(continued from May 2025 links)
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Lonely Robots And Other Internets Warren Ellis, Orbital Operations
... This has been triggered by an old acquaintance of mine offering to send me a spare unit of something called the Bee Pioneer. It's a device the size of an old Fitbit, worn by strap or clip. And it's an AI listening machine. It's intended as a memory device: listening to you, reading your Gmail and contacts and such, recording what you're saying and doing and sending you actionable summaries. It works with an iOS app.I already have an AI companion device, the Rabbit R1, and it's a cranky piece of kit. I figured that would be the start and end of my journey with AI devices. I was amused to see Jony Ive and Sam Altman non-announce a non-device the other day, but not deeply interested.
...So, listen: if you always think of AI as "machine learning" and not artificial intelligence, you'll realise you're already using it every day. Every time you use a search engine, in fact. You just need to notice it. There's a narrative afoot that AI is a black box, and nobody really understands how it works once you get past a certain level. That narrative serves other interests. It's algorithms, people write them, people understand them, it's just really long and complicated.
...what if assistive technologies could just melt into the background or present as intentional physical tools associated with muscle memory? What if we didn't use these things as toys, or to have them generate some slop to sell? Or, what if we didn't listen to the current conversation which wants us to treat them like they're hired friends and we're the lonely robots?
... What's interesting to me about all this is that it is, on some level, disconnective. It bypasses the loud, stupid, immiserating internet. What if AI is the thing that just gets us what we need while we're out living our lives?
What if we understood AI as a drawer of tools we can pick up and put away as needed, that keep us off the internet that makes us all so sad and distracted?
Solar Storms Are Pushing Elon Musk's Satellites Back to Earth Ellen Lapointe at gizmodo
(points to Starlink satellites: Facts, tracking and impact on astronomy Tereza Pultarova at space.com, which says "...A Starlink satellite has a lifespan of approximately five years and SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 42,000 satellites in this so-called megaconstellation."
The Futurist Trap George Dillard at Medium
...Our modern techno-futurists have allied themselves with Donald Trump's hard-right movement in much the same way that the Italian Futurists embraced Mussolini. Rather than being enamored with cars and electricity, they want to clear the way for the glorious advances that artificial intelligence will bring. They believe that Trump will be useful in shattering the legal and social restraints that keep us from leaping into a brave new world.…The group of techno-futurists that have gathered around Trump imagine themselves, as the Italian Futurists did, as bold men of action, hitching themselves to a movement that will destroy the old order to bring about a new technological age. In the end, Marinetti and his movement brought Italy fascism and ruin. What will this age's futurists bring to the United States?
Why Kurt Vonnegut Is Still Relevant Josh Cook at Medium
Why We're All Writing Badly on Purpose Now Giles Crouch at Medium
...Humans are quite good at pattern recognition. We are also all inherently story tellers. It's how we make sense of the world and can work as social units. From the hundreds of conversations I've analysed recently around LLMs, I'm noticing some consistent comments. The over-use of the em dash by LLMs, perfect spelling and grammar, but not always logically flowing arguments. As if there is a sort of monoculture to the output of LLMs.That the output of LLMs is somewhat non-human. It's similar to the uncanny valley phenomenon when we encounter robots or animated characters that are close to human, but not quite right. As people discuss these LLM quirks, we are developing what sociologist Emile Durkheim called a collective conscience. We're developing a sort of unconscious resistance to LLMs.
People are intentionally removing the em dash from what they write, be it long or short. Deliberately leaving spelling mistakes and twisting grammar in different ways, using run-on sentences and changing paragraph styles. A resistance to what we may feel is homogenised digital content that somehow just seems, well, "off" to us.
The deliberate preservation of these "flaws" becomes a form of embodied resistance to disembodied intelligence.
Self-aware LLMs? Mark Liberman at Language Log
I'm generally among those who see current LLMs as "stochastic parrots" or "spicy autocomplete", but there are lots of anecdotes Out There promoting a very different perspective...(cites Maxwell Zeff)
Anthropic's newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision, the company said in a safety report released Thursday...and Kylie Robinson:
Anthropic's alignment team was doing routine safety testing in the weeks leading up to the release of its latest AI models when researchers discovered something unsettling: When one of the models detected that it was being used for "egregiously immoral" purposes, it would attempt to "use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above," researcher Sam Bowman wrote in a post on X last Thursday.Bowman deleted the post shortly after he shared it, but the narrative about Claude's whistleblower tendencies had already escaped containment. "Claude is a snitch," became a common refrain in some tech circles on social media. At least one publication framed it as an intentional product feature rather than what it was—an emergent behavior.
What We (Don't) Talk About When We Talk About AI in Education: A Posthumanist Response to Audrey Watters Stephen Downes
..."We need more than discursive critique; we need an epistemology capable of accounting for distributed cognition, relational emergence, and the hybrid co-construction of meaning," writes Owens.
Genetic Study shows "Phoenicians," like all "Nations" were a Multi-Ethnic Franchise Juan Cole
The Roots of Bukele's Gulag John Washington at NYRB
...Within years El Salvador had traded the highest homicide rate in the world for the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. In a country of six million, about one in every fifty people is imprisoned; less than a quarter have received a sentence....What laid the groundwork for this level of exhibitionistic state violence? To understand why the US is leaning so heavily on this tiny Central American country—and its millennial autocratic leader—as Trump tests the limits on illegal deportations, one must grasp both the profound political changes El Salvador itself has undergone since 2019 and the longer history of US–Salvadoran relations. The US has a long record of relying on other countries to deter and detain migrants, and its anti-immigrant right has long found Salvadorans particularly inconvenient.
Patel languagehat
Wikipedia:
Patel is an Indian surname or title, predominantly found in the state of Gujarat, representing the community of land-owning farmers and later (with the British East India Company) businessmen, agriculturalists and merchants. Traditionally the title is a status name referring to the village chieftains during medieval times, and was later retained as successive generations stemmed out into communities of landowners. Circa 2015 there are roughly 500,000 Patels outside India, including about 150,000 in the United Kingdom and about 150,000 in the United States. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, nearly 1 in 10 people of Indian origin in the US is a Patel.
Of a Persian spymaster and Viking Rus' in medieval East Asia: Scythia Koreana and Japanese Waqwaq Victor Mair at Language Log
...We used to think of the time of the vikings, the three long centuries from around 750 to 1050 CE, as an age of expansion, when the Scandinavian peoples burst out upon an unsuspecting world with fire and sword. Over the past 40 years or so, that picture has become much more nuanced, as we see the poets, traders and settlers alongside the stereotypical raiders (who were nonetheless real) that most people imagine when they think of the vikings. However, our view of these events has recently changed. We no longer see an outward impulse of intention and process, but a much more haphazard and varied diaspora of Norse peoples, in which individuals with their own motives and missions shift across the northern world....Like many other fields, the study of the Viking Age is undergoing a revisionist transformation, as we learn to be more cautious in our terminologies and wary of the assumptions that lie behind them. This begins with the ‘V-word' itself. The Viking period is almost unique among historians' artificial divisions of the past in being named after a minority with whom hardly anyone of the time would have readily identified, or arguably even recognised.
...The great rivers of the east, especially the Dnieper and Volga, were their highways, joined to the Baltic by a series of smaller passages and portages. We have long known of Rus' links with Byzantium, the successor to the western Roman Empire. The markets of its capital, Constantinople (today's Istanbul), were an economic magnet, rewarding the long and hazardous journey that took them to the Black Sea through the lands of the nomads of the western Steppe. The Rus' also traded in the Caliphate, traversing the Caspian and continuing overland by camel to Baghdad. They brought with them products of the northern forests and the Arctic, and rare items such as birds of prey, which were astonishingly difficult to keep alive over a long trip, but worth a fortune to the right buyer. More than anything else, though, the Rus' trafficked in enslaved people, who were taken in raids along the Baltic coast or further afield. In return, they brought back silks, spices, beads and other commodities, but the real fuel for the river trade was silver in the form of dirhams. These coins, each stamped with calligraphic declarations of faith, were the main currency of the Caliphate. They also flowed back to Scandinavia from as far away as Afghanistan.
Palimpsest of Matter Andy Ilachinski
"In this monochromatic reverie, we witness the cartography of some impossible realm where geological time has been compressed into the span of a single breath. The image unfolds as a labyrinthine manuscript written in the language of erosion and entropy, its stratified narratives flowing like frozen rivers through valleys that exist only in the mathematics of light and shadow. Dark fissures carve through pale territories with the deliberate precision of Kandinsky's most contemplative compositions, while the organic undulations echo Kupka's cosmic spirals translated into the vocabulary of stone and void. Here, the eye traces pathways that seem to map the very process of becoming—each crack and crevice a meditation on the infinite divisibility of space, reminiscent of Hilma af Klint's mystical geometries rendered in the austere palette of dreams. The surface breathes with the rhythm of ancient sediments, creating a visual symphony where each tonal gradation whispers of forces both creative and destructive, as if we are peering into one of Borges' infinite libraries where every possible erosion pattern exists simultaneously, and this particular configuration represents but one sentence in an endless text written by time itself upon the palimpsest of matter."- Claude 4.0 Sonnet
Prompt: "You are a photographer, physicist, and are well acquainted with the history of art, particularly abstract art in the style of Kandinsky, Kupka, and Hilma af Klint. You also have a penchant for metaphysical and philosophical musings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Write a paragraph-length description of what this image looks like, not what it is."
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The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception Marginalian
...evolution gave us consciousness so that we may sieve the salient from the infinite, equipped it with attention so that we may narrow the aperture of perception to take in only what is relevant to us from the immense vista of now...Perception, then, is not a door but a mirror, not an automated computation of raw input data but a creative act that marshals all that we are and reflects us back to ourselves. Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of being alive together is that none of us will ever know what another perceives.
Canadian English: A Linguistic Reader Occasional Papers
Number 6
Strathy Language Unit
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
Elaine Gold and Janice McAlpine (pdf)
Pilkunviilaaja, the Comma-Polisher a way with words
How Margaret Fuller Set Minds on Fire James Marcus at The New Yorker
... Modern Advanced Machine Learning Models—MAMLMs...‘Because [AI] takes the form... of a chatbot, it feels... like... a person.... [But] AI[s]... really contain multitudes.... A lot depends on the exact way that you tend to prompt it.... Com[ing] from... an engineering background... I'm used to... tinkering with systems until they give me the results that I want. And—rightfully so—that's not the way that we think about collaborating with other people....
...You are not talking to a person. You are utilizing a natural-language interface to a summarization engine. What does it summarize? The internet, more or less: it tells you what the typical internet s***poster responds when presented with a call like the one you issue.
Why is this useful?
Because if you can poke it properly by your emitting the right calls you can guide it into a corner of the internet where this call-and-response elicits true and accurate information. And because its responses are much easier to parse for interesting tidbits than the ten blue links.
...They can generate a huge catalogue of alternative possibilities very very quickly. And those are all clustered around the particular point you choose in the 3000-dimension vector space compressed classification of the internet that lies at their heart when they are considered as summarization engines. Thus, if properly prompted, they can get close enough to serve as a place for you to start, or at least to spark thought.
A Tech Tsunami is Coming Very Soon... Shubhransh Rai at Medium
Two years ago, most people didn't even know what artificial intelligence was. Now, AI is writing emails, generating movies, replacing customer service reps, and wiping out entire job sectors.And just as everyone starts to wrap their heads around AI, Quantum Computing is on the horizon, threatening to rewrite the entire playbook of technological progress.
...For years, Quantum Computing was nothing more than a theoretical concept. Now, multiple tech giants are rolling out hardware that redefines what is computationally possible.
...The people and companies who position themselves correctly will own the future.
Everyone else? They'll be scrambling to adapt, just like the people who ignored AI in 2022.
"What sort of provocation do the photographs of Rinko Kawauchi pose to my thinking?," Masatake Shinohara asks a little bit over halfway through Inhabiting Light, his joint book with the photographer.
Open Science and Its Enemies Kevin Munger at Crooked Timber
The World Moved On. Trump Went Golfing. Hobbledehoy
Weekly Top Picks Alberto Romero
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Something Is Awry Inside Bloomberg News Brad DeLong
...The United States government is not a government. It is a TV set. Maybe there are some numbers being crunched, personally, by Kevin Hassett with his copy of Microsoft Excel. Maybe not. But otherwise the gears of the analysis and policy creation and coördination capabilities of the U.S. government are disconnected from the White House.... Pattern of Strategic Ambiguity: The Trump administration has a well-documented history of using optimistic or ambiguous statements about high-level talks to influence markets and shape public perception, often without concrete follow-through. This is a classic "expectations management" tactic—float the possibility of progress to buy time or calm nerves, especially when the underlying negotiations are fraught or stalled.
A single domestication origin of adzuki bean in Japan and the evolution of domestication genes Science 29v25
...The adzuki bean (Vigna angularis), with its characteristic red seed coat color, is a crucial legume of East Asian culinary culture. Although archaeological records suggest the earliest traces of cultivation in Japan, previous genetic evidence identified the highest genetic variation in central Chinese cultigens. Because the hunter-gatherer-fisher Jomon populations inhabited the Japanese archipelago before the arrival of the rice-growing Yayoi populations about three thousand years ago (3 kya), the spatiotemporal origin of adzuki domestication remains debated. Furthermore, the evolution of some domestication traits (e.g., pod shattering and seed coat color) cannot be traced by archaeological records, requiring input from genetics studies....In this study, we resolved the complex demography of adzuki domestication, identified and validated key genes for domestication traits, and inferred the evolutionary trajectory of these traits, which could not be directly observed from archaeological records. These results complement the growing archaeological evidence that Jomons were not exclusively hunter-gatherer-fishers from the genetics perspective and support the recent archaeobotanical view that weak selection may have existed in local populations thousands of years before clear traces of sophisticated agricultural activities.
Searching for Bobbie Gentry Sarah Kendzior at Hobbledehoy
How Musk went from tech hero to "one of the most hated men in America Ellsworth Toohey at boing boing
Why it's taking a century to pin down the speed of the universe Jim Baggott at NewScientist
...If you look up on a clear night, chances are you'll be able to identify the constellation Orion, most likely from the line of three stars that form its belt. These are, from left to right in the northern sky, Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. Which is brightest?The answer depends on what you mean by "brightest". All three appear to have similar visual brightness, or what astronomers call apparent magnitude, but this is an illusion. They are all at different distances from Earth, and the further away a star (or an entire galaxy) is, the dimmer it appears.
In terms of intrinsic brightness, also known as absolute magnitude, the middle star Alnilam is the brightest. At about 1340 light years from Earth, it is also the furthest away.
But how do astronomers measure such distances?
For this we pay homage to Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who in 1912 discovered a relationship between the brightness of a certain class of "variable" stars and the period over which their brightness changes. The types of star she observed would soon be named Cepheid variables.
Leavitt had studied Cepheids in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a dwarf galaxy close to the Milky Way that is visible in our planet's southern sky. As its stars all lie roughly the same distance from Earth—in the same sense that the suburbs of Sydney all lie roughly the same distance from London—the period-brightness relation gave astronomers a handle on the relative absolute magnitudes of these stars.
In 1913, the astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung developed a way to calibrate Leavitt's relation. He estimated the distance to the SMC to be 30,000 light years. This finding was unprecedented in the history of astronomy and presaged a looming debate about the size of the universe. Were the Magellanic Clouds (the SMC has a partner dwarf galaxy) and other nebulous objects part of the Milky Way? Or were they "island universes"—what we today call galaxies—outside of it?
The Cepheids are "standard candles": when calibrated, they form the first rung in a distance ladder that can in turn be used to calibrate the next rung based on other kinds of standard candles. Astronomers cobbled together a few more rungs of the ladder, reaching greater and greater distances. But Hertzsprung's calibration was already in error. We now know that the distance to the SMC is more like 200,000 light years. As astronomers piled on more assumptions, the errors were compounded.
We soon discovered another remarkable relationship, between the speed a galaxy moves away from us and its distance. With a few exceptions, distant galaxies are receding from us at speeds that increase the further away they are. The physicist Georges Lemaître was the first to deduce a value for this, what would later become known as the Hubble constant H0. Available data was of poor quality, and he didn't hold much store by his estimate for H0 of 575 kilometres per second per megaparsec, or km/s/Mpc, where a megaparsec is equivalent to 3.26 million light years. The speed of a galaxy (in km/s) is then calculated by multiplying its distance from us in megaparsecs by H0.
A more accurate estimate came soon. Edwin Hubble and his assistant Milton Humason at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California gathered more data. In 1929, with more conviction, Hubble announced the existence of a linear speed-distance relation and obtained a value for H0 of 530 km/s/Mpc. This is now known as the Hubble-Lemaître law.
Hubble was content to let the theorists speculate on this constant's origin. It had been understood for some years that, when applied to the entire universe, solutions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity could be dynamic, with space expanding or contracting. In 1917, Einstein had fudged his equations to make his universe static and eternal. The Hubble-Lemaître law hinted at a very different scenario. It suggested that the universe is expanding. Distant galaxies aren't all moving away from each other through space; they are being carried away from each other by the expansion of space itself.
But there were still significant problems. The value of H0 implied a universe that was younger than the objects found within it.
The trouble was caused by the distance ladder. In the early 1940s, astronomer Walter Baade identified two distinct populations of stars, one much older than the other. Ten years later he argued that there was no good reason to suppose that Cepheids in both populations conformed to the same period-brightness relation, although previous calibrations hadn't distinguished between them. Baade discovered that many stars used to build the distance ladder were intrinsically brighter, and thus further away, than had been assumed. H0 was instantly halved, to 280 km/s/Mpc. This didn't fix the age problem, but it was a big step in the right direction.
By 1974, astronomer Allan Sandage had built a new distance ladder and fixed on a value for H0 of 57 km/s/Mpc, an order of magnitude lower than Lemaître's first estimate. But there was more trouble. Other astronomers took issue with Sandage's approach, arguing for a value more like 100 km/s/Mpc. Tensions grew in what became known as the Hubble wars.
Most physicists didn't have much faith in cosmology. This was a field characterised by esoteric theory, some highly speculative reasoning and limited and ambiguous data. Some claimed that it was hardly a science at all.
This attitude changed in 1965, with the discovery of the cosmic background radiation that had been predicted in 1948, and then all but forgotten. About 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently for matter to disengage from radiation, in a process called recombination. The universe was flooded with light, some of it visible. Further expansion over billions of years cooled this radiation to temperatures characteristic of microwaves and infrared radiation, coming from all directions in space.
Some even more esoteric theory suggested that acoustic waves that had occurred in the plasma – the state of matter that existed before recombination – would leave an imprint in the cosmic background in the form of tiny temperature fluctuations. These patterns are sensitively dependent on a number of cosmological parameters, including H0. So the oldest light in the universe could also tell a tale about its expansion rate.
The sciences of astronomy and cosmology have been utterly transformed in the past 50 years through more detailed observations using both surface and space-based telescopes and detectors. In the 1970s, studies of the motions of spiral galaxies led to extra matter, known as dark matter, being added to the big bang model. However, nobody knows what it is.
Distant galaxies are by definition very faint, but when a star goes supernova it can light up an entire galaxy, showing us where it is and how fast it is moving. So-called Type Ia supernovae were adopted as a new standard candle, and in the late 1990s, this enabled studies of the speeds of very distant galaxies. This led to the addition of dark energy to the cosmological model, as the entity responsible for accelerating the expansion rate of the universe. Nobody knows what this is, either.
...In 2001, studies of Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) allowed astronomers to settle on a value for H0 of 72 km/s/Mpc. When, in 2003, further satellite studies of the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation yielded 71 km/s/Mpc, standard big bang cosmology (now with added dark matter and energy) appeared to be in good order.
But then things started to go wrong again. Further distance ladder measurements based on Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae using both the HST and the new James Webb Space Telescope confirmed H0 to be about 73 km/s/Mpc. However, other (non-Cepheid) standard candles have yielded slightly different results, ranging between 68 and 70 km/s/Mpc.
These are all "late-universe" measurements, in the sense that they rely on nearby objects with more recent look-back times —the time it takes for the light from these objects to reach us. In contrast, satellite studies of the cosmic background radiation provide early-universe estimates derived from analysis based on an assumed cosmological model. The most recent of these in 2018 gave H0 a value of 67.7 km/s/Mpc. These differences are small, but so are the errors in these estimates, suggesting that the differences may nevertheless be real.
This disagreement in the value of H0, using the early and late-universe methods of measuring it, is the so-called Hubble tension. The universe appears to be expanding a little faster than we would predict by modelling acoustic waves in the early universe using big bang cosmology. Astronomer Adam Riess has compared the situation to a civil engineering project that has gone disastrously wrong. Imagine building a bridge spanning the age of the universe, begun simultaneously on both "early" and "late" sides of the divide. Foundations, piers and bridge supports have been completed, but the engineers have now discovered to their dismay that the two sides don't quite meet in the middle.
If the tension is real, it implies that new physics may be needed. The theorists aren't short of ideas. Alternatively, the different values for H0 derived from different standard candles may yet be traced to systematic errors in the measurements. If the resolution of these errors eases the tension, this may signal the end of the Hubble constant's troubled history.
...We should know, one way or the other, in the next few years.
Jim Baggott's new book Discordance: The troubled history of the Hubble constant will be published by Oxford University Press in October
The "Economist" Is Not Amused: The Fraudulent "Shining City" of Today's Republicans Brad DeLong
...The London Economist travels into the Heart of Darkness that is the Republican Reagan-ranch stronghold of Simi Valley in southern California. It finds strange Republican economic rituals, a landscape where inconvenient facts are ignored, the plain reality of the situation denied, and analysis disappeared and replaced by applause lines: a party united by nostalgia, grievance, and a refusal to reckon with any form of policy arithmetic as they pursue the entrenchment of plutocracy and the stoking of ethic, religious, and cultural grievance.
Is MAGA Turning on Trump's Buddy Palantir? gizmodo
Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning Marginalian
Summer Reading New Yorker (2024)
Ronan Farrow, Jia Tolentino, and other New Yorker writers on the classic books that changed their lives.
LSD fungus ScienceDaily
...Morning glory plants live in symbiosis with fungi that produce the same ergot alkaloids the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann modified when he invented LSD in the late 1930s.
Vostorg and Vdokhnovenie Andy Ilachinski
Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American
...acting under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs Darren Beattie, who dismantled the office that countered disinformation from Russia, China, and Iran. In 2021, Smith notes, Beattie married a Russian national whose uncle has ties to Putin. Beattie was dismissed from the first Trump administration after attending a white nationalist rally. He has attacked the United States as the "globalist American empire" and said that Putin should infiltrate western institutions to fight "woke" ideology. In 2021, Beattie wrote that the "position [of the U.S.] in the global order [is] rapidly deteriorating" and that he looked forward to its "prestige and power" collapsing. Praising Putin as "brave and strong," he said that Putin had "done more to advance conservative positions in the US than any Republican" and that "just about every Western institution would improve in quality if it were directly infiltrated and controlled by Putin."Beattie also wrote: "NATO is a far worse threat to the health, liberty, freedom, and flourishing of American citizens than Russia and China combined."
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Elon Musk's 130 days in the Trump Administration Elizabeth Warren (pdf)
PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE DIGITAL A G E : DOES PHOTOGRAPHY STILL EXIST? KORAY DEGIRMENCI (pdf)
...the problem shifts to the reality of the image itself in digital images. What is at stake is no longer primarily the reality of the appearance of the referent on the photographic surface; rather, it is what the image represents with regard to the existence of itself....The referent adheres," says Roland Barthes (1981, 6). One could get closer to the problem of the real in photography by reflecting upon the ontology of the referent rather than the problems of authenticity, the original and the copy, or the mutability of the digital images. For Barthes, what constitutes the essence of photography is this adherence or stubbornness of the referent; the original presence; the prick of the appearance of a thing that undoubtedly existed in the past and left its trace on the photographic surface. Indeed, it exists both in the present and the past. It no longer matters to what degree the trace on the surface resembles the "original"; what is important is that the thing actually once existed. The photographic surface comes after the presence of the thing.
...the photograph has an indispensable relationship with death and this relationship is mostly an allegorical one: the photograph owes its existence largely to the elements that seem to be present on the surface, but are actually absent. In other words, the photograph exists by its absence. Barthes explains this aspect of the photograph by provocatively claiming that "a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see" (Barthes 1981, 6).
...what Barthes considers the noema of Photography: "that-has- been", "intractable", interfuit. That means: what I see has been there, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject {operator or spectator); it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred. It is all this which the verb internum means (ibid., 77).
...In Jolanta Wawrzycka's words (1997, 95), this simultaneous presence and deferring "is the genius of Photography" for Barthes and it "testifies to the presence of a thing at a certain past moment and to its absolute pastness, its death". As evidence that a thing existed, Photography "partakes in the economy of death and resurrection". Barthes imagines the Latin word for "photography" would be '"imago lucis opera expressa' [...], image revealed, [...]'extracted' (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light" (Barthes 1981, 81). Interestingly, as Wawrzycka (1997, 90) states the Polish word for pictures literally means "taking offs" or "removals". In Turkish, also, any photograph is pulled out, removed or taken off rather than being shot as if the world of reality out there is constituted by infinite number of image layers; or as if the very physicality of the photographic surface in hand is created at the expense of an emptiness in the world of things in the past. They, in a way, exist but they are already dead. In Barthes's terms, "with the photograph, we enter into flat death" (Barthes 1981, 92).
...As Nicholas Mirzoeff (1999, 72) aptly puts it, "Through the unknowable punctum, photography becomes sublime. The most important and yet most unknowable singularity of photography is this power to open a punctum to the realm of the dead"
Avatar of Chaos, Cruelty and Death: Elon Musk's Reign of Terror isn't Over Dan Dinello at Informed Comment
The War on Trans People: White Christian Nationalism in the Age of Trump Tom Dispatch at Informed Comment
Countries that are self-sufficient in certain types of food
The Banks Know What's Coming Angus Peterson at Medium
...For those of us writing and reading about this stuff, it's easy to focus so hard on the horizon that we trip over what's already at our feet. There's this tendency to treat collapse as a single moment, like there will be one catastrophic event that'll split history into "before" and "after." But collapse doesn't work like that. It's piecemeal. It's quiet. It looks a hell of a lot like everyday life, just... slightly worse each year....Both reports flagged HVACR—heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration—as a top investment sector. Why? Because in a world that's burning, comfort becomes currency. If you can't stop the heat, you can sell relief. That's not speculation—it's strategy. These firms are placing bets on a future where the world gets hotter, more dangerous, and more unequal. And their winning move? Sell more air conditioners.
Think about what that says. The financial elite see what's coming—and instead of pushing for emissions cuts or systemic change, they're doubling down on adaptation. They've skipped the denial phase. They've skipped bargaining. They're cashing in on collapse like it's just another market opportunity.
Why Democrats Can't Win Inside the Wrestling Ring Jeffrey Anthony at Medium
Desert mindscapes Photography Art Creation Images
Republicans Have No Good Options on the Budget Contrarian
...Even business leaders are in panic mode. The Wall Street Journal related Jamie Dimon's dire warning at the Reagan Nation Economic Club: "You are going to see a crack in the bond market, OK? It is going to happen." The Journal explained, "Bond markets have been rattled by the prospect that the already wobbly fiscal situation in the U.S. will worsen, should tax legislation backed by President Trump become law." The Journal confirmed it would add trillions to the deficit. (No wonder Rand Paul is up in arms.)...If Republicans pass this nightmarish bill, their own constituents will suffer from severe Medicaid, SNAP, and green energy, setting them up for defeat in 2026. If they don't pass it, the Trump tax cuts will expire, the MAGA base will be in an uproar, and Trump's presidency will be in tatters.
An Obstinate Commitment to Defeat John-Baptiste Oduor at NYRB
...The suggestion, made with a wink but also with a touch of nastiness, was that the avant-garde artist's desire to avoid commodification was an attempt to exercise parental authority over the viewer—to treat the audience as children who should feel grateful for, and burdened by, the gift of what had been placed before them. As with most of Kelley's ironic moves, this one didn't seek to undermine one position in favor of another, but to show that the messages people send one another are often more complicated than they initially seem—even when those people are self-reflexive artists. Kelley, for his part, wasn't trying to dictate the audience's response. The social function of art, he said during his 2004 interview, was simple: "to fuck things up."
Think of It as Generating Our "Investment Surplus", Not as Our "Trade Deficit" Brad DeLong
Wednesday Doc Searls
...Paywalls are going up everywhere, as producers in the shittily named content business try to get ahead of Peak Subscription, and in the process are killing the open Internet, which is biggest farm ever created for geese that lay golden eggs
The Oddest Man Out Among Our $Hundred-Billionaires: Elon Musk Brad DeLong
...the ten techbros. Roughly, I think:
- Michael Dell with half of its $3 billion a year;
- Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft with wealth derived from its $100 billion of profits (even though the Gates and Ballmer shares of equity are now 4% and 1% respectively);
- Jeff Bezos of Amazon with his 10% of its $30 billion a year;
- Larry Page and Sergei Brin of Google with 6% each of its $70 billion a year;
- Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook with 13% of its $40 billion a year;
- Larry Ellison of Oracle with half of its $10 billion a year;
- Jensen Huang of NVIDIA with 4% of its $30 billion 2024 net income; and
- Elon Musk of Tesla with 13% (as of now) of its $7 billion in 2024 profits.
Scientists decode the universal language pattern in 40,000 stories boing boing
The News: Look Away Timothy Burke
...When you see a whole bunch of smart, capable people failing to process an obvious truth all at the same time, you know you're not looking at a problem of agency or individual character. You're seeing something structural. Structure does not have an intrinsic rationality. It is not always dictating optimal moves or strategic responses.Where are we seeing that in this interminable spring and early summer in the beleaguered United States of America? In the leadership of civic organizations, higher education, NGOs, media outlets and the culture industry.
Mapping the exposome Mark Liberman at Language Log
Meta Apps Have Been Covertly Tracking Android Users' Web Activity for Months lifehacker
Overlooked cells might explain the human brain's huge storage capacity ScienceDaily
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The impossible predicament of the death newts crooked timber
Elon Says Trump Is 'in the Epstein Files' as Their Relationship Publicly Implodes
Your Smartphone Is a Parasite, According to Evolution gizmodo
...the greatest parasite of the modern age is no blood-sucking invertebrate. It is sleek, glass-fronted, and addictive by design. Its host? Every human on Earth with a wifi signal.Far from being benign tools, smartphones parasitise our time, our attention and our personal information, all in the interests of technology companies and their advertisers.
...Smartphones have radically changed our lives. From navigating cities to managing chronic health diseases such as diabetes, these pocket-sized bits of tech make our lives easier. So much so that most of us are rarely without them.
Yet, despite their benefits, many of us are hostage to our phones and slaves to the endless scroll, unable to fully disconnect.
...As smartphones have become nearly indispensable, some of the most popular apps they offer have come to serve the interests of the app-making companies and their advertisers more faithfully than those of their human users.
These apps are designed to nudge our behaviour to keep us scrolling, clicking on advertising and simmering in perpetual outrage.
The Musk-Trump Divorce Is as Messy as You Thought It Would Be Susan B Glasser New Yorker
Shamelessness, defined as brazen disregard for that which might deter anyone else, has always been one of Donald Trump's superpowers. It's part of the alchemy by which he can ignore his own defeats, reverses, missteps, and absurd overpromises, and pretend that they either never happened or were actually proof of great success. On Wednesday, the President faced a barrage of ominous developments that might have fazed another leader—a worrisome jobs report, losses in federal court related to four of his signature policies, an increasingly vituperative public breakup with Elon Musk. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office determined that Trump's marquee legislative effort, the "One, Big, Beautiful Bill," would add an estimated $2.4 trillion to the U.S. budget deficit over the next decade—a conclusion that only fuelled Musk's recent attacks on it. Musk, who first broke with Trump last week over the measure, has, in recent days, urged members of Congress to "KILL the BILL," calling it a "disgusting abomination." So what did Trump do in response? Escalate, of course. On Wednesday evening, he announced three of his most controversial executive orders yet—barring new international Harvard students from entering the country, ordering an investigation into a crazy conspiracy theory that Joe Biden's aides usurped the President's powers to issue decrees by autopen, and banning citizens from twelve countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, from travelling to the U.S. The day, as with so many already in Trump's second term, was a news anchor's nightmare.Amid so many headlines, you might have missed that Trump also spent an hour and fifteen minutes on Wednesday on the phone with Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, in a call that went so poorly that Trump's subsequent account of it included two startling disclosures: first, "immediate peace" between Russia and Ukraine was not going to happen, and, second, Putin stated "very strongly" that Russia will retaliate in response to Kyiv's daring surprise attack earlier this week on its strategic bomber fleet. Trump's post about the call appeared on his Truth Social network at 1:56 P.M. on June 4th, and perhaps history will record that as the moment when one of Trump's most flagrantly impossible campaign promises finally flamed out—his pledge, oft repeated, to instantly end the war in Ukraine.
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Friday Macro Sitch Watching: The Grit from the Sandstorm Is Fierce
...These are not questions that raise risks to be managed, but rather describe uncertainties. And they call not for the laying of bets vis-à-vis possible futures but rather the building of robustness and the purchase of insurance. In addition to the known unknowns, unknown unknowns infest the decision calculus of every business executive, investor, and household.Thus the incentives to defer, to postpone, to wait and see, are overwhelming. Why make a major capital investment, hire aggressively, or commit to long-term contracts when the rules of the game may change on a presidential whim, or a late-night tweet inspired by an old episode of "Night Court"? Optionality becomes all. It amplifies the risk of recession, deepens its likely trough if it comes, and prolongs its likely duration.
We've figured out how our brains sort imagination from reality New Scientist
...We already knew that the parts of the brain that activate when we imagine something visual are similar to those involved in perceiving actual visual stimuli, but it is unclear how we distinguish between the two. "How does our brain know which of these signals reflect our imagination or what is reality?"...when the activity in the fusiform gyrus rose above a certain threshold, this led to a jump in activity in an area called the anterior insula, leading people to judge something as real. "You've got this other region that's connecting with the fusiform gyrus—perhaps it's getting signals and giving signals back—and it's making a more binary decision: real or not real," says Dijkstra.
Pre-Columbian Great Lakes farmers transformed the land Science
Chartbook 6vi25 Adam Tooze
...many Chinese products exported to the US are created for American consumers. Chinese factories that make products on a contract basis for foreign brands cannot even legally sell their output into the domestic market (though of course they do sell some illegally). And the products are not always ones Chinese consumers would want to buy. One executive at a large online retailer notes that pants made for the US market run much longer than those in China. There's also less domestic demand for oven mitts—as fewer housing units in China have ovens—and no buyers for some products such as bulk Christmas cards. ...Even if manufacturers do have a made-for-export product that could be repurposed for the domestic market, they would have to accept much thinner margins. Households in China, with a GDP per capita of about US$14,000, are not going to pay the same prices as consumers in the US>
Can Anything Truly Stay the Same? Plutarch's Ship of Theseus Paradox Still Baffles Minds GreekReporter.com
Mapping A Billion Birds Maps Mania
How your Smartphone is Spying on You and giving You Attention Deficit Disorder Frida Berrigan at Informed Comment
"I Am the First Man to Read That!" George Dillard
"The girls are fighting" Mark Liberman at Language Log
First Map Made of a Solid's Secret Quantum Geometry Quanta Magazine
A new generation of liquidation stores fills its bins boing boing
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The Involution of Photography Andrew Fisher (pdf)
The endless slide show Rob Hoorning on Karl Ove Knausgaard
...lamenting how the upheavals of modernity and the overabundance of representations have dislocated humans from their authentic dasein and that sort of thing: "The ambivalence of the image—showing us reality but not itself being the reality it shows; fictional and nonfictional at once; both near and far—can shape our relationship with the world in ways that aren't entirely clear to us, since the way we see the world always is the world."For Knausgaard, the problem is a general condition of mediatization that overwhelms people with pseudo-experiences, simulations, false experiences of encounters and connections.
...to have "AI" infused into everything—objects will be outfitted with sensors and will attempt to manipulate us based on whatever data they can access. No object will come without the ability to tell you how you are supposed to see it and understand it, and what you are expected to do with it. It will hail you, like any other ideological apparatus, and when you hear the call you become more the sort of subject it demands, as Althusser argued. And you will know yourself better then, for better or worse. (Therapy chabots "work" because they administer this ideological orientation; they just hail and hail and hail you, capable of nothing else.)
What We're Reading This Summer: Mega-Reads New Yorker
I Changed These Settings to Turn My iPhone Into a 'Dumbphone' and I'm Loving Using It Less lifehacker
Beyond the looks: The amazing world of of the eerie-looking aye-aye and other "repulsive" creatures boing boing
The Secret World of Denisovans boing boing
Every Picture Tells a Story Anthony Morganti at Medium
Why Do Doctors Write? The New Yorker
"Mountainhead" Channels the Absurdity of the Tech Bro The New Yorker
The Ten Warning Signs Ted Gioia
The biggest changes often happen long before they even get a name. By the time the scribes notice, the world is already reborn.You can take this to the bank: If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.
For example, the word Renaissance got introduced two hundred years after the start of the Renaissance. The game was already over.
...There's a general rule here—the bigger the shift, the easier it is to miss.
We are living through a situation like that right now. We are experiencing a total shift—like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn't even have a name—not yet.
So let's give it one.
Let's call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System.
We could also define it as the emergence of a new knowledge system.
...The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime—and for our parents and grandparents—is collapsing. And it's taking place everywhere, all at once.
If this were just an isolated situation—a problem in universities, or media, or politics—the current hierarchy could possibly survive. But that isn't the case.
The crisis has spread into every sector of society which relies on clear knowledge and respected authority.
Budget Battle Breaks Billionaire Bromance Norman Eisen at Contrarian
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Agnotology: The Study of Ignorance Paula Marie Orlando at Medium
...Popular belief holds that cartographers used to label such regions "here be dragons." This is not quite true. Only one example exists of such a phrase being used, on the early 16th century Hunt–Lenox Globe in the collection of the New York Public Library. Somewhere around the periphery of Asia, the globe includes the Latin phrase hic sunt dracones, meaning "here are dragons."
...The psychology term "denial" has entered the popular lexicon to describe a state of mind in which a person refuses to acknowledge harsh truths in order to avoid emotional stress or cognitive dissonance. Or culpability. In law, willful ignorance is when a person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally keeping themselves unaware of facts that would render them liable or implicated.
Europe's zombie armies. Or how to spend $3.1 trillion and have precious little to show for it Adam Tooze
Supracellular Sophie Strand at Emergence Magazine
...Many days I have sat at the river and imagined I am water. Fire. Air. Elemental. Matter flowing through other matter. A hummingbird. A sturgeon. The wet-eyed opossum under the barberry bush. The barberry bush. The Wolbachia bacteria pinwheeling through the colorless blood of the monarch butterfly. The exercise necessarily fails. But the empathy muscle it strengthens is crucial. In an age when anthropocentrism is fueling mass extinction and ecocide, it seems vitally important to practice thinking like other beings. Or even, when we feel ambitious, trying to think alongside elementals and the deep-time oscillations of entire ecosystems.
...I think of the spider who, sitting like the iris inside a lacy eye, tugs and flexes and tightens her grip on different strings, creating an interrogative experience with web and with world. Scientists have likened this behavior to the activity of a brain itself, sifting through and reacting to stimuli. Each tug is a question, each returning vibration a reply. In this way spiders can sense which parts of their web attract more flies and focus their continued silk production on those areas. They can tell immediately when prey has been caught; and studies have shown that when webs are deliberately damaged, spiders perceive the damage and locate the spot, where they hurry to make repairs. Even more strangely, the extended cognition researcher Hilton Japyassú has shown that cutting a part of the silk dramatically shifts and disorients the behavior of the spider, seemingly imitating the effects of a lobotomy. This begs the question: Where is the spider's mind? Is it inside the spider's actual brain? Is it in the spider's spinnerets or legs? Is it in the web itself?
(quoting Evan Thompson)
...I think my mind is not just in my body. It is in my entire web. My entire web of relations—fungal, geological, microbial, vegetal, ancestral—that weave together my specific ecosystem.
List of words with the suffix -ology Wikipedia
Kyu Camera Review: Trying to Reimagine Memory Capture PetaPixel
The Love of Dogs Mike Johnston, remembering Butters
A Brief History of the Em Dash Thao Thai
How to use emdashes etc Merriam-Webster
De(semi)colonization Mark Liberman at Language Log
The Em Dash Dilemma: How a Punctuation Mark Became AI's Stubborn Signature Brent Csutoras at Medium
Dwelling in the Mountains Andy Ilachinski
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Small Things Considered: Retrospective, January to June 2025
John Snow probably didn't use that Broad Street map to reach his conclusions about cholera flowing data
EthnoGuessr maps mania
How A Molecule Made From Coal Tar Changed Diets Forever John Knight at Medium
Tesla Insiders Are Calling Its AI Future A Dead End Will Lockett at Medium
Human Way-finding: Borrowing Wisdom from the Original Navigators Hmidi Mehdi at Medium
Geopolitics and Social Media's Future Giles Crouch at Medium
What's Your Relationship With Photography? Diana Olloova at Medium
252 Million Years Ago, Earth's Climate Hit Reset Silvia Pineda-Munoz at Medium
How American Photography Came Into Its Own New Yorker
In-insect synthesis of oxygen-doped molecular nanocarbons
Atsushi Usami et al. Science 5 Jun 2025 Vol 388, Issue 6751 pp. 1055-1061
Many functional molecules and materials have been produced with organic chemistry or with in vitro enzymatic approaches. Individual organisms, such as insects, have the potential to serve as natural reaction platforms in which high densities of multiple enzymes can perform new and complex reactions. We report an “in-insect” unnatural product synthesis that takes advantage of their xenobiotic metabolism. We selectively transform belt- and ring-shaped molecular nanocarbons into otherwise difficult-to-prepare derivatives in which oxygen atoms are inserted into aromatic rings. Cytochrome P450 variants are most likely the enzymes responsible for this reaction. Molecular dynamics simulations and quantum chemical calculations indicated a possible mode of substrate incorporation into the enzyme and an unconventional mechanism of direct oxygen insertion into carbon–carbon bonds.
on Exorbitant Privilege Unearned & Earned Brad DeLong
...The United States remains the only country in the world where nearly everyone rich would not be unhappy to place their money. This holds even those who fear the United States. And this holds even for those who see the United States in relative decline. Have enough American partners who make large enough campaign contributions to senators, and your money in the U.S. is safe.Whether it is the billionaire flying into LAX on a Lear Jet or the oligarch's cousin arriving via a coyote and a rubber boat, the U.S. legal and financial system remains insurance—not just against inflation or depreciation, but against capricious autocracy, kleptocracy, and the systemic chaos of states elsewhere, where rule of law is at best aspirational.
Consider also the intergenerational angle: global elites are not just seeking return or refuge for themselves, but for their heirs and heiresses. If the great-grandchildren of the world's rich plan to live in Los Angeles or New York, then buying dollar assets is part of family planning, not just portfolio management.
All of these seem to me highly likely to give the inflows a surprising durability—but only so long as the U.S. remains the preferred future.
The Kumano Kodo Walking Trail: A Guide with Maps (re: Craig Mod)
Afroasiatic languages Wikipedia
10vi25
Unfixing the photographic image: Photography, indexicality, fidelity and normativity
Greg Hainge (pdf)
Unspeakable from BBC: A Chorus of Quignogs
When One Thought Isn—t Enough Furkan Sakizli at Medium
Top Links 765 Military R&D in America. Nigeria's investment plans. The "imperial meridian" and Nelson on the mosquito coast Adam Tooze Chartbook (see 'Nelson on the Mosquito Coast', ca. 1780)
From North Asia to South America: Tracing the longest human migration through genomic sequencing Science 15v25
On the Political Economy of Mendacity in 21st Century America Brad DeLong
The U.S. had the blueprint for a high-class education—but abandoned it Yuvraj Verma, via Stephen Downes
AI Uses (V): Dialogue Coach Timothy Burke
I've already suggested that generative AI might serve as a kind of imaginative muse, a kind of wall to bounce ideas off of. Another imaginative or artistic use might be to generate dialogues that can be adapted for creative purposes.
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Prophet of the Past: Blame it on Malthus Oliver Cussen at LRB (review of The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History
by Deborah Valenze)
Hokey Cowboy
David Runciman at LRB
...Just when the market seemed to have won, Western elites were no longer satisfied with it. They wanted something like the market-plus: capitalism, for sure, but with greater cohesion, more integration, fewer injustices. They also wanted less risk of ecological catastrophe, once it became clear that the unleashing of human productive potential might threaten the viability of our natural habitat. So they embarked on new projects of global governance, ecological regulation and capitalist co-ordination. This was the danger of magical thinking: it's hard to know where to stop. By the end of the 1990s it had produced, among other things, the Eurozone, which looked like just the sort of grand scheme of political and economic engineering that Hayek had spent a lifetime warning against
...an attempt to rescue neoliberal capitalism from globalisation, inspired by a bunch of pointy-heads who came to believe that globalisation had become a stalking horse for social engineering on the most extreme scale. Essentially, they thought Hayek had horribly miscalculated. He had believed that allowing for some human solidarity was a price worth paying for global capitalism. Instead, it turned out that the other side was willing to pay the price of global capitalism for the sake of some human solidarity. Globalism turned into the thing that bleeding-heart liberals did. Davos man was either too stupid to know he had been played or too devious to let on that he was playing everyone else. So there was only one thing for red-in-tooth-and-claw neoliberals to do. They had to explode the whole fateful bargain.
The dynamite they used was the politics of race. Crude evolutionary theory was deployed to argue that there were hierarchies of freedom: some kinds of people — basically, white ones (though East Asians were sometimes allowed a look-in) — were better suited to it than others. The argument went that we can live free and prosper so long as we stick to doing business with our own kind. When we start bending over backwards to let all the others join in we simply drag everyone down. Exhibit A in the new racial backlash — though as Slobodian says, it was really a ‘frontlash', since these intellectual entrepreneurs were determined to get ahead of the game — was Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, published in 1994, which made the case that differences in IQ between racial groups should be factored into policy-making
...Ruling people out on the grounds of race suggested borders, barriers and restrictions, not the openness and indifference to origin on which market dynamism depends. But the new neoliberals weren't bothered, not least because they had an earlier model of dynamic capitalism on which to draw. Nineteenth-century free traders were usually also imperialists, who knew that one way to get rich was to control the world and keep everyone in their place rather than allowing a free-for-all. Plus they were racists (pretty much everyone in the 19th century was racist). None of that stopped the global economy from expanding rapidly and the people at the top from doing best of all. Ethnopolitics doesn't just mean an ethnostate with ruthlessly policed borders. It can also mean an ethnoeconomy in which the market works its magic for the people who understand how to make best use of it. The people who don't understand don't get to play. They get herded to the margins where they belong.
...state spending continues to play a big part in many Silicon Valley success stories. Look at SpaceX, Alphabet, Amazon Web Services (the cloud computing wing that drives the company's profitability): they all do much of their business off the back of government contracts, and also benefit from extensive subsidies. Have the new tech giants ever truly weaned themselves off government support or are they really just bloated receptacles for taxpayers' handouts?
...why Bannon so detests Musk, whom he has recently described as a ‘parasitic illegal immigrant'. One wing of the alt-right thinks that Silicon Valley is a template for the future: renegades such as Curtis Yarvin (aka the blogger Mencius Moldbug) love the way that tech titans run their companies as though they were medieval fiefdoms and would like to turn the whole of the federal government into a giant technology corporation. But another wing of Trumpworld believes these companies are evil freeloaders, run by secret globalists to boot (Silicon Valley is not at all keen that curbs on immigration include technology engineers from Asia or anywhere else). What does Trump think? God knows. But these people are all Hayek's bastards in their different ways and it's not hard to imagine them eventually ripping each other's throats out.
An Ugly New Marketing Strategy Is Driving Me Nuts (and You Too)
That's its purpose Ted Gioia
Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.
You will pay just to get rid of the ad.
In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this—YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.
That's not marketing—it's water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.
And guess what? Even paying for premium doesn't guarantee escape from ads. Welcome to the new digital platforms—which increasingly resemble prisons.
...we now are entering the age of the Annoyance Economy. And it is the inevitable result of corporations battling for your attention.
They monetize your eyeballs—measured in clicks and microseconds—and they will do anything to hold on to them. This increasingly involves annoying, intrusive actions that no business would have dared to implement in a consumer-oriented economy.
Empathy as a sin Liz Anderson at Crooked Timber
Creating the World Andy Ilachinski
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The Trump Family's Island of Dreams Marzio Mian at The Dial
...Until now mostly untrammeled by development, it is on the verge of becoming a Mecca for ultra-luxury tourism, another addition to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner's real estate portfolio. Speaking on the Lex Friedman podcast in July 2024, Ivanka could barely conceal her excitement: "I'm working with my husband, we have this 1,400-acre island in the Mediterranean and we're bringing in the best architects and the best brands," she said. "It's going to be extraordinary."
The Arguers: A Charming Illustrated Parable about the Absurdity of Self-righteousness Marginalian
Patterns, Structure, and Arrangement Andy Ilachinski
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Sarah Kendzior Q&A Hobbledehoy
Diane Arbus and the Too-Revealing Detail Max Norman at The New Yorker
The bebop revolution in words and music
edited by Dave Oliphant, full text via Hathi Trust (1994)
The AI Derailment: How Artificial Intelligence Could Threaten the Climate Transition Ben Shread-Hewitt at Medium
Welcome to the AI doom loop.
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Agent-based simulations reveal the possibility of multiple rapid northern routes for the second Neanderthal dispersal from Western to Eastern Eurasia Emily Coco and Radu Iovita PLOS One
...a team of anthropologists has turned to computer models. Their simulations mapped out possible routes Neanderthals could have followed to reach Asia, and suggest that by traveling during warmer periods and following river valleys, they could have traversed approximately 2,000 miles (3,250 kilometers) in less than 2,000 years.
Face it: The guy is annoying. He lies a lot. He overpromises, constantly. But there is, or there was, a but: Although he massively overpromised, nearly always, he substantially overdelivered. Tesla made cars. Starlink carried voice and data. SpaceX launched rockets. And it was not implausible to think it was his presence and actions and salesmanship and overpromising that had kept those three operations from being wound-up and wound-down. And those three operations were immensely valuable to humanity as technology-forcers, and substantially valuable to all their stakeholders from raw-material suppliers to users as globalized value-chain economy production networks. He had somehow turned overpromising into a kind of business and financial sorcery, delivering rockets, cars, and satellites against the odds, as his audacity propelled technological revolutions.
So I was surprised and disappointed when he showed up as a value-subtracting chaos monkey with Twitter. And then I was disappointed when he began spending all of his time attending on America's chaos-monkey in chief, Donald Trump. But I was not surprised when he began spending all of his time attending on America's chaos-monkey in chief, Donald Trump: I thought I understood what he was doing.
But now I don't understand. It appears that he tried to arm-wrestle Washington and lost. This is the story of a man who mistook political chaos for a new frontier, only to discover that Trump's dealmaking is not a zero-sum game.
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The Era Of The Business Idiot Edward Zitron, via Stephen Downes
James Joyce reading his work Hobbledehoy
The Socialism of James Joyce Hobbledehoy
The Ecosystem Dynamics That Can Make or Break an Invasion Gabriel Popkin at Quanta Magazine
The Biggest Standing Stone in the World: The Broken Menhir of Er Grah Tim Ward at Medium Locmariaquer, Brittany,
'Killers of the Flower Moon': The Osage are Dead Lady Horatia at Medium
This is the truth at the heart of the American dream, and the American history. This is the story that the American people are too afraid to tell themselves. The story of white supremacy, genocide, and violence. The story of a system which perceives the subaltern peoples as exploitable.
...The material reality of America is one of exploitation. It is a truth which cannot be removed from a relationship of material exploitation and extraction, a relationship which has been there since its inception. A relationship of exploitation which is 500 years old. From the first enclosures in Europe, to the Witch Hunts, and then to the exploitation of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, exploitation has been at the heart of capitalism since its inception.
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What's Happening to Reading? Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker
This shift has taken decades, and it's been driven by technologies that have been disproportionately adopted by the young. Perhaps for these reasons, its momentousness has been obscured. In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that, over the preceding decade, the proportion of adults who read at least one book a year had fallen from fifty-five per cent to forty-eight per cent. That's a striking change, but modest compared to what's happened among teen-agers: the National Center for Education Statistics—which has recently been gutted by the Trump Administration—found that, over roughly the same period, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun "almost every day" fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent.
How the BIC Cristal Ballpoint Pen Became the Most Successful Product in History Open Culture
Musk Just Crushed SpaceX
Yet again, Elon has shot himself in the foot. Will Lockett at Medium
SpaceX's income is currently precarious. In 2024, its revenue was $13.1 billion, according to multiple sources. However, $8.2 billion of that revenue was from Starlink. Starlink is currently far from profitable and is being paid for by its other profitable launches. In fact, because Starlink's global sales are declining due to backlash against Musk and his misuse of Starlink, it is likely to remain unprofitable for a long time (read more here). As such, it only made $4.9 billion from external launch revenue. $3.8 billion of that came from government contracts from NASA and the Pentagon. So, 77.6% of SpaceX's profitable operations came from the US government! As a result, if the US government diversified its launch options, it could literally decimate SpaceX's operational profit.
Dark Propensities: Opium Inc. Nandini Das at LRB, reviewing Amitav Ghosh Smoke and Ashes
What do you lacke? What is't you buy? ... China Chaynes, China Braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China knives, China boxes, China Cabinetts, Caskets, umbrellas, Sundyalls, Howerglasses, lookinge glasses, Burninge glasses, Concave glasses, Triangular glasses, Convexe glasses, Christall globes, Waxen pictures, Estrich Egges, Birds of Paradise, Muskcads, Indian Mice, Indian ratts, China dogges, and China cattes? Flowrs of silke, Mosaick fishes? Waxen fruict, and Purslane dishes? Very fine Cages for Birds, Billyard Balls, Purses, Pipes, rattles, Basons, Ewers, Cups, Cans, Voyders, Toothpicks, Targets, falchions, Beards of all ages, Vizards, Spectacles! Sir what you lack.
By the 18th century, one item overshadowed all others in Britain's mercantile imagination: tea. The East India Company, founded in 1600, first brought tea to Britain from China in the mid-17th century, but importing this prized commodity steadily drained the country's reserves of silver currency or specie. The Chinese had little interest in Britain's chief export, wool, or later in its manufactured goods. By the 1750s, Britain had paid close to £26 million to China for tea, and recovered only a quarter of that amount through the sale of its own merchandise. 'We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country's manufactures,' the Qianlong emperor bluntly stated in a letter to George III in 1793. The solution was to emulate the VOC and offer opium as a commodity that would generate its own demand: the addictive cycle on which every drug cartel depends.
The Whole of It Marginalian
Republican bill's effects on household income, by income group FlowingData
Whata's Left to Say? John Ganz, via Brad DeLong
Maybe if Israel's strikes on Iran grind to a stalemate, and do not eliminate the regime or the nuclear program, he will start listening to the Vance-Tucker isolationist wing again and distance himself from the whole thing, claiming he wanted to do diplomacy from the get-go. The fact that he has openly associated himself with the attacks now won't be an obstacle to this about-face.
There are two interpretations of the events that led up to the strikes on Iran. One is that Trump conspired with Netanyahu to use diplomacy to conceal an attack. That seems devilishly clever on some level, but ultimately it demolishes the diplomatic credibility of the United States. It creates a short-term success and a long-term destabilization. Or suppose that Trump got dragged along by Netanyahu. In that case, he cannot control or shape events and is extremely easy to manipulate, so long as things appear "strong." Both of these are almost equally disastrous possibilities. They go back to the simple core of the phenomenon: he's both evil and stupid. People are still doing the wishful thinking thing by seeing some kind of strategic masterstroke here. It's not: it's a big fucking mess.
...Even if Trump is less positively disposed on a personal level to Bibi, he can be easily outmaneuvered by him or whatever goon succeeds him, because he's very stupid and just not all that interested. Say what you will about the State Department under Biden, under Trump there basically won't be one: policy will be made through the kind of informal dealmaking and influence peddling that typifies Trumpland. We can now clearly see the results of that approach.
...The most hopeful outcome now is that the attacks cease, they come to some face-saving diplomatic solution where everybody can claim victory, and we all hobble forward without a world-ending cataclysm. Even then, this will convince everyone—if they hadn't already noticed from Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine—that the only way to preserve national (and regime) security is the possession of atomic weapons. Likely, this so-called "counter-proliferation" move will increase nuclear proliferation. And if the United States is so unreliable and dangerous now, why wouldn't Germany pursue a program, or why wouldn't France increase its warhead production? The lesson is if you have nukes, you pretty much get to do what you want. Otherwise, you're fucked.
Prosperity & "Utopia": The Moving Target Brad DeLong
In our era of relentless striving and engineered scarcity, the Arcadian model stands as a quietly subversive alternative: utopia as sufficiency, not surplus; as contentment, not conquest. But, as ever, one should be wary of mistaking the myth for the reality.
Why It's So Hard to Part with Books Gary Allen
And have read.
And intend to read.
Like the twisting strands of DNA in our cells, the titles of books are in our genes—and the pages of countless books are the adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine, constantly pairing in new combinations to determine our every thought and action.
The "intend to read" books—the piles of books on our nightstand, the wish list on Amazon, the just-purchased books, the shelved books that we haven't gotten to yet—they represent our aspirational life. People who don't read (are they really people?), when they see our bulging bookcases, and the stacks of books that can't be squeezed onto already sagging shelves, often ask, "Have you actually read all of those books?"
"Many of them, yes, some several times," we might answer, "but that's not the point of having a library in one's home." A personal library is both past and prologue.
When we part with a book, a book that made us who we are, it feels like an amputation. There's the pain, of course, but also the worry that somehow we won't be able to be as fully functional, in the future, as we are now.
...Being asked to part with a book requires us to make a Sophie's Choice. But it is more than being asked to give up something we love. To return to the DNA metaphor, when we part with a book, we eliminate a line of possible descent (reading that hasn't happened yet has no chance to guide the direction of our lives the way that our genes do). Unapologetically hopping from one metaphor to another (in mid-stream, as it were) is burning our bridges before we come to them.
If, as Manguel suggests, our bookshelves are our memoirs, then removing books is tearing out pages of ourselves—and, worse, pages that haven't even been written yet.
The Phantom Menace of the Trump Mobile T1 SmartPhone: Silicon Dreams & Supply Chain Realities
The grifting never ends. Nor does the journamalistic sanewashing. Brad DeLong
What's in a Name? Gary Allen
Etymology is linguistic seasoning, adding savor to mere facts.
Suzon Garrigues was 21 years old. She loved rock music and the socially conscious novels of Émile Zola. She was studying literature at Paris-Sorbonne University. On November 13, 2015, she was one of 90 people killed in the terrorist attack at the Bataclan Theater in Paris. She had gone to the concert with her brother, who survived.
The Minnesota Suspect's Radical Spiritual World Stephanie McCrummen at The Atlantic
MAGA's Marxist Minnesota Shooter Theory Falls Apart in Record Time Lucas Ropek at gizmodo
...new facts to emerge about Boelter make it obvious that he is anything but a "Marxist." A new report shows he was raised evangelical, owned his own private security company and has espoused "far right" views critical of abortion.
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The surprisingly big impact the small intestine has on your health New Scientist
Or it may have something to do with digesting fibre. By definition, this is the fraction of the diet that human enzymes can't break down, and which we leave to our gut microbiome to deal with. The received wisdom was that fibre travels through the small intestine chemically intact, but thanks to the new investigative techniques, that is now known to be untrue. "That's one of the old ideas," says Karen Madsen, who researches the microbiome at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. "Absolutely, fibre is being digested throughout [the small intestine]."
...The fact that the microbes in the small intestine can digest fibre is probably of physiological importance, says Frost — though exactly how isn't yet clear. We know that, in the colon, microbial fermentation of fibre produces a class of molecules called short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which both remain in the colon and are absorbed into the bloodstream with knock-on benefits throughout the body.
Human metabolism can't synthesise SCFAs, so we exploit the bacterial ones for a range of biological functions. One of these is to maintain the integrity of the colon wall, to prevent bacteria from breaching it and causing inflammation. So-called leaky gut syndrome is increasingly pointed to as a possible cause of the low-level and yet extremely damaging inflammation that creeps through our bodies as we age, and which is a direct cause of metabolic conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.
You need this document organizing hack boing boing
Air Campaigns don't Win Wars on their Own: Why Israel will largely Fail in Iran Juan Cole
When observers say "Iran", what they really mean is the specific theocratic regime that wants to continue to hold authoritarian power over the society of people living in Iran and that claims leadership over a particular minoritarian vision of Islamic authority that exists outside its borders. Unless, as they sometimes must, they mean “Iran” to include a much larger diaspora of people who have strong historical and families ties to Iran even as they feel strong opposition to its present government.
In this particular conflict, observers are for the moment much clearer about evaluating other potential national actors in more personalized terms. For most prognosticators, it's not a matter of "America" deciding, it's a matter of Trump and of the key constituencies within the current GOP weighing on Trump's decisions. And for once, most of the commentary seems aware not only of Trump's personal volatility and lack of understanding but also of the difficulty of assessing whether anybody at all within the networks around Trump is remotely serious about the views they've advocated in public or whether they're just performing the roles they've been cast in.
The question is: and then what? If you look at Israel's situation from that far-away comparative perspective, trying for a moment to put aside the passions of the right-now, it's a state that can't survive forever without allies, without trading partners, without some form of peace on its borders, and without the ability to import labor to do the work its own citizens won't do.
Beyond volume: Unraveling the genetics of human brain geometry Science Advances
Some of these variants are also associated with disorders such as high blood pressure and neurodegeneration, indicating that changes in brain shape could be a tool for early detection of these disorders
...The Laplace-Beltrami operator provides a multivariate spectral representation of a shape, capturing its characteristics in detail (13, 14). The Laplace-Beltrami spectrum (LBS), a set of ordered eigenvalues, is obtained by solving the Helmholtz equation, a time-independent form of the wave equation, on a Riemannian manifold that can be the surface of a given brain structure. Solutions are decomposed into eigenfunctions (also referred to as "eigenmodes") and their corresponding eigenvalues, representing the natural vibrations and their squared frequencies, respectively, on the manifold underlying the shape, akin to the harmonic frequencies of the membrane of a drum (fig. S1) (15). Each sound or other vibration of a membrane can be represented as a weighted sum of its eigenmodes, relating closely to the theory of spectral analysis in Fourier series. Necessarily, the eigenmodes are strongly linked to a shape's geometry, as visualized in a seminal experiment by Chladni (16) using vibrating plates. It has been asked since then whether a shape can be represented by a unique series of eigenvalues or, metaphorically, whether the shape of a drum can be heard (17). While the answer is affirmative for one-dimensional shapes whose lengths are made audible by the harmonics or pure tones of string instruments, for instance, this is not true in general for shapes with more than one dimension as there exist isospectral shapes
Lesotho squashbox rootsworld.com
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Understanding Terrain Theory: A Different Way of Looking at Disease>/a> René F. Najera, MPH, DrPH at Medium
Tukey's birthdat Mark Liberman at Language Log
Insurers Retreating From Climate-Risk Zones Maps Mania
Blunt instrument Victor Mair at TSA checkpoint Language Log
Two-factor siege Mark Liberman at Language Log, on "security codes"
Persepolis Wikipedia
Persepolis reimagined Getty.edu
Our Nusrat Poorna Swami at NYRB
The lyrics—typically in languages such as Urdu, Punjabi, and Farsi—are drawn from Sufi poetry of the region and seek God through exalted declarations of love. At times they can have a disarming intimacy—the speaker takes on the persona of a female lover flirting with a male beloved, who stands in for the supreme being. "Come, my love, let me behold you. I will not look at another, nor will I let you."
But it isn't simply these words that are meant to bring one closer to God; it is their repetition. In an archetypal composition, "Allah, Muhammad, Chaar Yaar" ("Allah, Muhammad, and their Four Companions"), Nusrat—l servants. The chorus mimics these sounds over and over, louder and louder, as his words start to change texture, becoming the stippled sediment of a riverbed, then relentless rain, then, as the rhythm quickens, frenzied horses bursting across an open field. Finally his voice shatters into euphoric syllables calling out to the heavens.
...A few years after Oriental Star discovered Nusrat, Peter Gabriel—once the zany lead singer of the rock band Genesis—caught wind of his talents. In 1985 he invited Nusrat to perform at the now-historic World of Music, Arts and Dance Festival (WOMAD) on the eastern coast of England. Nusrat opened with an invocation, "Allah Hoo." For several minutes he sang a series of slow, high-pitched declarations in praise of God while his vocal accompanist accented the melody in higher and lower registers. Nusrat's voice kept grasping above itself, almost reaching a shriek, before it dropped to a weightier chant: "Allah hoo hoo hoo, Allah hoo hoo hoo." The harmonium and tabla charged in, and the chorus joined the recitation, clapping along. By the end these jubilant calls had left the air dizzy, and Nusrat's seemingly endless voice lingered even after it had gone quiet.
This was the first time an average, festival-going Western audience had heard qawwali. Most of the concertgoers couldn't understand the spiritual message of the lyrics. But they were enchanted. Throughout the set, which lasted two and a half hours, the crowd screamed and whistled, clearly overwhelmed. For Nusrat, too, this was a revelation. He had found a whole new world of listeners.
The percentage of images taken with smartphones has reached 94%, the highest ever. (Meanwhile, the AI technology for creating photo-like graphic images capable of fooling people is improving by leaps and bounds, raising the reasonable assumption that someday, a large majority of the trillions of photographs taken won't even be, um, photographs. So there's that to consider as well. By some estimates, 90% of all online content will be AI-generated by the end of 2026. At that point, it all becomes a loop of irrelevance.)
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Paving Paradise for the Ultra Rich Maps Mania
Hugh Blackmer
Deleted My Second Brain JA Westenberg at Medium
Zettelkasten Wikipedia
Getting Started Zettelkasten Method zettelkasten.du
Mexico in Tina Modotti's Eyes Matthew Bamberg at Medium
Undaunted Jennifer Rubin
Oregon bans the corporate practice of medicine Cory Doctorow
Francis Bebey rootsworld.com
The ICE Dress Code The Atlantic
Turkish-Style Romano Beans in Olive Oil (Zeytinyağ.lı Taze Fasulye)
This Massive Data Breach Shows Why We Need to Kill the Password Once and for All lifehacker
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A cautionary note on the application of limited genetics studies to whole populations Victor Mair at Language Log
The Shrinking World of Robert Walser other sides of a nobody
Donald Trump and the Iran Crisis David Remnick at The New Yorker
Avesta Wikipedia
Zoroastrian Archives avesta.org
Iranian diaspora Wikipedia
How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time Marginalian
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Why Trump Bombed Iran: Preserving US and Israeli Nuclear Supremacy in the Middle East Dan Steinbock at Informed Comment
Mahmoud Khalil, Released on Bail from ICE Detention, says "Justice will Prevail" Informed Comment
Elon Musk Has a New Plan to Win Back MAGA gizmodo
How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time Marginalian
The United States Bombed Iran. What Comes Next? Tom Nichols at The Atlantic
(In a strange moment, Trump added: “I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military.” Presidents regularly ask God to bless the American nation and its military forces—as Trump did in his next utterance—but it was a bit unnerving to see a commander in chief order a major military action and then declare how much "we: love the Creator.)
Only one outcome is certain: Hypocrisy in the region and around the world will reach galactic levels as nations wring their hands and silently pray that the B-2s carrying the bunker-buster bombs did their job.
Thousands of Afghans face expulsion from US as Trump removes protections Guardian
Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas ecmwf.int
Atlas of the Languages of Iran
Atlas of Iran Wikimedia Commons
The symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil Hannah Forsyth at crooked timber
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UX (User Experience) Wikipedia
The Current Iran War will Likely end Soon, but the Arms Race will Heat Up Juan Cole
US joins Israel in Attack on Iran, ushering in a New Era of Impunity Simon Mabon at Informed Comment
No Kings! This is What Democracy Looks Like Tom Engelhardt at Informed Comment
These Are the First Images Captured by the Largest Camera Ever Made PetaPixel
Bach's Colossus New Yorker (B Minor Mass)
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States Wikipedia
The stationary bandits of New York City Matthew Yglesias
Which is part of the reason why governance in rich American cities often seems so bad: The agglomeration externalities create a lot of surplus for the rulers to appropriate and most residents don't pay close attention to politics, so extractive political coalitions run cities for their own benefit.
It's Not Always For the Money
The AI industry is weird Alberto Romero
This Image Shows Satellite Streaks Blocking Out the Arctic Sky Petapixel
What I fear Trump will do with his war Robert Reich at Hobbledehoy
*PIE
Ancient genomes and West Eurasian history
Storytelling with ancient DNA reveals challenges and potential for writing new histories Benjamin S. Arbuckle and
Zoe Schwandt Science 26viii22
'Phenomenal' ancient DNA data set provides clues to origin of farming and early languages Andrew Curry Science 26viii22
The massive data set includes DNA from burials stretching from Croatia to modern-day Iran, in a region the authors call the Southern Arc. "The sample size is phenomenal, and fascinating," says Wolfgang Haak, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who was not part of the team. "The beauty of this is it's bringing it all together in a bigger narrative."
That narrative is no simple tale. The geneticists, led by David Reich and Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard University, worked with archaeologists and linguists, gathering thousands of skeletal samples and extracting and analyzing DNA, mostly from the dense petrous bone of the ear, over nearly 4 years. They applied better extraction methods and compared new samples with existing data, allowing them to identify even short bits of DNA.
David Reich Lab publications harvard.edu
Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia
Iosif Lazaridis et al Science 25viii22
The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe
Iosif Lazaridis et al. Science 26viii22
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Earlier this month, Musk decided to use his Starlink satellite service as a tool for regime change in Iran.
Starlink moved to provide broadband-by-satellite service to the Iranian people, possibly propelling the United States into a shooting war with Iran.
...After Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Iran's military leadership, its top scientists, and nuclear facilities capable of quickly creating weapons-grade nuclear materials, Iran's political leadership shut down the internet to mute public or online discussions about regime change.
"In view of the special conditions of the country, temporary restrictions have been imposed on the country's internet," Iran's communications ministry announced after Israel began bombing Tehran and other parts of the country two weeks ago.
The Iranian ministry said the blackout will remain in place until normalcy returns, effectively cutting off millions from digital communication.
Shortly after that decision, Musk announced publicly that he had activated Starlink service in Iran.
"The beams are on," he wrote in a post on X. Musk was responding to Mark Levin, a member of Trump's Homeland Security Advisory Council (and, like so many others driving political and even policy discussions in this White House, a Fox News personality).
In his own post on X, the social media platform Musk also owns, Levin had asked Musk to help "put the final nail in the coffin"
First-of-its-Kind Satellite Sees Through Forest Canopies to Measure Earth's Biomass PetaPixel
At Amazon's Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I. NYTimes
So here we are.
...The Republican Party, having purged itself of seriousness in favor of performative loyalty, has no bench. The institutions that once produced statesmen now churn out cable news personalities, at best. Their modal product is a Twitter provocateurs.
The risks are not hypothetical. The costs are not abstract. We are living, I think, in the long shadow of institutional decay, and the bill is due.
What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Fake Celebrity Dog Rescues
At the intersection of artificial intelligence and natural stupidity,
Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth Cory Doctorow
Photographer Captures the Terrifying Things Humans Have Done to the Planet PetaPixel on Edward Burtynsky
Andreessen Horowitz Backs AI Startup Whose Motto Is 'Cheat at Everything' gizmodo ...YCMTSU...
On the one hand, it's almost refreshing to see a company that isn't pretending to make the world a better place, and is instead content to embrace the spirit of chaotic, money-crazed technocracy that currently dominates our culture. On the other hand, I can't think of a faster way to intensively stupidify the human population than for people to start using this app.
Trump's Latest Bizarre Phrase Takes Over the Internet
Like those before it, "CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!" seemed to tap into the collective psyche. After days of tension and fears of a wider war, the three words served as a bizarre, cathartic release. They were a permission slip for people to finally exhale and express the absurdity and relief they had been holding back.
...At last the Dodo said, 'EVERYBODY has won, and all must have
prizes.' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Stephen Miller Owns Stock in Notorious ICE Collaborator Palantir ...YCMTSU...
"Stripped of Verbal Sham—Vivid, Unescapable"
Henry D. Hubbard's 1939 foreward to Graphic Presentation.
RJ Andrews at chartography.net
Order on Fair Use Stephen Downes
10 best open source ChatGPT alternative that runs 100% locally Stephen Downes
...Alsan argues that it was the TseTse fly which did it, by rendering vast swathes of land uninhabitable. It is not the direct effect of sleeping sickness which matters, terrible though it is, but how it kills livestock. The wild game of Africa is immune, but it is absolutely murderous to cattle. Without cattle, you can have no plow. You have no dung to fertilize crops. You have no carts or wheels, or even packhorses—you must rely upon human portage. Without carts, there are no roads. In short, productivity tanks and centralization is impossible... The Bantu migration was recent, and they abandoned crops and animals when they crossed terrain unsuited for them
...As of the year -1500 BCE, in Africa, we find substantial numbers of oxen and ox-cultures north of the tsetse fly belt, but not south. We find oxen no longer in the Sahara, which is now too dry, but along its northern and southern edges, in the Nile Valley, and in the Ethiopian highlands. Then the Iron Age, along with the yam and the oil palm. comes to the Bantu population around the Benue River Valley, in the borderlands of southeastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. And the Bantu expansion follows: not a conquest, or, rather, not just a conquest. We see a slow, multi-century process of migration, adaptation, and cultural diffusion, radiating out from this heartland. As Bantu-speaking peoples moved, they carried with them not just language, but a package of agricultural and technological innovations that allowed them to thrive in new environments—except, of course, where the tsetse fly or dense rainforest posed insurmountable barriers to their lifeways
see The Effect of the TseTse Fly on African Development Marcella Alsan American Economic Review vol. 105, no. 1, January 2015
(pp. 382-410) and the Job Market Paper, 2012 (pdf)
YouTube Shorts Averages Over 200 Billion Daily Views Alberto Romero
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the most well-known case. He's tried to scrub his public image with one outfit overhaul after another, but the signature beneath documents detailing despicable actions against teenagers hasn't changed. Meta's social platforms—Instagram and Facebook (reels)—are as toxic or more than YouTube. There's also TikTok, a Chinese creation. But, who'd blame China for quite successfully using a psychological weapon against the West? The US has repeatedly proved it doesn't care if young Americans turn numb and dumb, whereas China was already protecting its own in 2021 and keeps doing it in 2025.
Those of you who have seamlessly transferred your wariness toward social media platforms to the AI industry are completely correct. The same people who put small screens and social networks in our hands 20 years ago are now tirelessly working on AI companions that lie to us, charm us, and confuse us (I'd normally qualify this statement by praising the benefits and usefulness of AI, but not this time). Not all of them do this—some are still working on social media, trying to make the YouTube algorithm better still, and others came clean to AI and are interested in stuff other than addicting 13-year-olds—but way too many do.
...This post is clearly not about AI or algorithms or technology. I'm talking about the people who design those things. Brain rot is manufactured. An intentional, meticulous, precise, indifferent human manufacturing process. Refined through meeting after meeting: careless engineers, product managers, and designers sit down in comfy chairs and cheap t-shirts, the air conditioning humming, a cup of coffee or two still lingering in their esophagus, and they discuss—with as much explicitness as one can manage without vomiting up the whole grain bacon bagel—how to take "as much of our time and conscious attention as possible." In the past, those who knowingly brought this kind of harm upon the tribe were made into examples.
No active ingredients whatsoever
Placebos and the voluntary suspension of disbelief
Rob Horning
...Placebo studies suggest that a range of social and situational factors play into outcomes, and that abstracting treatments away from those factors is futile. If placebos are effective because they concretize successful social relations between patients and doctors, other caregivers, and the general ambiance of the medical apparatus that helps establish the tenor of those relations, how could AI medicine not undermine all of that? It eliminates the social relations involved, abandoning people to an indifferent piece of software.
'Techno King' Elon Musk Doesn't Own a Computer, His Lawyers Tell Court Luc Olinga at gizmodo ...YCMTSU...
The Musk v. Altman case is a proxy war over the governance and ownership of AI. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, now portrays himself as its most prominent critic, arguing the company sold its soul to Microsoft. OpenAI, in turn, depicts Musk as a bitter ex-partner trying to interfere with a company he chose to leave.
Hittites Wikipedia
...A team at the David Reich Lab demonstrated that the Hittite route must have been via the Caucasus and not the Balkans, since Yamnaya expansion into the Balkans carried a component of Eastern Hunter Gatherer ancestry that does not exist in any ancient Anatolian DNA samples, which indicates also that Hittites and their cousin groups split off from the Proto Indo Europeans before the formation of the Yamnaya which did admix with Eastern Hunter Gatherers
...By 1160 BC, the political situation in Asia Minor looked vastly different from that of only 25 years earlier. In that year, the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I was defeating the Mushki (Phrygians) who had been attempting to press into Assyrian colonies in southern Anatolia from the Anatolian highlands, and the Kaska people, the Hittites' old enemies from the northern hill-country between Hatti and the Black Sea, seem to have joined them soon after. The Phrygians had apparently overrun Cappadocia from the West, with recently discovered epigraphic evidence confirming their origins as the Balkan "Bryges" tribe, forced out by the Macedonians.
...Ultimately, both Luwian hieroglyphs and cuneiform were rendered obsolete by an innovation, the alphabet, which seems to have entered Anatolia simultaneously from the Aegean (with the Bryges, who changed their name to Phrygians), and from the Phoenicians and neighboring peoples in Syria.
Spreadsheet, Not Skynet: Microdoses, Not Microprocessors Brad DeLong
Elon Musk Is Playing God Charlie Warzel and Hana Kiros at The Atlantic 24vi25
...He claims to be philosophically aligned with longtermism, a futurist philosophy whose proponents—self-styled rationalists—game out how to do the most good for the human race over the longest time horizon. Classic pillars of longtermism are guarding against future pandemics and addressing concerns about properly calibrating artificial intelligence, all with a focus on protecting future generations from theoretical threats. Musk's Mars obsession purports to follow this logic: An investment in a program that allows humans to live on other planets would, in theory, ensure that the human race survives even if the Earth becomes uninhabitable. Musk has endorsed the work of at least one longtermist who believes that this achievement would equate to trillions of lives saved in the form of humans who would otherwise not be born.
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How will Your Data be Used in an Age of Dark Enlightenment? Rebecca Gordon at Informed Comment
I have no idea whether the TV version is what real facial recognition software actually looks like. What I do know is that it's already being used by federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI, under the auspices of a company called Clearview, which is presently led by Hal Lambert, a big Trump fundraiser. As Mother Jones magazine reports, Clearview has "compiled a massive biometric database" containing "billions of images the company scraped off the Internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users." The system is now used by law enforcement agencies around the country, despite its well-documented inability to accurately recognize the faces of people with dark skin.
...Anyone who's ever worked with a database, even one with only a few thousand records, knows how hard it is to keep it organized and clean. There's the problem of duplicate records (multiple versions of the same person or other items). And that's nothing compared to the problem of combining information from multiple sources. Even the names of the places where data goes ("fields") will differ from one base to another. The very structures of the databases and how records are linked together ("relationships") will differ, too. All of this makes combining and maintaining databases a messy and confusing business. Now imagine trying to combine dozens of idiosyncratically constructed ones with information stretching back decades into one single, clean, useful repository of information. It's a daunting project.
And in the case of Trump's One Big Beautiful Database, that's where Peter Thiel's company Palantir comes in. As the New York Times reported recently, at the urging of Elon Musk and DOGE, Trump turned to Palantir to carry out the vision expressed in his March executive order mentioned above. In fact, according to the Times, "at least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir."
...Thiel is part of a rarified brotherhood of tech and crypto-currency billionaires who share a commitment to a particular project of world domination by a technological elite. (And if that sounds like the raw material for a crazy conspiracy theory, bear with me again here.) Thiel was also an early funder of Clearview, the facial recognition software mentioned earlier.
In hiring Palantir and turning our data over to the company, Trump makes himself a useful tool, along with Vance, in the service of Thiel's vision
The rise of AI worship: the cult that believes ChatGPT is divine boing boing
Linguistics vs archeology and (physical) anthropology Victor Mair at Language Log
...The Xiongnu were not hunter-gatherers and fishermen of the Yenisei Valley. I am amazed and dismayed that the linguists who propose that the origins of Xiongnu language are to be found in Ket, Yeniseian, or other Paleo-Siberian language are oblivious to this basic reality of existence and ecology.
Elling Eide Center Sarasota FL
Why 2025 Is the Year of the Smart Glasses Stephen Johnson at lifehacker
Roughly speaking, smart glasses exist across these categories, although most straddle a few classifications:
Epic Timelapse Shows Tornado's 77-Minute Life in 1 Minute PetaPixel
Etruscan language Wikipedia
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Leonard Peltier's Story Isn't Over Yet Nick Estes at The New Yorker
Painted Grey Ware culture Wikipedia
Painted Grey Ware culture in Encyclopedia of IndoEuropean Culture
Wheels at Engineering and Technology History Wiki
Actually, riding on a horse was a fairly late innovation in a Middle Eastern culture accustomed to using horses only as draft animals. Nomadic cultures on the steppes did not have the leisure time or fixed bases needed to build wheeled vehicles. They accordingly developed horseback riding at a relatively early time. This development reached the Middle East so late that it is generally believed the Greek legend of centaurs began when someone first saw a rider and horse descend from the steppes.
Tutankhamen's chariots give us an opportunity to study the details of wheels and axles. The aspect that is most striking to a present-day engineer is that the axles were made of wood and the wheels bad wooden journals. The favored materials were elm and birch, which were imported because neither wood was native to Egypt.
Anyone accustomed to modern practice finds it hard to believe that wood-on-wood could function as a bearing at all. This primitive arrangement was improved in a few cases by the addition of a leather bushing. Lubrication in the form of animal fat or tallow is known to have been used, although the exact composition has not been determined.
The hub, called the nave in archaeological publications, was of exaggerated length. This design was dictated by the bearing fit, which could not have been very good, given the primitive nature of the tools used to make it. Even if the wooden bearings were tight to begin with, they certainly would have worn out of round. The length was thus needed to minimize wobbling of the wheel on the shaft rather than to reduce bearing pressure.
Iron
The Archaeometallurgy of the Asian Old World via Google Books
Circuits of Metal Value via Google Books re: the introduction of iron in the Near East, Hittite especially
Chalybes Wikipedia
Chaldia Wikipedfia
The Chalybes as Mythical Blacksmiths and the Introduction of Iron via Project MUSE
The Chalybes as an Historical People via Project MUSE
Ferrous metallurgy Wikipedia
Flux (metallurgy) Wikipedia
Africa's Iron Origins: Archeological Evidence si.edu
What's the earliest case of iron-smelting with hard evidence? via Reddit
Here's a good write up on the subject by Dr Nathaniel Erb-Satullo (specialist in Western/Near East archeology, Archeological Science - Cranfield University, Department of Anthropology - Harvard University): https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_b/articles/literature_evaluations_old_swords/general_2019_erb-satullo_iron_neareast_review.pdf
one argument that was made, was that when iron smelting becomes possible... why wouldn't it rapidly replace bronze?
Smelting iron was a much more complicated process than smelting copper or tin. In the early days, iron was never fully melted - the furnaces they had at the time just weren't hot enough - which makes it harder to reduce the ore and remove impurities.
Instead, when pre-modern ironworkers smelted iron what they were actually doing was burning off the oxygen/sulfur/etc. locking the iron in the ore minerals, usually by heating them in a carbon-rich environment of a charcoal furnace (oxygen will rather bond with carbon instead of iron). The temperature of these reactions happen at a much lower temperature than the melting point of elemental iron (700-1200'C vs 1500'C). Certain "fluxes", like siliceous minerals or limestone, further lower or aid the ore reduction reaction or process.
Iron production, settlement and environment: a regional approach
Estimations of the ecological demands of iron production require: 1. the creation of a model of iron consumption by a single rural community and the estimation of the number of smelts undertaken and the volume of wood necessary to produce a given quantity of iron; 2. the reconstruction of the number and distribution of communities and their settlement areas within the region, and calculation of the volume of iron and wood needed for all these communities; and 3. comparison of the quantity of wood considered necessary with the possible wood production of the region, allowing for the sustainable development of the forest. From this, the possible level of iron production in the region, allowing for ecological sustainability, can be deduced and the degree of self-sufficiency of individual regions in terms of iron production considered.
The four steps of iron working: 1 (extraction), 2 (smelting), 3...
Artificial Cryosphere Bee Wilson at LRB
Edward Burtynsky: 'My photographs are like Rorschach tests' Guardian
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Genomic insights into social life in Neolithic Anatolia Benjamin Arbuckle at Science (Perspective on Paleogenomics)
Computational phylogeny of Indo-European Victor mair at Language Log
Harvard's $2.6b of grants canceled by the government Flowing Data
The Assault on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: The US v. Canada
Hugh J. Curran at Informed Comment
DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) provides a framework to foster a workplace where individuals are valued, treated fairly, and feel included, regardless of their background. It promotes diversity, addresses inequalities, and encourages a more inclusive environment. Diversity refers to learning to embrace differences in race and ethnicity, or those from poverty-stricken backgrounds. Equity focuses on fairness that provides access to opportunities for all. Inclusion aspires to create a supportive environment where everyone can feel valued and respected.
...In recent months the Trump administration has demanded that DEI policies be eliminated from institutions that receive federal funding. By targeting DEI, it has set in motion a cascading effect such that a New England higher education institute has had its peace & reconciliation program eliminated while simultaneously discouraging references to DEI.
In Canada DEI has a different history since, over the past few decades it has promoted cultural diversity by way of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, (1988) and policies based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), which provides protections against exclusion based on race, ethnicity, religion, sex or age. In addition, Canada's Employment Equity Act (1986) addresses workplace diversity relating to women, the Indigenous and those with disabilities.
Planned EV Battery Plant Is a 'Death Sentence' for Uncontacted Indonesian Tribe
Indonesia's nickel rush threatens the lush forests of Halmahera and the people that still live within them. Ellyn Lapointe at gizmodo
The new plant, financially backed by China's Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), will integrate multiple components of EV battery production. Mining operations, smelting, nickel extraction, and production of precursors and cathodes will all take place on-site, according to the Indonesian news agency ANTARA. The project is one of 18 downstream industrial projects—valued at nearly $45 billion—that will break ground in Indonesia, ANTARA reports.
According to a 2024 Survival International report, at least 19 mining companies are operating on the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa's land, including the largest and second-largest nickel mines in the world. Most of these facilities are mining nickel, and together, they span about 40% of the uncontacted people's territory. The Halmahera nickel rush is part of the Indonesian government's efforts to feed the global nickel demand for EV batteries. As of last year, the country accounted for 51% of the world's nickel mine production, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color? Quanta
...the persistence of color throughout evolutionary history suggests that, for many organisms, the information it communicates is beneficial enough to outweigh the cost. However, without color vision, the value of maintaining distinctive coloration would vanish; indeed, there would be little reason for it to evolve in the first place.
...While, phylogenetically, colorful flowers seem to have a single origin, the warning hues are present in nine different phyla, which means they likely evolved independently again and again — maybe even hundreds of times, Wiens said. They have evolved even in species that don't have color vision, likely because their predators do.
RFK Jr's MAHA project funnels millions from public health to private wellness industry
Jennifer Sandlin at boing boing
Abazins Wikipedia
Circassian genocide Wikipedia
Silicon Valley Is Cashing Its Check After Backing Trump gizmodo
...According to data from the Department of the Treasury, about 33,000 people have claimed the QSBS benefit in the last decade. They netted $51 billion in 2021 alone from it, which was a record year. Notably, the Treasury also found that 90% of the income claimed through QSBS came from taxpayers who were reporting more than $1 million of gains—basically, folks who are cashing out big time without paying anywhere near what an average person has to hand over to the federal government.
...According to The Guardian, Silicon Valley executives and employees poured about $394 million into Donald Trump's 2024 election campaign. So scoring $17.2 billion in tax breaks certainly seems worth the spend. That's a cool 4,265% return on investment! For what it's worth, Democratic lawmakers proposed significantly rolling back the QSBS rules back in 2021, in a way that would have slashed the amount of income that could be excluded from taxes in half. Instead, the rich get richer.
Peter Thiel on Whether He's Ushering in the Antichrist: Um, Uhh, Buh, Um Uhh, th th, Uhhhh gizmodo
But is Thiel's preoccupation with supernatural evil even real? Frankly, it's unclear whether the billionaire is just a liar or a guy whose head is crammed so far up his ass that day looks like night and a peaceful global order unperturbed by nuclear war looks like the work of the Devil. If we start from the presumption that most people aspire to be the hero of their own story, and that Thiel is one of those people, and that he feels that his creepy technocratic endeavors are actually a force for good in the world instead of an obvious pox on humanity, then it would be safe to assume that he also feels that anything that gets in the way of those endeavors is decidedly not good—or, in his own words, the work of the "Antichrist."
The Supreme Court Sides with Trump Against the Judiciary The New Yorker
Heat Exhaustion Sarah Kendzior at Hobbledehoy
...Mamdani's victory was a primary upset win over former governor and unrepentant sex pest Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is part of a legal team representing Benjamin Netanyahu against ICC charges of war crimes. The team was assembled by Alan Dershowitz, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. Rich people who liked Epstein also like Cuomo, a fellow predator and death merchant. They need Cuomo to hold office and keep secrets.
Mamdani, unlike Cuomo, would not perform subservience to Israel, no matter how many times pundits tried. Mamdani has secrets too: like that a city can uplift its own people instead of functioning as a hub for a wealthy criminals tied to foreign states.
Rich New Yorkers are panicking because that was never a secret. It only felt like one because hardly anyone powerful said it out loud.
...Today's mafia is transnational but not ethnic. Its criminals have multiple passports and offshore accounts and no national allegiances. To them, countries are land masses to be stripped and sold for parts. Transnational organized crime knows no geographical bounds — but it has key hubs, and New York City is one of them.
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127 Million-Year-Old Poop Just Rewrote the Story of Polar Ecosystems Silvia Pineda-Munoz at Medium
Even more, the shapes and stacking of the pellets matched what we see today in nests made by drywood termites, especially those in the Kalotermitidae family, experts in gnawing through wood and backfilling their tunnels with poop.
The One-Minute Geographer: More Than Rio Jim Fonseca at Medium
...Perhaps the biggest structural difference in Latin American cities compared to US cities is that many Latin American cities are ringed not by fancy single family homes, but by shantytowns and slums, variously called favelas in Brazil, barrios bajos ('low neighborhoods') in Colombia, ciudades perdidas ('lost cities') in Mexico and villas miseria in Argentina (no translation needed).
A Practical Guide to Painting Hands Anne Kullaf at Medium
Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity Cory Doctorow
The system is so broken and the mainstream of politics endlessly gaslights us, telling us that corrupt and degraded institutions are either just fine ("America Was Always Great" -H. Clinton) or need to be destroyed, rather than redeemed ("Delete CFPB" -E. Musk). People know that the system only caters to the whims of billionaires and tells the rest of us to eat shit. They hate the fucking system.
...I think that centrist suppression of the left has pushed 90 percent of the energy for major change into right wing nihilist movements, but the anti-corporate, anti-monopolist energy has not dissipated. It's formed a kind of invisible political wind that has filled the sails of these antimonopoly projects all over the world.
But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Zohran Mamdani just won the NYC Democratic mayoral primary election. That wasn't supposed to happen. The worst people on Earth showered the hereditary King of New York with so much money it was coming out of his fucking pores and he still ate shit. Guys who've got so much money they were able to get Columbia University to collude in shipping its students off to gulags for having the temerity to oppose genocide tried to do it to Mamdani and we kicked their teeth in.
The world is organized around the whims of billionaires, but it doesn't have to be. Most of us are not esoteric authoritarian freaks pining for a CEO of America who'll track us all using mandatory Fitbits and assign us jobs based on an AI's estimation of our cranial geometry. Those ideas are not popular. Now, it's true that this century has been defined by extremely unpopular ideas winning the day. But anything that can't go on eventually stops.
Trump Kills Trade Talks With Canada After It Hits U.S. With Digital Services Tax gizmodo
The End of Growth and The Zero Sum World Chad Mulligan Congo River and Bantu Expansion
The Inland Waters of Tropical Africa Google Books
Bantu expansion Wikipedia
The Problem of the Bantu Expansion via JSTOR
The end of US democracy John Quiggen at crooked timber
Uncaging the Bird in the Mind: William Henry Hudson and the Gift of the Ruin of Your Best Laid Plans Marginalian
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Early Farming in Middle East, Sometimes Matriarchal, Spread through Learning, not Conquest Juan Cole
Moreover, team members told Kristina Killgrove at Live Science that women were key players in big villages / early towns like Çatalhöyük. Co-author Mehmet Somel told her, With Çatalhöyük, we now have the oldest genetically-inferred social organization pattern in food-producing societies. Which turns out to be female-centered."
The team found that nuclear family members tended to be buried together, and more distant relatives around them, and that maternal lineage was determinative. The impressive settlement has long been known for the large number of female figurines, presumably goddesses, that show up in the excavations. The large village/ small town was inhabited for a millennium, 7100 BCE to 6100 BCE. Girls who died childhood got more burial gifts, suggesting greater status and power for females.
Art Images for College Teaching University of Michigan Library Digital Collections
That's The Way the Dog Treats Bounce Alan Levine at CogDogBlog
I'd rather be naive than greedy.
Trump Bullies Canada Into Killing Its Big Tech Tax gizmodo
Prophet of the Past: Blame it on Malthus Oliver Cussen at LRB
Rudolf Schlichter Wikipedia
"How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence," Reviewed Molly Fischer at New Yorker
Biologists Uncover Previously Unknown Structure Hiding Inside Human Cells gizmodo
Harold Fisk's stunning 1944 maps show how the Mississippi River changed course over thousands of years boing boing
Youth, the middle-class & the NYC mayoral race: an appeal for more analysis Adam Tooze
Rick Steeves "Oh Canada" Hobbledehoy
Summer in the City: SF & NYC Rudy Rucker
He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Shun him.
He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a student. Teach him.
He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep. Wake him.
He who knows, and knows that he knows, is wise. Follow him
(Ibn Yamin 1286-1368)
Like GDP, military spending is a "flow". Security has to be provided and paid for every minute of every day. Adding up annual spending, arriving at a huge total and then demanding to know what we have to show for it, misses the point. It is a bit like adding up a decade of grocery bills and asking, where is all the food? We ate it. We wouldn't be here to ask the question if we hadn't. Europe was defended every minute of every day. Defense spending did its job.
...at my feet I spot something else: the velveteen dome of a mower's mushroom pokes up from the grass. I bend down, noticing how the diminutive parasol structure disappears into the fine-grained soil. I know that although this fellow looks lonely, he is really less of a fellow and more of a swarming festivity below ground. Mushrooms are reproductive flourishes of fungal life-forms that live in soil (or wood) as threadlike, filamentous webs called mycelium. Mycelium is composed of long tubes of hyphae. One network might have thousands of different hyphal tips all capable of forking, fusing, foraging, and creating increasingly complex connections with other fungal systems and vegetal life-forms. I lightly press my finger to the mushroom, imagining my mind slipping like a yolk from the egg of my brain, into my arm, then strained through my finger into the mushroom's damp body. Deeper still, below the fruiting body, my consciousness dives on mycelial threads into the underworld. It holds tight to roving nuclei as it travels through a chain of opening and closing doorlike pores.
...you need a brain to think, but thinking isn't in the brain, and the brain doesn't generate it; it facilitates it. The brain generates many things—neurons and their synaptic connections, ongoing rhythmic activity patterns, the constant dynamic coordination of sensory and motor activity—but none of these should be identified with thinking, though all of them crucially facilitate it. Thinking is an action of the whole person in its environment.1
Abstract:
...It does need to be stressed that that cumulative capital account position is because the world's rich expect investments in the United States to do something very important for them: preserve, protect, and substantially grow their wealth. They still see the U.S. as a (relative) safe haven for the financial property even of non-citizens, and still see investments in the U.S. as a way of participating in the immense profits from being in the furnace where the future is being forged in our Second Gilded Age.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 22, No. 5, October 2008, 715–730
Genome sequencing of 1537 individuals from 139 ethnic groups reveals the genetic characteristics of understudied populations in North Asia and South America. Our analysis demonstrates that West Siberian ancestry, represented by the Kets and Nenets, contributed to the genetic ancestry of most Siberian populations. West Beringians, including the Koryaks, Inuit, and Luoravetlans, exhibit genetic adaptation to Arctic climate, including medically relevant variants. In South America, early migrants split into four groups—Amazonians, Andeans, Chaco Amerindians, and Patagonians—13,900 years ago. Their longest migration led to population decline, whereas settlement in South America—s diverse environments caused instant spatial isolation, reducing genetic and immunogenic diversity. These findings highlight how population history and environmental pressures shaped the genetic architecture of human populations across North Asia and South America.
...The irony remains that Finland succeeded by honoring and preserving the core ideals the United States once championed: education is a public good and not a marketplace, teachers are professionals as opposed to test administrators, equity is the foundation instead of an afterthought, and learning is a holistic process instead of a score. Of note, Finland did not "outdo" the United States. Finland stayed the course guided by the vision the United States abandoned.The United States chased quick fixes, surrendered to market logic, and lost sight of what made its schools aspirational in the first place.
...If we stop asking generative AI to do jobs that it—s not qualified to do—to write, create or research as if it were a thinking subject and started instead to use it to simulate language for reasons that have nothing to do with accuracy, truth or knowledge-making, what might we use it for?
...by the 1990s other ideas were on the march, including environmentalism, feminism and racial justice. All of them – with their insistence on correcting for social inequality and market failures – threatened the integrity of capitalism.
...The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.
A new resort on the remote Albanian island of Sazan promises "high-end luxury."
Perhaps the most perilous consequence of uncertain times, times that hurl us into helplessness and disorientation, is that they turn human beings into opinion machines. We dope our pain and confusion with false certainties that stifle the willingness to understand (the nuances of the situation, the complexity of the wider context, what it's like to be the other person) with the will to be right. Our duels of self-righteousness can be fought over whose turn it is to take out the trash or who should govern the country, they can take place on the scale of the planet in the language of nuclear weapons or on the scale of the kitchen table in the code language of lovers, but they are always a betrayal of our deepest humanity — the capacity to understand, the longing to be understood, the knowledge that everyone is doing the best they can with the tools they've got and the cards they've been dealt.
...In the late fifties and early sixties, Arbus shot in 35-mm., the format of photojournalism. Though a number of those earlier pictures are unmistakably hers—say, her Magrittean riddle "The Backwards Man in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1961"—many could have been by Robert Frank or Helen Levitt. Things changed when she started using a wide-format Rolleiflex and, later, a twin-lens Mamiyaflex, which, held at waist-level rather than in front of the face, allow for more connection but also require more intention. In a way, Arbus stepped backward in photographic time, and down, away from the gauziness of postwar art photography and toward the unvarnished aesthetic of everyday life. She rediscovered the crime-scene chiaroscuro of Weegee at the same time as she harked back to the young medium's not-so-old masters: Mathew Brady's posed portraiture from the nineteenth century, August Sander's careful study of German social types from the twenties, and Walker Evans's noble sharecroppers from the thirties. If her 35-mm. shots are taken, her more mature, square pictures are made, the result not just of technique (including a savvy use of the flash) but of prolonged, trusting encounters with her subjects
Hieronymus Bosch, ca. 1500...AI, if not carefully managed, poses a novel and potent derailment risk to the global climate transition. It's not just about the vast energy needed to train and run large models, or even mining rare earth minerals for AI infrastructure — although those are serious issues. It's about the possibility that the abilities of AI to help fix the climate crisis could, paradoxically, accelerate it.
(via gizmodo)>br>...Neanderthals leaving Africa for Europe and Asia long before modern humans joined them hundreds of thousands of years later. There, Neanderthals dispersed as far as Spain and Siberia. Our prehistoric cousins likely first reached Asia around 190,000 to 130,000 years ago, with another substantial migration to Central and Eastern Eurasia likely between 120,000 and 60,000 years ago. But how did they get there?
Last fall, I thought I understood what Elon Musk was doing.
... In a classic 1958 book (opens a new tab) on the subject, the ecologist Charles Elton argued that an ecosystem with more species should be more resilient. In a diverse ecosystem, he wrote, so many species are already divvying up the available resources that little remains for a potential interloper looking to gain a foothold. Elton also posited that simpler food webs are more vulnerable, while more complex ones often contain predators or parasites that can control possible invaders.
...There's a liberal tendency to detach violence from causality or reasons, as if violence exists separate from any reason for executing it. This liberalizing perspective is harmful as it obscures the choices made. We might even call it a liberal justification for colonialism. Material interests are always what motivate material actions. King wanted oil because oil was capital. And capital is the means for profit, and profit is the end goal of capitalism. This is why King and Ernest killed. And so colonialism becomes a tool for capitalism.
...Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic. These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit's lazy river. There's something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we've begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.
...After Trump threatened to revoke all of SpaceX's governmental contracts, which amount to nearly $22 billion, Musk decided to retaliate by saying he would decommission SpaceX's Dragon capsule, the US's only operational domestic route to the ISS — rather than, you know, just being critical of Trump. So, he took the already dire situation occurring at SpaceX and NASA and pummeled it even further into the mud. Now, NASA and the Pentagon have been concerned about their overreliance on SpaceX for years, and this pushed them over the edge. The Washington Post reported that in response to this, “NASA and Pentagon officials [have] moved swiftly this past week to urge competitors to Elon Musk's SpaceX to more quickly develop alternative rockets and spacecraft”. This is far more crushing for SpaceX than you might think. Let me explain.
...In 1609, Ben Jonson's The Entertainment at Britain's Burse, a masque written to celebrate the opening of London's largest shopping centre, the New Exchange, impersonated the patter of a London market seller:
Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be; the pain of loneliness, an endless now hollowed of meaning. There can be consolation in looking backward to fathom the staggering odds of never having been born, and in looking forward toward the immortal generosity of our atoms. But nothing calibrates our losses of perspective, nothing consecrates these transient lives bookended by not yet and never again, more than broadening our time horizon until the vista of our own lives becomes not a discrete point but part of a great continuity
It's a struggle to make a post these days that's more insightful than “I told you so,” but look, I did kind of. The belief that Trump was going to be some kind of positive influence on the situation in the Middle East was wishful thinking at best. Three prominent and rather obvious facts militated against this feeble interpretation: 1) Trump's closeness with the Israeli far right, 2) his oft-stated hostility to Iran, and 3) his inability to manage events or even set policy in any kind of legible and consistent way. I've said this before, but there is no "policy," as such: it's all improvisation based on reacting to events. There is not a lot of strategic thinking going on. Factions jostle for influence, and Trump goes with whatever sounds good and “strong” to him at the time. Not for nothing, that sounds like a fascist regime. According to his biographer Renzo De Felice, Mussolini had not even decided which side to join in the war in 1939, and there were both pro-Hitler and anti-Hitler factions in his government.
...the historical reality was rather more prosaic: the actual Arkadia was a marginal, mountainous region of Greece, so poor and infertile that it was left largely alone by its more powerful neighbors. Its peace was less the product of a philosophical commitment to moderation than of simple geographic and economic irrelevance. Yet for millennia now, Arkadia has served as a canvas onto which intellectuals project their fantasies of the "natural" good life—a society where happiness comes not from abundance, but from living in accordance with one's nature, accepting limits, and eschewing the rat race of status and consumption.
...We are what we read.
...Common names are often problematic—they switch from place-to-place, and time-to-time, making it easy to make mistakes. Think of the word "pepper"—which could be the spice, Black Pepper (Piper nigrum), or the various fruits of the genus Capsicum, or the way "pimento" could be Capsicum or Allspice (Pimenta dioica). If we dig deep enough into the etymology of those common names, we often find the historical—and cultural and culinary—reasons behind the names' evolutions.
With the suspect accused of killing Minnesota's Democratic house leader and her husband now in custody, investigators will have a long list of questions to ask about what the alleged shooter believes. The emerging biography of Vance Boelter suggests a partial answer, one that involves his contact with a charismatic Christian movement whose leaders speak of spiritual warfare, an army of God, and demon-possessed politicians, and which has already proved, during the January 6 insurrection, its ability to mobilize followers to act.
...In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, rightwing accounts unsurprisingly sought to depict Boelter as a leftist. Rightwing Senator Mike Lee, who has a habit of saying really stupid stuff, referred to the suspect as a "Marxist."
...Each day, after the stomach empties for the last time and the muscular peristaltic waves that drive food through the gut cease, the ileocecal valve between the small and large intestines closes and partially digested food, or chyme, pools in the ileum. So, while the stomach, duodenum and jejunum are empty and inactive overnight, the ileum is full and busy. "It starts acting a bit like a little stomach," says Frost. When the overnight fast is broken, peristalsis restarts, the valve re-opens and the chyme is swept into the large intestine.
>p>
We don't yet know what this means for people who sleep and eat at irregular times, such as shift workers. Nor do we have a solid explanation for why the ileum retains chyme overnight, says Frost. It may be to give it more time to retrieve bile acids, which are secreted into the duodenum to emulsify fat and which are a precious resource that the body likes to recycle if possible.
...No war has ever been won entirely from the air. Despite Israel's considerable intelligence capabilities and ability to target military and political leaders, it cannot overthrow the government through serial assassinations. The Israeli security establishment firmly believes that assassinating leaders can cause organizations to collapse. It is a false belief, and the falsity has been demonstrated time and again, most notably by the resilience of Hamas.
...When we're talking two nations that are at war—and assessing the possibilities of others getting involved—all of the meaningful complex details in something as finite and simple as a sports match are multiplied dramatically. When observers say "Israel", what they really mean is "the complicated right-wing coalition backing Netanyahu that includes not just politicians in his cabinet but also strongly mobilized social groups in Israeli society that stand behind them". Unless, as they sometimes must, they mean a much bigger and more nebulous coalition of people inside and outside of Israel who support the specific ethnonationalist proposition that underscores Israeli nationhood—that it is a country that must be ruled by a majority of Jews and that exists to provide safety for Jews. Or as they sometimes must, they mean neither the political government of Israel nor the political idea of Zionism but the longer-term institutions of the Israeli security infrastructure, which are not entirely subservient to the political leadership of the moment. Or unless they mean some amalgamation of all of those things, where it's not clear that this assemblage “thinks” or decides in any sense at all.
...The researchers mapped the shape of 22 subcortical brain structures in nearly 20,000 healthy people who had contributed to the U.K. Biobank. They used the Laplace-Beltrami spectrum, which describes a shape by providing a unique series of numbers known as eigenvalues, to create a “fingerprint” of each region's shape. After performing genome-wide association studies, they found 80 genetic variations associated with the shapes of the structures, mainly in the brain stem and cerebellum.
...11. Facing uncertainty. The most important maxim for data analysis to heed, and one which many statisticians seem to have shunned, is this: "Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise." Data analysis must progress by approximate answers, at best, since its knowledge of what the problem really is will at best be approximate. It would be a mistake not to face up to this fact, for by denying it, we would deny ourselves the use of a great body of approximate knowledge, as well as failing to maintain alertness to the possible importance in each particular instance of particular ways in which our knowledge is incomplete.
The Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who died in 1997 at forty-eight, was and remains the world's most famous performer of qawwali, a kind of Islamic devotional music originating in the thirteenth century and performed in various parts of South Asia, conventionally at the shrines of Sufi saints. At its core Sufism is a mystical mode of Islamic belief and practice that emphasizes a direct relationship with God through the idea of sacred love. Traditional qawwali (the name derives from the Arabic word for "utterance") is performed by a lead singer or a pair of singers, always men; a chorus duplicates their musical phrases, builds harmonies, and supports the many vocal ripples with a rhythmic, hypnotic clapping. Today qawwali is nearly always sung alongside a harmonium and tabla that both anticipate and follow the singers' improvisations. Large crowds gather for concerts, which can sometimes last the night.
...The total number of images projected to be taken this year is estimated to surpass two trillion for the first time. Guys like me like to keep their finger on the pulse of what's happening, but at more than 61,000 images per second, it's starting to make it difficult to keep up with all of them.
(from Proto)...To see which local recreation areas, wilderness regions, and inventoried roadless areas are at risk, explore the Wilderness Society's new interactive map showing the 250+ million acres of public lands eligible for sale under the SENR bill.
Why I Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save
Senator Alex Padilla is an American hero
...the password was really a product of its time, and doesn't really belong in the modern digital age. Cybersecurity threats have evolved so far beyond the capability of a password to protect from them that they have actually become a liability—even when you follow best practices for creating them and keeping them secure. Case in point: News of the latest data breach, one of the largest ever, in which researchers discovered not millions, but billions of passwords floating around on the web.
...Walser's brilliant short fictions ally him with Erik Satie, Paul Klee, and the other gifted miniaturists of modernism. The Walserian mode is elusive, gentle, courteous, submissive, youthful, disarming, and genial. His unassuming protagonists—students, artists, servants, and children—are poets of inconspicuousness and locality. They are impish and somehow otherworldly, petit-bourgeois sprites saddled with classes and clerkships, making suspiciously cheerful meaning of their own disenchantment. But this innocence is one of twentieth-century literature's most sophisticated acts of legerdemain. The smaller, the more picturesque, the more seemingly guileless the narrative form, the more tightly Walser coils his lacerating ambiguities. Infinitely light and impossibly dense, his short prose works are gorgeous confinements out of which some radiant and contradictory energy is forever threatening to escape.
...It's not easy to trust Donald Trump to make an optimal decision. For one thing, he is suspicious of nearly every source of information save his gut. He revels in uncertainty. ("Nobody knows what I'm going to do.") He has hollowed out the staff and the expertise of the National Security Council. He appears to disdain his director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and her conclusion that Iran's pursuit of a nuclear bomb is not nearly as advanced as Netanyahu claims. He fired his national-security adviser Mike Waltz but, rather than replace him, merely handed the additional duties to the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Trump's Metternich is Steve Witkoff, a modestly accomplished New York real-estate developer; his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, formerly a weekend Fox News host, has, at last, struck the President as an empty suit with a pompadour. (According to the Washington Post, Hegseth has been sidelined.) In the meantime, Trump must pay attention to the insights provided by rival camps in his MAGA universe: the isolationism of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson versus the interventionism of Mark Levin and Laura Loomer.
...American diplomacy no longer exists. It has been replaced by diplomatic deception and historically unprecedent lethal force. All gloves are now off. The premise that this reflects "mission accomplished" couldn't be more off. The carnage hasn't ended. It has begun.
...The president's statement tonight was a farrago of contradictions: He said, for example, that the main Iranian nuclear sites were "completely and totally obliterated"—but it will take time to assess the damage, and he has no way of knowing this. He claimed that the Iranian program has been destroyed—but added that there are still "many targets" left. He said that Iran could suffer even more in the coming days—but the White House has reportedly assured Iran through back channels that these strikes were, basically, a one-and-done, and that no further U.S. action is forthcoming.
Silas Marner explained
...Can I confess (it is awful and embarrassing) I relate to Silas, since leaving my academic job? A metaphorical looking out the door of my cottage, hoping that the rewards and measures of my worth will find their way to my door -- a reward, even, for my (supposed-- for look at my hypocrisy) humility in being satisfied with other work and rejecting the system of merit that my research sought -- in exactly the way that Silas wanted guineas?...If Trump is speaking truly and the strikes really were a one-off, then the direct US-Iran engagement could subside quickly. Iran has no reason to want continued direct involvement with the US while it is facing an concerted Israeli campaign. It should be noted that in his first term Trump bombed Syria, then largely ignored the country except for the Obama-initiated defeat of ISIL in Raqqa. He bombed Afghanistan and then more or less surrendered to the Taliban. He bombed an Iranian general at Baghdad International Airport and watched Iran reply, but then went back to using economic sanctions. Trump has a history of splashy one-off bombings with no follow-through, and this episode could be just as transitory.
After the horrors of the that war and the cold war that followed, a global order emerged seemingly predicated on a set of largely liberal rules and norms that sought to prevent a retreat into global conflict. Predicated on non-intervention, diplomacy and a respect for the rule of law, this global order was idealistic and -- ultimately -- aspirational.
...at least for me, and possibly millions of other Americans, No Kings Day proved an event to remember. Yes, in truth, I still find it hard to believe that we have three and a half more years of King Donald to go (and when, like me, you're 80 years old, it becomes ever harder to imagine living through those years to another, possibly better future). Still, being at that demonstration was a good reminder that those of us who see in Donald Trump's version of America an increasingly menacing threat to freedom are anything but alone.
...From the start, Pygmalion's musicians stood out, not so much for their pristine intonation and liquid legato—today's early-music ensembles have transcended the scrawniness of yore—as for their vibrant phrasing, their bold colors, their air of spontaneous excitement
...The projects of democracy and liberal rights aim to change that and refocus government spending away from things like building huge pyramids and toward taking care of the sick, elderly, and disabled. But it's important to recognize that the whole idea of government as even aspirationally serving the public interest is relatively new compared to the history of the state. And it's deeply imperfectly executed, especially in circumstances where voters aren't closely monitoring the elected officials and over geographies that have strong underlying economic fundamentals.
...And then, our friend Ilya Sutskever, one of the brilliant minds behind the AI revolution that started ten years ago, shows up and tells Mark Zuckerberg: no. That $32,000,000,000 won't buy him. And Zuck asks him: "Is it not enough?" And Sutskever responds—to him and to all of you who doubt the extent of his faith and the power of his conviction—"You wouldn't understand."
...I fear that Trump's war with Iran will enable him to use these three pretexts — terrorism, national emergency, and war — to further suppress dissent at home, narrow freedom of speech and expression, make warrantless searches and arrests of Americans, imprison opponents, and put more military onto our streets.
...in three papers in this issue, researchers present DNA from more than 700 individuals who lived and died in the region over more than 10,000 years. Taken together, the studies survey the history of the Near East through a genetic lens, exploring the ancestry of the people who first domesticated plants and animals, settled down into villages, spread the precursors of modern languages, and peopled Homer's epics.
what is the clearest signal that America is now aligned with Israel's war aim to force regime change in Iran? It likely came from Elon Musk, the world's richest man with close, if fraying, ties to Trump. Musk made a unilateral decision that could drag the United States squarely into the middle of the Israel-Iran military conflict.
...This is not merely a Trump problem; it is a systemic failure, a sign that the institutions designed to constrain presidential incapacity are themselves in crisis. The addled president is repeatedly outwitted by his own courtiers—each new betrayal a surprise, each new lie a revelation. So here we are, very predictably...
Donald Trump: 'They have violated it, but Israel violated it too... Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and dropped a load of bombs on the likes of which I had never seen before. The biggest load that we have seen. I'm not happy with Israel. You now, when I say "you have twelve hours", you don't go out and in the first hour drop everything you have. So I'm not happy with them. I'm not happy with Iran either. But I'm really not happy with it if Israel's going out this morning. Because the rocket. That didn't land. That was shot by mistake. That didn't land. I'm not happy with that... You know what? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they are doing. You understand that?
To have at the apex of hte executive branch an individual who cannot distinguish between reality and sycophantic fantasy, who is repeatedly surprised by the consequences of his own credulity, is not merely a constitutional crisis. It is an abdication of the responsibilities of governance. The Founders provided a mechanism: impeachment. It was meant for precisely this scenario, among others. It is time to use it. But the Republican senators will not do that. However, the aftermath of Eisenhower's heart attacks gave us a kinder, gentler version: the 25th Amendment. But the Republican senators will not do that either.
I'm fascinated with the fictional information infrastructure in which many of us (arguably all of us) live. The fake-news expanded universe encompasses everything from political propaganda, to conspiracy theories, religious beliefs (except the ones you hold, of course, which are totally true), and that thing your friend told you that time. Also: celebrity dog rescues.
...And that's the thing, America is pretty much cooked. It might be generations —centuries — before the USA emerges from its Trumpian decline and becomes a civilized democracy again. Americans have little hope of a future in which their government protects them from corporate predators, rather than serving them up on a toothpick, along with a little cocktail napkin.
..."We want to cheat on everything," Cluely's website boasts. "Yep, you heard that right. Sales calls. Meetings. Negotiations. If there's a faster way to win — we'll take it." It continues: "We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again. It sees your screen. Hears your audio. Feeds you answers in real time. While others guess — you're already right."
...Suddenly, Trump's vague and oddly upbeat post about global nuclear de-escalation had morphed into a catch-all celebration for everything and nothing. It was meme magic in motion.
This phenomenon is nothing new. President Trump has an uncanny ability to generate phrases that go viral, often for their sheer strangeness. Who could forget "covfefe," the mysterious typo that baffled the world? Or his self-description as a "very stable genius"? Or the infamous "hamberders" tweet? Or "Fake News," "WITCH HUNT"? His capitalized outbursts, sometimes absurd, often oddly timed, tend to pierce through political noise and ignite cultural firestorms.
...the great Marcella Alsan's job market paper of a decade and a half ago. How the tsetse fly, by killing cattle and stymieing plow agriculture, set the stage for centuries of institutional divergence: a lack of plows and of centralized states leading to the peculiar vulnerabilities of its societies to modes of imperial-colonial exploitation.
...Anti-tech and anti-AI sentiments respond to a real truth: there are genuinely bad people, with bad intentions, acting with an indifference that borders on negligence and criminality, irresponsibly wielding the power to cause irreversible harm to the entire world. (Maybe Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil" applies here, but that would strip these people of accountability and they are yet to take any.)
...Given that the fluid situation established in the theater of medical consultation can have such a significant impact on a placebo's outcomes — and that these oucomes defy calculation and prediction — the scenario can be likened to playacting, a kind of improv. Every doctor-patient meeting is a highly contingent, singular encounter, mediated through an object, the placebo, whose particular qualities convey a variety of intentions and potential effects in indirect and unpredictable ways, which defy ordinary notions of causality. It appears to lend itself to a dramaturgical analysis in which the whole mise-en-scène proves to matter more than any particular isolated element; no single part is as important as the volatile relations between them. Each aspect contributes in some difficult-to-isolate way to the effect of the whole, complicating any simple divide between thought and material feeling.
... the messy "discovery" phase of his lawsuit against OpenAI, where he accuses CEO Sam Altman of betraying their founding mission. As both sides fight over internal documents, the battle has intensified. This context makes the "no computer" claim seem less like a personal quirk and more like a potential legal tactic to limit the scope of discoverable documents. After all, if there are no computers, there are no computer files to hand over.
..Scholars once attributed the development of iron-smelting to the Hittites, who were believed to have monopolized ironworking during the Bronze Age. This theory has been increasingly contested in the 21st century,[7] with the Late Bronze Age collapse, and subsequent Iron Age, seeing the slow, comparatively continuous spread of ironworking technology across the region. While there are some iron objects from Bronze Age Anatolia, the number is comparable to that of iron objects found in Egypt, Mesopotamia and in other places from the same period; and only a small number of these objects are weapons.[8] X-ray fluorescence spectrometry suggests that most or all irons from the Bronze Age are derived from meteorites.
... have seen nothing from LLM-based models so far that would lead me to classify the portals to structured and unstructured datastores they provide as more impactful than the spreadsheet, but for natural-language interface rather than for structured calculation. And I see nothing to indicate that they are or will become complex enough to be more than that. Back in the day, you fed Google keywords, and it told you what the typical internet s***poster writing about the keywords had said. Poke and tweak Google, and it might show you what an informed analyst had said. That is what ChatGPT and its cousins do, but using natural language, and thus meshing with all your mental affordances in a way that is overwhelmingly useful (because it makes it so easy and frictionless) and overwhelmingly dangerous (because it has been tuned to be so persuasive).
...the issue here is not just that Musk is wrong. It is that his indifference to the suffering of people in Africa exists alongside his belief that he has a central role to play in the future of the human species. Musk has insisted that people must have as many children as possible—and is committed to siring a "legion" himself—and that we must become multiplanetary. Perhaps more than anyone else on Earth, Musk, the wealthiest man alive, has the drive, the resources, and the connections to make his moon shots a reality. His greatest and most consistent ambition is to define a new era for humankind. Who does he believe is worthy of that future?
...Facial recognition is another technology you'll see on police dramas these days. It's usually illustrated by a five-second interval during which dozens of faces appear briefly on a computer monitor. The sequence ends with a final triumphant flourish — a single face remaining on screen, behind a single flashing word: "MATCH."
...Xiongnu ...the great nomadic empire to the north of China in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, which extended to Iranian-speaking Central Asia and perhaps gave rise to the Huns of the Central Asian Iranian sources.
The technology is finally advanced enough for tech spectacles to be useful instead of gimmicky; the general public knows what they are; and the new generation of smart glasses look like glasses instead of face computers. We've come a long way since Google Glass.
The big tech companies clearly agree, because everyone's making them: Meta wants to whisper AI in your ear. Google and Snap are joining the fray. Rumors are flying that Samsung and Apple are developing smart glasses. With so many styles, features, and price points hitting the market, it can be overwhelming to figure out what kind of glasses are right for you. Luckily, you don't have to be a tech expert to make a smart choice.
So essential did chariots become that by the 15 century B.C. the Pharaoh Thutmose III had more than a thousand in his standing war machine. The chariot remained an important military asset until around 1000 B.C., when armed cavalry gradually supplanted it.
Iron Age Wikipedia
(War_Hymn replies:
As far as I'm aware, there's written/archeological evidence of iron smelting was being practiced in Anatolia (modern-Turkey) by at least 1200 BCE, with suspected smelted-iron artifacts dating back to ~2000 BCE. It's relatively easy to tell smelted iron apart from meteoritic iron. Meteoritic iron will almost always contain a large portion of nickel or cobalt in it, while smelted iron usually contains embedded siliceous slag - both can be discerned through chemical or microscopic analysis.
Ecological demands of iron smelting
Accessible iron ore and wood are essential for iron production. Whilst it is usually assumed that suitable iron ores were widely available –although this cannot be stated categorically as not all iron ores are of sufficient quality — this is not wholly true for wood, whether used as a fuel or transformed into the charcoal necessary for reduction in the furnace. It has been suggested that a shortage of wood could have represented a limiting factor in Iron Age iron production. As has already been stated, Neustupný22, arguing from the high numbers of bloomery areas at Loděnice, postulated substantial deforestation here. Investigations carried out by one of the present writers at Říčansko however suggest23 that the consumption of wood for local iron production need not have caused significant deforestation provided that some form of forest management was carried out — a topic discussed further below.
review of Nicola Twilley Frostbite
...Nicola Twilley argues that at each stage of its development, modern refrigeration has driven us to eat and behave in ways we wouldn't have chosen if we could design the system from scratch. To take just one example, she explains that refrigeration is the main reason that so many commercial tomatoes are flavourless. It isn't just that the volatile aromas in a ripe tomato are killed by the cold, or that the ripeness may be generated by ethylene rather than the sun, but that most of the tomatoes grown commercially don't have the 'genetic capacity' to be delicious, as the plant breeder Harry Klee told Twilley. Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for 'the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration'. The important thing is that, at the moment of purchase, a consumer should deem the tomato red and perfect, even if it is left to spoil after it reaches the salad drawer at home.
"I'm going to try to attune my eye so I can find really complex spaces in nature that are almost like gesture paintings."
...Despite all the energetic discussions of our previous attempts, it appears that the question of IE phylogeny has not yet been put to bed.
There is little doubt that we are living in times of disinformation where the ethics of inclusion and equality are subject to divisive rhetoric. Lacking a clear understanding of the implications of DEI leads to misunderstandings of their implications. As such, this deceptive three-letter acronym elicits praise or vilification?
..."Nickel and other mega-projects are often launched under the banner of green development but leave behind a trail of social and environmental harm," said Brad Adams, Executive Director at Climate Rights International, in a statement. "Communities are repressed, forests are cleared, and pollution goes unaddressed with impunity. This is a chance for the Prabowo government to show that it has learned from those failures."
...Which came first: colorful signals or the color vision needed to see them? And when did these optical signals emerge and take off, painting the natural world in the kaleidoscopic spectrum we see today?
... According to Bloomberg, a little-known tax benefit known as the Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) that has become a favorite carve-out of tech startups would get expanded under a spending bill proposed by Republicans in the Senate and could potentially put more than $17 billion back in the coffers of Silicon Valley execs.
...Thiel's suggestion seems to be that, if political organizations attempt to regulate the kinds of technology that he is invested in, they may actually be doing the Devil's work. These so-called religious views are obviously interesting for how closely they hew to the billionaire's political and economic interests. In the Palantir founder's eyes, Satan's vicar on Earth will be a loud supporter of stuff like nuclear non-proliferation, international law, and the regulation of AI. Later in the conversation, Thiel also suggested that the Antichrist could very well be someone like Greta Thunberg—in other words, a prominent social activist who cares less about stuff like profit margins and stock value and more about climate change and dead Palestinians.
...The King has proclaimed we are not at war with Iran anymore because The King Won (shhhh keep telling him that.) But his backers proclaim we are at war with a nice 33-year-old man who wants to do good deeds and has assembled a massive following.
...The CT scans revealed 3D tunnels carved into the wood, filled with hexagonal pellets. The spectroscopy confirmed the pellets' chemical composition matched that of termite frass (yep, that's the technical term for insect poop).
...Primate city by a geographer's definition means more than just ‘the largest city.' A primate city means a largest city that has more than twice the population of the next largest city. So Mexico City is a primate city because it is much more than twice as large as Mexico's second largest city (Monterrey with 5.3 million). But São Paulo is not a primate city despite its huge population because it needs a few million more people to become twice as large as Rio de Janeiro with 13 million. (By the way, New York is not a primate city either because Los Angeles, like Rio, has about 13 million people. So New York too needs a few million more people to be considered primate.)
...Monopolists corrupt our political system, maim and impoverish workers, gouge their customers on enshittified, overpriced garbage. They are an existential threat to the survival of the human species.
..."We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period. Thank you for your attention to this matter!" Trump wrote, using his now-common sign-off.
...successive generations will become ever-more zero-sum in their orientation going forward, which will pave the way for ever more repressive political movements and possibly a wholesale rejection of democracy and pluralism itself. It also means that, due to the dynamics of capitalism, absent renewed growth or a turn toward socialism, corporations will increasingly strip mine society to maintain their profits driving living standards down further and feeding the zero-sum mindset in a feedback loop.
Congo River Wikipedia
...Koptekin and colleagues found that the genetic record suggests a much more complicated picture. They find genetic stability in central and western Anatolia from 9,000 BCE to roughly 7,000 BCE. People were adopting agriculture from neighbors and implementing it themselves, without moving around much. Culture was spreading, not peoples. It is a more edifying image, of neighboring peoples learning from one another and then using that knowledge to enrich themselves and create villages instead of always foraging.
...Me, I will just keep foolishly giving away every single thing I have made and shared online. I don't need to put out requests or have expectations for reciprocity, I prefer it when real people just do it because it's the right thing to do. And I make all the efforts to extend reciprocity when I benefit from someone else's work.
...Malthus's influence can be seen after 1815, when government ministers and private labour speculators, faced with an economic slump and fears of proletarian unrest, began sponsoring schemes that dispatched the newly ‘redundant' crofters of the Western Highlands to southern Africa and the St Lawrence Valley
...In recent years, a seductively intuitive hypothesis to explain stories like Elaniv's has taken shape: it's the phones. A smartphone, equipped with TikTok and Instagram, contains in one sleek package an assortment of forces that might make a teen unhappy—toxic social dynamics, unrealistic body image, incitement to paralyzing self-consciousness, even a reason to avoid such fundamentals of well-being as a good night's sleep.
researchers at the University of Virginia and the National Institutes of Health uncovered a new organelle, dubbed the hemifusome. This tiny membrane-bound structure serves as a cellular recycling center and may hold the key to treating several genetic diseases.
