from the last 2 weeks of November, and some are paywalled
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"Your Body, My Choice": A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right The New Yorker
The Great Transfer-mation : How American communities became reliant on income from government
Three main forces are fueling the Great Transfer-mation: an aging population, rapidly rising healthcare costs, and growth in other earnings that just hasn't kept up....The largest transfer programs are designed for the elderly—56% of the $3.8 trillion in total transfer income goes to Medicare and Social Security—so a rapidly aging population rapidly increases the flow of transfer income.
...many metropolitan hubs, affluent suburbs and exurbs, and high-income, high-productivity farming and mining communities remain minimally reliant on transfer income to power their local economies.
Some Yiddish-American Humor, 1911 - 1922 Mainspring
Burma:Land of Golden Pagodas Frank and Helen Trager 1954
Alterity Wikipedia
(Missing) Inhabitants of Impossible Worlds Andy Ilachinski
Only those who attempt the absurd...
will achieve the impossible.
I think ...I think it's in my basement...
Let me go upstairs and check.- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)
Great Photographers of the 20th Century Part 1: Toward a Canon of the Artless Art Michael Alford at Medium
Great Photographers of the 20th Century part 2 Michael Alford at Medium
Western Culture Has Expired Matthew at Medium
...Music, too, has become a listless monoculture, dominated by artists such as Taylor Swift expressing a vacuous me-culture at the dead end of the romantic's self-narrativizing, shorn of value and mired in stunted adolescence, sold as a cult of personality...Influencers rule the culture of the young, famous for being famous and rich for doing nothing. We have entered a cultural desert of memes and TikTok dances, addicted to and dictated by the narrow culture of algorithms.
It is, then, the end of a cycle. The energy drawn from rejecting the past in exchange for hedonic freedom and self-expression can only ever be a temporary state, akin to spending an inheritance. The culture of the last half a century has produced a huge amount of historically unprecedented cultural creativity and expression, but the well seems to have run dry.
...Tectonic political shifts are moving underneath us, and most recognize we are at a precarious time in the history of Western societies. Unlike Lot, we must look back at the conflagration behind us. And then, run.
19 Punctuation Marks You Never Knew You Needed Jack Shepherd at Medium
Penrose's Magic Tiles: Where Physics and the Divine Proportion Meet Merry Jansonat Medium
Mesopotamian seals and the birth of writing Victor Mair at Language Log
Pando, Earth's Largest Living Organism, Could be 80,000 Years Old Gizmodo
Project Esther: A Trumpian Blueprint to Crush anticolonial Resistance Yoav Litvin at Informed Comment
This Looks Bad Alberto Romero at Substack
Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale Sunday Photoblogging
Discussing the election results with CBC Nova Scotia Colin Woodard
Edaphon Small Things Considered
A Diesel Powered Civilization B at Medium
Without diesel fuel — the lifeblood of transportation, agriculture, mining and construction — civilization would grind to a halt. Despite knowing for decades that the source of this fuel — oil — is a finite resource, we still haven't been able to find a scalable replacement. What we have found ourselves in, instead, is a massive Ponzi scheme: where we constantly need to add "newer and better" energy sources just to keep the system going... Thereby perpetuating the use of coal, oil and gas despite their grave impacts on the environment, and worsening returns on investment....without diesel fuel the world economy would immediately seize up, and manufacturing a "replacement" system would become impossible. No oil well was ever drilled using unleaded gasoline, nor was any uranium ore lifted out from a mining pit on jet fuel. And while these fuels are immensely important in moving billions of people around the globe, so is plastic in keeping food fresh, or lubricants greasing machines, together with the many other items made from oil. Despite their many benefits to society, however, fuels like gasoline or kerosene cannot keep oil, nor electricity flowing — long gone are the days when we burned oil in power plants. When it comes to continuing with civilization as usual gasoline and jet fuel are nothing but an added bonus, ultimately contributing little to none to the energy extraction business.
Photographic art in the Instagram age Steve Mansfield-Devine at Medium
Juggernaut Wikipedia
Evidence is growing that microbes in your mouth contribute to cancer New Scientist
Vital Atlantic Ocean current is already weakening due to melting ice New Scientist
You Must Cultivate Your Own Garden Abhishek at Medium
Candide Wikipedia
Post-Election Beatitude: Beating the Blues H Patricia Hynes at Informed Comment
Blessed are those of the people, for the people and by the people — beacons in a country sundered by militarism, rich privilege, origins in slavery and genocide of Native Americans, and persistent inequality of women.
A Visit to Planet Koren New Yorker
Timothy Snyder .org
The Battle of Waterloo as Recounted by one of Napoleon's Personal Aides
Strangelove at the hobbledehoy
Sheltering the Heroes Among Us: John Berger on Art as Resistance and Redemption of Justice Marginalian
The Bizarro Presidency Robert B Hubbell
For 70 years AI has been scarcely populated by passionate scientists who cared little about public interest or investment—except for the minimum they needed (which unfortunately led them to name the field "artificial intelligence"). They never cared about high revenues—they worked in the lab, not in some Big Tech moonshot! One group of young underdogs worked for decades on symbolic AI and expert systems. The world ignored them. They didn't care. Then, a different group of young underdogs worked for decades on deep learning and neural networks. The world ignored them. They didn't care. Both groups were motivated by an unfathomable focus-induced obsession-fueled curiosity. That's what underdogs do.
--Alberto Romero
Symbiogenesis Andy Ilachinski
Living beings defy neat definition. They fight, they feed, they dance, they mate, they die. At the base of the creativity of all large familiar forms of life, symbiosis generates novelty. It brings together different life-forms, always for a reason. Often, hunger unites the predator with the prey or the mouth with the photosynthetic bacterium or algal victim. Symbiogenesis brings together unlike individuals to make large, more complex entities. Symbiogenetic life-forms are even more unlike than their unlikely 'parents.' 'Individuals' permanently merge and regulate their reproduction. They generate new populations that become multiunit symbiotic new individuals. These become 'new individuals' at larger, more inclusive levels of integration. Symbiosis is not a marginal or rare phenomenon. It is natural and common. We abide in a symbiotic world."
Genomes by AI Small Things Considered
Evo, a 7-billion-parameter genomic foundation model, learns biological complexity from individual nucleotides to whole genomes. Trained on 2.7 million raw prokaryotic and phage genome sequences, Evo is naturally multimodal, enabling the codesign of DNA, RNA, and protein molecules that form higher-order functional systems. Evo is also inherently multiscale, enabling prediction and generation tasks at the level of molecules, systems, and genomes.
AI simulations of 1000 real people using GPT-4o accurately replicate their behaviour New Scientist
"We really had to simplify human behaviour a lot to make these models," says Park. "What we have the opportunity to do now is create models of individuals that are actually truly high-fidelity. We can build an agent of a person that captures a lot of their complexities and idiosyncratic nature."
What to Read If You're Angry About the Election The Atlantic
Lichens Aren't Easy to Understand: What Are These "Corals of the Forest,", Exactly? Elaine Medline at Medium and The Quantastic Journal
12 Readings on the Lichen Thallus Trevor Coward (pdf)
Esse Est Percipi Andy Ilachinski
The Wild and Crazy World of "Cutthroat Compounds" A quakebuttock, a praisegravy, and a killpriest walk into a bar ... Jack Shepherd at Medium
Why Does a Meme Go Viral, and Can We Predict It? Todd Feathers at Gizmodo
A successful meme has an element of surprise while being fully aligned with the current moment. These might sound contradictory. But the humor of popular memes often relies on the unexpected, on combining cultural elements that feel incongruous. Yet, somehow, mixing these elements communicates their commentary or jokes in a very clear manner. In addition, memes tend to circulate more when they are relevant to current debates or events in the public sphere.Research on popular memes has shown that they often contain content that is funny, simple, surprising, and highly relatable. This is why content that includes ordinary people (or celebrities in ordinary situations) and/or universal situations (like "that moment when" memes) tends to circulate widely...
Most simply, memes go viral when they resonate with a lot of people all at once. So those lots of people end up sharing with lots of other people who do their own sharing until the meme flairs and crackles like a fountain sparkler firework. Eventually, the interest fizzles; everybody's seen it, and they move on to the next thing; the viral spark fades to embers.
A few factors help a meme burn brighter faster. First is some kind of emotional valence. Humor inspires us to share because we want to give others a laugh or put something funny in our feed. Outrage works just as well, maybe better, because we want to scream at the injustice or fact-check the problem (be wary of quoting something just to yell at it—you're helping it go viral). Sentiment, sadness, and even lust, depending on the platform, can all drive clicks.
The Rise of 4B in the Wake of Donald Trump's Reëlection The New Yorker
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Majority of people believe their devices spy on them to serve up ads New ScientistSmall Things Considered: Genomic Dark Matterough the natural world. The experience is embodied in one sense, disembodied in another. Reading the same material while lying on the couch would be a different, and arguably more extreme, form of disembodiment.
...Without the institutions and cultural traditions that once brought us together, face-to-face, in non-political ways, we’re all too vulnerable to being herded into competing online echo chambers that magnify our differences and erase our common humanity.
Gen AI as a producer of "goods ... which are of little worth" Tony Hirst
Noting from the Nottingham Review of Friday 06 December 1811, at the start of the Ludding times:The machines, or "frames", as they are called in the manufacturing dialect, are not broken for being upon any new construction, for they are not, but in consequence of goods being wrought upon them which are of little worth, are deceptive to the eye, are disreputable to the trade, and therefore pregnant with the seeds of its destruction....These vile arts were first resorted to by a few adventurers, as destitute of honor, as the article they made were destitute of real worth, and the respectable part of the manufacturers were obliged to follow the example in their own defence.
Genomic Dark Matter Mechas at Small Things Considered
Discovering microscopic organisms and elements that exist at the Edge of Sight is no easy task. New tools designed to explore this mysterious world reveal previously unknown elements and uncover a complex web of forms whose secrets remain to be fully unraveled.
How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible Marginalian
Drones still revealing Nazca geoglyphs—hundreds of them Rob Beschizza at Gizmodo
Mapping the U.S. Electoral Divide MapsMania
Stagecraft
Tools for Stagecraft
Stagecraft Fundamentals: A Guide and Reference for Theatrical Production
Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China
Theatre Design and Stagecraft Immersion RIT
Introduction to StagecraftMusic and Theater Arts at MIT OpenCourseWare
Granite
History of Quarrying in Maine Maine Geological Survey
History of Maine granite, part 1 The County
History of Maine Natural Stone Quarries Marble.com
Order and Disorder Andy Ilachinski
It’s possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms."
Georges Perec (1936 - 1982)
Our Chin Cellulite Orange Muse Molly Crabapple
Word of the Year Wikipedia
Drowning in Plastic Maps Mania
Unexplained heat-wave 'hotspots' are popping up across the globe ScienceDaily
The humanities as preparation for the End Times Language Log
When We Cease to Understand the World
Stagecraft Wikipedia
Granite Quarrying in Maine Robert Johnson (pdf)
"Like the librarians of Babel in Borges's story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
WikipediaA Cautionary Tale About Science Raises Uncomfortable Questions About Fiction New Yorker
The Ecstasy of Scientific Discovery, and Its Agonizing Price NYT
The forgotten civil engineer with a vision we could all learn from New Scientist John "Bud" Benson Wilbur
Emily Ada Curry Whittemore (1880-1972)
findagrave.com
The Greatest Amateur of All: Jacques Henri Lartigue Michael Alford at Medium
"Manifesting" — Pyramid Scheme Prayer for an Idiot Generation Matthew at Medium
The Hidden Internet Shaping Society Giles Crouch at Medium
The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what it is like to be anybody else. It does not come naturally to us, this recognition that every other consciousness is a different operating system governed by different needs and different responses to the same situations, encoded by different formative experiences.
"You scalar implicature!" Language Log
Long Live the Free Web Cogdog
The Needy Genius Who Understood the Cosmos NYT review of Patchen Barss on Roger Penrose
Consciousness and Cognition
from Human Brain ProjectCognition and Consciousness Entwined Peter Grindrod and Martin Brennan in Brain Science
Consciousness, 4E cognition and Aristotle: a few conceptual and historical aspects Diana Stanciu in Conceptual Analysis
Concepts of Cognition and Consciousness: Four Voices BonnieA. Nardi 1996 (pdf)
Consciousness and cognition in plants Segundo‐Ortin 2022 at WIREs Cognitive Science
Tar Baby
Tar-Baby WikipediaThe Tar-Baby: Folktales of Types 175 and 1310A DL Ashliman
Oooh, I’m not gonna touch that tar baby! Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
women photo booth shots from the roaring 1920s Marija Stefanović at Instagram
We need to talk about plastic: five everyday items choking the planet Guardian 29xi24