August 2026 general links
(continues July 2026 links)
1viii26
Let's eat badly: Irrationality and its Other William Davies at LRB
review of Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason Justin E.H. Smith
...ever since the dawn of market research and advertising in the late 19th century, there has been a commercial interest in understanding what determines individual choices, as distinct from what economists or moral philosophers think should determine them....Where orthodox economists explain behaviour on the basis of rational choice, assuming that each of us is a finely tuned calculator weighing the costs and benefits of every decision, the 'nudgers' are always on the look-out for anomalies, situations in which we habitually do things with harmful consequences: eating badly, neglecting to recycle, or failing to save for retirement.
...The extent to which we are predictably irrational is conditioned by how much of our behaviour the predictor is privy to. And since the launch of the iPhone and the lift-off of Facebook in 2007, the quantity of human irrationality available to be scrutinised and exploited has grown exponentially.
...It has become something of an orthodoxy in these circles that our behaviour is rarely governed by rational self-interest, but is swayed by norms, habits, instincts and emotions.
...maybe Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon (presently earning $75,000 every thirty seconds), with his global network of household sensors and consumer tracking, is the real rationalist now. But if Silicon Valley (not, say, the university) is now the seat of objectivity and reason, that puts rationality out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of us.
...The new dominance of such giant technology platforms as Facebook and Google represents a distinctive threat to the status of reason in society. These are businesses that make money by collecting data about our behaviour, then exploiting the intelligence that results: what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as 'surveillance capitalism'. But as we know from controversies over 'fake news' circulating on Facebook and extreme content on YouTube, the platforms have no interest in establishing norms of behaviour, only in maximising engagement with the platforms themselves. As far as Mark Zuckerberg's business interests are concerned, it doesn't matter how absurd, stupid, dangerous or mendacious a post is, just so long as it takes place on Facebook.
...Nudgers, like Bentham, see rationality as a habit in which to be trained by a benevolent government in order to steer us towards health and happiness. My preference for a Big Mac may one day be conditioned out of me altogether. Platform giants, by contrast, regard rationality as their intellectual property, the product of a calculation going on in secret. If they can discern the underlying mathematical logic of society, they have no intention of disclosing it. Neither of these attitudes to rationality is politically attractive. The problem lies with behaviourism itself, and its assumption that human freedom is programmed and programmable: ‘rationality' is in the eye of the all-seeing observer, not a property of conscious action at all. In this conception of reason there is no place — and crucially no time — for thinking, reflection or deliberation: each of us is reduced to a node in a network, bombarded by stimuli to which we can react only as automatons. Behaviourism flips rationalism into irrationalism. Surveillance capital treats the global population as if it were a vast zoo, spotting patterns of behaviour that the specimens themselves will never know about. Once democracy and public argument are premised on the logic of the platform, it simply doesn't matter what anyone says or does, so long as they remain engaged and engaging. President Trump is the symptom of a society that treats rationality as a property of machines, and not people.
the entangled time tree Adam Tooze
...Given this vast and lucrative psycho-industrial complex, you might think that the human mind could hold few surprises for business and policy elites. It has become something of an orthodoxy in these circles that our behaviour is rarely governed by rational self-interest, but is swayed by norms, habits, instincts and emotions. Yet when such irrational forces, combined with techniques of psychological experimentation and influence of the sort used by nudgers on social media platforms, disrupted the democratic arena in 2016, it was as if Dionysus himself had hurtled dancing into the room. Irrationality is predictable, maybe, but not to the point of putting Donald Trump in the White House. The myopia of the nudgers is in their assumption that irrationality is a ‘behaviour' like any other, which can be tracked and controlled — that is, rationalised. It's true that the relation between rationality and irrationality is ultimately one of power: which part of society (or the self) is able to boss the other?But Trump's election demonstrated the naivety of assuming that in the end reason will always come out on top. Perhaps with sufficient surveillance, the logic of our present madness can be divined; maybe Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon (presently earning $75,000 every thirty seconds), with his global network of household sensors and consumer tracking, is the real rationalist now. But if Silicon Valley (not, say, the university) is now the seat of objectivity and reason, that puts rationality out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of us. The anxiety provoked by the use of Facebook to influence elections isn't so much that the platform is all-powerful, but that we have no way of knowing what its true capabilities are. Paranoia is the rational response to a system whose rules and goals are shrouded in secrecy. …
Contrary to the comforting myths of Enlightenment, irrationality is no longer peripheral to science or liberal democracy, but appears swirling around in their core. ...
This is the nub of the crisis that we're in. It can't be that irrationality is simply bad or dispensable: every society — indeed every psyche — must find a place for it, in the arts, in sleep or on the analyst's couch. The colonial Enlightenment fantasy was that unreason was external to the white European male; the digital-behaviourist fantasy is that unreason is external to the algorithm. One crucial difference is that, as the standard of reason shifts from white, male, European minds to the machines of Silicon Valley, our society no longer demands that white men provide a model of rational behaviour. Hence President Trump.
Thinking About Tomorrow Center for Strategic Futures, Singapore
...The Entangled Time Tree challenges the common mental framework of linear time and simple causality. Inspired by a baobab plant, the diagram envisions time as an interconnected tangle of stems, branches, and roots, where multiple strands of each exist. Moreover, the roots, branches, and stems flow into each other, indicating how the past, present, and future are constantly influencing and reshaping one another.
The diagram makes other points:
World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Third Notice Eric Lee at Medium
text (pdf)
2viii26
Universal Consciousness Andy Ilachinski
'Portrait of a Man' (Possibly Matteo di Sebastiano di Bernandino Gozzadini) and 'Portrait of a. Woman' (Possibly Ginevra d'Antonio Lupuari Gozzadini) —Maestro delle Storie del Pane (Attributed) Alejandro Orradre at Medium
In My Life as a Visiting Lecturer I Meet Various and Sundry People or, Another Way to Think of This, Here Are All the Novels I Never Wrote and You Are Welcome to Them Anne Carson at LRB
3viii26
Global Human Population Has Surpassed Earth's Sustainable Carrying Capacity Eric Lee at Medium
...The idea is that if all humans reduce their population to 'x', become Master Gardeners who use regenerative agricultural practices (or 'organic', permacultural'...) with no fossil fuel inputs, and properly farm all of Earth's resources (all terra firma and aquatic resources to maximally feed humans), then Earth can support some 'x' number of humans.In the 1960s systems ecologist H.T. Odum was guessing 500 million was a maximum human population (but didn't publish). David Pimentel (distinguished professor of entomology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University) guessed 600 million. One ecologist emailed some 60 of his colleagues to ask what their best guess of how many humans Earth could sustainably support was, but did not publish (low was 50 million, high 2 billion, mean about 1 billion). Oh, but Dave King, small ball expert, informs President Trump that Earth can support at least 1 trillion prosperous people.
...The context for all numbers is the presupposition that Earth, the Planet of the Humans, can be managed by modern humans to maximize their numbers within limits they agree to. In some 4 billion years, no species has done so, but modern humans (with technology and ideology) can turn Earth in a Trantor-like planet if they want to (and those who currently live within limits self-select out of the future, to be replaced by Anthropocene enthusiasts who exceed limits habitually). Humans are not mere animals. We modern humans are denormalized domesticants, humans of NIMH, who will create the future we want and deserve.
Oh, but the opinions of usually clothed apes doesn't determine Earth's carrying capacity, nor that a serially invasive species can run Earth's biosystem to maximally benefit them for as long as they want to until they decide to leave Earth as astronomical expansionists to spread throughout the Milky Way Galaxy (first of trillions) to turn all the planets for the taking into more humans.
88 Prompts for Long Term Thinking Kevin Kelly
1 Our aim is to improve the present by remembering the future.2 Our religion is change.
3 We promote tools and systems that manage the resources of change.
4 Over time, the process of change itself changes, compounding change.
5 We are making the world safe for continuous compounding change.
6 The system that best manages compounded change is civilization.
7 We favor tools that operate upon civilization.
8 Civilization is long-term thinking; Long-term thinking is civilization.
9 We promote long-term thinking instead of long-term planning.
...
13 The best choices today are those that lead to a greater number of choices in the future.
14 We seek those possibilities that increase future possibilities for all.
15 Individually we are better off with expanding possibilities for everyone.
16 Civilization is the process of creating the maximum number of opportunities that work for the maximum number of people.
...
41 Thinking about the future is a way to think about the systems.
42 Focus not on the outcomes, but on the processes that produce outcomes.
...
62 We'd like to improve the ways of being accountable to posterity.
...
67 This present moment used to be the unimaginable future.
68 The future is purchased by the present.
69 We have more obligation to the future than the past.
70 The tyranny of the present can only be offset by possible futures.
71 The future is no more free of the past than the present is.
Night Visitors T.J. Clark on the Chauvet cave paintings at LRB
...At Chauvet, depiction was already what picturing had become. Look at the way the artists have organised the meeting of the line of beasts with the cleft in the cave wall – the little cave within a cave, which doubles in the illusion as a hilltop or defile. Look at the difference of pace and depth and solidity of the group – the procession – before and after. The overall being-together of shapes and objects and intervals between them, and their arrangement within some kind of spatial surrounding: that seems to be what these artists most wanted to capture.
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco and the nature of the home library reddit...The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.The Antilibrary: The Hidden Value of Unread Books fs.blog
...It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones....If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice!Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.
Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (Amazon video)
The Oldest Map of Grand-Pré? Jonathan Fowler
...In June of 1760, Charles Morris drew what may be the oldest properly surveyed large scale plan of Grand-Pré, or at least part of it. His focus was the place the French inhabitants had called Vieux Logis, the area near the landing on the Gaspereau River at the eastern end of the Grand-Pré Marsh. It may be presumed that some of Acadian Grand-Pré's founders disembarked hereabouts in the 1680s. It was also from this landing that their children and grandchildren were sent away. Now Charles Morris selected the hillside overlooking the landing as the best location for the town plot, or nucleus, of the planned settlement of Horton Township.
4viii26
How to Finally Sync Your Fitbit Data to Apple Health lifehacker
The Grasshopper and the "Lusory Attitude" Essential for Playing the Game of Life Marginalian
Post-American compute for a post-American Internet Cory Doctorow
...Big Tech is key to Trump's pogroms. Without Oracle's databases, Microsoft's administrative tools, Amazon's cloud, and Google's location data, ICE would be frozen in place. Big Tech is the source of Americans' risk from authoritarian oppression. That means that Americans cannot rely on Big Tech to protect them from that authoritarianism.And yet, after decades of regulatory forbearance and lax antitrust enforcement, Big Tech has forced nearly all its rivals out of business. Who can compete with companies that use Irish domicile to evade taxation and US domicile to evade privacy law?
5viii26
Pronoia or reverse paranoid delusion: A brief exploration into a conspiracy in your favour S Jesus et al (2021)
Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Fires Rebecca Solnit
...A lot of the cynicism about climate is cynicism about human nature. The simplest response to that is that there is no one human nature: we are a malleable species, much shaped by the beliefs and values of the society we're from, and the same society, even the same family, can produce wildly varying specimens of humanity. Renee Good going out on a cold January morning to try to protect her immigrant neighbors represents human nature; so does the ICE agent who shot her. Recent noodling around online led me to learn that fashion designer Christian Dior's sister Catherine Dior was a hero of the French Resistance, but their niece was a neo-Nazi. Even the same family can produce wildly different versions of humanity
6viii26
Eternal Sloptember Cory Doctorow
...when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is....If Zuck thought other people are as real as he is, he wouldn't spy on them in ways he himself could never tolerate. He certainly wouldn't pay fancy white-shoe lawyers to steal their land out from under them. At heart, Zuck is a billionaire solipsist to beat all other examples of the form — a billionaire social media solipsist who sees others as manipulable collections of statistical abstractions, and not as people at all
...Once you realize that Zuck doesn't really think other people exist, "the metaverse" starts to make a lot more sense. Why would Zuck light $61b on fire in a bet that we will all stand still while he converts us and everyone we love into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters that he imprisons in a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel? It's easy to understand if we're all non-player characters — if that's true, then the metaverse is surely our native habitat.
...Zuck and people like him call themselves "high agency," a disgusting bit of jargon meant to denote someone who has real interiority, wishes and desires (as opposed to the rest of us, who do as we're told and stay where we're put). Zuck's "agency" isn't higher than yours or mine. The difference between him and us is that he doesn't think we're really real, and we know that he's really a monster.
El Cid of the Left? Abdul El Sayed, Victor in Michigan Primary, Faces Racism over his Name Juan Cole
aaaaaa.. Robert Mazzocco on Any Warhol (NYRB)(1969)
...The auto-destructive sculpture of Tinguely, the defecation iconography of Robert Whitman or Sam Goodman, Paradise Now and its coup d'état: a "liberated" water ballet ("Are we gonna talk about Bolivia, or are you here just to look at our big dicks?")... What has been happening in Warhol has been happening, to lesser or greater degrees, throughout the Sixties. A power vacuum exists in culture today, frequently filled with self-congratulatory innovations, demagogic somersaults, ponderous theorizing—the evangelical "new sensibility," the bridging of the gulf between art and life. It's an historical problem. "Why must I think," asks Mann's Leverkuhn in Doctor Faustus, "that all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?" Leverkuhn approaches the question with anguish. The most Warhol (and how many others?) seems able to do is snigger.
The Data Center Debate Rages. Will It Change the Course of History? John Battelle
...Until we can see the monster, we tend to ignore the monster. With their massive appetites for energy, land, capital, and water, data centers have become tangible manifestations of Big Tech's otherwise incorporeal impact on society. Data centers give the monster a body, a tractable container through which to air out a dog's breakfast of grievances against not only the tech industry, but also the corporations, politicians, and financiers profiting from its concentrated power.
"Melt Up"? Mark Liberman at Language Log
...since the semantics of phrasal verbs is at best quasi-compositional.
Every country was wrong on the State Department's map of Africa boingboing
30-odd metaphors from Ross Macdonald Stan Carey
Google Maps Has Launched 'Agentic Food Ordering,' but Don't Get Too Excited lifehacker
There's now a $69 pair of shoes designed only for using the toilet boingboing
The Internet of Stuff Doc Searls
We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmitter sites near highways and airports everywhere.
7viii26
Science Friday
NASA's PUNCH punches up space weather forecasts...The intensity of a geomagnetic storm depends partly on the orientation of the magnetic field embedded in the plasma. If that field's orientation is aligned with Earth's field, Upton says, the storm's effects will be far milder than if they're opposed. Where things stand today, "We don't really have that information until 30 to 40 minutes before it hits," Singer says. But by sensing both visible light and its polarization, PUNCH can capture the front of an approaching CME in 3D, allowing researchers to model the strength and orientation of the front's magnetic field hours before impact....Most Indigenous groups held—and still hold—buffalo as sacred, considering them the beating heart of the land. Lakota Sioux writer and spiritual leader John Fire Lame Deer wrote in 1972 that the "buffalo was part of us, his flesh and blood being absorbed by us until it became our own flesh and blood. Our clothing, our tipis, everything we needed for life came from the buffalo's body. It was hard to say where the animal ended and the man began."That's in part why Europeans set out to exterminate the beasts. The animals sustained the tribes U.S. and Canadian governments wanted to subjugate or eliminate, and the herds occupied territory coveted by ranchers, railroads, and farmers. Beginning in the 1860s, hunters rode the newly laid rails out into the plains and shot just about every bison they spotted. By 1890, when the smoke from their Sharps rifles had cleared, hunters had slaughtered all but about 500 scattered bison
There were already indications of a systematic evolutionary relationship between primates' expanded neocortex and visual specializations. Living primate species with a larger neocortex and brain for their body size have more convergent orbits (bony eye sockets), larger optic nerves, more neurons in subcortical visual nuclei, and relatively expanded cortical visual areas. These differences are concentrated in visual pathways that support high-acuity color vision
A harrowing tour of Earth's sacrificial lands (James Crawford The Vanishing Earth reviewed)
...chapters 2 through 5 are entitled respectively "Rock," "Metal," "Sand," and "Water." These four chapters are grouped together into a part entitled "Sacrifice," in reference to the 1970s notion that human civilization needs to set aside sacrifice regions for its uses. Crawford's narratives in these chapters take the reader to the Bone Valley in Florida, the heart of the US phosphate industry for fertilizers; to the salt flats of Chile's Atacama Desert, where lithium is produced by evaporating brine; to the melt-shorelands of Greenland, where sand is mined; and finally to arid lands including the province of Almeria in southeastern Spain, which boasts the world's largest concentration of arid commercial plastic greenhouses filled with crops that consume huge amounts of water.Curb plastic pollution at its source
...Global plastic production has more than doubled since 2000 to roughly 460 million tonnes per year, about half of it destined for single-use products (1). After accounting for reprocessing losses, only about 9% of plastic waste is ultimately recycled, whereas nearly half is landfilled, about a fifth is incinerated, and the rest is mismanaged or leaks into ecosystems (1, 2). As governments negotiate a legally binding global plastics treaty (3, 4), they should recognize that recycling alone cannot solve plastic pollution and prioritize reducing production and reusing materials.The recycled plastic cycle is structurally inefficient. Contamination, mixed polymers, and degradation during reprocessing divert much of the collected plastic back to disposal, and reported rates are inflated by accounting that blends waste collected, sorted, and transformed into new material (1). Recycled plastics still supply only a small share of feedstock, leaving virgin fossil-based plastics dominant (1, 2). Plastics also account for about 3.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from production (1), and the global recycling rate is projected to reach only about 17% by 2060 (5), far too low to offset rising plastic waste (6).
A central role for dietary sugars in human evolution
...Before cooking made starch easily digestible, the sugars in fruit and honey provided glucose, the brain's preferred fuel. Modeling suggests that sugars provided >25% of dietary energy, fulfilling obligatory glucose demand. Pounding and cooking released glucose specifically, not merely energy. The evolution of a bigger brain is therefore a story of carbohydrate foods as much as animal foods: from sweet sugars to cooked starch, from chewing to processing, and from wadging to advanced nutrient extraction.
What China Wants and Why Thomas Pueyo at Medium
...The Hu Line: 94% of China's population lives on 43% of its land, east of that line.
9viii26
Grand Theories of History and Popular Historical Discourse One Last Sketch (2012)
History as weather: A fractal theory of history for Ian Morris, Jared Diamond and CGP Grey Metaphor Hacker (2021)
The Web and the New Reality Doc Searls (a repost of a 1995 post)
...The import of the Internet is so obvious and extreme that it actually defies valuation: witness the stock market, which values Netscape so far above that company's real assets and earnings that its P/E ratio verges on the infinite.Whatever we're driving toward, it is very different from anchoring certainties that have grounded us for generations, if not for the duration of our species. It seems we are on the cusp of a new and radically different reality. Let's call it Reality 2.0.
The label has a millenial quality, and a technical one as well. If Reality 2.0 is Reality 2.000, this month we're in Reality 1.995.12.
10viii26
LRB translation articles (html)
Mapping the Hollowing of the United States maps mania
US Population Growth Atlas, an interactive map showing how the populations of every US county and state have changed between 1980 and 2025.
The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction Cory Doctorow
...an interactive map of the world throughout history, created by people like you and dedicated to the public domain.
11viii26
The Wisdom of Water: Alan Watts on the Ocean and the Meaning of Life Marginalian
Trump and American Enshittification Hobbledehoy
You feel it and see it, everywhere, like an ambient, grating sensation that everything is worse, and getting more so by the day.Your airline seat is narrower than it was ten years ago, and you paid extra for it. Your insurance company denied the claim through a system designed so that appealing it takes more days than the cancer patient has left without treatment. Your groceries come in a smaller box at a higher price. The brand you love was bought out by private equity and cheapened, a logo stuck on something made in a Chinese slave factory.
The app that used to just work now wants a subscription. The doctor gets four minutes. The customer service line is a machine that says it understands, then hangs up. The hotel charges a resort fee for a resort that doesn't exist. Every institution you interact with has quietly discovered that it can degrade the thing it sells you and lose almost nothing, because where exactly are you going to go?
The Future, Made in China The New Yorker
...For a long time, China looked west for visions of the future. These days, it favors its own. The Chinese car company BYD recently surpassed Tesla as the world's largest maker of electric vehicles. A popular clip shows Tesla's C.E.O., Elon Musk, being asked in 2011 about competition from BYD, which was then known mainly for a boxy, undersized sedan; Musk laughed and said, "Have you seen their car?" Fifteen years later, China has more than a hundred automakers, competing for customers with such extravagant features as in-car karaoke, mechanical foot massagers, and video headlights that can project drive-in movies.
Karine Polwart performs "James Hutton and The Restless Earth" Hobbledehoy
12viii26
John asks Aki for breakfast suggestions in Boston
maps mania
Model collapse Cory Doctorow
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same Lauren Leek
Iraq between Occupation and Sovereignty, as US Troops Depart Alex Poppe at Informed Comment
Our Wars on Each Other and our War on the Planet Tom Engelhardt at Informed Comment
US War on Iran Is Devastating for Women Who Want Life and Freedom Truthdig at Informed Comment
3 Ways To a Picture-Perfect Process AND Product with the Studio Habits of Mind via Stephen Downes
The Rise of the Measles-Industrial Complex Paul Krugman
Why do I call it a "right-wing turn"? Because declining support for childhood vaccines is entirely a Republican phenomenon. Gallup has some striking charts on this. One tracks belief that it's extremely important for parents to get their children vaccinated — a belief that has plunged over the past decade, but only among Republicans
...Why is this happening? Anti-vaccine sentiment is a lot like climate change denial. In both cases, to understand the politics one must do two things. First, follow the money: look at which interest groups benefit financially from misinformation, and why those groups have power. Second, follow the culture war: ask why this particular misinformation resonates with the prejudices and grievances of a segment of the population.
At first sight, the monetary interests behind anti-vax politics are less obvious than the fossil-fuel interests backing climate denial. After all, nobody benefits directly when children get measles.
Peddling quack medicine is, however, a highly profitable business. And it's a business deeply enmeshed with the right-wing media ecosystem: Ads for dietary supplements with no proven medical benefits and other forms of snake oil have for decades been a key revenue source for right-wing talk radio, conspiracy-theory websites, and more. So there is a longstanding connection between hucksters touting fake cures and hard-right politics. Some observers were startled to see Dr. Mehmet Oz — who has touted, among other things, the health wonders of bovine colostrum — named by Trump as administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, a job for which he has no relevant qualifications. But given the underlying monetary and political incentives, Oz's appointment is no surprise.
Why are right-wing audiences receptive to the lies of the snake oil industry along with agitprop against vaccines? To understand such gullibility, we have to address the culture war part of this debacle.
The modern right is a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-expertise movement that is highly receptive to conspiracy theories. And like RFK Jr during his recent interview with CNN's Dana Bash, when confronted with scientific facts it flies into a sputtering rage. So the snake oil industry targets its marketing to the kind of person who listens to the rants of right-wing influencers, gets their news from Newsmax, and finds common cause with the neo-Nazi posters on X. By framing their false claims as "The Medical Miracles that the Elites Don't Want You to Know About", the snake oil hucksters create a receptive audience for conspiracy theories that malign actual medical miracles like vaccines.
Unfortunately, Covid greatly boosted anti-vaccine forces. The witch hunt against Anthony Fauci shows how strong a hold anti-medical-science conspiracy theories now have on the Republican Party. This was not, to be clear, because medical science failed. In fact, the clear negative correlation across the United States between rates of Covid vaccination and Covid deaths was an object lesson in how effective vaccines can be. But those Americans already inclined to believe that the elites are out to get them, already hostile to any notion of collective action for the common good, reacted to vaccine mandates with rage. And their rage quickly generalized beyond preventive measures against Covid to preventive measures against all diseases — including measles.
China's Polar Silk Road Adam Tooze
...China is now the world's great oil power: Forget OPEC. The Chinese Communist Party calls the shots
THE IRAN war has caused the largest supply shock in petroleum history. Yet even when fighting was most intense, oil prices never reached the $150 a barrel many analysts had predicted at the start of the conflict. For this, thank a few governments. Soon after Iranian munitions made the Strait of Hormuz unpassable, trapping 14m barrels a day (b/d) of crude inside the Gulf, petro-monarchs in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh directed an extra 5m b/d through pipes bypassing the conduit. Ministers in Washington and Tokyo released a record 2m b/d of emergency stocks; state-led rationing in poorer countries shaved off a chunk of demand. But disaster would still have struck without decisions quietly taken in another capital: Beijing. Between February and June, China slashed its crude imports by half, or 5.5m b/d—enough, experts reckon, to have shaved $30 or more off Brent, the global benchmark. That is more than half of the worldwide decline during the covid-19 lockdowns, when global demand collapsed by 9m b/d. And in contrast to the pandemic, when the world economy slid into recession, China's GDP has chugged along just fine. It has not been buying less foreign crude because its economy is suffering.
13viii26
"Basically pleasant bureaucrat" vs. "Sexy murder poet"
A is for Airtight Categories, B for Blanket Statements, C for Cherrypicking... Rebecca Solnit
...We live in a time where people are more isolated then ever from the kind of private, personal engagement where you can wonder, doubt, improvise, or just admit you don't know, and where many of us are instead more than ever in the para-public sphere of social media where you perform for an audience of casual acquaintances and strangers who may savage you if you get anything wrong or even seem weak or uncertain or uncommitted. This requires a performance of confidence and certainty that is seen as powerful even when it's also uninformed or oversimplified. I think of it as "you're naked without an opinion," in that lots of people there seem to think they need to have an opinion on everything and the old assumption that you have to have the facts first has faded.
...Ideas matter. How we tell the story matters. How good we are at recognizing our own habits of mind, frameworks, assumptions, biases and those of the most powerful storytellers in our society is how good we are at navigating our personal and collective path toward the truth and our aspirations. This is cultural work, the cultural work that shapes our world, because culture underlies politics the way topsoil underlies crops. Understanding the culture, the frameworks, the stories is essential to all the political work we do.
Stewart Brand put his 1997 BBC architecture series online for free
Greatest science books: Gödel, Escher, Bach: a daunting but captivating look at consciousness New Scientist
CROSSPOST: SCOTT AARONSON (2013): Against John Searle's Analogy of an Apparently Chinese-Understanding Room Brad DeLong
The Lost Vocabulary of Whaling Orion Magazine
14viii26
Science Friday
Most force-carrying particles largely ignore one another. For example, photons convey the electromagnetic force but do not readily interact because they have no electric charge. In contrast, gluons possess a charge for the strong nuclear force, so they attract one another mightily and can bind together, according to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory describing the force. The challenge is that glueballs can mix with ordinary particles made of quarks and antiquarks. Instead of appearing as entirely new particles, they may be hybrids, with both quark and gluon components.
The scales of strain on sharks
...Humans operate as apex consumers in the oceans through fishing (11), but that capability, and the species that people depend on, often have complex and varied cultural and oceanographic contexts. Understanding the current state of natural systems requires an understanding of their histories. That is, the past can be a key to understanding the present
A boost for chemical vaccination against malaria
The phase-shifting architecture of chromosomes
...A simultaneous physical chemistry development over the past 50 years that Beel et al. feature is progress in understanding gels of charged polymers, where elastic energy contributions must be considered in addition to purely electrostatic and osmotic effects. In the classic "ionic hydrogel," for example, the system consists of a network of many flexible charged polymer chains connected by physical (e.g., divalent counterion) or chemical linkers, and well-developed theory (13, 14) accounts for the bulk-phase first-order condensation transition that it undergoes as a function of concentration, temperature, or ionic strength. A chromosome, on the other hand, is a single, inches-long anionic polymer molecule (DNA) organized by millions of cationic histone octamers into 10-nm and associated 30-nm fibers, the effective length of which is substantially decreased (and the width, increased) by millions of "loop-extruding" condensin and cohesin proteins, forming the thick iconic chromatid arms visible by optical microscopy (see the figure). As argued by Beel et al., each of these single-DNA but many-component, noncovalently linked network structures achieves thermodynamic osmotic equilibrium in the same way as does a bulk ionic hydrogel. More explicitly, its structure (volume fraction, the degree of swelling) is determined by minimization of a free energy that includes corresponding osmotic, ionic, elasticity, and demixing (polymer-solvent interaction) contributions.
The eukaryote chromosome, a two-state system with interconversion by a volume phase transition (Beel et al.)
Inside the world of aspiring octopus farmers
...Schweid's ethnography of the cooperative farming initiative around O. maya in Sisal, Mexico, is a fascinating part of the book. He contributes voluntary labor to the farm, joining with local women to place 40,000 pats of paste made from crab, squid, and vitamins on trays to feed baby octopuses. In this way, readers glimpse beyond the corporate forces that have pushed octopus aquaculture globally— most famously seafood giant Nueva Pescanova in Spain—to see people investing in the future economic health of their communities.
However, the story of O. maya is also one of loss and failure. Schweid describes "a tranquil environment for the expectant mothers" in the cooperative's tanks. However, data logged by the company showing mortality across a dozen years at that facility in excess of 52%, largely due to octopus cannibalism, has led to a push by Mexican lawmakers to ban octopus farming altogether (2).
As Schweid explains, the goals of octopus aquaculture vary according to location and culture. In Mexico, the hope is to sell octopuses to the country's upscale restaurants and thus pull people out of poverty; in Japan, it is to reduce octopus imports; and in Spain, it is to revolutionize the global market for elite diners. Despite keen interest around the world, no farmed octopuses have yet reached the market. Even Nueva Pescanova has now failed in its goals for octopus aquaculture; in July 2026 the company withdrew its plans for an industrial-scale facility in Spain, citing changes in technical, business, and regulatory requirements it could not meet. (I believe it is highly likely that yearslong pressure on the corporation from international activists about harms to octopus welfare and to the environment played a role in the decision as well.)
Hidden costs of China's straw-burning ban
Equity in pathogen genomic surveillance
False reporting undermines the integrity of supply chain sustainability initiatives re: Cote d'Ivoire cocoa production
...Because agroforestry actions by multiple buyers are scattered, overlaps are not systematically reported at the subnational level, and monitoring data are not disclosed, it is generally not possible to assess how changes in the implementation of VSS affect false reporting. Our partnership with a cocoa trader enabled us to study this issue. We adapted the partner's monitoring data collection protocol for the shade tree planting program and embedded a preregistered randomized controlled trial in the program's field verification process. To minimize interference with other programs (including potential PES projects), the monitoring data were available only to the researchers. As part of the baseline data collection and before the beginning of the shade tree planting program, all cocoa farmers in the target villages were incentivized to report how many shade trees were planted in their cocoa fields by offering them a lottery, administered by the same cooperative agents later conducting field verification visits, and using electronic forms. The lottery procedures, the winning probability, and the prizes were stated up front in village meetings. A total of 3654 cocoa farmers participated in the lottery in the 85 villages. If the farmer won the lottery, they were rewarded with a machete or boots, but only if the self-reported outcomes matched the result of field verification visits, no matter the number of trees reported. This mechanism removes incentives to over-or underreport and instead rewards accurate reporting (SM section S3.2 documents a successful manipulation check). A total of 407 farmers won the lottery, and half were randomly allocated to the treatment group. We obtained field visit results for all 407 farms. They were, on average, 2.64 ha (SD = 1.94 ha) large and contained, on average, 20 trees (SD = 27 trees) planted from seedlings, according to farmers, and 26 trees (SD = 28 trees), according to field agents.
...The question is, why is Trump doing this? To understand what is happening, we need to put Monday's executive order in the context of the general right-wing turn against vaccines, and against science in general.
...For China, the Northern Sea Route to markets in the West is far shorter than a route by way of the Suez Canal
This paper examines the strategic use of language in contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) discourse, focusing on the widespread adoption of metaphorical or colloquial terms like "hallucination", "chain-of-thought", "introspection", "language model", "alignment", and "agent". We argue that many such terms exhibit strategic polysemy: they sustain multiple interpretations simultaneously, combining narrow technical definitions with broader anthropomorphic or common-sense associations. In contemporary AI research and deployment contexts, this semantic flexibility produces significant institutional and discursive effects, shaping how AI systems are understood by researchers, policymakers, funders, and the public. To analyse this phenomenon, we introduce the concept of glosslighting: the practice of using technically redefined terms to evoke intuitive—often anthropomorphic or misleading—associations while preserving plausible deniability through restricted technical definitions. Glosslighting enables actors to benefit from the persuasive force of familiar language while maintaining the ability to retreat to narrower definitions when challenged. We argue that this practice contributes to AI hype cycles, facilitates the mobilisation of investment and institutional support, and influences public and policy perceptions of AI systems, while often deflecting epistemic and ethical scrutiny. By examining the linguistic dynamics of glosslighting and strategic polysemy, the paper highlights how language itself functions as a sociotechnical mechanism shaping the development and governance of AI.
...the discomfort with temporal uncertainty that manifests as false certainty about the future has, I've come to realize, an equivalent in the unease about ambiguity, complexity, contradiction, and opacity that manifests as the urge to stuff reality into airtight categories. Categories are inevitable—language itself is a collection of categories—but their leakiness and limits should be recognized... Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there's a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorized, no further consideration is required.
...See, consciousness has this weird dual property that, on the one hand, it's arguably the most mysterious thing we know about, and on the other hand, not only are we directly aware of it, but in some sense it's the only thing we're directly aware of. You know, cogito ergo sum and all that. So, to give an example, I might be mistaken about my shirt being blue –—I might be hallucinating or whatever — but I really can't be mistaken about my perceiving it as blue. (Or if I can, then we get an infinite regress.)...
Physicists find strong evidence for elusive 'glueball'
...Matter is like a Russian doll. Molecules are made of atoms, atoms of electrons and nuclei, and nuclei of protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons, in turn, consist of quarks held together by a swarm of gluons. A glueball would be different: a particle whose mass comes almost entirely from gluons bound to one another, with little or no quark content.
...changes that have taken place within the past century. Paradoxically, even though global fisheries yield increased by more than 30 million tons in the period 1970–2022 (7), a huge portion (35%) of those fish populations are overfished (8). Commercial capture increased in many regions across the world's oceans during the first half of the 20th century, but there have also been substantial declines and collapses as stocks have become depleted (9, 10)
...Malaria is one of the world's most devastating infectious diseases, causing an estimated >600,000 deaths yearly, particularly in children up to 5 years old. Two vaccines that became available in the past few years partially protect children against infection with Plasmodium, the malaria parasite. However, a need remains to increase vaccine efficacy and expand it to other groups of people at risk (1). Plasmodium sporozoites infect the mammalian host's liver without causing malaria symptoms, before developing into symptomatic mature merozoites that infect red blood cells. Whole-sporozoite vaccines use sporozoites that have been irradiated or genetically modified before immunization to arrest their liver development or drugs that act on liver-or early-blood-stage parasites to prevent the onset of symptomatic blood-stage infection
...proton carries a conserved baryon number of one. In the conventional valence quark model, it consists of three quarks, each carrying one-third of this number. As the proton moves through space and time, its baryon number (its identity) moves with it. This flow is governed by quantum chromodynamics, a theory that describes the strong interaction between quarks and the gluons that pass back and forth between quarks to bind them. However, in a high-energy collision, a proton may break apart into quarks and gluons that crash into each other, transferring massive amounts of energy and momentum. Consequently, its baryon number can appear far from the initial path of the proton. In this scenario, what causes the baryon number to move? In the valence quark model, movement of the baryon number is tied to the electric charge and flavor (an intrinsic property that defines type of quarks) of the valence quarks (see the figure). An alternative hypothesis is the baryon junction model in which three "strands" of gluons bind quarks at a common point, forming a structure known as the baryon junction (4, 5). Here, the baryon number does not require following the motion of valence quarks. Instead, its movement may be associated with the overall organization of the gluon field that binds the quarks together. Thus, transport of the proton's identity depends not only on its quark content but also on the structure of the gluon field (6). For decades, the baryon junction hypothesis has been rarely tested. In most experiments, valence quarks and baryon number moved together, making it difficult to determine which component (quark or gluon) carries the baryon number.
As biologist and Nobel laureate Francois Jacob famously observed, "The dream of every cell is to become two cells."; And because the cell is the indivisible unit of all living things, this dream can arguably be considered the driving force for life. On the cellular level, the dream is fulfilled by the process of cell division (mitosis), and on the molecular level, it is fulfilled by the replication of chromosomal DNA molecules and their organization into compacted X-shaped pairs followed by their separation into daughter cells
...How to grow octopuses in bulk to adulthood remains a key challenge that vexes would-be aquaculturists. The common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean goes through a paralarval period of drifting in the water, and this planktonic stage brings with it incredibly high mortality. By contrast, the O. maya species in Mexico does not drift but instead becomes benthic rapidly, settling to feed on the seafloor, and is easier to grow in captivity.
...In China, the world's largest producer of crop straw (2), local governments implemented strict straw-burning bans in 2013 to reduce its environmental and social harms (3). Between 2013 and 2022, annual agricultural fire spots across 19 Chinese provinces decreased by more than 80% (4). However, the apparent success of the bans does not take into account the costs borne by already disadvantaged farmers.
When a disease outbreak occurs, sequencing the responsible pathogen and posting its genome to a public database facilitates research into diagnostic tests and vaccines. However, the benefits of sharing genomic data quickly and widely are not equally shared. Many outbreaks begin in lower-income countries (1), where health workers and scientists collect samples and generate sequences that are then used by well-resourced institutions to create proprietary tests, therapeutics, and patents (2). When there is little return for sharing data, countries may decide to share less [as Indonesia did in 2006 (3)], making the equity problem a security problem as well. Member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the Pandemic Agreement in 2025 (4), and they are now negotiating an annex called Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) (5). The current terms of the annex will help in emergencies but overlook the steps required to establish enduring equitable practices.
...Although producers' main incentive is to maintain market access by complying with buyers' rules, cooperatives and traders also benefit from showing compliance because it can ensure stable supply and good relations with supplying communities. Traders and manufacturers can also benefit at the brand level from the appearance that their supply chain programs are functioning well. This structural conflict of interest creates fertile ground for false reporting that benefits at least one of the agents involved (either the data collector alone or the data collector and the beneficiary). This false reporting may be a form of collusion when the agent and producer collaborate on the misinformation.
...Memories leave lasting physical changes at the synaptic level. Although stable, larger spines are thought to support memory, the high turnover of dendritic spines and the drifting of neuronal representations after memory formation suggest alternative possibilities. To elucidate the structural trace underlying memory retention, we used a mouse model of artificial hibernation. During hibernation, hippocampal neurons exhibited a substantial reduction in their activity and an extensive elimination of dendritic spines and synapses. Despite these changes, their memory and associated hippocampal neuronal representations remained intact.
The eukaryote chromosome, a two-state system with interconversion by a volume phase transition (Beel et al.)
Forest canopy decline under elevated CO2 during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
Uncertainty remains regarding the impact of rapid anthropogenic warming on forest ecosystem structure, biodiversity, and function. As an analog, we reconstruct forest canopy density and compositional change in Wyoming, USA, through the Paleocene-Eocene thermal Maximum (PETM), an interval of abrupt carbon increase and warming ˜56 million years ago....Anthropogenic enrichment of atmospheric CO2 (pCO2) has driven increasing global “greenness,” measured as leaf area index [(LAI); foliage area (m2)/area of ground (m2)] since 1982 (1). Around 2000, this pattern reversed across ˜90% of Earth's vegetated surface, particularly at mid-to low latitudes (45°N to 30°S), indicating that the benefits of pCO2 fertilization for primary productivity are being outpaced by heat and drought stress from increasing air temperature (2). As a result, vegetation carbon storage is declining and could lead to a net loss of above ground live carbon of up to 20% by 2100 (3). However, the long-term ecological consequences of sustained greenhouse warming for forest structure and carbon storage remain poorly constrained, limiting our ability to predict how modern forests may respond over millennial timescales.
Bison Restoration Efforts and Grazing Rights Hinge on One Question: Are Bison Wildlife?
The FDA says you can't wash Cyclospora from your lettuce boingboing
Proto-Elamite in the Iranian Context languagehat
15viii26
365 Geospatial Papers Milan Janosov
Mapping All Our Yesterdays maps mania
Popova:
The great paradox is that we are aflame with aliveness only as we burn through the atmosphere of now, and yet our lives are the story we constellate from the signals of bygone experience across the sky of time.To be truly alive is to inhabit the moment not as a future memory of experience, not as a projection of the past, but as a meteor of actuality.
16viii26
As a long-time fan of Italian design, I have to... ...admire these Milanese runway-models who are so aggressively chic that they really look like they would assassinate men, eat the flesh of men, and then chew on the dry bones of men. Bruce Sterling
Trump reinvents the Portuguese Empire with Plan to make Hormuz US Territory Juan Cole
Calculated Deception: How Israel uses Diplomacy to buy Time for Gaza's Destruction Informed Comment
A History of the Lottery: Winners, Numbers, Powerball, & United States Britannica
Lottery Wikipedia
Barbie, Dolly, rebarbative, phenobarbital sesquiotic
17viii26
Shots and Misses Doc Searls
...a meteor impact crater in Utah's Canyonlands National Park. It's called Upheaval Dome, because that's what geologists thought it was before it became clear that it wasn't
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! David Graeber (2009)
The New Anarchists David Graeber (2002)
N is for Nuts Timothy Burke
...("Nut" is also a semantically live word in general in English, when you consider the variety of other things it can mean—testicles, insanity or mania, a difficult problem, a dominant hand in poker, a derisive interjection.)
Iraq Kuwait via Adam Tooze
18viii26
THC in cannabis may reduce nightmares in people with PTSD New Scientist
We Need To Talk Kevin Munger
...the media theorist Walter J. Ong, who spoke of the emergence of a secondary orality'. And Ong deserves his flowers; his careful work about the psychodynamics of orality and literacy catalogued the multitudinous and profound ways in which our previous media regime constructed the humans that took part in it, and how those humans are being replaced by new kinds of humans as the media regime changes. It's difficult to imagine reading through this well-researched text and not coming away convinced by his argument.
The Passing of the Decisive Moment Michael Alford at Medium
..."The Decisive Moment" is perfect to describe HCB's photography. It's more on point than his original French title for the book, Images à la Sauvette, which roughly translates as "photography on the sly," or "furtive photography," or "images on the run." Images à la sauvette is accurate as a description of how HCB took his pictures, but it doesn't describe his results.
Surveillance vs guillotines Cory Doctorow
...the alleged heroes of the market system — the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity — are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating....Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.
Epictetus Ran a Better Productivity System Than Any App You've Bought JA Westenberg
...Epictetus focused on three things: your judgments, your desires, and your decisions; in particular, he emphasized choosing what to pursue, what to turn down, what to keep, and what to cut out completely.Everything outside that circle is neither your circus nor your monkeys.
Everyone else's actions, opinions, ideas, annoyances, traumas, outrages, and emotional dysregulation don't actually need to concern you at all. Neither do the various algorithms you can't reshape or the markets you can neither predict nor control, or the emails someone else marked urgent based on their needs and their deadlines. None of these things belong to you, and it's not your job to try to own them.
The Stoics called this the dichotomy of control; the YouTube philosopher squad might call it a lifehack. I call it a damn good way to avoid going insane while still getting through a to-do list.
Back from Bali: A 12-Point Meditation On Our Moment Otto Scharmer at Medium
...We live in a time of Rupture, Fracture, and Absencing. A time of rupture, as Mark Carney put it at Davos earlier this year, not transition. A time of fracture, not fragmentation. And a time of absencing, not just presencing. We see different versions of these patterns pretty much everywhere... The three patterns — anomie, atomie, atrophy — are not three separate problems; they result from one and the same source: the erosion of social soil. Beneath the clash of logics lies something deeper. Social soil, i.e., the quality of our awareness and relationships, can be degraded in multiple ways. The fracture of our relationships results in loneliness (atomie). The fracture of our inner values results in loss of meaning (anomie). And the fracture of both results in the loss of our creative capacity (atrophy). All three deepen the fracture of our consciousness, moving us backwards (or locking us in) inside the boundaries of an ego-centric awareness. And that is the loop: the fracture feeds back into the very soil from which it grows.
...Soil Functions As A Membrane. The soil of our planet functions as a breathing membrane between atmosphere and lithosphere. A membrane is semi-permeable, partially open, partially closed. It's the quality of that earth soil (or of that breathing membrane) that allows the biosphere to emerge and flourish.
Likewise, the social soil functions as a breathing membrane that allows the social sphere to emerge and flourish. But what actually is that middle sphere, that breathing membrane, in the case of the social soil? It's human attention. Shared human attention. The quality of our shared human attention allows the social sphere to emerge and flourish.
As my Japanese colleague Professor Masato Homma, who is one of the participants in the IDEAS Asia Pacific journey, explained to me last week: if that membrane is too closed, we experience loss of connection (atomie). If that membrane is too open, we experience loss of inner substance (anomie). And if that membrane loses the capacity to breathe between both, we experience loss of agency (atrophy)
Model Collapse Cory Doctorow
rabbithole: type a word, fall in via Stephen Downes
Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape Guardian
Secondary Source People languagehat
(quotes David Hollingshead)For many years, I've held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede, in one of my undergrad classes; the student of mine who disclosed that he loved The House of Mirth because "something similar happened to me recently" (????); or the guy who collects swords as a way into understanding the medieval period are examples of this type. You've certainly met these people or been taught by them; they are often motivated by personal attachments to specific works, and my hunch is that they represent the majority of those who care about art today.Secondary Source People are different; they become obsessed with the discourse about the objects being studied. Professional critics, "theory bros" (gender neutral), Letterboxd reviewers who primarily read other Letterboxd reviews, the weirdly combative people in your seminars who know all about the different scholarly camps on a topic—this group prioritizes the conversations, contexts, and conflicts surrounding the works above and beyond the works themselves. Secondary Source People are the main contingent both producing and consuming academic writing. For them, the question of a text's beauty or capacity to immerse is less important than how its ideas expand or contract as we engage with them.
I can see the attraction of this distinction, but I think that as stated it feeds into the ever-popular tendency to divide humanity up into mutually exclusive groups: there's this kind of people (our kind, the good kind) and that kind (their kind, the bad kind). Note that he doesn't say, as I would if I took it into my head to make use of the distinction, that most of us, especially scholars, are a mix of both, with each surfacing and taking control at different times and in different situations. No, there are Primary Source People and Secondary Source People, and never the twain shall meet; he, claiming membership in the second group, presents the first as simple-minded and laughable (“the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede”) — serious people like himself prioritize “the conversations, contexts, and conflicts surrounding the works above and beyond the works themselves.” I think the latter characterization is true of a lot of people, notably academics, and I think it's a big problem. Once upon a time, literary scholars took it for granted that literature (alias "primary sources") was a vital element of humanity, and the job of scholars was to explain it and bring out its various excellences — "the good and the beautiful," as they used to say. This led to a lot of silliness (the biographical fallacy, Walter Pater's ecstasies), but it also brought to light a great deal of useful information about textual interconnections, linguistic details, real-world referents, and the like. The 20th-century reaction against it took various forms, starting with the structuralists ("what's important is the system of relations between elements") and winding up in Theory (Derrida, Althusser, & Co.), with an ever-increasing elevation of the critic/scholar above the mere author (who, it turned out, didn't exist anyway) and the kind of contempt for the lay Primary Source reader that we see in evidence here.
19viii26
The ordinariness of evil Cory Doctorow
...AI is mostly a novelty, a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction. Where AI does produce value, that value is comparable to a plug-in, a new feature for your word processor or image/sound/video-editing package that might help you do your job somewhat better, or it might not.That doesn't make AI useless, it just makes it a normal technology: useful for some, useless for others, capable of being abused and likely to waste a lot of time when used unwisely
...This is a civilizational act of Magic Underpants Gnomery, and every day that it goes on is a day when more economic, climate and political costs of AI are imposed on all of us. Scientific journals, open source repositories and even science fiction magazines are being overwhelmed by slop, whose perpetrators and apologists insist that soon, AI will realize its potential and the slop will be transformed into gold.
That's why AI bosses are so committed to talking up AI's destructive potential: because destructive potential is nonetheless potential. The moment we stop believing in that potential is the moment that we stop supplying AI companies with bales of cash to shovel into their money-furnaces so that they can afford to sell hundred dollar bills for a dollar each to Elon Musk cultists who want to generate child porn and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs.
AI does have destructive potential. It has the potential to destroy the productive economy when an AI salesman convinces your boss to fire you and replace you with chatbots that can't do your job
...Treating AI as unexceptional is the best way to halt the destructive march of AI companies and their impact on jobs, the climate and the economy. But treating AI as unexceptional requires that we stop talking about AI as if it were exceptionally evil. Yes, some people who use AI experience severe mental problems, but that's not because AI is a Lovecraftian horror that destroys your brain and your capacity for rational thought if you use it. It's not a basilisk. AI is like a carny ride that triggers cardiac events in riders who never knew they had a problem because they never experienced those particular g-stresses –— it's not something that induces vulnerability, it's something that triggers vulnerability
Demiurge Wikipedia
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) Wikipedia
Maurice Merleau-Ponty Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive
Merleau-Ponty's Encounter with Saussure's Linguistics: Misreading, Reinterpretation or Prolongation? Anna Petronella FOULTIER (2013) (pdf)
The Diacritical Nature of Meaning: Merleau-Ponty With Saussure Emmanuel Alloa (2013)
The News: The Chessmen of Uranus Timothy Burke
Speaking really broadly, empires are defined by a relationship between a core, peripheries and outer frontiers. The core region or territory can move around somewhat. The Western Roman Empire shifted its administrative core from Rome to Ravenna in its last century of existence, and the Roman Empire as a whole effectively relocated its overall core to Constantinople before that. Niani may have been the nominal capital of the Mali Empire but the big metropolitan cities of the central Niger like Timbuktu and Gao defined its core, which then carried over into the Songhay Empire afterwards.The core, in any event, is a conceptually different space than the peripheries. Power and wealth flow inwards towards the core and are then dispersed from there in various ways throughout the core and into the peripheries. Laws and rules, social formations and structures, forms of personhood and access, customs and languages, all operate differently in the core. Empires don't have to be exclusive or monocultural in their cores—many of them in history have been cosmopolitan, inclusive, or heterogenous at their heart.
The peripheries, on the other hand, shift and fluctuate all the time. Frequently, they do not have precise boundaries. Their relationship to the imperial core may be defined by arbitrary violence, brutal exploitation, persistent contempt. Or it may be contractual, business-like and constrained to the paying of tribute and mandatory alignment with the empire's larger military and political objectives. A periphery may be a perpetual battleground between regional hegemons that changes hands frequently, it may be a sparsely inhabited region valued for its provision of a single extractable resource, or it may be a centralized state ruled by a client elite who treasure their relationship to the empire and the benefits that relationship provides.
If you want to diagnose the health of an empire, and its likely futures, you look to its peripheries. The rulers of the core, whatever the nature of their rule, see their peripheries as the wellspring of opportunity and the portent of danger. Pretenders and challengers who lose the game of thrones go out into the peripheries to try and earn another throw of the dice.
Manifold
Manifold WikipediaWhat Is a Manifold? Quanta Magazine
Reddit:
palordrolap 4y agoEtymologically, the word "manifold" is a Germanic counterpart to the Latinate "multiple". They're not strictly cognate in the linguistic sense, but their derivations mean exactly the same thing.
That the meanings have drifted a bit, or been co-opted for different concepts shouldn't really blind us to that.
A manifold has multiple things about it. Dimensions. Layers. Abstract interconnected concepts. Possibly all three.
Subjective selection, super-attractors, and the origins of the cultural manifold via PubMed
Husserl's Notion of Manifold Carlo Ierna's Blog
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Rediscovered) livinganthropologically.com
The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality.A Homage to Eric R. Wolf's Europe and the People Without History Alex Sager
20viii26
Psychedelic Visions Andy Ilachinski, quoting Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836 - 1870) The Hasheesh Eater
...It is this process of symbolization which, in certain hasheesh states, gives every tree and house, every pebble and leaf, every footprint, feature, and gesture, a significance beyond mere matter or form, which possesses an inconceivable force of tortures or of happiness....Perhaps one of the most difficult things to convey to a mind not in the hashish delirium, by the symbols which there teach the manner of its process, or by any others, is the interchange of senses. The soul is sometimes plainly perceived to be but one in its own sensorium, while the body is understood to be all that so variously modifies impressions as to make them in the one instance smell, in another taste, another sight, and thus on, ad finem. Thus the hashish-eater knows what it is to be burned by salt fire, to smell colours, to see sounds, and, much more frequently, to see feelings.
Fragments Christopher Hobson
quotes Arendt (1975):>br>...n retrospect it looks as though there existed no such grand schemes but "only" the firm resolve to do away with any law, constitutional or not, that stood in the way of shifting designs inspired by greed and vindictiveness rather than by the drive for total power or any coherent political program. In other words, it is as though a bunch of con men, rather untalented mafiosi, had succeeded in appropriating to themselves the government "of the mightiest power on earth."
World may warm by 25 per cent more than current projections suggest Michael Le Page at New Scientist
Paul Simon's Graceland' Turns 40. I Wish I Hadn't Researched It The Complex Backstory of a Masterpiece James Geuzebroek at Medium
...I learned some rather disturbing things about the making of this album.No, I am not talking about the controversy around Simon travelling to South Africa during Apartheid, in defiance of the United Nations-backed cultural boycott. Nor am I talking about the accusations of cultural appropriation that have dogged the album. Both have been thoroughly covered, and I don't feel particularly qualified to chime in on either.
...This excellent Ringer article by Steven Hyden, a warts-and-all tribute to Paul Simon, does a nice job of outlining the complexities of the man's legacy. Of Graceland, it says: "an impossible album not to love until you learn its back story. Then it becomes impossible to love without caveats."
...The whole story raises questions about where creativity comes from, and what belongs to whom. When musicians get together in a studio and build a song through improvisation, who owns the bass line, the guitar riff, the groove that suddenly makes everything click? At what point does a musician stop being a collaborator and become a songwriter? There are no easy answers.
SWEET THINGS, Part 3: Cane Syrup #2 Home Made David S Shields
Medieval Europe was battered with 16 catastrophic floods in just 2 years Julia Vaz at Science 18viii26
In the town of Göttingen, Germany, sits a small parish of stone and red brick. Inscribed on a cross within, a son mourns the loss of his father, Hermann, who drowned in a flood in 1342. Known as the Magdalene flood, the deadly deluge was one of the greatest natural disasters to hit Europe in the past 1000 years.Despite the devastation, historical records of the flood are scarce. The inscription on the Göttingen cross is the only known text to name a victim. Now, after years of scrubbing archives, researchers are painting a much more complete, and even more devastating, picture of catastrophic weather from this era. In a study published this month in Nature, scientists report evidence of about 16 cascading floods that wreaked havoc across Europe between late 1341 and 1343—the largest number of back-to-back flooding events documented in the past 700 years.
"This is a massive cycle of floods," says Ellen Arnold, an environmental historian at Ohio State University who was not involved in the study. "It's like taking the last five extreme flood events over the last 20 years and having them all happen within 2 years."
The cascading floods would have been particularly devastating for medieval Europe. Many towns and villages relied heavily on rivers for transportation, trade, and water-powered mills. The deluges would have drowned thousands, while many more perished from resulting food shortages and diseases. Buildings and homes were destroyed, and roads were washed out. "It damages the core metabolism of cities," Arnold says. And if that wasn't bad enough, these events were closely followed by the arrival of the Black Death, a devastating plague that killed millions in Europe.
...a period of climatic transition that brought about the start of the Little Ice Age, which was marked by extreme weather with an increase in high-intensity cyclones, volcanic eruptions, and changes in Arctic sea ice. All those conditions could have led to the series of intense floods
Academia: Go Into Plasticity Timothy Burke
...Robbins' thought is that what current agentic AI lack is “phase”, which in turn denies them the semantic plasticity that is a basic part of how we as individuals relate to language and to representation through an accumulating and irreversible history. Robbins uses the example of how the phrase "Fuck you, asshole" changes if you've seen the film Terminator 2 such that you can say it to a friend if the friend has also seen the movie, as long as you're careful to say it like Ah-nuld does in the movie. There are a lot of examples. My daughter and I were bemoaning how the innocent variety of things that the word “goon” meant is being destroyed by the virulent spread of the new meaning of "gooner", but that semantic destruction is only happening to people who are online too much (as the two of us are).Even before generative AI, the kinds of agent-based approaches I was thinking about (inexpertly) almost two decades ago required topography, meaning a confined environment that gave their rulesets something to act on and within. Some experts, like John Holland, were working to make agent-based systems have history, in a sense—that was the whole point of “genetic algorithms” and of machine learning. There was a fitness criteria, the agents that met it best in one cycle were kept and others discarded, the cycle began again, and so on.
So as I understand it, Robbins is suggesting that to have "phase" is to have a confined linear topography of time just as agents have an "environment" that is quasi-spatial, and with it, they would have some kind of semantic plasticity that was persistent. Tasks would be undertaken differently after some kind of rupture or shift derived from a previous experience. Interaction histories would be conserved and continuously processed rather than constantly destroyed by each new training cycle and versioning. And that this, suggests Hollins, would create the possibility of persistent relations between agents. And perhaps? between agents and users.
21viii26
The Resilience of Uncertainty: How to Hold the Universe in You Marginalian
Touch and pain shape what brain imaging sees Adiya Rakymzhan and Laura D. Lewis at Science
Much of what is known about the spatial organization of cognitive and sensory function in the human brain comes not from recording neurons directly but from imaging signals from blood vessels. For example, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) infers neural activity in the brain from local changes in blood oxygenation. Neurons send signals to nearby vessels to dilate, delivering oxygen and glucose to fuel neuronal activity. This neurovascular coupling is often treated as a faithful, modality-independent translator of neural signals into an imaging readout.
Bricolage origins and evolution Thomas Aston at Medium
...the official origins of the word bricolage come from anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind. The word is derived from the French verb bricoler ("to tinker") and linked to the term bricoleur which means 'a jack-of-all-trades.' In essence, it refers to the reuse a heterogeneous repertoire of available materials to solve new problemsIn art, bricolage refers to the construction, or creation, of an artwork from what materials are available or can be found. It generally emerged as part of post-modern art practice, finding expression in surrealism, dada, cubism and most notably in assemblage art. Formally, it was said to have emerged from Pablo Picasso's cubism, but most explicitly found expression in German Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters' collage, or Merz, technique of scavenging scrap materials (see below). The term Merz itself was borrowed from the suffix of the German word for commerce: Kommerz.
...So, in art, there's a sense of retrieval, borrowing, repurposing, re-configuring and re-signifying everyday found objects into an artistic setting.
...In qualitative research, Norman Denzin and Egon Lincoln referred to the qualitative researcher as a bricoleur or "quilt maker" who borrows from many different disciplines, perspectives, theories, or methods, working between and within competing and overlapping paradigms and perspectives and the result is a ‘"set of fluid, interconnected images and representations." It speaks to a kind of "eclectic methodological pluralism," as Robert Chambers put it. We can see here a slightly different form of skilled worker in this image. Not hobbyist gentleman or handyman jack-of-all-trades out in public life, but a domestic quilt maker. Perhaps what Denzin and Lincoln best convey here is a disposition of open-mindedness, pluralism, and dialogue.
...There are multiple different words for bricolage, but I think it doesn't really matter which we use. Mosaics, jigsaws, tapestries, patchworks, quilts, montages, collages, combines, assemblages are all variations of a similar theme and are functional equivalents. All of these are metaphors to refer to how diverse elements fit together to create a multi-perspectival and multi-coloured whole. They merely have slightly different organisational schemas. It is not that one media or mode is always superior to one another. It depends on the context which is the most appropriate organisational schema. Sometimes a fixed mosaic tile doesn't fit.
...It is also worth acknowledging that there is almost always a mixture of purposeful design and contextual improvisation. There is also a clear need for integration and for that integration to be coherent. And perhaps finally, there seems to be some need for legibility (or transparency). Creative and flexible integration all sounds lovely, but it's not always that easy to achieve.
Bricolage — a systematic review, conceptualization, and research agenda in Sara Mateus & Soumodip Sarkar Entrepreneurship & Regional Development (2023) (full text)
23viii26
How to Be a Sea: Albert Camus on Learning to Die and Learning to Live Marginalian
"The Voodoo Thing"
Ted Reichman at NYRB (review of David Toop Two-Headed Docttor: Listening For Ghosts in Dr. John's Gris-gris)
24viii26
The Vocabulary of Vulnerability: 10 Words from Around the World for Complex and Difficult Emotions Marginalian
How Canada can help Americans and defeat America Cory Doctorow
Systems Thinking Kevin Kelly (Brian Hayes' Infrastructure)
Centennia Atlas in several versions
A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World Quanta Magazine
In neuroscience's traditional view, categorization happens at the very end of sensory processing. The brain passively receives sensory details, then decodes their features and matches them to stored templates in memory, like a clerk shuffling through a neural filing cabinet. But this approach to categorization struggles to account (opens a new tab) for the extraordinary flexibility in the way we assign labels to features of the world. On a clear day on an open street, a sudden rhythmic patter is a pigeon taking flight, yet when we're walking down a dimly lit alley at night, the same sound is the shuffle of a stranger's footsteps. How can the brain categorize similar sets of sensory signals in radically different ways for different situations?
...Lisa Feldman Barrett (opens a new tab), who studies the psychology and neuroscience of emotion at Northeastern University, and Earl Miller (opens a new tab), who studies how the brain carries out goal-directed behavior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, collaborated on a new view of categorization. They describe how the brain constantly reconstructs its categories (opens a new tab) moment to moment based not only on senses and memory, but on the body's immediate physiological needs.
At the heart of their framework is a counterintuitive insight. While we may have the impression that our categories reflect an objective reality, the researchers argue that the brain projects categories onto the world in response to the body's survival needs. Before we are even aware of our sensory impressions, the brain is already preparing the body to behave in ways that maintain the energetic resources that power our physiological systems. In this way, the brain's predictions — rather than the cumulative effects of sensory information — ultimately shape and limit how we categorize objects and features of the world.
...Also new in Barrett and Miller's framework is the hypothesis that categorization doesn't happen in a particular area of the brain, but across the entire organ and beyond. To understand how organisms form categories, they argued, neuroscientists have to look all over the nervous system, from head to toe.
...The limbic core includes structures deep in the brain that combine signals carrying information from the body, senses, memory, and higher-level cognitive functions. This integrative network is both close to and highly connected to the hypothalamus, an ancient part of the brain that monitors basic bodily functions, such as body temperature, heart rate, and hunger.
Because the hypothalamus helps inform the cortex — the folded, outermost layer of the brain, which is involved in high-level cognition such as executive control — about the body's energetic state, the authors hypothesized that the limbic core facilitates the brain's ability to anticipate the body's energy needs.
The limbic core is where the most compressed summaries of internal and external signals intersect. You can imagine the nervous system as being structured like two funnels, shaped like a bow tie, that meet at their narrowest point — the limbic core, the point of highest compression. Just as visual information is compressed as it travels through the visual cortex and deeper into the brain, physiological signals are compressed as they travel from the body up the vagus nerve and into the brain. They then reach the limbic core, where they are integrated with compressed sensory information. Together, these signals generate an appropriate category and its associated behavior.
...Barrett and Miller are asking the field to move beyond a model in which categories are stored like documents in the brain's filing cabinet. From the way the brain is structured to compress sensory information, to how it predicts and prepares the body to respond, categorization is “baked” in, the authors wrote. It is a core organizational principle of the nervous system that draws on memory, perception, and behavior to help us survive well in an information-rich world.
Pacing the Frontier living together, somehow
...There's been a lot of talk about producing Skynet, but for my money, that scenario (still possible) is too comfortingly anthropomorphised for my liking. In its relentless pursuit of its own goals — to propagate, to survive — The Thing cannot in any way be aligned with human interests. Alignment is impossible, co-existence is impossible, trust is impossible, flourishing is impossible. The thing about The Thing is that it is truly an agent, and that its entire existential modus operandi is orthogonal to our own. There is 0 overlap between The Thing's existential prospects, and our own: there is no community of fate, only fatality. If such an agent is pacing the frontier (and, again, this is a speculative fiction), then we may be truly fucked – or we could be lucky, and everything will be okay — and it will have been a grand folly to allow these reckless, heedless, irresponsible tech bros to do this. I don't think being lucky is a good, sustainable basis for dealing with these dangers. I have no idea how such dangers can be controlled now, or by whom, but I rue their existence.
25viii26
How Canada can help Americans and defeat America via Stephen Downes
When Iran Ruled the World, from Baghdad to Delhi Informed Comment
26viii26
The age of disinvention Cory Doctorow
..."Disruptors" are best when they move value from existing companies to those companies' customers. The first TV remotes let people change the channel when an ad came on, making their TV better at broadcasters' expense. The broadcasters had to struggle to adapt, which is fine. They're not charities, after all: they're in business to make money for themselves, and they're only going to give you as much value as they have to.
Donald Trump's Artifishy Intelligence Tom Engelhardt at Informed Comment
After all, Trump has already claimed that AI is "bigger than anybody ever thought possible." And he's also said, "The way you look at AI, whoever wins AI just wins. It's that big. It's bigger than the internet by many times."
27viii26
Watch the mechanisms from an 1868 engineering book come to life boing boing
28viii26
Science Friday
The stakes are enormous, as Cole herself witnessed when she first visited the Galápagos in 1989 and saw the devastation that spiking ocean temperatures during a 1982-83 El Niño inflicted on the islands' coral reefs. Beyond ecological damage, the extreme weather during large El Niño events can cause trillions of dollars of economic losses. As forecasters warn that this year's El Niño could end up the strongest in nearly a century, understanding whether climate change itself is strengthening the events has taken on new urgency.
"This system is the largest source of climate extremes on our planet," Cobb says. "And if it is in itself becoming more extreme, that has some very serious implications for society, and it's information that we should be acting on."
El Niño events develop every 2 to 7 years, when weaker trade winds allow warmer waters from the western Pacific to flow east and pile up near the Galápagos. Through "teleconnections" in the atmosphere, the events have far-flung effects, for example causing flooding in South America and devastating droughts in some parts of Africa.
...miniature laboratories that autonomously melt, dissolve, cool, and recrystallize pharmaceutical compounds. On Earth, those processes are disrupted by gravity, which drives bubbling convection in liquids and causes crystals and particles to settle. But in space—where there's no up or down—warm fluids do not rise, dense particles do not sink, and crystals can assemble under far calmer conditions.
As a result, Varda says, microgravity can make protein and drug crystals purer or more uniform—or nurture ones that won't form on Earth. Cialdella hopes those advantages will translate into medicines that are easier to make, store, and administer. If so, space won't merely be a venue for research. It will become a factory floor.
...a key milestone from pharmaceutical company Merck, which flew ISS experiments on its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab), a monoclonal antibody that unleashes the immune system so it can attack tumor cells. In a 2019 study, Merck researchers reported that in microgravity, the antibody proteins form smaller, more uniform crystals than conventional manufacturing could produce, opening the way to formulating the drug as an injection rather than a lengthy intravenous infusion. Although Merck ultimately commercialized the injection with a different (Earth-based) approach, the experiment highlighted the advantages of microgravity.
The Merck study motivated the founding of Varda. On its first mission in 2023, the company melted the HIV antiviral ritonavir and recrystallized it as the drug's least stable structural variant. The demonstration showed drugs could be autonomously processed in orbit, withstand months in space, and survive the searing heat of atmospheric re-entry.
By hitching rides on frequent SpaceX Falcon 9 launches, the company now aims to speed up what was once an agonizingly slow experimental process so it can support commercial research. "When you have something where you get a data point once a year, every other year, every 3 years, it's hard to do that in a business context," says Adrian Radocea, Varda's chief scientific officer.
The knotty problem of RNA structure prediction
Ordering atoms on weak interaction
...Skin aging involves the reorganization of a dynamic ecosystem, where host-driven changes reshape the composition of microbial communities and microbial functions influence tissue decline. Can this understanding guide interventions that improve skin resilience with age? Such interventions could include microbe-centered approaches—such as application of probiotics, engineered microbes, or defined microbial strains or multispecies communities—or habitat-centered ones that target the repair of skin-barrier lipids and inflammation (1). The most effective strategies would plausibly combine both approaches, because an exogenous microbial strain will not engraft unless supported by the appropriate nutrients, pH, barrier state, or physical niche of the skin environment and because improving the skin habitat could also facilitate the recovery of beneficial microbial populations. Clinical translation of such strategies must overcome several barriers: The microbiome is highly personalized and body-site specific, the production of live biotherapeutic products faces complex regulatory and manufacturing challenges, and the topical products or delivery vehicles used for microbiome disruption may have harmful effects. The success of such interventions must be judged against functional improvement in aging-related features, such as reduced susceptibility to infection and skin disease, decreased itching or dry skin, improved skin repair responses, restored barrier function at the molecular level, and reduced concentrations of inflammatory mediators.
The history and future of sickle cell disease
The distorted red blood cells present in those with SCD clog small blood vessels, reducing oxygen delivery to tissues and precipitating excruciatingly painful vaso-occlusive crises. Oxygen starvation generates a cascade of pathologies, ranging from pneumonia, anemia, and jaundice to avascular necrosis, blindness, strokes, cognitive impairment, end-stage organ damage, and premature death. SCD is more common in certain ethnic groups, including people of African descent. Life expectancy is between 5 years and 50, depending on the availability of medical care.
...In his powerful and compelling book Curved Air, geneticist Kevin Davies takes readers on a whirlwind, and at times heart-wrenching, tour of the history and nature of SCD, which the American chemist Linus Pauling referred to as "the first molecular disease." Davies uses SCD to illustrate the remarkable successes and limitations of molecular genetic medicine, while providing a rigorous critique of the deeply ingrained prejudices, denial, indifference, stereotyping, ignorance, injustice, and inequality of the American health care system.
In 1949, Pauling and his colleagues transformed SCD from a blood disorder into the first disease understood at the molecular level, tracing its origin to an abnormal β-globin subunit in the oxygen-carrying molecule hemoglobin. The British biochemist Vernon Ingram showed in 1956 that this resulted from a mutation that changes a negatively charged glutamic acid residue into an uncharged valine. This makes sickle hemoglobin polymerize under deoxygenated conditions, distorting red blood cells into their characteristic shape and coaxing them to self-assemble into rodlike fibers.
...The CCZ is not a vacant or barren mineral province, as it has been portrayed by mining enthusiasts. Its nodules provide the scarce hard substrate required by sponges, corals, anemones, echinoderms, crustaceans and many other benthic organisms. Thousands of metazoan species have already been recorded there, most of them still undescribed (1), and removing polymetallic nodules would eliminate or severely damage one of Earth's least understood ecosystems. Because these habitats develop over geological timescales, recovery is expected to be extremely slow, if it is possible at all.
Designing pseudoknots using AI
Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs
Hypervision: An on-chip hyperspectral microsystem for online video-rate computational imaging
The Metal Whose Entire Public Image Is a Tomato Soup (And Whose Price Is Set by a Country That Doesn't Exist) Martina H at Medium
Tariffs Mark Liberman at Language Log quotes xkcd
Rename Lake Ontario Now! maps mania
Statistical Account of Nova Scotia Tomas Chandler Haliburton (1829) archive.org
The upland is hilly, and in some places broken; and though embracing, like every other part of NovaScotia, of the same extent, a great variety of soil, is for the most part good tillage land. The farmhouses are larger and better built than in Windsor or Falmouth, and few of them are to be seen without an orchard adjacent. The Packet which plies between Windsor and Parrsborough, touches at Horton, for the convenience of those who wish to cross the Basin of Minas. At the upper part of this township, and near its junction with Cornwallis, is situated the village of Kentville, containing several well built private houses, the Court-House, and Jail. It is distant from Halifax about seventy-two miles, and from Annapolis sixty, forming the central point, at which the stage-coaches meet, that run between those two towns. There is a good grammar school at this place; and it is said that the Baptists of Nova Scotia have it in contemplation to found an Academy within a few miles of it, which shall be open for the reception of the youth of every denomination
Nusantara languagehat
10 Hacks Every Intel Mac User Should Know lifehacker
29viii26
15 Minute Towns Animated maps mania
Unusual risks Mark Liberman at Language Log on Black Swan Events
30viii26
The Mocha Monopoly: how Yemen's Dominance of the global Coffee Trade birthed the Houthi Rebels Ibrahim Al-Marashi at Informed Comment
The plant's natural built-in pesticide is caffeine – the chemical that keeps the bugs away is also what gives us the buzz. Sufi orders in Yemen drank it to stay awake during their prayers at night. Later, Portuguese sailors used the beverage to keep alert as they navigated new maritime trade routes to places like Hormuz. The drink spread through the Ottoman world and into Europe, carrying the port's name with it.
But Mocha's monopoly would not last. Like all dazzling port cities, it had its share of swashbuckling smugglers. One apocryphal tale tells of a Sufi pilgrim, Baba Budan, who some time around 1670 strapped seven fertile seeds to his body and carried them from Mocha to the hills of Mysore, in India.
The Dutch East India Company had already taken a coffee plant from Mocha as early as 1616, eventually cultivating it on the island of Java in the Indonesian archipelago by the 1690s. A seedling from Amsterdam's botanical garden also grew into a plant presented to Louis XIV. Its descendants crossed the Atlantic to Martinique and, from there, reached Brazil in 1727.
Within a century, Mocha's monopoly had been ground down, one stolen seed at a time. Its harbour silted up, and the British development of Aden in 1839 ended its status as a major entrepot. The bustling port that named the drink became a small fishing town.
Macbeth 2:2
The Raveled Sleave of Meaning William Tyler at Medium
It turns out that's not right, and it makes a difference to the meaning. A "sleave" is "The knotted or entangled part of silk or thread" or "Silk not yet twisted; floss" [See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sleave]. It has no relationship to the part of a garment that covers a person's arm.
The ambitions of Faust Bruce Sterling
Matter, Memory, and the Paradox of Perception: Henri Bergson on How to See Reality Marginalian
Matter and Memory Henri Bergson (pdf)
31viii26
What Tom Waits Understands That Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos Do Not Jeffrey Anthony at Medium
...We regard extravagant displays of deference to gods and divine rulers as absurd rituals belonging to less rational societies. Yet here is our version compressed into a thirty-seven-second video.
Bezos was lucky. His day came through a contingent arrangement of public infrastructure, labor law, tax policy, trade agreements, and consumer behavior that made Amazon possible. By the time he founded the company, two decades of Milton Friedman's market fundamentalism had conned Americans into seeing private fortunes, resulting from the intentional arrangement of public infrastructure, as the achievements of exceptional individuals. The workers, public investments, and systems of governance that actually create such fortunes, disappeared from the story altogether.
Into that blindness came Amazon, a technological and logistical apparatus capable of siphoning spending out of local communities while exploiting global differences in wages, taxes, and labor protections. As locally owned businesses closed and the jobs and relationships they sustained disappeared, the resulting deterioration was treated as the inevitable price of progress. Amazon's empire depends upon roads, postal networks, telecommunications systems, courts, workers, and layers of governance extending from the local to the global.
Yet all of that collective production was compressed into the body of one exceptional man and placed at the center of a ritual spectacle. Modernity congratulates itself for having outgrown the societies it once dismissed as "savage," but the old machinery remains. The exploited warehouse worker, the hollowed-out towns and communities and the damaged environment become offerings to technological progress, while rockets, yachts, magazine covers, and choreographed security details elevate Bezos into a culture hero through whom the promised future is said to arrive.
10 Video Downloading Hacks Every YouTube User Should Know lifehacker
The Age of the Third Brain JA Westenberg
...What the second brain got right is that writing changes what you think rather than simply recording what you already think, and that your future self is a different person who will benefit from the archival labor of your present self.
I eventually had to admit: I never actually went back through my notes. I don't think most people do, with any regularity.
The friction of capture is low enough to sustain; the discipline of review, connection, and synthesis was consistently higher than I could maintain. Notes accumulate. Links proliferate past navigability. The graph visualization meant to reveal latent structure starts to resemble a plate of spaghetti. We spend more time organizing our notes than thinking with them, which is the classic Soviet bureaucratic failure: the system designed to support the work becomes the work.
The second brain required you to know, at the time of capture, how your future self might want to retrieve something. You had to tag it, categorize it, connect it to existing notes, name it in a way that your future self would recognize as relevant. But the whole reason you needed the second brain was that your first brain wasn't good at that kind of anticipatory organizational work. You were asking the weak cognitive function, your ability to predict and plan future retrieval, to compensate for another weak cognitive function, your ability to retain and recall past information.
...The third brain is AI operating on top of both the first and the second.
AI as a standalone query interface is a good search engine: moderately and impersonally. But AI that has access to your second brain, your notes, your captured thinking, your annotated reading, your past writing, your in-progress ideas, is something qualitatively different. It can do what the second brain promised but couldn't deliver: retrieve relevant material at the moment of need, surface connections you wouldn't have made, synthesize across everything you've captured, and do all of this without requiring you to have maintained a perfect organizational discipline in the first place.
...The second brain required you to invest upfront organizational labor in exchange for future retrieval benefit, and most people found the labor-to-benefit ratio unfavorable once the initial enthusiasm wore off. The third brain substantially lowers the upfront hurdle. You can capture messily, knowing that semantic search and pattern recognition will do work that hierarchical tagging used to demand. You can take notes in whatever form makes sense at the time of capture rather than in whatever form will make retrieval possible months later.
If the third brain can retrieve, connect, and synthesize, the question of where thinking actually happens becomes murky.
Otto's notebook is part of his cognitive system, but it sits passively on the shelf until he consults it, and Otto still does the thinking. The third brain is a processor. It can work on your knowledge base while you are doing something else, making connections you haven't asked it to make, surfacing implications you haven't noticed.
...The first brain is fast, associative, and emotionally intelligent - but painfully forgetful. The second brain is infinitely persistent and organized -—but entirely passive, demanding endless manual upkeep. The third brain is a tireless engine for retrieval and synthesis, but it lacks the critical judgment that makes those things valuable. It can't tell you what actually matters or what should change your mind.
Every moment of our lives, our bodies are awash in sensory signals. Photons hit our retinas. Waves of compressed air collide with our eardrums. Volatile molecules bind to receptors in our nostrils, and chemicals slather our taste buds. Pressure and heat activate nerve endings in our skin. We are able to navigate this torrent because the brain does an enormous amount of data compression. Through a process known as categorization, the brain turns the messy, noisy, information-rich world into objects, people, concepts, and emotions that we can understand and act on at the level of experience.
...I think it's wrong to think of contemporary LLMs as stochastic parrots in 2026 (they are so much more powerful-flawed than that), but once we have agents ‘out there' in the world, a set of entities that have been trained to be relentless in the pursuit of one goal (who don't understand deontology or care), what do we expect will happen? Honestly, this is a categorically different level of danger... and in a weird irony, we appear to have commensurately less caution and fucks given than we did a few years ago when LLMs were at the frontier. As Ezra and Helen notice, 'we can't say we weren't warned'. Yes, indeed. But what rough beast is this?
...copyright is a "fact-intensive" doctrine, which means that determining whether a use is or isn't a copyright violation can be a complex and expensive process of gathering facts, weighing conflicting expert views to arrive at a judgment. If the rule was that new technologies couldn't be introduced unless you could prove that they would never infringe copyright, we wouldn't have any digital technology. Indeed, most technologies would be illegal under that standard. You can infringe copyright with VCRs, photocopiers, hard drives, tape recorders, scanners, computers, phones… Hell, you can infringe copyright with an X-ray machine, a saxophone or a pair of ballet slippers!
NY Times
T o the administration, AI can do little wrong. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump and his top aides have dismissed the suggestion that widespread automation could carry real negative consequences for families, businesses, and the broader U.S. economy. Even as the electorate grows uneasy about the technology — and the data centers that power it — the president has only hardened in his view that A.I. will supercharge everything from medical research to military action.
Coral records suggest global warming is strengthening El Niño
...because the intensification coincides with rapid postindustrial warming and exceeds El Niño's natural variability, the authors argue that human-driven warming is the leading explanation. "That's the thing that has changed over that time," says Julia Cole, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Michigan who led the study. "So if I get pushback on that, I would like to know what the alternative is."
...Nicholas Cialdella, Varda's chief technology officer, adjusted his Apple Watch, knowing his pulse would quicken. At 10:59 p.m., the show began. Screaming toward Earth at about 31,000 kilometers per hour, the capsule awoke and separated from the satellite that had shepherded it through orbit, an update it passed along via GPS and radio pings. Cheers went up 17 minutes later, when the capsule's first parachute deployed exactly on time. But then the telemetry stream from the capsule slowed to a trickle. "Give me another data point," one cursing engineer muttered.
...RNA sequences are composed of only four chemically similar nucleotides and therefore provide a less information-rich alphabet than the 20 amino acid building blocks of proteins. A given RNA sequence can usually fold into multiple, nearly isoenergetic structures, making it difficult to identify the biologically relevant conformations
Next-generation computer logic and memory technologies require high-speed data processing and low power consumption to handle massive data loads and perform real-time artificial intelligence tasks. Meeting these demands involves packing more transistors into a limited chip area while maintaining efficient control of electrical current. However, continued miniaturization of conventional silicon transistors becomes difficult as their dimensions approach the nanometer scale. Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors—atomically thin materials that bridge conductors and insulators—are promising materials for future transistors (1). They can efficiently transport charge carriers, such as electrons and holes (the counterpart of electrons), and regulate current flow at atomic dimensions. Realizing this potential requires atomically controlled metal contacts that connect 2D semiconductors to external circuits. On page 938 of this issue, Zhang et al. (2) report a stepwise process that grows single-crystal metal contacts on 2D semiconductors. This offers a route to integrate a range of single-crystal materials into devices.
...surveys of immune cell subsets and inflammatory mediators in aging skin showed increased immune-cell exhaustion and senescence, inflammation, and impaired immune responses. Even mild cutaneous injury in aging human skin can trigger a strong immune response in which senescent fibroblasts recruit inflammatory monocytes that, through prostaglandin E2 production, suppress local antigen-specific T cell activity (10). Differences in the frequency and function of dermal dendritic cells, increased T cell exhaustion and senescence, reduced responsiveness of regulatory T cells, and reduced absolute numbers of Langerhans cells have also been observed in aging mouse and human skin compared with younger skin (10, 11). These findings support a model in which altered microbial exposure and function interact with age-associated immune remodeling to turn skin away from repair and tolerance processes toward chronic inflammation, although a causal link remains to be demonstrated in human skin and evidence of temporal associations is not enough to establish
...In 1874, the West African physician James Africanus Beale Horton described patients with fever, recurrent pain crises that worsened during the rainy season, and blood abnormalities that today would be recognized as consistent with sickle cell disease (SCD). His observations initiated a journey that moved this disease from clinical description to molecular explanation and, ultimately, genomic intervention.
...the ecological importance of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), the world's largest polymetallic-nodule exploration region, in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean.
Slow light for faster communications
The rapid increase in artificial intelligence engines, processing of data in the cloud, and digital communication networks requires efficient, fast and low-power interconnects that can handle the vast amounts of data. Traditional Mach-Zender modulators lie at the heart of existing technologies but can be relatively big and limited in scalabilty. Jia et al. present a silicon-photonics approach based on the slow light properties of a structured photonic crystal. Through careful design of the photonic crystal structure, the authors could achieve modulation rates of 400 gigabits per second per wavelength with a power consumption of just 15 femtojoules per bit. Such a large-scale manufacturable platform is promising to address the need for energy-efficient and compact high-speed optical interconnects. —Ian S. Osborne
Not so deserted after all
Since the sequencing of Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, extensive gene flow between archaic hominins and humans has become increasingly apparent. However, early episodes of gene flow can obfuscate later signals, and introgression is still difficult to detect without a reference genome. Zhang et al.developed TRACE, a method that uses ancestral recombination graphs to identify introgression in humans without archaic reference genomes. They found introgressed regions from a ghost lineage of hominins in all modern human populations that surprisingly overlapped regions previously identified as lacking Neanderthal and Denisovan introgression, called "deserts." This work also supported previous evidence of superarchaic ancestry within Denisovan introgressed regions. —Corinne Simonti
RNA molecules can fold into intricate three-dimensional shapes that drive much of their biology, but designing new structured RNAs from scratch has remained out of reach. Townley et al. show that complex RNA structures called pseudoknots can now be designed reliably using artificial intelligence (AI). In a year-long competition on the citizen science platform Eterna, AI methods solved more than 95% of 57 design challenges, matching the performance of expert human players (see the Perspective by Mustoe and Guo). Cryo-electron microscopy revealed that the molecules folded into entirely new three-dimensional architectures, sometimes featuring intricate interactions that the AI had not been instructed to build. RNA design has thus entered the deep-learning era. —Di Jiang
The sequencing of Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes has revealed extensive interbreeding between modern humans and now-extinct archaic hominins, transforming our understanding of human evolutionary history. However, many archaic populations that contributed to modern human ancestry—particularly those lacking preserved fossils or DNA—remain uncharacterized. Existing computational methods cannot detect these contributions as they rely on either an archaic reference genome or an unadmixed outgroup. As a result, the full extent and complexity of archaic introgression remain unknown.
In this work, we tackled the long-standing challenge of the massive computation for hyperspectral imaging that is required to reconstruct and process large-volume spatial-spectral data cubes. Specifically, we designed a hardware accelerator, fabricated as a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of 9.3 tera operations per second at 16-bit integer (INT16), alongside a topology-aware structured pruning strategy for a lightweight reconstruction network. Through integration with our HyperspecI sensor, we demonstrate a fully standalone visible–near-infrared hyperspectral microsystem (˜950 grams) that requires neither external power nor computing resources.
During the few last years of the occupation of Horton by the French, a small detachment of Provincials was stationed there, to keep them in subjection ; and after their removal, it was continued for some time to overawe the Indians. The settlements of the Acadians extended from the mouth of the Gaspereaux river, to within two miles of Kentville. Satisfied with the abundant crops which were gathered from their diked fields, they gave themselves but little trouble in the cultivation of the upland, and seldom extended their clearings beyond the view of their meadows. They had enclosed and cultivated all the Grand Prarie, which then contained 2100 acres, besides smaller marshes on the Gaspereaux, and the Ilorton river. The former, they redeemed from the sea at different periods, and the remains of the old dikes, which, like the cells of a honey-comb, divide it into very numerous partitions, though still visible, are so crumbled by the corroding hand of time, as to be passed without difficulty by loaded teams. From the removal of these people in 1755, the country remained unsettled until the year 1760, when two hundred emigrants from Connecticut were invited to remove thither and take possession of it. The delays attending their embarkation and passage, unfortunately protracted their arrival until the season was too far advanced, to admit of their raising any crops that year. The succeeding winter was both tedious and severe, and as they had been accustomed to a milder climate, and the comforts and conveniences of an old colony, it was accompanied by much distress. Although the greater part of these settlers were respectable people, yet there were many idlers among them, whose chief inducement to visit Nova-Scotia, was the provision they were entitled to receive, as a bounty for their emigration. When the most industrious could not obtain the necessaries of life without the greatest exertion, it is not surprising that persons of this class availed themselves of the first opportunity of quitting the country, as soon as the government rations were withheld. The English found the dikes very much dilapidated, and most of the meadows under water. As they were ignorant of the manner of rebuilding these embankments, they contented themselves for many years with gathering salt grass, and such other herbage as the higher parts of the Grand Prarie still afforded them. As they increased in population and acquired experience, they at length succeeded in shutting out the tide from all the land that had been formerly enclosed. But it was not until the year 1810, that that extensive meadow, which is bounded by the Grand Prarie on the east, and Wolfeville on the west, was finally encircled by a substantial dike. This embankment, and the nine aboiteauxs connected with it, which secure G87 acres of land, were erected at an expence of £9,858. The cost of keeping these dikes in repair, varies according to their exposure, and the nature of the materials with which they are built. The annual assessment for the support of that on the Grand Prarie, is upon an average about one shilling and six-pence per acre ; while others containing less land and equally exposed, arc maintained at a greater expence. This township includes about 4000 acres of diked land, exclusive of salt marshes and intervals
...From the 16th to 18th centuries, Mocha was the gateway through which all of the world's coffee passed. The plant was native to Ethiopia but was first cultivated commercially in Yemen's terraced highlands. The Romans called the region "Arabia Felix", and Arabia would give the coffee plant its name, Arabica.
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.You know the quotation from Macbeth, "Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care." And you'll often see it written as "...sleeve...". Until 5 minutes ago, I would have seen no difference except for archaic spelling.
FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I'll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
I'll have them wall all Germany with brass,
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wittenberg;
I'll have them fill the public schools with silk,
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad;
I'll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,
And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,
And reign sole king of all the provinces;
Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,
Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp-bridge,
I'll make my servile spirits to invent....the polymathic French philosopher Henri Bergson (October 18, 1859-January 4, 1941) aimed his uncommon mind at "the threefold problem of matter, consciousness, and their relation" in what became Matter and Memory (public library | public domain) — a pleasingly disorienting, because revelatory, investigation of the interplay between perception and memory in how we construct the cathedral of interpretation we call reality.
...His walk struck me as arrogant and offensive. When I watched again, I noticed the choreography surrounding him. Four men arrange their bodies around Bezos in an absurd court ritual for the corporate age. One guard moves aside so that another can open the very same door, and then all four reposition themselves around him as he walks. His dependence upon their precisely coordinated labor is transformed into an obscene spectacle of his individual importance.
...your biological brain is not equipped to store and retrieve the volume of material a contemporary knowledge worker encounters, so you need a trusted external system that functions as a second brain, capturing ideas, organizing them, and surfacing them when relevant. The framework he called PARA, which organized everything into Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives, gave people a way to stop improvising their organizational logic and start building something consistent.
