Many of these seemed to be bellwethers when I collected them...
1x25
The exceptionally tasty new fermented foods being cooked up in the lab New Scientist
Maxwell's Demon
Maxwell's demon WikipediaMaxwell's demon and the relationship between information and irreversibility Patrice Camat at mappingignorance
Maxwell's Demon—A Historical Review Andrew Rex at mdpi.com (pdf)
Schismogenesis
Schismogenesis Wikipediaschismogenesis OED
Schismogenesis, Cultural Appropriation, Conformity, and Identity James Wallace Harris
...Graeber and Wengrow use the concept of schismogenetic to identify a human trait that is very worth recognizing — the urge to belong to a group by defining distinctive wanted traits. This explains children and adolescents who like to conform, to subcultures and hobbyists who love sharing a common interest, to ethnic, cultural, and nationalistic groups who fight cultural appropriation to preserve their unique identity, to political groups who want to maintain unity, and so on.papers re: schismogenesis Semantic Scholar
Culture Contact and Schismogenesis Gregory Bateson (1935) (pdf)
Riding the Trump Train to the End of the American Line Steve Genco at Medium
(quotes Thom Hartmann):
[Trump] is dismantling America's scientific leadership, destroying our universities and public schools, gutting our social safety net, rigging our future elections, legitimizing corruption for himself and his high-level cronies, building a network of concentration camps across America, and has created a massive federal police force of masked, unaccountable agents with a larger budget than Russia's entire military....America's cultural revolution is likely to have far more devastating consequences than China's. Externally, the world will learn to live without the USA at its center. New global leaders will emerge and America will suffer a long-lasting decline not unlike that which Britain has suffered under Brexit, just massively worse. How about internally? How will the American people weather this destruction of their nation?
(quotes Washington Post):
The top 10 percent of earners now drive about half of spending, according to Moody's, up from 36 percent three decades ago. These people will determine if the U.S. economy avoids a recession. These are households earning $250,000 or more, and they are largely doing just fine, buoyed by strong stock-market gains, mansions and rental properties that have shot up in value in recent years......the American economy is predominantly a services economy, not a goods economy (80% of American spending is on services, not "stuff"). This means that the US is highly dependent on imports for many of the goods it consumes.
...Today, the average American household carries $264,000 in mortgage debt, $45,000 in home equity debt, $38,000 in student loan debt, and $7,000 in credit card debt
...According to a 2020 study by the (soon to be de-funded) U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16–74 years old — that is, about 130 million people — lacked proficiency in literacy, and were unable to read above a sixth-grade level (source). Lacking the cognitive tools necessary to discriminate between truth and lies, these Americans remain susceptible to false promises of skilled con artists like Donald Trump
...In 1995, the minimum wage was $4.75/hour (source). In that year, there were approximately 365 billionaires worldwide, together holding approximately $892 billion in assets (source). By 2023 (only twenty-eight years later), the minimum wage was still a measly $7.25/hour. But there were now approximately 2,544 billionaires in the world, holding a total of $12 trillion in assets ...This is not simply increasing inequality, this is exploding inequality. Something is fundamentally broken in any economy that produces results like this.
...Donald Trump is a sociopath and malignant narcissist , probably also a sadist, who displays increasing signs of dementia. He has no interest in anything that does not further his three conscious life goals: personal wealth, constant attention, and sycophantic flattery. These conscious goals mask his one unconscious driving motivation: to protect himself from humiliation and exposure as the fraud and imposter he knows he is. This psychiatric diagnosis of Trump is necessary because it is impossible to explain his obsession with tariffs in any other context... Trump's affinity for tariffs is not the act of a man doing a favor for business interests. It is the act of a guy who has a weird idea in his head and has clung to that idea for decades because he believes he is the smartest man in the world.
...America's "safe haven" status was always based on three underlying conditions:
...The bottom line: the shambolic chaos of Donald Trump's program to overthrow American democracy is destroying America's status as a safe haven for foreign investment. It is ending the era of "dollar dominance"s in the global economy. The consequences of this are likely to be catastrophic for the American people, but might actually be beneficial for the rest of the world
- America operated the world's largest economy, with an 80-year track record of relative political stability and steady economic growth.
- The American economy operated under predictable rules and laws.
- The American economy was overseen by serious people with serious knowledge and experience.
The Crisis Behind the Crises Daniele Nanni at Medium
...you may have come across the term metacrisis. This terms points to something larger than any single catastrophe. Crises such as climate change, pandemics, nuclear risk, economic instability, political polarisation, and ecological collapse each have their own form and urgency. The idea of the metacrisis suggests that these crises are not separate. They share structural roots, reinforce one another, and together create a pattern that our institutions struggle to recognise, let alone resolve....One of the clearest explanations of the metacrisis comes from Daniel Schmachtenberger and the thinkers around him. They describe three interlocking dynamics that feed today's global risks.
The first is the obligation to grow. Modern economies are built on the expectation of continual expansion. On one hand, this has created a stream of benefits: technological innovation, new services, and rising material wealth. But it also creates pressures to design products that capture attention rather than serve wellbeing, or to extract resources at unsustainable rates. The very drive that makes venture capital possible is also what drives algorithmic manipulation in social media and exponential extraction from the biosphere.
Growth is rewarded, whether or not it is good.
The second dynamic is competition that races to the bottom. When companies, states, or individuals fear being outpaced, they optimise for narrow measures of success: market share, engagement, GDP, military budget. Even if all would prefer to slow down, no one dares to be the first.
The result is a trap.
Everyone must run faster on metrics that are disconnected from long-term wellbeing, simply to stay in place. The third is subtler but no less damaging: our bias towards compression and simplification. Institutions prefer confident statements and static models. Complex realities (ecological systems, cultural patterns, global supply chains) are squeezed into headlines, quarterly reports, and blueprints. But complex systems do not stand still, but they rather adapt, shift, and throw up surprises. By forcing them into rigid categories, we blind ourselves to nuance and entrench conflict, because people only see the simplified slice that fits their worldview.
Each of these dynamics is powerful on its own, and together they reinforce one another, making it almost impossible to reform one area without being pulled back by the others.
...A jet engine is complicated. It may have thousands of parts, but there is a blueprint, and once you have the design you can repeat the process with confidence. Society, culture, and ecology are complex. They have feedback loops, emergent properties, and elements that adapt in response to interventions. You cannot map them once and for all.
The metacrisis comes partly from our failure to appreciate this difference.
...solutions must be systemic and cultural. That begins with incentives. As long as markets and politics reward extraction, manipulation, and short-term growth, those behaviours will dominate. Realigning incentives means pricing externalities properly, rethinking what counts as success in both business and governance, and rewarding resilience and wellbeing rather than speed and volume.
Recipe for Newborn Rough Beast Timothy Burke
.
- Acquire one histrionic, repellently charismatic leader who is profoundly underestimated by enemies because he seems too ridiculous and crude to be the leader of a powerful country. Put in charge of far-right ethnonationalist political movement. Stage attempted coup, fail, escape with minimal consequences.
- Add established conservative political parties, churches and industrial leaders who are afraid of accelerating demands for social reform. Have them surrender power to far-right movement while thinking they are still in charge. Disabuse them of this illusion by ordering false criminal cases against them.
- Build semi-official paramilitary force to exert power in the streets against enemies both real and imagined while gaining firmer control over established military. Look for opportunities for theatrical confrontations.
- Add Horst Wessel assassination and big memorial afterwards.
- Add Reichstag Fire. (See list of suggested substitutions if no Reichstag available.)
- Make big speech to generals, demand unquestioning loyalty.
- Cancel elections and suspend constitution before you lose elections due to growing unpopularity.
- A big pinch of suppress dissent, seizure of all civic institutions, building of concentration camps. (Substitute big prisons and death squads if preferable.)
- Annex neighboring territories, make generally belligerant noises and intensify fear of internal persecution to avoid population noticing how much more miserable life has become.
- Optional: form axis with other totalitarian states.
...There's always been a faction among people who believe in the Second Coming who think they can force God to kick it off by doing what prophecy instructs, as if the Creator were a genie in a bottle. No matter what Scripture instructs. So just as much, we now live among people who want to live in a post-Constitutional land, an America of their own desire, scoured of everything they disdain. They aren't looking to prevent it, but to hasten it.
Why I am Here Instead of on Substack Doc Searls
This blog is mine. While it is hosted somewhere, it could be anywhere. The main thing: it isn't on a platform, and doesn't have to be.I publish it on my own, and syndicate it through RSS.
This puts me in a publishing ecosystem that is wide open and full of interop.
...Blogging is an ecosystem because it's open, as are ecosystems in nature. It's not sitting on somebody's platform or contained in somebody's silo.
...Blogging is just publishing, plus whatever grows naturally around that. It's a how, not a where, which makes it a much better what. And that what isn't "a social media app."
Anyway, my thinking isn't complete on this, and may never be. But what Hamish wrote in that newsletter turned me off to ever blogging on Substack. I like my freedom and independence.
The Measure of a True Visionary: Jane Goodall on the Indivisibility of Art and Science Marginalian
The aim of science is to illuminate the mysteries of nature and discover the elemental truths pulsating sublime and indifferent beneath the starry skin of the universe. The aim of art is to give us a language for wresting meaning from the truth and living with the mystery. Creativity in both is a style of noticing, of attending to the world more closely in order to love it more deeply, of seeing everything more and more whole — a word that shares its Latin root with "holy."This is why the greatest visionaries bend their gaze beyond the horizon of their discipline and of their era's givens to take in the vista of life as a totality of being.
...There are few visionaries in the history of our species who have changed our understanding of nature and our place in it more profoundly than Jane Goodall (April 3, 1934-October 1, 2025) — something she was able to do in large part because she never saw science as a walled garden separate from the wilderness of life.
...only an integrated human nature can begin to apprehend nature itself — that "great chain of causes and effects" in which "no single fact can be considered in isolation," in the lovely words of Alexander von Humboldt, who knew that artists too are all the greater for taking a passionate interest in the realities of nature subject to science. It was Humboldt who first conceived of nature as a system, who saw "the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter." It was Jane Goodall whose science revealed that kinship is the software the system runs on, and whose life reminds us that just the kinship within a creature — the unity and harmony between all parts and passions of a person is as essential to being fully alive as the kinship between creatures.
Sensations In The Mind Andy Ilachinski
Freudian slip of the century: "Let's stop attacking pedophiles" Victor Mair at Language Log
2x25
European Death Zones European Death Zones
Europe's population crisis: see how your country compares Guardian
Albanian Songs of Heroes Wikipedia
Academia: Enthusiasms! Enthusiasms! Timothy Burke
...You're going to sign over control over every detail of your life, accept that you'll have to betray the people you've chosen to be with and value, lose your values and self-respect, just to get some money that will likely be yanked from you anyway after you've put the collar on and agreed to servitude? What are you going to do with that money if you don't have any mission, if you don't have any values, if you have to betray people when you're told to. When you're likely to get whacked by a baseball bat the day that something goes wrong for the gangster, your new boss? You're not even buying your own future....I expect that some of those presidents and vice-presidents and trustees are going to take a pen in hand and sign on the dotted line. A few of them will even act like it was their idea. A few of them will swagger into meetings in the weeks after signing telling the faculty that academic freedom is an outmoded idea, that disciplines like history and anthropology and literary studies are really just too political and best we do without them, that what we need in this country is more loyalty to the President and to Jesus (in that order) and more respect for Western tradition (without any of that annoying history to confuse us about what that is, exactly). And holding the paper with the deal on it in their pockets, they'll smile for once when the faculty and the students and the alumni and maybe even some of the staff pipe up and object, and they'll yell—as if they're the ones holding the baseball bat—that the next person who talks back is fired, tenure or no tenure. The leaders who've been day-dreaming of that moment will be the ones who sign first, because they're not quite smart enough to see that the only person who is going to get told what to do is them, and the only person who is going to get blamed when some disobedient professor mentions colonialism or slavery in a survey course is the president, the vice-president, the trustee. The mob boss is too busy to go after the peons directly. That's the job of his university flunkies. I get nowhere unless the team wins." The employees are just getting fired, the students are just getting expelled. The president is going to be the one getting a baseball bat to the head.
It's a dumb thing to sign even for the self-interested. It's a dumb thing to sign even if academia, like American corporations, is showing that the fruits of neoliberalism are a complete inability to engage in collective action even when it is desperately and obviously beneficial. Public university leaders in red states have the merest smidgen of an excuse for at least pretending to consider the offer, because they're under direct political control of state governments that already hate the university as an idea and an institution. Private universities have no business getting within a million miles of signing. If they have trustees who insist, it's time to get rid of those trustees on the grounds that they are in breach of fiduciary duty.
3x25
The Atlas of American Gun Violence maps mania
Listen to legenday Bert Jansch live radio performance from 1969
AI map reveals vast scope of 'ghost forests' along east coast of US Science
...The ghost forest map is largely the result of work by Henry Yeung, a doctoral student at the University of Virginia (UVA). He spent hundreds of hours identifying more than 50,000 dead trees in aerial images of the coastline between South Carolina and Maine. He then used these hand-labeled trees to train a deep learning algorithm to spot their pale color and the distinctive shadows of their bare branches in other images.
Battery charging goes quantum Science
...Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries power consumer electronics and electric vehicles, making them an essential component of the modern economy. Although lithium-ion battery technology has improved continuously over the past decades, widespread adoption of electrified transportation requires charging in less than 15 min to be competitive with internal combustion engines. As a battery charges and discharges, lithium ions travel across the electrode-electrolyte interface. The rate at which lithium ions transfer is dictated by the structure and physical properties of electrolytes and lithium-storing electrodes. Yet, the exact chemical reaction mechanism underlying the insertion of lithium ions at the electrode-electrolyte interface remains elusive
4x25
Maps old and new Jon Udell
...The map on your phone isn't really a map, it's a tiny viewport that can see the whole planet at any resolution but never provides the context your brain needs to reason about spatial relationships. It'll get you from point A to point B but struggles to convey where B is in relation to C.
Histpry of Kerala Wikipedia
Questions of Law, not Just Politics Doc Searls. listing US federal government websites with partisan notices, and some without. The Hatch Act violated?
Secret Order Andy Ilachinski
...There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. (Chuck Palahniuk)
The Commander in Chief Is Not Okay Hobbledehoy
...The president talked at length, and his comments should have confirmed to even the most sympathetic observer that he is, as the kids say, not okay. Several of Hegseth's people said in advance of the senior-officer conclave that its goal was to energize America's top military leaders and get them to focus on Hegseth's vision for a new Department of War. But the generals and admirals should be forgiven if they walked out of the auditorium and wondered: What on earth is wrong with the commander in chief?...And so it went, as Trump recycled old rally speeches, full of his usual grievances, lies, and misrepresentations; his obsessions with former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama; and his sour disappointment in the Nobel Prize committee. ("They'll give it to some guy that didn't do a damn thing," he said.) He congratulated himself on tariffs, noting that the money could buy a lot of battleships, "to use an old term." And come to think of it, he said, maybe America should build battleships again, from steel, not that papier-mâché and aluminum stuff the Navy is apparently using now: "Aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away."
...The president had a speech waiting for him on the teleprompter, and now and then Trump would hunch his shoulders and apparently pick off a stray word or phrase from it, like a distracted hunter firing random buckshot from a duck blind. But Trump has always had difficulty wrestling Stephen Miller's labored neoclassical references and clunky, faux Churchillisms off a screen and into his mouth. Mostly, the president decided to just riff on his greatest hits to the stone-faced assembly.
Ohhhkayyyy.
5x25
Eight Takes: How to Tell a Truer Love Story Marginalian
Intentional for good Mark Liberman at Language Log
6x25
Popova on Kipling's daemon:
…Kipling's relationship with his daemon contains a wonderful antidote to what may be the greatest danger of success for any artist — becoming a template of yourself — entirely countercultural in our era of sequels and uninspired variations on a marketable theme:
How Trump is Demolishing U. S. Global Power and its World Order Alfred W McCoy at Informed Comment
By structuring relations among nations and influencing the cultures of the peoples who live in them, world orders can outlast even the powerful empires that created them. Indeed, some 90 empires, major and minor, have come and gone since the start of the age of exploration in the fifteenth century. In those same 500 years, however, there have been just four major world orders — the Iberian age after 1494; the British imperial era that began in 1815; the Soviet system that lasted from 1945 to 1991; and Washington's liberal international order, launched in 1945, that might, based on present developments, reach its own end somewhere around 2030.
Successful global empires driven by the hard power of guns and money have also required the soft power of cultural and ideological suasion embodied in a world order. Spain's bloody conquest of Latin America soon segued into three centuries of colonial rule, softened by Catholic conversion, the spread of the Spanish language as a lingua franca, and that continent's integration into a growing global economy. Once permanent mints were established in Mexico City, Lima, and Potosí during the seventeenth century, Spanish galleons would carry millions of minted silver coins — worth eight reales and thus known as "pieces of eight" — across the globe for nearly three centuries, creating the world's first common currency and making those silver coins the medium of exchange for everyone from African traders to Virginia planters.
...Mark Twain's classic futuristic assessment of American world power seems more appropriate. "It was impossible to save the Great Republic. It was rotten to the heart. Lust for conquest had long ago done its work," he wrote in an imagined history of this country from a far-off future. "Trampling upon the helpless abroad," he added, "had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home." After watching the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in 1898 descend into a bloodstained pacification program replete with torture and atrocities, Twain suggested that empire abroad would, sooner or later, bring autocracy at home — an insight Trump confirms with his every tweet, every speech, every executive order.
The Age of Enshittification Kyle Chayka at New Yorker
Tariffs on bonfire night Adam Tooze
Study Reveals America's Most Searched Slang Words 2025 Victor Mairv at Language Log
...A spokesperson for Unscramblerer.com commented on the findings: "Popular slang in 2025 continues to be heavily influenced by TikTok, Instagram, gaming, streaming, Gen Z and Alpha online communities. Trends from social media spread rapidly via memes and viral challenges. Fueled by technology our language adapts to new slang trends more rapidly than ever. Slang is a fascinating and fun mirror of our culture."
...the analysis creates an important shift of focus from the village to the larger social systems of interchange within which villages are located — the patterns of social intercourse that are associated with periodic markets, the flow of ideas associated with the circuits of martial arts specialists, and the likelihood of intersections between economic, cultural, and political processes rooted in the geometry of social exchange.
...A central and crucial aspect of Skinner's thinking is spatial; he was vastly ahead of the GIS revolution in the social sciences, in that he consistently tried to analyze China's social, economic, and cultural data in terms of the spatial patterns that it displayed decades before the corresponding desktop computation capability was available.
Lessons from the pandemic: the regional geography of distancing, vaccinations, and death Colin Woodard
On Social Media as a Public Servant Stephen Downes
The extension of my professional life into my personal life is pretty clear. We've already noted that my profession imposes limits on my social media. But even more to the point, in my case at least, my brain does not turn off when I leave the workplace. I'm pretty immersed in what I do. I think about it, I dream about it, it occupies me. And it has been made clear to me that even if I come up with an invention or idea related to my work on my own time, it's still owned by the Crown.
Think about that. Depending on how one defines my job, everything I do could be considered the property of the Crown. Everything is pretty clearly limited by the confidentiality policy, and also the IP policy. It's one of the major reasons I haven't published any books in my time at NRC — there's no real way to do it without involving the IP office, and they have opinions about how that would work.
What people don't often think about is how this works in the other direction — how my personal life flows into my work.
Now there is what we might call 'the unofficial unstated interpretation' of this which is essentially that I should not let my personal life enter into my professional life at all. Some would call this unfair — how can this flow be one way only? But from my personal perspective, the concern is more pragmatic: the expertise I bring to my job every day is more often than not the result of my personal life.
...Everything I post is related to my work. This is a practical statement and an economic statement. It's practical because my life, my philosophy and my work are all intertwined. You don't get 'connectivist Stephen' without 'photographer Stephen'. You don't get 'learning technology Stephen' without 'cyclist Stephen'. But it's also economic, because I suggested above, Crown ownership over my ideas isn't limited to the workplace.
Leavings Doc Searls
My heart seems fine, but I've had an ablation to stop occasional atrial fibrillation. I take blood thinners to prevent another pulmonary embolism (I had a scary one in '08, but none since). I have a bit of macular degeneration. My genetics are long on longevity (my paternal grandma lived to almost 108), but I have some risk factors as well. The main one, however, is plain old mortality. We're here for the ride, but the ride ends. And I know that.
So I'll be devoting more of my bloggings to surfacing valuable lessons and stories left in my care by those now gone, and to making clearer what I'm bringing to generations after mine.
Here is one of the biggest lessons: life really is short. Those 78 years went by fast. And each year goes by faster, since it's a narrower wedge of my life's pie. I wish everyone a long life, and also knowledge that the decades, years, or minutes one has left will still be too few. And that this is how life is designed.
The War Over Defense Tech Susannah Glickman at The New York Review of Books
...Sankar is the CTO and executive vice-president of Palantir, the start-up cofounded in 2003 by Peter Thiel that specializes in a peculiar hybrid of big-data manipulation and McKinsey-style consulting work. Many of Sankar's Palantir colleagues and peers at other Thielworld start-ups—notably Anduril, which bills itself as a pioneering disruptor in software-heavy military hardware—have advanced a similar criticism of the neoliberal state, bemoaning its declining interventions in manufacturing and research and lambasting the legacy defense firms, often nicknamed "primes," for their sclerosis, inefficiency, and alleged monopolistic behavior. The innovative, capitalist spirit and manly vitalism that defined the defense department through the cold war is, for this group, long gone. The task of the hour, as Sankar writes in "The Defense Reformation," is therefore nothing less than "to resurrect the American Industrial Base."
..."The most important and malleable weapons system," Sankar writes, is not missiles or other military hardware but software, by which he presumably means technologies like large-scale data manipulation, narrow forms of computerized optimization applied to "smart" weapons systems and robotics, sensors, autonomous weapons systems, and artificial intelligence.
Investing lavishly in such technology and teaching "our warriors...to wield the software industrial base to maximize lethality" will catalyze what Sankar has elsewhere called a "software-driven reindustrialization" akin to previous industrial revolutions based around water, steam, coal, or oil. For a range of figures in the emergent defense-tech sector to which Palantir and Anduril belong, this will require wrenching guaranteed contracts from the bloated primes and promoting competition by having branches of the armed services bid against one another, not to mention allowing even more sales elsewhere. It will also require binding the state closer to a range of tech giants—especially firms like Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft—that have thus far, on this view, neglected their patriotic duty to engage in defense work and profited from feminized "ad-tech" instead.
...This new Silicon Valley defense-tech and finance group—their grievances, ideology, and policy visions—has become central to Trump's second term. Several defense-tech boosters have assumed powerful positions in the administration, most notably one of Anduril's former senior directors, Michael Obadal, who was just confirmed as Army under secretary, the second-highest ranking civilian official in the Army. Since January Palantir and Anduril have received many billions in contracts, with more on the way. ICE has contracted Palantir since 2011 for software it uses to enforce sanctions and make arrests, and in April signed a new $30 million contract with the company to, in The New York Times's words, "build a platform to track migrant movements in real time." Presumably the deal will help ICE's director, Todd Lyons, realize a vision he laid out that same month at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, where he said that he wants his agency to run like Amazon Prime, "but with human beings."
These trends show no signs of stopping. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed the Department of Defense—now calling itself the Department of War—to increase its spending on software, which, he stresses, is "at the core of every weapon and supporting system we field to remain the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world." Trump has signed executive orders designed to ease restrictions on defense exports and speed up and reduce oversight of the DoD's acquisition process. In September the army announced a new venture-capital-style model for procurement called "Fuze." Firms like Palantir and their new constellation of Silicon Valley funders stand to benefit handsomely from these developments. "We're moving to a software-driven, autonomous...battlefield," the managing director for a prominent private equity firm said at a defense summit earlier this year. "Well, if you want daily software upgrades, you gotta pay software margins.""
8x25
DxO PhotoLab 9 vs Lightroom Part 1: Interface and Library Terry McDonald at Luminous Landscape [Lightroom alternative?]
10x25
Quantum Compositions Andy Ilachinski
How Not to Be a Victim of Success Marginalian
The complicated legacy of antibiotics Audrey R Glynn at Science
...Shaw excels at illustrating how science and politics collide. His account of broad-spectrum antibiotics captures what might be called the mid-20th century's "guns blazing" approach: a push to produce drugs that could kill nearly all bacteria, despite limited understanding of microbial ecology. In 1959, hospitals using broad-spectrum agents unexpectedly reported increased mortality from bacterial infections, and some scientists warned of their destructive impact on microbial flora. Yet drug companies promoted them as cure-alls and encouraged indiscriminate prescribing. This observation drives home the point that antibiotics were not just medical tools, they were commercial products shaped by marketing and profit motives.
Equally powerful is Shaw's discussion of antibiotic use in farming. After 1950, he reveals, antibiotics reshaped global meat production, first as US Food and Drug Administration-approved growth promoters and later by enabling concentrated animal feeding operations. "Antibiotics became a crucial cog in a vast new agricultural machine," Shaw writes, with animals "slaughtered on the altar of economic growth." What began in the United States soon spread worldwide, where antibiotics fueled unsanitary and inhumane but profitable modes of food production, with consequences we are still living with today.
The book also surprises in its cultural reach. Shaw writes, for example, that antibiotics used in tuberculosis sanatoriums sometimes triggered euphoria, leading to the serendipitous discovery of compounds first called "psychic energizer[s]" (later "antidepressants").
...Overall, Dangerous Miracle succeeds brilliantly as an engaging and incisive history of antibiotics, capturing paradigm-shattering breakthroughs and political upheavals. Its call to rethink the patent system is essential. But the battle against antimicrobial resistance will require not only a reinvigoration of antibiotic research but also a broadening of our therapeutic imagination. As history, the book is a triumph. As a roadmap, it left me with questions—and perhaps that is the point.
12x25
Where's Blockchain Anyway? What Happened? Giles Crouch at Medium
Our answer was the creation of culture. This includes language, writing, social governance, norms, behaviours, customs, rituals, systems of reciprocity (economics), the arts, militaries, meaning-making and, creating technologies. It is foundational to who we are as human beings.
For technologies to succeed in our cultures, they need collective rituals and shared symbols that become embedded in our societies. Like the telephone, printing press, smartphones. The original ritual that gave blockchain its cultural momentum was cryptocurrency. Like its own language terms such as "HODL" and more. It would be crypto that became the downfall (in the short term) of blockchain.
Blockchain and crypto communities created all these rituals, but they became too exclusive, too tribal, rather than inclusive. They created in-groups rather than out-groups rather than a societal idea that brought people in broader society in.
It created structural opposition as anthropologist Lévi-Strauss called it. Blockchain quickly became encoded in broader society a "crypto=speculation=greed" as opposed to "traditional finance=stability". Blockchain's association to crypto and sticking its nose up to broader society left a sour candy taste in peoples mouths. It was almost like these crypto and blockchain idealists began acting like some elite, snooty club. Not a way to get culture interested. Blockchain became structurally trapped in the wrong opposition.
...Blockchain was (and is, for most people) too hard for most to get their head around. In anthropology terms this is massive cultural friction and viscosity. People were like "what the fuck is a distributed ledger? How do computers "mine" for coin? What does that even mean?" When the iPhone launched, it had zero-viscosity and friction. People just "got it" cause it just worked. Blockchain is the opposite.
...For blockchain to thrive in the world again, it may have to lose or quietly shove aside, the very word "blockchain" and focus on the solution and the brand names savvy blockchain developers can create. It needs to be re-ritualised with new symbols, new heroes and most importantly, a new narrative, creating shared-stories we can all buy into. More like "Intel Inside" did, when they created a shared story that PCs with Intel chips were infrastructure that made them better. It was rather brilliant positioning.
What Happened to Ohio? Beth Macy at The Atlantic
...Even though Urbana inspired my work, until Mom began her descent into dementia in 2015, I rarely returned home, save for holidays and class reunions
...During trips home to see her, I began to notice another kind of decline. Something was rotting beneath the surface of my postcard-cute hometown, and its descent had begun long before my mother's. The newspaper I used to deliver and later wrote for no longer employed paper girls like me, or much of anyone. With a newsroom of two, the Urbana Daily Citizen largely fills its pages with press releases and high-school sports. Published for decades by a local family, it's now owned by a Texas-based media company.
...The family's grown daughter still lived at home, along with her fiancé and two kids. When I asked what year she graduated from Urbana High, she said she'd been homeschooled by her mom, a housekeeper at nearby Urbana University, before it closed in 2020.
High-resolution 'fingerprint' images reveal a weakening Atlantic Ocean circulation (AMOC)
Ocenography article Stefan Reinsdorf
The future of the world economy beyond globalization - or, thinking with soup Adam Tooze
The world economy as envisioned at Bretton Woods in 1944, was composed of "hardened" national economies, which in that form had not really existed in the late 19th century. The lego bricks out of which the postwar order was assembled, were pressed into shape during the crises of the interwar period and the war economy of World War II.
...by the 1980s at the latest, as a result of a new wave of trade and capital market liberalization, the 1940s vision of the national economies and the world economy assembled out of them was under massive pressure.
Already in the 1970s a debate had begun about the role of multinationals, a tradition continued down to the present day by agencies like UNCTAD. The 1990s Asian financial crisis caused soul-searching about the adequacy of international economics. By the 2000s even at the very heart of orthodoxy a fundamental reconsideration was beginning about what the world economy actually consisted of. As Hyun Song Shin of the BIS argued in a series of classic papers, the world economy began to be reenvisioned as a series of national economic islands (lego bricks), and more and more as a mesh of interlocking private balance sheets.
...What is clear in retrospect is that that vision of a massively networked, privatized world economy not just as a sophisticated statistical description, but as an affirmative model of how the world should be organized, entered a phase of crisis in 2008.
...However giant they may have been, the macroeconomic policy experiments of 2008 and 2020 had no corporatist underpinnings. The aspiration of the Green New Deal, Build Back Better and even the IRA was in fact to bring back into existence the balance of class forces that once propelled macroeconomic policy.
The interest groups politics of tariffs is what national economies once built out of. In the US in 2025 we are witnessing the bizarre spectacle of tariff politics conducted on a Presidential whim, almost entirely without serious interest group politics.
So, if the future is neither the retrofuturism of restored national economies, nor the 1990s and 2000s vision of a privatized world economy of interlocking balance sheets, then what will the future hold? My own personal guess is some kind of patchy, disintegrated globalism, a condition captured by a phrases like "globality beyond globalization"
...Why not try imagining the future shape of the world economy neither as a neat assemblage of robust bricks, nor as a mesh of interlocking balance sheets, but as something more akin to a lumpy potage, or a noodle and dumpling soup.
Everything is suspended in a viscous fluid of footloose money and more or less mobile labour and capital. There are occasional pieces of nutrition to bite into, nuggets of technological systems, good brands or institutions. Then there are the tangled threads of noodles, the networks. Here or there you find an actual hunk of high-value meat — a petrostate, for instance, or a world city like new york — or even a wonton, an object with an distinct outside and inside, with some internal structure, unlike the rest of the soup.
As strange as it may seem to imagine the world economy as dumpling and noodle soup, it seems a more plausible image than a return to lego brick national economies, or all-encompassing hyperglobalism. .
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An intimate portrait of the iconic but elusive English folksinger Annie Briggs Hobbledehoy
What the Founders Would Say Now Fintan O'Toole at The Atlantic
Milen Radev via boing boing
Ancient chewing gum could reveal how early men and women split up their chores Science
Chicago's beloved rat hole' was actually made by a squirrel Science
Scientists reopen the case of "splatatouille"
TOWARD A GRAMMAR OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: RHETORIC AND ATTENTION
IN THE NETWORKED IMAGINARY Damien Smith Pfister (pdf)
9 Algorithms That Changed the Future Wikipedia
Geospatial Thinking: An Introduction to Geospatial Thinking and Open Source GIS University of Washington
On zombies, struldbrugs, and other horrors of the scientific literature
May R. Berenbaum PNAS
Yet there is a cost of expunging papers that have apparently outlived their usefulness—doing so risks losing the chance of restoring their utility in new contexts made possible by future scientific advances. Although most papers accrue the bulk of their citations within five years of publication, others remain ignored for decades until, due to a change in the state of knowledge, often in a new field, they gain (or regain) relevance. Van Raan (20) coined the term "Sleeping Beauty phenomenon" for this revivification, and Ke et al. (21) created a metric, the beauty coefficient, that takes into account the number of citations received by a paper and the length of time after publication that the citations are received. Among their top 10 Sleeping Beauties is Pearson (22), a paper that was effectively overlooked for more than a century. The 1901 paper accumulated only two citations in its first 20 years; in 2021, the total number of accumulated citations is approaching 5,000 in the Web of Science. The paper, "On lines and planes of closest fit to systems of points in space," had applications in the development of principal component analysis for small datasets, but it gained new relevance in the 21st century when computers became sufficiently sophisticated and accessible to apply principal component analysis to large datasets (23).
This is not to say that all of Karl Pearson's work has weathered the century as well as his 1901 late bloomer. Although a gifted mathematician and statistician, Pearson was among a coterie of eugenicists dedicated to twisting science to demonstrate the inherent superiority of the White race and the value of maintaining racial purity. He founded a journal, Annals of Eugenics, at least in part to further that objective (24). In its inaugural issue, in 1925, Pearson and coauthor Margaret Moul (25, 26) published a two-part treatise on "The problem of alien immigration into Great Britain, illustrated by an examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children," the "purport" of which was "to discuss whether it is desirable in an already crowded country like Great Britain to permit indiscriminate immigration" (25), and the conclusion of which was that these particular alien immigrants "will develop into a parasitic race" (26).
Although chock-full of measurements and statistics, the paper was criticized on methodological grounds almost immediately after publication, and subsequent studies failed to corroborate its findings; Delzell and Poliak (24) concluded that, "even given the standards of the day, Pearson and Moul's study lacked the rigor necessary for the strong conclusions of Jewish inferiority they make throughout their work."
In 1955, Annals of Eugenics became Annals of Human Genetics, reflective of increasing discomfort with the status of eugenics as a scientific discipline. I could read Annals of Eugenics because Annals of Human Genetics, University College London, and Blackwell Publishing digitized its full run (1925–1954). Instead of opting to ignore its existence, this group did us all a favor by preserving this example of problematical science. It serves as a reminder that, along with Sleeping Beauties, the literature contains slumbering monsters, and part of the iterative process of scientific research is calling out and remembering the mistakes so as not to repeat them.
Chapter 26 of Gulliver's Travels
Struldbrugg Wikipedia
Annie Dillard on How to Live Marginalian
Down in Dyess Ben Nadler at Contingentmagazine.org (Johnny Cash)
16x25
Urbana University Urbana University in Ohio closing due to coronavirus challenges, low enrollment (2020)
Former college campus in Urbana, Ohio, will house program to develop athletes (2022)
Urbana University to Transition to Prep Academy (2024)
City of Urbana takes investment group to court over old Urbana University campus (2025)
This pattern continued throughout the summer. Eventually, all responses from the investment group would cease. By September, citations for 20 buildings, totalling 160 violations, were reported to UIG. Citations stacked upon citations. Fines piled upon fines.
In January 2025, members of the UIG appealed to the Champaign County Common Pleas Court and were dismissed.
Since then, the City of Urbana has made several unsuccessful attempts to contact individuals associated with UIG to seek an agreement regarding occupancy in the interim. Despite open Fire Code violations, UIG directly stated that they will continue to occupy and use the facilities. Specifically, "12-14 basketball players and a couple of coaches living on the premises." These occupants were seen as recently as March 2025. As of May 21, 2025, re-inspection shows all of the open violations remain uncorrected.
On Friday, June 20, the City of Urbana filed a complaint for injunctive relief and damages against Jared Pitt and the Urbana Investment Group, LLC., in the Champaign County Common Pleas Court, seeking remedies for Fire Code violations or a lien to be put on the property. They seek payment of the initial civil fines of $17,500, plus fines accumulated at a rate of $100 per day per violation since January 8, 2025.
Only recently did attempts to care for the facilities begin with mowing and bailing the grass in the open campus areas. These bales, however, and staged on campus, and fallen tree branches and limbs remain spread throughout.
I Feel, Therefore I Understand: Humboldt on the Essence of Science and How to Read the Poetry of Nature Marginalian
17x25
The Pivot Charlie Stross
It's pretty clear now that a lot of the unrest we're seeing—and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition that looks to be more or less irreversible at this point.
...The 20th century left us with three obvious problems: automobile driven suburban sprawl and transport infrastructure, violent dissatisfaction among the people of colonized oil-producing nations, and a massive burp of carbon dioxide emissions that is destabilizing our climate.
...the polycrisis: nobody can fix what's wrong using existing tools. Consequently many people think that what's going wrong can't be fixed. The existing wealthy elites (who have only grown increasingly wealthy over the past half century) derive their status and lifestyle from the perpetuation of the pre-existing system. But as economist Herbert Stein observed (of an economic process) in 1985, "if it can't go on forever it will stop".
...neoliberalism was repurposed within a couple of decades as a stalking-horse for asset-stripping, in which the state was hollowed out and its functions outsourced to the private sector—to organizations owned by the existing elites, which turned the public purse into a source of private profit. And we're now a couple of generations into this process, and our current rulers don't remember a time when things were different. So they have no idea how to adapt to a changing world.
Cory Doctorow has named the prevailing model of capitalist exploitation enshittification. We no longer buy goods, we buy services (streaming video instead of owning DVDs or tapes, web services instead of owning software, renting instead of buying), and having been captured by the platforms we rent from, we are then subject to rent extraction: the service quality is degraded, the price is jacked up, and there's nowhere to go because the big platforms have driven their rivals into bankruptcy or irrelevance
...If we can just get through the rest of this decade without widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete collapse of the international financial system caused by black gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s.
But this year, 2025, is the pivot. This can't go on. So it's going to stop. And then—
...In a truly integrated life, there are no mistakes — only experience, and the narrative we superimpose on experience to slip between our lips the sugar pill of coherence. There are as many possible stories to tell about an experience as there are ways to paint a cloud, to walk a forest, to love.
...It's interesting that the definitions as given in dictionaries (e.g. Wiktionary and Merriam-Webster) are consistent with both the old and new patterns of use. The moral evaluation of attitudes and actions, and the distinction between actors and actions, seem to have shifted while lurking beneath the lexicographic surface.
Ed Rorie comments:
J. Alfred Prufrock causes himself unbearable suffering by attributing intentionality to the innocently quotidian behavior of women in social situations:
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question...
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.
Considering the Socratic notion of a personal daemon that Aristotle popularized — an "unknown superfactor" of divine origin that steers you toward right action by mercilessly flagging wrong choices
One of the clauses in our contract was that I should never follow up "a success," for by this sin fell Napoleon and a few others.
Kipling distills the central tenet of allowing your daemon to serve you:
When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey
...While even the most powerful of history's empires eventually fall, such world orders entwine themselves in the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. They influence the languages people speak, the laws that order their lives, and the ways that so many millions of us work, worship, and even play. World orders might be much less visible than the grandeur of great empires, but they have always proven both more pervasive and more persistent.
Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment. "Enshittification," coined by the prolific technology critic and author Cory Doctorow, is one of these. Doctorow came up with the phrase, in 2022, to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time. Google Search had become enshittified, showing ads and product links instead of relevant website results. TikTok had become enshittified, artificially "heating" specific videos so that some would go viral, inspiring copycats and goosing engagement while frustrating creators whose output didn't get the same treatment. Twitter would soon become royally enshittified in its reincarnation as X, losing its status as a global town square, as it tipped into Muskian extremism and rewarded grifters and meme accounts over legitimate news sources. Spotify, iPhones, Adobe software, e-mail inboxes—it was hard to think of a platform or device that wasn't seeing a decay in user experience. Wasn't technology supposed to endlessly improve in the long run?
Gillian Tett, from Financial Times:
"Remember, remember the fifth of November!" … tariffs on bonfire night.
Here we go again. American markets have already faced endless shocks this year: the April 2 "liberation day" tariffs; US President Donald Trump's attacks on the Federal Reserve; and this week's government shutdown. Now another drama looms: on November 5, the Supreme Court will consider whether Trump's tariffs, introduced under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), are legal — or not. If they are deemed to be illegal, there is a chance the White House may have to repay billions of dollars of tariff revenue to businesses, creating trade and fiscal chaos. It could also undermine Trump's approach to geoeconomics, the use of economic policy for statecraft, since he currently assumes he can act without asking Congress. But if the April 2 tariffs are judged lawful, some legal scholars think that Trump's powers will then dramatically expand, enabling him to impose taxes or capital controls in a unilateral, almost monarchical, manner without asking Congress. So November 5 could be momentous. And this creates an unintended irony. That date is also "bonfire night" in Britain, when kids burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Catholic seditionary who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. You could not make it up... the case is so wobbly that some conservatives question why the White House team ever invoked IEEPA at all, instead of section 232. The answer probably lies in political anthropology rather than jurisprudence: Trump's team has a power structure more akin to a royal court than anything that adheres to 21st-century norms; and his closest courtiers, such as Stephen Miller, have patchy legal training, while junior staffers fear admitting mistakes.
6-7...Bop...Mogging...Huzz...Chopped...
Skinner was insistent that social data need to be analyzed in spatial terms; he believed that many social patterns will be best understood when they are placed in their geographical context. And the reason for this is straightforward: human social activity itself is structured in space, through transport systems, habitation patterns, the circuits of merchants and necromancers, and the waterways that integrate social and economic systems in pre-modern societies. He also believed that identifying the right level of geographical aggregation is an important and substantive task; for example, he argued against the idea of making economic comparisons across provinces in China, on the basis that provincial boundaries emerged as a result of a series of administrative accidents rather than defining "natural" boundaries of human activity.
..."it's impossible to completely separate one's personal and professional life." It's worth exploring what this means.
...at 78 (still a year younger than the current US president), I am also more mortal than ever, and I know it, especially since I figure at least a third of the guys I grew up with are now gone, or ahead of me in the checkout line.
Silicon Valley firms like Palantir and Anduril are threatening the foundations of US industrial policy even as they call for reenergizing it. What made their current bid for power possible?
A self is a personal mythos — a story through which we sieve the complexity and condradictions of lived experience for coherence. The cruelest price of success — that affirmation of the self by the world — is the way it can ossifty the story of person, ensnare them into believing their own myth. In this regard, learning to live with your success can be as challenging as learning to live with your failure — both are continual acts of courage and resistance to the petrification of personhood into a selfing story, a refusal to measure your soul by the world's estimation.
The first antibiotic became commercially available less than 90 years ago, with resistance emerging almost immediately. In 2024, the United Nations General Assembly declared antibiotic resistance "one of the most urgent global health threats." The drugs are scientific marvels, argues British biologist Liam Shaw in his new book, Dangerous Miracle, but inseparable from capitalism, power struggles, and misuse. Shaw tells the story of antibiotics with clarity and flair, from penicillin's serendipitous discovery and wartime mobilization to the combination therapy that saved his own grandfather from tuberculosis. Throughout, he reminds readers that antibiotics are not abstractions: They have been a large factor in defining modern life.
The ultimate arbiter of all technologies, from the stone axe to Generative AI today, is culture. Always has been and as long as we have culture, which we will, it always will be. When I say culture, I mean it in the context of humanity's 'operating system" if you will. We recognised hundreds of thousands of years ago, that biological evolution was too slow for our survival.
begins:
There was a time when nearly every airplane made in America used lights manufactured in Urbana, Ohio, my hometown. When the economy was good, my mom soldered those lights at Grimes Manufacturing, founded in 1933 by a high-school dropout who ended up inventing the airplane-light navigation system still in use to this day. By the time I was growing up, in the '70s, everyone called him Old Man Grimes because he basically ran the town, serving as its largest employer and, for some years, its mayor. He gave away Ohio State scholarships, bought radio equipment for the police department, and supported the construction of the hospital where I was born.
...The term "world economy", or Weltwirtschaft, first came into use in the late 19th century in debates between economists in the German-speaking world. One school sought to use graphic tools like maps to describe a world economic organism. Others focused on the institutions and structures created by the competition of Empires. This was same milieu of thinking about "world politics" that also gave us the concept of Weltkrieg i.e. world war. More hardline neoclassical minds refused such substantive conceptions of the world economy, focusing instead on the more abstract representation yielded by the mesh of price quotations for major commodities.
...The underlying hardware technology of this first in a series of devices is presumably a not-phone that sits in your pocket, around your neck, or on your wrist: A palm-sized, screenless, "always-on" not-phone ambient assistant. It listens to what you say and hear, ideally sees what you see, watches what your smartphone does, and is ready to respond with the right information when you say "computer..." but then also do a little bit more—but not overtalk, and only intervene where people will be happy that it decided to speak up.
...To summarize: Since 1770, the modern economy changes by puncture, not glide. Every thirty years these days, a sector explodes—lifting productivity, reorganizing firms, and scrambling career ladders. Roughly four-fifths inch forward, while one-fifth quintuples and redefines the frontier. Those leading sectors—steam, mass production, information—rebuild institutions and stress politics as they march. Most people experience partial gains in consumption and workflow; the unlucky fifth face brutal displacement unless they pivot fast. Past waves forged industry, mass production, suburbia, microelectronics; each remapped the social order, often painfully. Average living standards rise, but the distribution is jagged, and the politics volatile. Today's leading edge runs through data centers and cognitive work: prompts, context engineering, evaluation, and synthesis. The liberal arts—long buffered—now sit at ground zero. Survival means translation: turn judgment, clarity, and taste into leverage over machines and markets, while rebuilding public capacity to manage the turbulence.
Birch bark tar, used as chewing gum and glue, provides rare window into life 6000 years ago
Struldbrugs—Forgotten but Not Gone
There's no name for papers that remain in the literature yet cease to be cited, ostensibly due to obsolescence. Drawing inspiration from the ranks of the literary undead, I'd suggest "struldbrug," a creation of Jonathan Swift. In chapter 10 of Gulliver's Travels, author Swift (18) described the residents of the nation of Luggnagg who are immortal yet continue to age and, upon reaching the age of 80, are pronounced legally dead. Subject to normal aging up until that point, they then start decaying at an accelerated pace. An exemplar of a struldbrug might be the 1953 paper published by Linus Pauling and Robert Corey titled "A proposed structure for the nucleic acids," which Perkel (19) pointed out has been "known to be wrong for most of its nearly 60-year life—and yet remains in the literature."
A particular description of the Struldbrugs
Popova quotes Walt Whitman: Not so the other animals. "They do not sweat and whine about their condition," Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass (which is philosophy and poetry and scripture and self-help in one), "they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things."
...Dyess was not just any Arkansas town; it was the Dyess Colony, one of dozens of federal projects designed to aid farmers who lost their livelihoods during the Great Depression. Established by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1934, the colony provided housing and farmland for 500 families. Tenants could eventually buy these properties at cost from the government... The Cashes were one of 500 families who moved to the Dyess Colony
Urbana University Wikipedia
Pro Development Institute (PDI) was to be a professional-grade development center to prepare high school and college athletes for the NCAA and Professional leagues. Until recently, the only growth witnessed on campus was the grass. According to court documents, in November 2023, UIG was notified of several fire code violations in the buildings of the old school. They were advised that no occupation of the buildings could occur until after these violations were corrected. The group planned on hosting a football camp in January 2024, but couldn't because of the fire code violations. Again, in March 2024, they requested temporary occupation of the buildings. Upon reinspection, once again, no corrections were made, and occupancy was denied..
...I'm calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.
...part of a wider cultural appreciation for self-directed action and intentionality (also glossed as "agency") and, like so many memes, embodies a particular response to the political and social world we live in. In this case, it's a world in which many believe that meaningful action is obstructed by burdensome procedure, either in the form of sclerotic state institutions or oppressive cultural diktats. The reminder that "you can just do things," then, has accrued a totemic power. The phrase is used by both left and right, by CEOs and shitposters alike, and is often accompanied by exhortations to become "more agentic" or "high agency." The advice welds together self-help cliché, entrepreneurial spirit, and cod-Nietzschean will to power into a single maxim: you can do it if you really try. That so many feel the need to reiterate this claim so frequently makes you wonder what has troubled their sense of agency in the first place.
18x25
Sarah Kendzior on How America Lost Its Guardrails Hobbledehoy
Vibration of Quanta Andy Ilachinski
Death and Capitalism (Part 1 of 4) Hannah Forsyth at Crooked Timber
19x25
World Atlas of Ecperience Jean Klare & Louise van Swaaij (pdf)
Sarah Kendzior: A member of "antifa"? It's awful hard to join a thing that's not there Hobbledehoy
The ecology of a merger Nate Sowder at6 uxdesign.cc ...What he was really searching for was what he called the 'pattern that connects'. Every living system, he argued, survives by registering difference — the small shifts that signal when something in the environment has changed. To Bateson, information was a relationship that needed to be maintained. It wasn't something you could create and store away.
He saw life as a constant negotiation between something you are aware of and something you let drift. The moment a system stops sensing its surroundings, it begins to lose the capacity to learn. And what we often call stability is just the early phase of decline. In other words, if you aren't working toward something, you're automatically moving away from it.
That was the core of his thinking. He replaced the language of control with the language of relationship. A forest, an organization, even a mind. Each stays 'alive' by keeping the conversation open between its parts.
20x25
The Long & Wild History of Tech Bubbles" Giles Crouch
French doctors proclaimed that women would develop "bicycle face" a form of dementia where they'd develop an irresistible desire to hurt other women cyclists. Divorce cases cited bicycle obsession. Cigar use fell by 700 million per year, tailors lost work. Yet in the end, the bicycle became a technology of emancipation for women, even influencing a change in women's clothing to better suit riding.
...Each new technology tends to reduce friction in society (though not always, as new frictions can also emerge) like time, distance and effort for tasks. So society has to recalibrate itself around these new changes.
...While these hype cycles are often wild and woolly and a bit crazy, they're just part of how we bring technologies into our societies. No revolutionary technology has ever escaped this social cycle. There's no reason to expect AI will and there are signs things are likely entering the moral panic phase. Economic disruption hasn't, contrary to the hype, quite caused economic disruption at scale (maybe it has but three years is not enough actual data to prove any major trend.) Normalisation of AI, specifically GenAI, will happen.
With these hype cycles, we also know that new technologies are never neutral, all have unintended consequences and most can have dual purposes. We also know that the ultimate arbiter of all technologies is culture.
Three Whole Weeks Alone
Jenny Diski LRB (1992)
A 65,000-Year History Map Australian Broadcasting Corporation Deep Time project
21x25
The extraordinary influence of the lymphatic system on our health New Scientist
The Fight Over Eccentric Arkansas Photographer Mike Disfarmer Continues PetaPixel
"To be" is to Inter-Be Andy Ilachinski
Hear The Rheingans Sisters perform "Devils" Live in London Hobbledehoy
TextEdit and the Relief of Simple Software Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker
Here's what AI does in summary of MYKeywords:
James Marriott on the Post-Literate Society Honest Broker
The Muscular Compassion of Paper Girl" Grace Byron at The New Yorker
23x25
What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality (snagged from New Scientist) (it's that good...)
Chilling book exposes true cost of tech bros' immortality dreams New Scientist
Senses of the Mind Andy Ilachinski
...
A master who puts his senses to sleep is able
...
Do you know what you are?
- Rumi (1207 - 1273)
Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs Cory Doctorow
24x25
A 3D View of Our Warming Seas mapsmania
Famed Cartoonist Jules Feiffer Taught Us to Fail Up and Never Surrender Robert Lipsyte at Informed Comment
ceilidh sesquiotica
The Kasina Connection Astral Codex Ten
Visual Memory
Visual Memory EBSCO
The Role of Meaning in Visual Memory: Face-Selective Brain Activity Predicts Memory for Ambiguous Face Stimuli
Timothy F Brady et al. Journal of Neuroscience (2019)
Eidetic memory Wikipedia
Visual Memory Stephen J Luck and Andrew Hollingworth Oxford (2008)
Visual Memory Systems Andrew Hollingworth and Stephen J Luck (pdf of Ch 1, above)
Trump says all Canada trade talks terminated' over ad criticising tariffs Guardian
Trump hates this Canadian ad so much>/a> boing boing
25x25
The Intentional Collapse Douglas Rushkoff at Substack
(of the uber-rich who hired him to futurize): ...So the object of the game, to them, was to acquire enough money and technology to outrun the impacts of their own businesses and technologies. If they had a social media company whose net effect was to make people crazy and break democracy, then the thing to do is create a fortified island paradise that doesn't depend on a functioning democracy back at home.
...Convinced an inevitable collapse is coming—private bunkers aside—their best answer for survival in the chaos is to get as rich as possible, buying up as much land and assets as possible, while also building a military force capable of controlling the hordes of us who won't have enough food or shelter or medicine. Even if it means enacting policies that hasten the collapse, that's preferable to losing control over one's monopoly on the remaining spoils. As long as the edifice is coming down, may as well do controlled demolition.
So they invest in crypto while devaluing the dollar, lower their own taxes while raising taxes on the poor through tariffs. The tariffs simultaneously bankrupt farmers who can't find a market, and see their land purchased by private equity who can then rehire them as sharecroppers. Put as many people as possible out of work by firing government employees, which leads to a cascade of failures of the businesses they patronize. Cut healthcare and other programs, throwing more people into poverty. Basically, they looked at Naomi Klein's "disaster capitalism"—the way that businesses profit off disasters—and realized they may as well create those disasters. As state and local governments go bankrupt, sovereign wealth funds and other investors can buy up the ports, bridges, highways, state parks...privatizing public assets so they can own rather than share what remains. It's how Putin and the oligarchs who supported him took over Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Except in this case, the collapse will be orchestrated for the purpose.
Fish in the Wrong Place: Aquatic Colonialism Oliver Cussen at LRB, reviews Corey Ross Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World and James C Scott In Praise of Floods: the untamed river and the life it brings
...Like much of Scott's later work, In Praise of Floods is often self-consciously provocative and deliberately reductive. He concedes, begrudgingly, that river engineering has brought some benefits — to health, agriculture and navigation &mdash but argues that its main legacy has been ‘iatrogenic' disorders: the erasure of wetlands, the loss of habitats, the extinction of species and the increasing likelihood of destructive floods. There is a certain charm to Scott's attempt to give voice to non-human species, but his eagerness to shock readers out of their anthropocentrism results in some questionable rhetorical choices, such as his description of modern agriculture as 'a kind of horticultural and mammalian apartheid'. Political distinctions and causal arguments start to get fuzzy. The draining of the Fens, Mussolini's reclamation of the Pontine Marshes and Saddam Hussein's clearance of the wetlands of southern Iraq 'are only three examples of what has been a worldwide process'. The transition from 'thin' to 'full-blown' Anthropocene was a matter of scaling up technologies and political forms that had existed for thousands of years; the industrial revolution was 'perhaps the culmination of the earliest quest of our species to domesticate fire and make it do our bidding'.
The Oldest (Known) Song Ever Victor Mair at Language Log
27x25
Breaking the News Cycle Eliot Kirschner
The smartphone eradicates "space" in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.
Full Days and the Long Walk Craig Mod
28x25
Why zero is the most important number in all of mathematics New Scientist
No space, no time, no particles: Vlatko Vedral's radical vision of quantum reality New Scientist
Revealing Key Dimensions Underlying the
Recognition of Dynamic Human Actions André Bockes et al. Communications Psychology
...Using a computational model of perceived similarity judgments, we
discovered 28 key dimensions describing human action recognition
...craft, sport, interaction, food, mouth, gestures are 'example dimensions'
...we identified key dimensions corresponding to a
broad range of domains, including human actions, non-living and living
things, environment, substance, and force, at varying levels of abstraction.
USA is actually seven nations that will never work together, and never have David Wineberg at Medium, on Woodard's Nations Apart, due 4xi25
Haitians helped boost Springfield's economy — now they're fleeing in fear of Trump Guardian
Read Sarah Kendzior's powerful take on "The Shutdown" Hobbledehoy
Agentive Tech and Agentic AI: Cousins not adversaries Chris Noessel at Medium
But we shouldn't get too bent out of shape about it, since there are other words like this that go unchallenged in English, like "artistic" (Latin root artis) or "passive" (Greek root πάθος). Language weird.
...the agentic framework is a "back stage" thing — being about how a user request is handled in the code — and the agentive framework is a "front stage" thing — being largely about the user experience implications of a thing being handled out of the user's attention
...agentic AI is a way to take a natural language user request, use large language models to break it into an actionable plan, and have each step handled by a software agent that is good at that particular thing; like web search or handling math, writing code or looking for potential harms, improving output through Socratic challenges or formatting the final output. Agentic frameworks enable a user to ask for things like "List the nouns that have appeared uniquely in the dialogue of every movie that has won Best Picture since the advent of the Oscars" and have a system start to work on it. Current large language models kind of panic about such requests.
Mirrordome MAKE
New book documents the golden age of zine publishing from 1982-1998 boingboing
HHS rolls out new performance metric: loyalty to Dear Leader
Math to map the world flowingdata audio
Revealing Key Dimensions Underlying the Recognition of Dynamic Human Actions Stephen Downes
xkcd shielding vs. forces matrix flowingdata
The Most Distressed Communities in the USA maps mania
Sangoma Malombo re-release
Defining the Demonic Public Domain Review
Hokusai's Ghost Stories Public Domain Review
29x25
US public health system is flying blind after major cuts New Scientist
How a surge in ancient plagues 5000 years ago shaped humanity New Scientist
Preparing for the #30DayMapChallenge maps mania
Trump is trying Hard to do a bad Job, and that Works for Him; Not so much, for Us
Ouroborosian Complexity Andy Ilachinski
Elon Musk's 'Grokipedia' Is Certainly No Wikipedia lifehacker
Abstand und ausbau Victor Mair at Language Log
The END of Canada? Shubhransh Rai at Medium
...From 2000 to now, foreign investment into Canada has dropped from 9% of GDP to just 2–3%. Research and development spending is abysmal — the second-lowest in the G7, just above Italy.
And it's not because there's no money. It's because the rules suck.
Canada has some of the toughest restrictions on foreign investment in the developed world. Combine that with rising regulation and risk-averse politicians, and you get a chilling effect.
Canadian workers now have less capital to work with, which drags down productivity — even if the workers themselves are doing fine.
That's the real kicker. The economy isn't lazy. It's under-equipped.
The Death of Social Media as We Knew It & What's Next Giles Crouch at Medium
...The major platforms shifted from promising connection to becoming extraction machines. Author Corey Doctorow calls this "enshittification"
...Even influencers on social media are declining in social value. They are now seen as performative and their model of extraction is seen as suspicious and untrustworthy. There's also been the rise of AI generated influencers, some with huge followings, but that is a short-term trend. Major social media platforms have stepped backwards, steering towards a more "broadcaster-viewer" model like with TV. Publicity in 2025 has become fundamentally performative.
And when everyone is performing authenticity becomes the rarest currency.
...All this pseudo-reciprocity online (likes, shares without obligation) trains us out of real, true reciprocity. This social muscle weakens. So we feel less obligation to people in the real world. We can see this in greater social divides today and people being crueler to one another in real life.
...We are in the process of re-imagining what we want social media to be. Open social media platforms are reacting by enabling them to become broadcast channels. We're animals who need reciprocity to survive. Digital platforms made us forget this. Now we're remembering.
Tom the Dancing Bug: Inside the writers room that's ruining your life boingboing
Photographing Central Asia (pdf)
30x25
'World War Four': the Global Involution of Global Involution, 2025 PC at livingtogethersomehow
...beyond a certain point, involution isn't 'destructive like a war': it is war. I don't think we clocked this. Or like: involution is happening and we know it is very destructive, but because we still don't think it is possible that the system could take itself down, could be its own destructor, we don't acknowledge it to be true. And it could actually-also turn into hot war: armed conflict between major power is still, sadly, a crapshoot chance. But at the same time, the biggest source of conflict and destruction in the mid 2020s is ‘just what shittily happens' as the whole shebang, this globally involuting pseudoreality, prevails
...(quotes Baudrillard):...a Fourth World War: the war globalization wages on itself. In a globalized system, face-to-face conflict is no longer possible; there's no declared enemy any more, no territory to conquer. The system's gone too far. To the point where it eventually breaks down and begins to consume itself by secreting a form of inner corruption. Not corruption in the moral sense, but something like a dismantling of the whole, terrorism being the violent metaphor for this tension that is irreducible to the system. As though it played the role of a virus which, in the end, might be said to affect everyone's imagination, adding a supplementary element of tension to the system, though this time a symbolic and virtual one (c.f. Baudrillard interview, 2011)
...There is nothing in human history or experience — as far as we know — that could have prepared us for the fact that *this* would be our undoing.
...If World War Four is caused and proceeds by way of involution, that means our undoing will be our undoing, that our unravelling will be its own causal-effective snowball. Ai ai ai. This means we can say now, with full clarity and perplexity, that we are the cause and the problem, and that we are its only solution — which might mean there is none.
...how does one fight a revolution against involution, when it is us, in our systems, shredding ourselves, with our systems — we who cannot live now without our systems?
How We Lost the Trade War Paul Krugman
...Trump's Asia tour appears likely to yield some stability in the tariff picture, with America reducing some of the extremely high tariffs it has imposed or threatened to impose, while Asian nations make vague promises to invest in the United States and buy more U.S. products. The content of these deals will be less important than a potential reduction in uncertainty.
Long-lasting damage to the US and the global world order
Soon, I expect, Trump will be declaring victory after performing a climb-down on tariffs and touting make-believe investment numbers. He will proclaim that he won the trade war. Well, he didn't.
The main benefit from these deals (assuming they happen and last for a while), is that the United States will stop hitting itself in the face. U.S. consumers, producers and workers have been the main victims of Trump's tariffs. We could have achieved victory by not hitting ourselves in the face in the first place.
Furthermore, these deals cannot fix the more profound damage that six months of tariff madness has inflicted: the incalculable damage to U.S. credibility and, with it, to the global world economic order.
First, everything — everything — Trump has done on trade has, in addition to its illegality, been a violation of past U.S. agreements with other countries. So we emerge from the trade war as a nation that can no longer be trusted to honor its promises.
Second, if we look at the confrontation with China in particular, the end result looks like a demonstration of U.S. weakness and Chinese strength. China may offer some cosmetic concessions, promising to buy some soybeans or whatever. But the reality — which is obvious to everyone in the world except, possibly, some U.S. voters — is that Trump threatened extremely high tariffs on China but climbed down when China began curtailing exports of rare earths and other industrial inputs. China had the upper hand, and it played it.
In fact, I'd argue that China is now clearly winning its geopolitical conflict with the United States. America used to be able to count on support from its democratic allies. Now it has alienated them, and established a reputation for arbitrarily reneging on agreements. America used to have unmatched economic leverage. Now the world knows that China has more.
A World Too Rich to Care“ Angus Peterson at Medium
...If antibiotic resistance is the slow-motion crisis, then climate change is the fast-forward one. Both amplify each other. Higher temperatures accelerate the spread of vector-borne diseases. Floods and droughts push populations into crowded, unsanitary conditions. Crop failures drive dependence on cheap, industrial meat production — the very system that fuels resistant bacteria. The web of cause and consequence is so tight it's hard to tell where one problem ends and another begins. Yet, we often treat these crises as separate silos: climate here, health there, economics somewhere else. The truth is that they are one organism. And like any organism under stress, it's starting to show symptoms.
...Mental health, inequality, and public trust aren't side stories — they're feedback loops. The more unequal a society becomes, the more fragile its public health outcomes. The more fragile those outcomes, the more despair and distrust grow. That despair, in turn, fuels political extremism, scapegoating, and denial. It's a vicious cycle that feeds on itself, and like any unchecked infection, it spreads.
...In poorer nations, overuse of cheap antibiotics, lack of sanitation infrastructure, and counterfeit medicines accelerate resistance. In wealthier ones, it's overprescription, industrial agriculture, and complacency. The end result is the same: a silent pandemic that deepens the divide between those who can afford newer, last-line treatments and those left to gamble with outdated drugs.
Equivalent Andy Ilachinski
What 'Middlemarch' Reveals About the Attention Economy Taryn Parker-Holmes at Medium
Ancient DNA Reveals the History of Rome's Forgotten Enemies and King Arthur's Knights
Experience, Emptiness, and Luminosity Andy Ilachinski
31x25
The Hilariously Hyperbolic Humor of Roald Dahl is Real! Selena Ballerina at Medium
What I saw in Vietnam, 50 Years after the War and Ecocide H Patricia Hynes at Informed Comment
What I've been up to Neal Stephenson
Sarawak
How voters were affected by Batang Ai Dam (2009)
The Resettlement of Indigenous People affected by the Bakun Hydro-Electric Project riverresourcehub.org
Development and Change in Batang Ai Sarawak: Perception of a Resettled Iban CommunityAhmad Mahdzan Ayob and Noran Fauziah Yaakub Sarawak Museum Journal (1991)
Batang Ai Women Speak Out isiswomen.org
They also became share-holders in a rubber and cocoa plantation managed by SALCRA, a state agency, and each family received two acres of dusun.
But in spite of the cost, a recent study of the resettled women shows a high level of unhappiness with the results of the move. Most women thought they were worse off now than if they had been left alone on their traditional lands.
Alternatives Borneo Project
...The development of large scale dams almost never translates into electricity access for affected or upland river communities. Villages that were displaced for construction of the Batang Ai and Bakun dams, for instance, do not have access to this energy; they are powered by a diesel generator managed by a subsidiary of SEB (the government-owned energy supply company in charge of dam development). When families are unable to meet this monthly expense (because resettlement from dams has impoverished them) the company removes the fuses from the house....I chided my subconsciously racist self. What did I expect, non-stop corroboree? Perhaps I was guilty of ‘poverty porn', taking my excessively educated arse where it did not belong, seeking to exploit First Nations suffering for intellectual gain.
Gregory Bateson and the art of staying in conversation with yourself
...we mustn't forget the Liberation Machine of the 1890s, also known as the bicycle. It was the first bicycle with equally sized wheels. It too, saw massive adoption. But not without its controversies! Protestant leaders viewed cycling as a threat to morality, where people would ride bikes on Sunday instead of attending church.
...Sunday. I wake to the sound of the kitten being sick on the carpet at the foot of my bed. I hadn't planned for this. It was to be a morning spent repossessing my space. Still, cats are often sick. I get on with my plan.
Content Type: Personal Blog Mobile-Optimized Summary: Author: Not specified Main Points: This text discusses the author's personal collection of keywords, which are central to their interests and experiences. These keywords are seen as pivotal points in the author's journey of curiosity and exploration. The author plans to explore the semantic spaces of these keywords, acknowledging the challenge of mapping their personal significance. The keywords range from long-standing terms to recent additions, all of which have historical traces and connections to other ideas. The author references the "key-words project" and Ted Striphas' "Algorithmic Culture" to highlight the complexity of words and their meanings. The list includes terms like "affordance," "algorithm," "creativity," "ecology," and "semantics," among others. The author also mentions related concepts like "world model" and "semantic field," indicating a broader exploration of language and meaning. The text is a work in progress, updated to a specific date, reflecting the author's ongoing engagement with these keywords.
...a conversation with James Marriott about the reading crisis and the looming post-literate society
Why does it matter that Silicon Valley's tech bros are out to cheat death? Graham Lawton finds out in Aleks Krotoski's The Immortalists, a disturbing new book that charts the territory with brilliantly dispassionate reporting
and the mind is the tool of the Spirit
When the mind becomes confused, it is
Spirit that brings back clarity and harmony.
to perceive the unseen emerging from Spirit
Even in his waking state he dreams
dreams that open the gates to Divine Truth.
You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you.
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that....In Buddhist terminology, a kasina is an object of meditation. Meditation while staring at a bright light — traditionally a candle flame — is called "fire kasina". You start by concentrating on the light; then, after it's produced an afterimage on the retina, you switch to concentrating on the afterimage.
Visual emory Wikipedia
...I think it's important I explain what I see as the motivations driving some of the people — yes, human beings for now — engineering what feels like an intentional collapse of our government and society.
More recently, and for obvious reasons, the idea that states have ever been able to exert control over complex natural systems has become less and less convincing. The latest scholarship argues that all forms of hydrological intervention are inherently unstable. The construction of dykes and dams for flood control requires the removal of vegetation, which causes erosion, salinisation and sedimentation, which in turn raises river levels and increases the likelihood of floods. The historian of China Mark Elvin called this process 'technological lock-in': once begun, the harnessing of rivers becomes increasingly counterproductive and increasingly necessary. The hydrologic engineer Raphael Kazmann once referred to the (ongoing) efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers to control the Mississippi as 'planned chaos': 'The more planning they do, the more chaotic it is.'
...The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from "true" fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it's this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it's this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.
For me, a walk is a way to force practice on a number of crafts manifesting in GOOD WORK ("the reward of good work is more work"). The structure and modes of social media don't (I don't think / feel) allow for practice, craft, or meaningful work. (Not for me, and, I suspect, not for most other people, either.) Part of "good practice" (deep focus, lots of iteration) is having properly-sized feedback loops. Too short a loop, and it subverts the development of voice (too many other voices jutting in, telling you how to be). Too long a loop, and you might lose momentum (some feedback, properly timed, is critical). For me, the daily popup newsletter is a good balance. I can engage with the placid, inert medium (email)2 while filtering your responses. Ideally, I wouldn't look at any responses during the walk. (As I did with my SMS project in 2019; the responses were compiled into a book I couldn't see on the road, but was waiting for me back at home.) But, of course, on day five or six of B2M, I peeked. And I'm always sad I peeked — I feel something shift inside me (the chemicals, the voices), wanting to align with "expectations" or "desires" of the readership. And though you, dear readers, may have sent hundreds of nice messages, the single message of a dingdong, alone in his (always a "him") room, solitudinal in the worst way, "lashing out" for whatever demented / sad / crushing reasons, is the message that feeds the terrible imp of self-doubt. Social media feedback loops are like that, amplified a billion-fold: Lots of dingdongs, lots of food for the imp of self-doubt. Bad news. A field of dead muses.
28 meaningful dimensions (e.g. interaction, sport
and craft) which capture information concerning human actions as well as a broad range of related
domains (e.g. living and non-living things). [from the abstract]
...This book was completed at the top of the year, just before Trump resumed office, and Woodard makes all kinds of predictions about this regime, all of which have come true. He cites Robert Paxton's famous list of nine points for the traits of fascism, and they fit the MAGA ethos to a tee. Woodard says Trump and Trumpism tick every one of scholars' boxes defining fascism.
...my language-nerd hackles are raised by the word "agentic", since "agent" is a Latin-based word, and the Latin suffix for adjectived-noun is -ive, whereas -ic is Greek. That's why we would write "festive" rather than "festic" for the Latin-based word "festival", or "geographic" rather than "geographive" for the Greek-based word "geography."
...What's important here aren't the specific categories, but the importance of the multidimensional space underlying them
...an example of the autocratic government's "strategic incompetence" — a systemic failure, in other words, that served the interests of those then in power by discouraging people from voting
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we're not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.
Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )
I Am a Strange Loop...Canada is in the middle of its worst economic crisis in 100 years
...There is today, a massive shift underway when it comes to social media. It is being driven by cultures reaction not so much to the technology, but more to how these major platforms have used the technology. And the primary reason? Major social media platforms broke a social contract. What we call in anthropology, gift economies as part of reciprocity systems.
...what's most fascinating, if one takes an involuting Amazon, Google and the EU as trillion+ dollar examples, is to notice that involution is such a powerful dynamic now, that it seems to be owning things even in the absence of a complicated substantive wrong (like military occupations and atrocities), a massive extrinsic shock (like covid), or eco-geopolitical disadvantage (like being under aerial bombardment or underwater, like Gaza, Ukraine, or Pakistan). 2025 has taken us into a place where, no matter what happens, there will be involuted thinking, involuted processes, and involuted outcomes. Quite often it's bamboozling: how could it all be this bad? If we had all sat down and worked out a fiendish plan to attack ourselves and everything, it would uncannily look just like ‘how shit rolls', just because everyone can't shoot straight, is asleep at the wheel, jacking off to GPT's new AI porn offerings while they should be paying attention, or distracted by a trying to buy their loved one a "genuine" Labubu.
...Even under the Trump tariffs, most goods from Canada can enter duty-free if they're "USMCA compliant" — that is, they qualified for zero tariffs under the free-trade agreement formerly known as NAFTA, rebranded but barely changed in practice during Trump's first term. In 2024, only 38 percent of U.S. imports from Canada entered under the USMCA. That's surprisingly low, but the main reason was probably paperwork: certifying that a good complies with the free trade rules requires a lot of documentation. For smaller exporters, in particular, that paperwork often wasn't worth doing, because tariffs were low even for goods not certified as USMCA compliant. Now the tariffs are much higher, and there has been a rush to do the extra paperwork. In June 2025, 81 percent of imports from Canada entered duty free. Not incidentally, this points to a hidden cost of the tariffs: Companies are incurring significant administrative costs to deal with a vastly more complex tariff system.
...In poorer nations, overuse of cheap antibiotics, lack of sanitation infrastructure, and counterfeit medicines accelerate resistance. In wealthier ones, it's overprescription, industrial agriculture, and complacency. The end result is the same: a silent pandemic that deepens the divide between those who can afford newer, last-line treatments and those left to gamble with outdated drugs.
Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes.
You as an artist create configurations out of chaos.
You make a formal statement where
there was none to begin with.
All art is a combination of an external
event and an internal event...
I make a photograph to give
you the equivalent of what I felt.
Equivalent is still the best word
(Ansel Adams)
...The so-called 'attention economy', whose algorithmic rewards have us constantly clicking and scrolling as obediently as any of Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell, has perfected what Eliot only feared: we've exchanged true moral energy (to improve ourselves and the world) for an addiction to validation metrics.
..."What happenned to poor Jill, you don't hear what became of her?", wailed my son. I came back with the answer that my own Mother, a nurse, had given me to a very like question forty years earlier when i was little: "She had the brains to check into the local Accident and Emergency and get her head seen to forthwith. Jack, on the other hand, tried to save on doctors' bills with a remedy from the local witch, and that's why he was f**ked in the head for the rest of his life and such an utter cockwomble!" My Mum had grown up with the deprivation begotten by the constant, stingy economizing improvisation of her Scottish Father, has never quite gotten over the trauma, as such dry quips attest.
Batang Ai Dam Wikipedia
...Batang Ai is a showpiece resettlement, 3,000 Iban from 21 longhouses received a total of M$50 million in compensation when they were forced to move in 1982 and 1984. This was paid out in cash as down-payment on new longhouses.
The Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), an independent energy research facility at the University of California, Berkeley, recently conducted an in-depth analysis exploring the potential of clean energy solutions for Sarawak. The results: the dams are not necessary.