truly novel, Boden observes, it requires "a rich store of knowledge in the person's mind, and many different ways of moving around within it."
The other two aspects of creativity both involve the conceptual spaces in people's minds — those structured styles of thought we absorb unconsciously from our peers, our parents, our culture, the fashions and fictions of our time and place: styles of writing and dress, social mores and manners, existing theories about the nature of reality, ideological movements. One creative approach to conceptual space is exploration. Boden writes:
Exploratory creativity discovers novel ideas within an existing conceptual space and, in the process, invites others to consider the limits and potential of the space. But one can go even further, beyond exploring and toward transforming the conceptual space:
A given style of thinking, no less than a road system, can render certain thoughts impossible — which is to say, unthinkable... The deepest cases of creativity involve someone's thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they couldn't have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator changes the preexisting style in some way. It must be tweaked, or even radically transformed, so that thoughts are now possible which previously (within the untransformed space) were literally inconceivable.
This, of course, is the paradox of all transformation, best illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — because our imagination is the combinatorial product of past experience, we are fundamentally unable to imagine a truly altered future state and deem such states impossible, chronically mistaking the limits of our imagination (which transformative experience expands) for the limits of the possible.
...a given style of thinking, no less than a road system, can render certain thoughts impossible — which is to say, unthinkable... The deepest cases of creativity involve someone's thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they couldn't have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator changes the preexisting style in some way. It must be tweaked, or even radically transformed, so that thoughts are now possible which previously (within the untransformed space) were literally inconceivable.
Art and Aliveness: Willa Cather on Attention and the Life of the Senses as the Key to Creativity The Marginalian
Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT The Marginalian
Oliver Sacks on the Three Essential Elements of Creativity The Marginalian
Servants of the Mafia State: Thank you, Merrick Garland Sarah Kendzior
Making it official: Famine strikes Gaza City Informed Comment
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Eclipse Atlas (via Sandy)
Pudding brain Trump on how China tricked us into using magnets Jason Weisberger at boing boing
Trump Says China Convinced the World Let's All Do Magnets' gizmodo ..."China intelligently went in and they sort of took a monopoly of the world's magnets," Trump said. "Nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, 'let's all do magnets.'"
Why Semantic Spacetime (SST) is the answer to rescue property graphs Mark Burgess at Medium
Knowledge representation is in a state of confusion. The first step was to confuse data and information with knowledge. The next step was to believe that reasoning is a form of logic. The final step was to misunderstand the role of graphs in knowledge representations.
...Too often, computer science thinks of data in terms of static snapshots over a single scale, rather than as multi-scalar dynamic processes. As we weave modern systems ever more tightly into our daily lives, that belief is crumbling and failing. Moreover, our fascination with logic itself is based on the fallacy that there are invariant truths about the world that can be determined by naive storytelling of the most simplistic kind.
...There are four main relationships:
The Ancient Greek Computer That Was Lost for 2,000 Years Azanta at Medium
Secret inscriptions hitherto believed to be illegible were plainly read. These were not ornamental marks, but were actually technical instructions- how to use the device.
...It was, in short, a portable model of the universe, which was able to foretell the positions of the heavens, eclipses, and significant cycles with amazing accuracy. It was literally the first known analog computer in the world.
There Are Two Types of Dishwasher People Ellen Cushing at The Atlantic
...I searched online for information about dishwashers and dishwasher conflict. It was this: "In every relationship, there's one person who loads the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect, and one who loads it like a raccoon on meth."
...The Scandinavian architect's dishwasher is a beautiful thing, but it's also, in a certain light, self-indulgent and fussy, more art project than act of service. The stimulant-addled raccoon's is arguably something much worse: negligent and unsanitary, evidence of a failed commitment to the family. (To be clear, if the raccoon is a woman, especially a mother, society looks even less kindly on her.) In both cases, the criticism is not completely superficial. Dishes are what we eat off of, after all, and eating is how we take care of one another.
...In the late 2000s, according to Barnes, we switched from phosphate detergent to enzymatic detergent, which works like a little Pac-Man, eating dirt and making room for the soap to do its job. "So if you don't leave a little bit of food for these enzymes," she told me, "you run the risk of it starting to break down other materials, such as your actual dishes. Everyone thinks the way they grew up loading the dishwasher is correct, so this one is hard for people to hear, but she was insistent: The detergent is designed to work on a little bit of dirt. You need, she said, to "trust the machine to do its job." Binomial
Binomial (polynomial) Wikipedia
Binomial Definition, Calculation & Examples study.com
Binomial nomenclature Wikipedia
https://brilliant.org/wiki/binomial-theorem-n-choose-k/">Binomial expansionYou have the privilege of orbiting Earth aboard the International Space Station. As nighttime darkness envelopes a cloudless Europe, your attention is drawn to one of your favorite cities in the world, the "City of Lights." Paris. From your vantage point, some 400 km above the surface, you can take in the area from the coast of Normandy on the West to past Reims on the East. Paris at center stage, the major cluster of lights. It is neatly encircled by smaller clusters that you accurately identify from the coast of Normandy going clockwise as La Havre, Rouen, Amiens, Reims, Troyes, Orléans, Tours and Le Mans. Then, there is an infinitude of tiny light clusters. Every one of them, places you'd love to visit, with beautiful parks, cultural centers, and countless bistros and cafés. Places where, at this very moment, thousands upon thousands are enjoying each other's company along with a nice meal. And, of course, a glass of wine. Some of the great advantages afforded to humans thanks to their social network.
(noting the sanewashing of Trump's Alaska play-acting, DeLong links Dan Pfeiffer's take
...We know that Donald Trump sees the world through the lens of television news coverage. He cares about imagery, pomp, and circumstance. While this is an outdated and dangerously vacuous approach to the presidency, it remains the best way to understand Trump's motivations.
...what happens next is out of U.S. hands. With Washington stepping back, leadership has shifted to Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Warsaw, and Kyiv. NATO unity, EU resolve, and Ukraine's strength now shape the future. Europe might manage Russian aggression, energy pressure, and Ukraine's path westward. But we've seen what happens when Europe, to put it politely, "hesitates", as in the Balkans in the 1990s. But today's Europe is more assertive and invested than 1990s Europe was. Whether it acts in concert or falls into division will decide what comes next. The drivers are no longer in D.C., but across the Atlantic.
...Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard. When you nudge the "buy" button a few pixels over and see how sales rise or fall, you're interacting with people as a mass. The dashboard tells you how "sales" respond to a change in the UI, but not how people are affected by that change.
Otroverts is the term I use for those who don't feel the obligation to merge their identities with others. We are all born as otroverts, before the cultural conditioning of childhood cements our affiliations with various identities and groups.
12vi2005 via meta/infospace.html
The leopard's spots are much the same
...Stars are ingredient factories, producing elements like carbon and oxygen during the intense temperatures and pressures of nuclear fusion, then launching them out into the universe when the star dies in explosive fashion. Or, at least that's what scientists thought. A new supernova detection marks the first direct evidence of this theory, finally confirming the root of the matter that makes up everything from planets to people.
...You don't see many circle dances nowadays—they violate the linear motion of everything in our left-brain dominated analytical world. But the circle dance is the most important ritual in many cultures.
In the week that has passed since I began working on this story — until the time you are reading it — hundreds of pieces of heavy engineering equipment from Israel have demolished hundreds, if not thousands, of homes in the Gaza Strip, with the Defense Ministry spending millions of shekels for this work. Never in Israeli history have so many homes and buildings been demolished consecutively, in what is also one of the most expensive engineering projects the country has ever took on.
Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor's salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”
...These four different approaches have influenced the way I approach my own writer's notebook.
These journals focus on a work-in-progress. They serve as a backstage for possible ideas, character development, and celebrations of (or vents about) recent progress.
This stream-of-consciousness journaling might be the most common form of journaling, and often the one most people think of when they hear "writer's notebook." Writers start jotting down whatever is on their mind, even if it's writing the banal “I don't know where to start” and repeating it until the next idea comes to mind.
...Why the name "attic journals"? Once she fills up a journal—they're small, 40 pages—she stores it away for a month. Nor does she look back over previous entries as she's writing. A month after she's finished the journal, she reads it, usually surprised at forgotten treasures that lie within.
Some writers have multiple journals, each one fulfilling its proper purpose. However, other writers are overwhelmed with the extra task of organizing their ideas, and so they have "catch-all" journals, originally called zibaldone. Created by the Florentines in the mid-fourteenth century, a zibaldone was a personal anthology of its owner's favorite texts. Its users copied down excerpts of poems, prayers, recipes, and books. Today, the term zibaldone refers to journals that also include free-writing, to-do lists, sketches, grocery lists–really, anything its owner wants.Kubrick didn't just make a science fiction film; he created a 142-minute training ground for your attention, for your consciousness. Every deliberately slow pan across a spacecraft, every wordless sequence drifting through space, every moment where “nothing happens” is actually something profound happening: you're learning to be present with experience rather than constantly analyzing it.
In the mid-1950s, IBM approached Jacques Perret, a Classics professor at the Sorbonne, with a question. They were about to sell a new kind of computer in France, the Model 650. What, they asked, should it be called? Not the model itself, but rather the whole class of device it represented. An obvious option was calculateur, the literal French translation of ‘computer'. But IBM wanted something that conveyed more than arithmetic. ‘Dear Sir,' Perret replied,
How about ordinateur? It is a correctly formed word, which is even found in Littré [the standard 19th-century French dictionary] as an adjective designating God who brings order to the world. A word of this kind has the advantage of easily supplying a verb, ordiner ... (Our translation.)
Besides, Perret added, the implicitly feminine connotation already present in IBM's marketing materials could carry over to the new term:
Re-reading the brochures you gave me, I see that several of your devices are designated by female agent names (trieuse, tabulatrice). Ordinatrice would be perfectly possible ... My preference would be to go for l'ordinatrice electronique.
The female reference was not entirely inappropriate. Up until the mid-20th century, the term ‘computer' meant an office clerk, usually a woman, performing calculations by hand, or with the help of a mechanical device. IBM's new machine, however, was intended for general information-processing. The masculine and godlike version prevailed. The term soon entered common language. Every computer in France became known as an ordinateur.
Yesterday, our nation's heartland said goodbye to a fast-casual icon of red-blooded, full-fat Americana when Newport, Kentucky, laid its recently shuttered Hooters to rest in style, shoving the restaurant onto a barge in the Ohio River, where it floated downstream to parts unknown.
Japanese trade statistics show that last year's banana imports from Vietnam rose to 33,000 tons, nearly 14 times their 2019 volume ... Growing costs are lower in Vietnam compared with the Philippines and other major producers. In addition, Vietnam's relative proximity to Japan compared with Latin American sources like Mexico and Ecuador makes for cheaper shipping. ... The dominance of the Philippines as a banana source owes in part to concerted efforts by importers in Japan and growers in the Philippines to develop a stable supply. Their market share peaked around 90% in the early 2010s. For the last decade, however, disease and erratic weather have hurt production while rising labor costs have driven up prices. Though the Philippines remains the biggest exporter of bananas to Japan, its share dropped to about 75% last year. Their quality has often been inconsistent, and some importers have reduced their purchases, according to one trading company. "Vietnam started growing bananas relatively recently, so disease has not yet spread and the quality is high," a representative of produce wholesaler said. Younger banana plants make for fresher fruit that last longer. Japan and Vietnam are members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, so Japanese tariffs on Vietnamese banana imports are now 5.4%. They will be reduced further in stages and phased out completely in 2028. In contrast, industry sources expect that tariffs on bananas from the Philippines will continue to alternate between 8% and 18% depending on the season. This could give Vietnamese bananas more of an advantage in pricing.
...she distinguishes between two types of creativity — personal creativity, which "involves coming up with a surprising, valuable idea that's new to the person who comes up with it" no matter how many other people have come up with it, and historical creativity, in which the idea is completely new in the whole of human history. Both are axoned in a substrate of surprise — "the astonishment you feel on encountering an apparently impossible idea. It just couldn't have entered anyone's head, you feel — and yet it did."
>
Within a given conceptual space many thoughts are possible, only some of which may actually have been thought... Exploratory creativity is valuable because it can enable someone to see possibilities they hadn't glimpsed before.
...History shows that famines are, for the most part, engineered. Be it through carelessness, selfishness or plain malice on the part of officialdom, creating the circumstances under which a population expires to hunger is a matter of construction. As the economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen so powerfully showed in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), the focus on the cause of famines should be less on the food supply and more on the economic, social and political factors surrounding them. Food prices might severely spike. Food distribution systems can fail. Certain groups in society may lose their means of employment, thereby preventing them from purchasing essential foodstuffs.
The president threatened a 200% tariff on China as he rambled incoherently Monday.
How we misrepresent reasoning and how to fix it
There are three kinds of node: Events, Things, and Concepts (etc).
Antikythera mechanism EBSCO
...Dishwashers are finicky: Loading them right depends on what kind of dishes you have, what kind of mess you have, and what kind of dishwasher you have. They're also inscrutable—a black box, sometimes literally. "You close the door; you don't know what you're gonna get until you open it," Carolyn Forté, who has worked for more than 40 years at Good Housekeeping and currently runs its Home Care and Cleaning Lab, told me. We can't see our dishwashers doing their job, so most of us don't know how they work.
Binomial distribution Wikipedia
brilliant.org
The Political Economy of Incompetence Paul Krugman
quotes Hannah Arendt: Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
The Evolution and Cultural Importance of Kitchen Sink Dramas Hobbledehoy
One Awakening, Infinite Forms: You Are the Universe Waking Up to Itself Oguz Birinci at Medium
I was wrong about almost everything.
The recognition that's emerging through human awareness isn't personal awakening. It's the universe recognizing its own nature through the temporary fiction of individual seekers. And the most extraordinary part? The same pattern of recognition is happening at every scale of existence, from quantum particles discovering their entangled nature to galaxies organizing themselves into cosmic webs of intelligence.
Your awakening and cosmic evolution aren't separate processes. They're the same recognition, happening through different organizational patterns.
Self-Creation Andy Ilachinski
Making China's rare earth domination Adam Tooze
The same firms also refine rare earths from the ores—an area in which China is even more dominant. As well as domestic feedstock, they have access to cheap ore from neighbouring Myanmar, where a bitter civil war has allowed a completely unregulated mining industry to flourish. Refining is a complicated business, requiring lots of electricity, solvents and reagents. Processing some ores involves more than 100 separate steps, the details of which are fiercely guarded secrets. These techniques are also tailored to the local geology, so are not easy to replicate.
...The road to the Chapare winds from arid highlands into tropical forest. About 260,000 people, many descended from internal migrants escaping drought and poverty, live there across five coca-growing municipalities. The newcomers turned to coca, which grows easily and can yield four harvests a year. There is a market for leaves that Andeans have chewed as a stimulant for millennia. But in the 1980s demand for coca to produce cocaine exploded. Coca farmers say the union was forged in the repression that ensued. When forced eradication backed by the United States began, farmers fought back. Eventually they won the right for each union member to have a coca plot of 1,600 square metres.
The rise of the cult of seamless: a short history of frictionless digital products Helena Mathiesen at Medium (Vannevar Bush, Licklider, Engelbart, XeroxPARC, etc)
How LiDAR measures the toll of climate disasters Jon Keegan [Light Detection and Ranging]
...Today, in addition to mapping complex urban landscapes for autonomous vehicles, airborne LiDAR collection from planes and drones capture snapshots of the Earth's surface geometry. Scientists can then "diff" the data—compare before-and-after snapshots and highlight all the changes—to identify more subtle consequences of a disaster, including fault line shifts, volcanic eruptions, and mudslides.
An incredible Denisovan skull is upending the story of human evolution New Scientist
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When the Man Tried to Sell Minimalism to the Counterculture William Robin at The New Yorker, on Terry Riley's "In C"
The Great Deceleration Small Things Considered, on the decline of Total Fertility Rate worldwide
Tea and Credit in 1770s Canton The Tontine Coffee-House
Dimensions of Reality Andy Ilachinski
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Growing a World Wide Web Maps Mania
...Starting from 1989, when the first modern subsea cables appeared, you can step year by year through time and watch the growth of the global internet unfold on the map. The animation reveals how over time the sparse early connections developed into the dense intercontinental webs of cables of today, with new systems being added almost every year. By sliding through to 2025, you can literally watch the internet's backbone expand, seeing when major routes were built and how new IXPs shifted regional connectivity patterns.
First photograph ever taken, "restored" aka hallucinated by Google Nano Banana
Thugs R Us: How MAGA Uses Violence to Consolidate Power Andrea Mazzarino at Informed Comment
What cash can and can't do Matthew Yglesias
That's all fine. But I do want to emphasize that if the empirical evidence came out the other way, there would be an equally obvious explanation: Kenyans are living in a third world country with weak governance and terrible institutions, so obviously dropping some cash into a village doesn't change anything — only fundamental reforms will help. The American poor, by contrast, are living in a functional society and just need a little money to get ahead.
It's obvious!
Which is just to say that everything is obvious once you know the answer.
"They have to give us magnets": Trump warns of 200% tariff on China if exports are curbed
Flattery Inflation Henry Farrell
...Kim Jong-il's toadies and catchfarts were willing to claim in public that he "had mastered teleportation to avoid being tracked by American satellites." I've not seen anything as ostentatiously ridiculous as that being said by Trump's cabinet members. In fairness though, we're only seven months in.
When East Met West: The True Legacy of Marco Polo Martino Sacci at Substack
Ocean Acidification Crossed A Critical Boundary, Threatening Marine Ecosystems GrrlScientist at Medium ...A planetary boundary is not a tipping point because, unlike a tipping point, it is possible to reverse the damages we've caused by, in this situation, stopping emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
...Professor Findlay and collaborators found that as of 2020, over 40% of the surface of the ocean had passed the OA [Ocean Acidification] boundary.
Memetic phrases Mark Liberman at Language Log
Reviewing Dan Wang's "Breakneck" Brad DeLong
By contrast, America's legalistic elite solves problems by assigning rights to property and security. This creates the conditions for people to live as they wish, and enterprise and innovation follow as a matter of course. The reflexive response to any problem is to establish another entitlement or right, pulling more people into the frameworks required for agreement and approval.
...Both mix crass materialism with admiration for entrepreneurs. Both tolerate tastelessness. Both love competition. Both are pragmatic and will often rush work to "get it done." Both countries teem with hustlers and hucksters selling quick paths to health and wealth. Both admire the technological sublime — grand projects that push the limits. Elites and masses in both countries share a creed of National Greatness, represented by John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan's "City upon a Hill" in America, and in China by the "Central Country" inscriptions on Zhou Dynasty bronze ritual wine bowls.
Monster Mash Timothy Burke
Now the bomb has been dropped. Trump is the kaiju his supporters wanted: with every clumsy. bloated step something is getting wrecked. Other countries have suspended postal shipments to the U.S. because the system of import duties has been shredded by chaos, he's stuffing the Constitution into his adult diapers and blatting over it daily, he's demanding a tithe from random companies and organizations, he's putting people who know less than nothing in charge of offices and departments while gutting their capacity. I feel vindicated in my view that this is what at least some of his supporters wanted all along, and even if they're starting to get a slightly queasy feeling about what it's going to be like living in a vastly diminished post-imperial America that has violently removed itself from the world-system it helped to shape, I doubt they're going to say anything about that unease until it's far too late.
Quintessence Andy Ilachinski
28viii25
Phages
Bacteriophage Wikipedia
Bacteriophages Laura M. Kasman; La Donna Porter at NCBI Bookshelf
Bacteriophages and their use in combating antimicrobial resistance WHO
China began mining rare earths in the 1950s. At first it trailed behind America, which had discovered rare-earth deposits in the 1940s as it searched for uranium to make atomic bombs. But in the 1980s China granted licensing authority to local governments even as it began welcoming foreign investment and encouraging exports. Landlocked provinces saw a chance to industrialise. Hundreds of mining firms sprang up. By the 2000s there was a rare-earth glut. America's main mine, Mountain Pass, had shut. Chinese producers were the last men standing, but even they were suffering: the industry was fragmented, illegal mining was rife and profits were scarce. To shore up the industry, China's government enlisted ministries, institutes and universities to foster research. Between 2000 and 2016 the Chinese Academy of Sciences produced 2,018 papers on rare earths. The authorities also encouraged consolidation in the industry, culminating last year in the formation of two state-owned giants. China Northern Rare Earth, in inner Mongolia, extracts "light" rare earths by digging. China Rare Earth (CRE), based in Ganzhou, cranks out the "heavy" kind through leaching. The pair account for nearly all of China's rare-earth mining.
...and Bolivia's coca kingdomWar stories abound in the Chapare, Bolivia's coca kingdom. It has been peaceful since Evo Morales emerged from its coca farmers' union to lead the Movement to Socialism (MAS) to power in 2006. But that may soon change. Torn into factions, the MAS looks set to lose the coming election.
...The default today is often frictionless convenience at any cost. When we become attached to instant gratification, have no built-in pause points to encourage reflection, and grow dependent on the digital, we suffer: more consumerism, depression, extreme political views, and other social, environmental and political consequences are rampant.
...LiDAR, which measures how long it takes for pulses of laser light to bounce off surfaces and return, has been used in topographic mapping since the 1971 Apollo 15 mission
...The tea trade grew briskly in the 18th century as consumption in England and elsewhere in Europe was picking up. The British East India Company legally imported over 1.7 million pounds of tea in 1739 and perhaps another 2 million pounds was smuggled into Britain annually at around this time. After 1730, prices were falling, meaning even more people could afford tea so the import volumes went well beyond what only the rich could consume. By the 1740s, consumption of tea in England and Wales probably amounted to about one pound per person per year.
...The Internet Infrastructure Map allows you to see how the current network of submarine telecommunication cables has developed over the last 36 years.
...And the explanation is obvious: Poor people in Kenya are average people who happen to live in an extremely poor country. Basic habits of hard work, diligence, and thrift don't necessarily pay off in an environment where everybody is so poor that hardly anyone can hire you or pay for anything you make. Dumping cash on people in these circumstances really lets them level-up. By contrast, the domestic poor are — unless they are recently arrived immigrants — often people who, for one reason or another, are struggling to get their lives together in a very wealthy country. If they were thrifty and diligent, they wouldn't be poor in the first place. Putting money in their pockets doesn't make them thrifty and diligent, so it doesn't really alter their lives that much.
...Yesterday, at Trump's cabinet committee meeting, Steve Witkoff said the following to his beloved President.
There's only one thing I wish for. That that Nobel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace award was ever talked about, to receive that award. Your success is gamechanging out in the world today and I hope everybody wakes up one day and realizes that.
...Apparatchiks' willingness to degrade themselves will hurt their reputation with other people. But for exactly that reason, it serves as proof of loyalty to the one man who counts, Donald Trump. The more appalling the self-abasement, the more effectively it will serve this purpose.
The world's oceans are in worse health than realised, according to an international collaboration of oceanographers, ecologists and marine biologists. They recently published a report that finds parts of the world's oceans have undergone increased acidification that has already surpassed what is now known as a ‘planetary boundary'.
...Breakneck describes China as a country of the sledgehammer, and America as a country of the gavel. China's technocratic engineering elite solves problems with concrete, steel, and scale — with roads, bridges, power plants, and other massive projects. The same impulse extends to society, reflected in the notorious one‑child policy and the repression of Tibet and Xinjiang. China's technocracy prizes order, control, and visible achievement.
...My two steady conclusions ... have been that Trump is a blasphemous violation of every moral and ethical principle that I care about and that many of his supporters embrace him precisely because he is a blasphemous violation to people like me. He's a bubbling mass of pestilence that they've catapulted over the walls of post-1960 America, a perfected sign of their hatred and alienation from the America that emerged in that decade and took further shape in the 1970s and 1980s.
Global Phage-Assisted Salmonella Virulence Small Things Considered
Phages are considered the most ubiquitous entities on Earth. They are also well-known agents of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in bacteria. In a recent analysis of sequence data, researchers showed that phages of Salmonella enterica, which is associated with a variety of diseases in humans and animals, are involved in the spread of virulence.
Bacteriophages, also known as phages, are viruses that infect and replicate only in bacterial cells. They are ubiquitous in the environment and recognized as the earth's most abundant biological agent. They are extremely diverse in size, morphology, and genomic organization. However, all consist of a nucleic acid genome encased in a shell of phage-encoded capsid proteins, which protect the genetic material and mediate its delivery into the next host cell.
