May 2026 general links
(continues April 2026 links)
Many of these seem to be bellwethers for what's on and just beyond the Horizon of the moment,
collected from the Incoming for their portentous savor, and illustrative of my engagement with serendipity)
The form factor I seem to gravitate toward is The Commonplace Book, a now-digital place to entomb snippets that seem at the moment of encounter to want saving, often as prime examples of some form or genre to which my attention has been drawn. Most offer temptingly yawning Rabbit Holes, and these collections of links form a sort of map of my wanderings and encounters.
1v26
Science Friday
Can AI simplify the alphabet of life? Charles Sanfiorenzo and Kaihang WangLife can be imagined as a language, with genomes as books and proteins as sentences that relay messages within living cells. Unlike in human languages, the alphabet of life seems immutable. Across living organisms, proteins are composed of the same 20 canonical amino acid (cAA) letters. Could one of these cAA letters be removed from all protein sentences in an organism while keeping the sentences coherent? On page 487 of this issue, Liu et al. (1) report that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to design functional bacterial proteins without the amino acid isoleucine.Each cAA is encoded by a unit of three nucleotides, which is known as a codon. There are 64 codons encoding 20 cAAs and the stop signal, which stops the transcription of a protein. Therefore, the genetic code is redundant because a single cAA or stop signal can be encoded by multiple codons (synonymous codons). Synthetic genomes can be rewritten to reduce codon redundancy while still encoding the same cAA sequences across an organism's proteins (the proteome). This is achieved by changing some of the codons to their synonymous counterparts
Disneyland's factory-inspired future Renée Blackburn reviews DISNEYLAND AND THE RISE OF AUTOMATION
...The central thesis of Betancourt's book is as provocative as it is well supported: Disneyland is, at its most fundamental element, a factory. He traces the lineage of the park's automation backbone to well-known industrialists of the early and mid-20th century, specifically citing Walt Disney's visits to Henry Ford's River Rouge plant and his open-air museum, Greenfield Village, as inspirations for what would eventually become Disneyland.Through five well-researched sections, Betancourt explores how industrial automation was “aestheticized.” He draws on Leo Marx's concept of the "machine in the garden," arguing that in the mid-20th century, Disneyland successfully rendered the dirty and dangerous realities of industrial automation into a nearseamless and magical experience. This was not just for entertainment, he argues, but should be thought of as a form of mass education. At a time when the United Auto Workers union was warning of an “economic nightmare” where "mechanical monsters" might render human labor obsolete, Disneyland provided a safe space to consume automation without forcing visitors to consider the immediate threat it posed to employment.
Anticipating the future in an algorithmic age Alex Gomez-Marin reviews Carissa Véliz' Prophecy
...Prophecy is about the power of predictions, especially when they are maliciously misleading. The structure of the book is dialectic: The first part expounds the promise of predictions and their influence throughout history, and the second articulates their manifold perils and related abuses of power, particularly in the current age of AI oracles. The third and final part of the book seeks a resolution, namely, how to rethink predictions and resist their deceptive lure.Predictions have always been with us, from ancestral wisdom that told us when to sow and reap to mathematics used to optimize decision making under uncertainty. Forecasts are ultimately guesses—educated or naïve, right or wrong, innocuous or consequential. They can also be deliberately deceptive, not anticipating the future but rather covertly shaping it. When such predictions are then turned into promises and ossified into decrees, we are in trouble.
Using predictions as prescriptions to benefit one's agenda is not new. Rulers have always done so. But current AI empires make such a practice unprecedentedly pervasive and pernicious.
AI, argues Véliz, is the new diviner—the ultimate prediction machine. Mirrored on the fashionable idea that our brains are inference devices, such artificial prophets are dangerous. Digital technologies now rule our personal and professional lives, as well as the fate of countries and civilizations. They tell us who to date, what to watch, who to hire, when to start a war, and so forth. These simulacra are presented as deep knowledge, even truth, and then turned into self-fulfilling prophecies. Perils abound, as predictions also give us a false sense of security, increasing risks and lacking accountability.
In sum, Véliz writes, prediction has become a sophisticated act of misdirection and control. Today's techno-prophets wage forecasts as weapons of mass distraction. Their digital warfare is chiefly psychical, shaping reality to manipulate not only our memory, attention, and perception but also our will, outlook, and expectations.
Rumen ciliates modulate methane emissions in ruminants
...Ruminant agriculture (including the farming of cattle, sheep, goats, and deer) accounts for ∼30% of global anthropogenic methane emissions (1) largely due to anaerobic fermentation in the rumens of these animals (2). The rumen harbors a complex microbial ecosystem composed of bacteria, archaea, protozoa, fungi, and viruses (3-5) that supports host nutrition but also drives substantial methane release (2, 5, 6). Although methanogenic archaea are the direct producers of methane, rumen ciliates, which constitute ∼25% of the total microbial biomass, play a key role in stimulating methanogenesis (7, 8). Experimental removal of ciliates can reduce methane emissions by up to 35% (9-14), underscoring their importance. Despite this, the molecular mechanisms by which rumen ciliates promote methanogenesis remain unclear.Toward life with a 19–amino acid alphabet through generative artificial intelligence design
...despite the vast metagenomic sequencing efforts of the past decades (5), no self-replicating life has ever been found to have a simpler amino acid alphabet, making the 20 cAAs truly universal to modern life. By contrast, cells that preceded the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) must have relied on a more limited set of amino acids before coevolution and eventual fixation of the standard amino acid biosynthetic pathways and the genetic code (6). Accordingly, we pose a simple question: Can a cell be made from an alphabet with fewer than 20 amino acids, and how do we make such a cell? Through synthetic biology, creation of a free-living organism from a more minimal set of biochemical building blocks can deepen our understanding of the design rules of life and assist bottom-up efforts to engineer synthetic cells with new properties.Apparent Hack's law in river deltas
...River deltas are densely populated landscapes with critical socioeconomic and ecological functions (1-4), hosting ∼4.5% of the world's population in only 0.5% of its land area (5). However, human and natural forcings, such as upstream damming and rising sea levels, have negatively affected land building in deltas (6-10). Distributary channel networks, widely found in river deltas, enable the dispersal of sediment and organic matter from the upstream river to a much larger area downstream, building deltaic land (9-14). The deltaic region where sediment deposits, downstream of a network apex (e.g., bifurcation node), is known as a nourishment area (11-13), a counterpart to the drainage area in tributary basins, where flow accumulates (Fig. 1A). Distributary channels and islands within nourishment areas are mainly built through processes such as over-levee floods and channel branching (15-18). Whereas it is straightforward to hypothesize that the network organization is linked to land building, the quantitative relationship between distributary characteristics, such as channel length and nourishment area, is not well understood, even though such a relationship could serve as a helpful rule of thumb for landbuilding estimation.
Historic Photos Show the Once Ubiquitous American Diner Petapixel
How Netanyahu made Israel an ever more Lawless Nation H Scott Prosterman at Informed Comment
The Border Wall Thrives, The Borderlands Don't William Debuys at Informed Comment
...it's still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron....Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams, and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there's no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4th, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated $46.55 billion for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance, and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related. The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.
...No detail illuminates the mentality behind border enforcement better than this: in cooperation with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, military elements at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, are now engaged in "the largest Concertina wire (C-wire) emplacement in U.S. territorial history." "C-wire," or "razor wire," is designed to lacerate any flesh, human or animal, that comes in contact with it. Fort Huachuca soldiers are deploying 43,000 rolls of it, the largest single purchase ever.
Usually C-wire is used atop a wall or fence to prevent people from climbing over. Ominously, it's now being spread on the ground, sometimes in areas where there is no wall, but also in front of the wall and between double walls — a policy of pure viciousness, not necessity.
My Classroom Life Michael Gorra at NYRB
From Dolphins to Oil Tankers: My Visit to the Strait of Hormuz Abhinav Explores at Medium
...I remember the dolphins — and the brief moments they stayed beside us, moving freely through the same sea. We also spotted stingrays, flashes of fish beneath the surface, and the quiet sense that this place was full of life, even if much of it remained unseen.
Enigmatic muscle may help explain penguins' signature waddle Science
Datum:
Penguin knees, which are tucked into their body cavity, are bent and arranged in a perpetual squat.
Twirlbot: Tumbleweed-inspired rolling robot
... we developed a tumbleweed-inspired rolling robot (Twirlbot) to achieve the hollow spherical architecture by weaving photoactive/passive bilayer strips. The Twirlbot demonstrated autonomous rolling under constant light, enabling multiple functionalities, including omnidirectional locomotion, slope climbing, trampling resistance, cargo transport, self-correction, wind resistance, and adaptation to diverse terrains and environments. These features endowed the Twirlbot with great potential for real-world applications, such as self-sustained seed-sowing, daylight-driven commuting, and autonomous underwater wiring.
What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity? Quanta Magazine
Is consciousness more fundamental to reality than quantum physics? New Scientist
Power, democracy, and clarity Don Moynihan
What has been the impact of the Roberts Court on democracy? Wealthy people have more political power than everyone else. Partisan actors have more power to reduce voter choice. Black people and other minority groups are offered fewer protections and less visible political representation.If this seems like hyperbole, let's review the key decisions.
- With Citizens United in 2010, the Roberts Court killed any meaningful effort to regulate the flow of money in politics.
- The Roberts Court refused to take on gerrymandering when Justice Kennedy was on the court, and then in 2019 said that partisan gerrymandering might be “contrary to democratic principles” but there was nothing they could do about it.
- With the Shelby County decision in 2013, it eliminated the pre-clearance section of the VRA, which meant that districts with a record of discriminating against Blacks would no longer need to get permission from the DOJ for their changes. With the 2021 Brnovichcase, they further limited the conditions under which laws that made it harder to vote could be considered as discriminatory.
- Now with Callais, SCOTUS gave state the green light to redistrict majority Black districts out of existence. The Court insisted it is not overturning the Voting Rights Act, but it made the bar for demonstrating such actions are illegal so high as to be impossible.
Africa: 101 Last Tribes and Dan
...The ironies of Nigerian jet fuel production, Macdonald Dzirutwe for Reuters Nigeria's giant Dangote refinery is benefiting from record margins for producing jet fuel that it is mostly selling abroad, while the domestic airlines it also supplies have threatened to stop flying because of the surge in fuel prices. The refinery, the largest on the continent, was built to turn Africa's biggest oil producing country into a net exporter of refined products, end Nigeria's reliance on fuel imports, and shield its economy from global energy shocks. It became fully operational at the start of this year and is producing at its maximum capacity of 650,000 barrels per day. That has improved local fuel availability but domestic fuel prices are still among the highest in Africa as Nigeria's market is fully deregulated, meaning fuel prices are not subsidised by the government as they are in most African countries. The issue is further complicated by the state oil company's long-standing debt repayment agreements that mean Dangote has to import most of its crude oil, making it easier to balance its books if it sells abroad. ... Nigerian airlines last week threatened to halt all flights, prompting the government on Thursday to approve measures including some relief on debts owed by local airlines and ordering talks to try to agree lower prices… much of Nigeria's roughly 1.5 million barrels per day of production goes to paying debts to international oil majors, banks and traders. The NNPC does not disclose its obligations, but analysts estimate they amount to about 400,000 bpd. Dangote Group Vice President Davekumar Edwin said Dangote imported most of its crude from the U.S., as well as some from other African producers and Brazil. He did not give precise figures. He said the bulk of the 24 million litres of jet fuel it produces daily was shipped to Europe, although he also said the refinery largely supplied the needs of Nigerian airlines, which the aviation industry estimates at about 2.1 million litres per day.
Did He Fake The Shooting? Shubhransh Rai on Medium
...Trump hasn't attended the Correspondents Dinner since 2016. Skipped it every single year.Then out of nowhere he shows up. First time in a decade. And something happens.
Caroline Levitt said "there will be some shots fired tonight" before the event started. An old dormant account posted the shooter's name in 2023. JD Vance got evacuated before Trump did.
None of this individually means anything.
But stack it together in an environment where nobody trusts anyone and you get a conspiracy theory that spreads faster than the actual news.
Iran war has cost $25bn so far, admits Pentagon. The real cost is closer to $50bn boing boing
Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass NYTimes
2v26
Jonathan Swift's Last Joke The New Yorker
3v26
The Magic of Comics Revealed Dan Piraro on Medium
After El-Fasher NYRB
4v26
In Praise of Small Small Things Considered
Mapping Trump's America The New Yorker
Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure Cory Doctorow, citing Rebecca Solnit
...In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs...
Hyundai Reportedly Demanding 'Tens of Thousands' of Boston Dynamics Robots ASAP gizmodo
Iran offers 14-point Peace Plan, Trump declares the US "Pirates" Juan Cole
As the Stalemate in Iran drags on, the Danger of a wider Conflict Rises Paul Rogers at Informed Comment
The Plague of Plastic: The other Petroleum Curse H Patricia Hynes at Informed Comment
Trump's Iran War as a Trap for the Economy & Democracy Jonathan. Este at Informed Comment
Did Donald "WWW III Apprentice" just Fire the Whole World? Tom Engelhardt at Informed Comment
Psychology says people who still write things down on paper aren't aren't resisting technology — they're preserving the only thinking process that actually slows the mind down enough to hear itself other sides of a nobody
Samuel Butler
Blog Muzzled Again for a Week (more?) of Comment Blogging Alan Levine
https://bryanalexander.org/horizon-scanning/campus-cuts-closures-mergers-and-layoffs-for-spring-2026/ Bryan Alexander
Decipherment of Linear Elamite, part 2 Victor Mair at Language Log
Home on the Range No More: Trump Wants Bison Gone NYTimes
5v26
Outrage is letting someone else set the frame JA Westenberg
Someone.
A century on, the framing is automated // the framers are algorithms tuned to a single metric: how long can we keep you scrolling?
...Your time on the platform is sold to advertisers in increments, your annotated rage in the comments trains the recommendation model, your re-share recruits one more person into the same loop, and your dwell time on each story sharpens the algorithm's prediction of what will hold you next. The feeling moves through you and leaves a residue on the corporate balance sheet. You absorb the cost, and they book the revenue.
...Rage is metabolically expensive; borrowed rage even more so. You spend cognitive bandwidth on a quarrel imported from a stranger's algorithm, then arrive at your own work depleted, with less attention left for the people and projects you'd actually choose. The outrage cycle runs on fuel siphoned from your real life
...Stop offering the response the system was built to extract, and watch what shows up in the space the rage used to occupy: the work you've been avoiding, the conversation you owe someone you actually care about, the book on your nightstand, the neighbour you've been meaning to call back.
and On Wintering
War Powers Act Exists to Prevent Trump's Iran Quagmire Informed Comment
Trump likens his Iran War to Vietnam & Iraq. Feel Better? Mitchell Zimmerman at Informed Comment
Netanyahu's Hezbollah War Masks a Mission of Destruction Robin Andersen at Informed Comment
The Cybertruck's Hilarious Failure Is A Dire Warning Of What Is To Come Will Lockett at Medium
He Renamed It To "Strait Of Trump" Shubhransh Rai at Medium
Europe is protecting the past while Xiaomi builds the future in 76 seconds Enrique Dansat Medium
The End Of the Petrodollar System? Shubhransh Rai at Medium
Uncovering histories of us Harvard Gazette
Looking for Ireland's "Invisible People" Harvard Gazette
Have archaeologists found the long-lost Maya city of Sac Balam? Science
8v26
Visualizing history within a grid flowing data
From the Ancient Greeks to Trump, Iran has Stood up to Aggression Informed Comment
American Gangs and Climate Change, Born in the USA Tomdispatch at Informed Comment
...we are astonishingly social, have hands, and can talk and listenn. Perhaps those are our key edges. Perhaps it is our ability to learn from others, first by watching and then by listening and speaking, and our highly prosocial nature, and our ability to use are opposable thumbs to do things other than hang from branches. Perhaps those factors make us think that we are uniquely smart, because those are the factors that have allowed us to both (a) transform the environment in which we operate so that its affordances have enormous synergies with the kind of intelligence we have, and (b) effectively become a group organism, an anthology intelligence, now some 8.4 billion strong.
That anthology intelligence has 700 quadrillion cortical neurons, after all.
...The evolutionary biologists, from Darwin to Mayr to the more recent work of Joseph Henrich (see The Secret of Our Success, 2016), have made it very clear, to me at least, that the story of Homo sapiens' intelligence is not the story of a solitary, calculating brain, but of a collective, chattering, imitative, and—crucially—teachable species. The "Machiavellian intelligence" hypothesis, advanced by Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten in the 1980s, posited that the complexity of human cognition was driven by the demands of navigating ever-more-intricate social relationships: alliances, rivalries, kinship, reputation, and the subtle art of not getting eaten or exiled. The size and density of our neocortex is necessary but far from sufficient. It must, also, be the structure of our social learning that sets us apart.
Consider, for a moment, the "ratchet effect"—that is, the process by which each generation builds upon the innovations of the last, such that cumulative culture becomes possible. This is not mere imitation (the crow can bend a wire into a hook, but her daughter will not necessarily do so unless she, too, discovers the trick). Rather, it is teaching, language, and the capacity for "overimitation" (see Tomasello, 1999), that allows Homo sapiens to maintain, transmit, and elaborate upon the complex toolkits, social norms, and symbolic systems that define human societies. This is not a trivial point: the difference between a chimpanzee's termite stick and a Hadza bow is not just a matter of degree, but of kind—a difference rooted in the cognitive ecology of teaching, joint attention, and the recursive mind.
...Language is not merely a vehicle for information transfer; it is a technology for the coordination of minds, the transmission of norms, and the creation of shared fictions.
...true driver of human progress is not individual intelligence, but the size and connectivity of the "collective brain"—the network of minds linked by social learning
A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it really began New Scientist
In fact, Kelly and many other researchers argue that encoding speech isn't just an important feature of writing, but its defining one. This would mean that scripts like proto-cuneiform that don't encode speech aren't really writing at all. Accept that argument and proto-Elamite — if it really did encode spoken language – was the world's first true writing system.
Evidence for this language encoding comes from proto-Elamite tablets in which non-numerical signs occur in curious sequences between four and 12 signs long. These sequences are difficult to explain if the signs represent objects. But they would make more sense if the signs instead represented syllables in long, multisyllabic words – almost certainly the names of important people.
MAGA Will Kill Many Americans Paul Krugman ...What drives this correlation? Part of the answer is that red states have weak social safety nets and are especially unwilling to provide healthcare to vulnerable populations. As I noted in my most recent primer, many red states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would have borne the bulk of the cost. Texas, which likes to boast about its economic success, leads the nation in the share of its children who lack health insurance.
...Why is right-wing politics so deadly? Greed and willful ignorance.
...The right's opposition to providing healthcare obviously has a lot to do with greed, with wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.
Greed is also an important factor in the attack on medical science. The best-known example of scientific disinformation promoted by corporate interests is the fossil-fuel-financed attack on climate science, but the template for this attack was the earlier campaign by the tobacco industry's "merchants of doubt" to discredit evidence that smoking is harmful to your health.
To A Dairy Farmer, After the End Timothy Burke
No matter how much I remind myself of this history, and of the reality of what farming has become in the United States, I still find myself deeply moved when I read of people who have lived on the land and tended crops and livestock having to give it up. Sometimes that's still the old story that the next generation has moved on to other futures and aspirations, a story which is just as associated with small businesses or local industries. And sometimes it's another kind of old story: the banks and the big businesses grind the farmer down, distant marketplaces shift and the farmer sees all profit turn to loss, the government turns some knobs or changes some laws and an abyss opens up underneath the farmer's feet.
Against the dark forest Erin Kissane
...the existence of dipshits is indeed unfixable, but building arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that allow a small number of bad actors to build destructive empires defended by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to genuinely remodel that machinery when its harms first appear is another choice. Mega-platform executives, themselves frequently dipshits, who make these choices, lie about them to governments and ordinary people, and refuse to materially alter them. But in the Dark Internet Forest, the mega-platforms and their leaders are missing from the frame except as shadowy super-predators—the equivalent of Liu's inevitably annihilating aliens.
...In truth, the mega-platforms and their pocket-warlord leaders fell into their roles largely by chance and have since attempted to rule as though extraordinarily consequential global rulemaking and governance by a handful of US companies built to exploit human feeling for financial gain were a sensible way to arrange the world. Facebook was born from a website made for elite students to rank their classmates' sexual attractiveness; Twitter was a watercooler where bored office workers could get attention by telling jokes in public. It's as if 3M's accidental invention of Post-It notes while failing to make space glue landed them a UN veto. The dangers of the situation are obvious and real, but it matters that we remember that the world's big platforms are steered not by shadowy forces, but by teams of gold-rush-addled dorks whose sometimes-well-meaning employees are stuck frantically LARPing world government on internal forum software.
...It's equally important to remember that the patterns we've experienced on mega-platforms are not the only way to do networks but the result of specific combinations of under-thinking and malign commercial pressures—and that the currently ascendant systems are not inevitably annihilating forces, but legal and financial constructs that can be brought to heel, forcibly reconfigured, or just replaced. Keeping these basic facts in mind is oddly difficult, because there's so much money involved, and money is a spell for blurring the truth.
But all these platforms and attendant dipshits will be replaced, eventually, and what happens next isn't guaranteed. The British East India company was a commercial atrocity factory at near-global scale; what came after it was direct colonial rule.
...our failure to remember that the mega-platforms are just intentionally extractive constructs run by brainmelted but very human weirdos is a failure of accountability, but our failure to remember that it doesn't have to be this way is a failure not only of imagination, but of nerve.
...the flattening of global diversity to fit the norms and interests of any given American techno-culture—corporate or otherwise—is both a baldly colonial aspiration and one we should scorn for the same reason that we leave the idea of effective, monolithic, planetary-scale government—benevolent or otherwise—to underbaked science fiction. Home rule and genuine resilience both require the existence of many places, many of them at least partially interconnected. Decades down the road, I think the notion that a pack of mostly-American mega-corporations could ever have stood in for the complexities of governing a new layer of global public life, with all the opportunities and dangers it brings, will be obviously laughable. I think it already is.
...The social internet should be a forest—not The Dark Forest, but something much more like a real one: Interconnected from the densely mycelial underground to light-filtering overstory but also offering infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered exchange and play. Deeply human in the way that real forests are the result of human and other-than-human collaboration running back into unrecorded time. Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a working ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for growth and for the long, continuous experiment of evolutionary change.)
What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting Quanta Magazine
...Recently, the field has experienced a sort of renaissance as researchers — many of them astrophysics refugees like Dwyer — have devised new ways to pierce the clouds. They've taken a slew of instruments built to study violent cosmic events and trained them on the brutality of terrestrial thunderstorms. They've seen lightning shooting out X-rays as it zigs and zags, spotted flickering glows of gamma rays coming from thunderclouds, and, very recently, detected hints of bolts traveling in unexpected directions.
No one has put all the pieces together, but a new understanding of lightning is taking shape. The fearsome flashes look less and less like the supersize electric sparks that physicists once imagined them to be. While electricity plays a central role, lightning bolts are formed and shaped by the whole physics canon — from cosmic blasts to particle physics. In particular, triggering a bolt seems to require extreme events more typically associated with supernovas, black holes, and particle colliders than with fluffy clouds.
...A visible bolt means the air has broken down into a mess of hot, charged subatomic debris. So either something has supercharged the electric field, pushing it past the critical threshold, or some other process must break down the air molecules. The question is: what?
...n 1994, a satellite searching for extreme deep-space explosions happened to pick up flashes of gamma rays coming from thunderclouds, often alongside lightning. Gamma rays are the most energetic type of light rays, typically marking the last gasp of a dying star or the cataclysmic clap of two neutron stars. They are not something you'd expect to come out of a cloud, no matter how many sharp ice chips it had. Something was afoot in the fast and intense realm of subatomic particles.
...According to Dwyer's process, when one electron in the avalanche collided with an atom, the electron could ricochet and emit a gamma ray. That gamma ray would transform into an electron and its antimatter twin, a positron. The cloud's electric field would push the positron backward close to where the avalanche began. There it could crash into another atom, setting off another avalanche, which would make more gamma rays, more positrons, more avalanches, and so on, until you got a flash visible from orbit.
...The stack of runaway relativistic avalanches could explain the gamma rays. And it could also contribute to lightning initiation. As the avalanche cascades, electrons pile up at the front while leaving positively charged ions in their wake — boosting the cloud's electric field.
In praise of vultures Cory Doctorow
Whether or not you believe that this computer exists and functions as predicted, one indisputable fact about it is that it requires the freedom to choose in order to work. The point of market-as-computer is that it aggregates decisions, so it can only work if everyone is as free as possible to decide.
Muriel Spark, the Double Agent The New Yorker
Map Cam Selfie maps mania
American, British and Canadian Studies The Journal of Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu
The war between fast and legitimate is here JA Westenberg
...the gene-editing tools available to a competent graduate student in 2026 would have required a fortified national laboratory in 1996. The technologically possible has outstripped the institutionally permissible — to the point that whole industries are migrating to jurisdictions with looser rules. The regulatory tortoise is still doing its job, but it's not the only animal in the race — not anymore.
...The pessimist in me (of whom I remain rather less fond) is convinced that the divergence only accelerates from here, and there's a betting chance we end up with a two-tier civilisation. The fast tier governs through algorithms, contracts, and platform policy; the slow tier governs through statute, precedent + parliamentary procedure. The two tiers nominally coexist but operate in different timeframes and address different populations. The fast tier handles anyone who is rich, technical, mobile, or willing to live within the rules of private platforms. The slow tier handles everyone else, in the residual physical world of borders, courts, parliaments, and the postal system. This is, broadly, what is already happening.
...How much of the actual coordination of modern life is now happening inside corporate platforms and private networks that have no constitutional standing whatsoever?
7v26
Bubbles are REALLY evil Cory Doctorow
From Worldcom to Enron, from crypto to AI, the point of the bubble wasn't ever the residue or lack thereof – it was a transfer from working people to crooks. Bubbles are a system for moving the painfully sequestered life's savings of people who do things to people who steal things.
Since the Carter years, workers have been forced to flush their savings into the stock market, after the traditional "defined benefits pension" (that guarantees you an inflation-adjusted sum every month until you die) was replaced with 401(k)s and other "market-based pensions" (where you only get to survive after retirement if you bet correctly on the movement of stocks):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/29/against-cozy-catastrophies/
Despite this having all the appearances of a rigged game — finance industry insiders are always going to be better at betting on stocks than teachers, nurses, janitors and other productive workers — proponents of this system always insisted that workers weren't really the suckers at the table. But the stock market is like Kalshi or Polymarket in that one bettor's losses are another bettor's gains, and in those markets, nearly all the money is harvested by less than 1% of bettors
...When the AI bubble pops, it will vaporize (at least) 35% of the US stock market and wipe out everyday savers who have been swindled into betting their futures on AI, based on the fraudulent representations of AI pitchmen. Millions of people who worked hard all their lives and deprived themselves of small comforts in order to save for their retirement will be wiped out. They will be made dependent on the Social Security system that Republicans are determined to starve into bankruptcy and then turn into (yet another) "market based system" that you will be required to convert into chips at the stock market casino where you're up against professional players who hold all the cards
How America's Addiction to War led to Self-Harm Hugh J Curran at Informed Comment
...the U.S. has withdrawn from 31 of the most consequential UN organizations. This recent action has precipitated a decline in its influence over the developing world. Despite this, hundreds of peace groups express their humane concerns with on-going peaceful protests while also taking action against the punitive policies of deporting undocumented immigrants, many of whom are farm and health care workers innocent of any crime.
The hypothesis of the collapse of powers like Iran fails in the real world Jenny Williams at Middle East Monitor (via Informed Comment)
The fundamental weakness of these analyses is the oversimplification of the conflict's nature. For example, the strategy of simultaneously intensifying economic and military pressure ignores the fact that modern warfare is a two-way street. While one side focuses on targeting the opponent's economy, the other side takes the war to a new and dangerous level by targeting energy infrastructure.
...The Strait of Hormuz blockade and the effort to control this vital chokepoint do not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. This action, particularly for Beijing, is a practical masterclass in how to use maritime chokepoints to exert pressure on the global economy.
While the US tries to contain Iran by controlling Hormuz, China carefully watches and learns for a potential blockade scenario of the Taiwan Strait; a waterway which is the main artery for transferring advanced semiconductors and a massive portion of global trade. This means that the US strategy to solve a regional problem could inadvertently become a model for creating a much larger global crisis and hand its main rival the very tool it struggles to contain.
10 Hacks Every DuckDuckGo User Should Know
Grand Theft Oil Futures Paul Krugman
...What's truly remarkable is that this keeps happening even though the pattern has become familiar. This tells us two things: The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it.
The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers.
8v26
Science Friday
...Early colonial Latin America has come into focus as a key strand in the birth of the modern world, not least because it was the nexus of the first truly globalized economy. It imported enslaved Africans, European fortune-seekers, and Asian plants while exporting silver by the galleon-load to China and foodstuffs everywhere. The development of a multilayered bureaucracy accompanied that process, and Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters have found a story of bottom-up pressure from Indians who quickly adapted to alphabetic writing.
Gradually, all this agitation contributed to the "ladinization," or Spanish acculturation, of Indigenous people and a process of ethnogenesis that the authors see as qualitatively distinct from the mestizaje, or benign racemixing, that previous writers have posited. Paperwork gave them a certain autonomy, if not exactly citizenship.
The vulnerability of Middle East desalination
Deep-Earth map points to a lost U.S. continent
Safeguard water infrastructure amid conflict
Knowledge gaps for neuromorphic ionic computing
...achieving the goals of ionic computing requires not only implementation of much more sophisticated device functionality but also overcoming fundamental barriers in materials science, device architecture, and system integration. Current ionic devices, even those incorporating state-of-the-art materials, still suffer from limited functionality and stability, which restrict their performance and increase energy demands. Developing new materials with enhanced ionic properties is essential to overcome these limitations. Similarly, the design of neuromorphic devices must evolve to leverage the particular advantages of ionic processes. Existing architectures often follow a single-information-carrier logic of conventional electronics or are constructed of mesoscale fluidics, failing to capitalize on the energy-efficient mechanisms inherent to ionic systems or implement the multiple-information-carrier paradigm.
...The brain seamlessly integrates memory and computation within the same physical structures, eliminating the inefficiencies associated with repeated data transfer. Although digital CMOS systems have made progress in adopting this principle, the brain's ability to combine it with features such as massive parallelism, 3D connectivity, and diverse signaling mechanisms remains unmatched. Ionic computing has the potential to emulate these distinctive attributes and achieve substantial improvements in computational density and energy efficiency (6).
...Our brains exemplify vastly capable, massively parallel, adaptable, and most importantly, energy-efficient computing. In human brains, information is processed by neurons, interconnected in complex three-dimensional (3D) networks that use voltage-gated ion channels and modulated ion concentrations to propagate signals as action potentials and store information in physical connections
...Future advancements in ionic computing will hinge on collaboration across multiple disciplines, including neuroscience, materials science, nanofluidics, and computational engineering. Insights from neuroscience into brain architecture, connectivity, and ion signaling mechanisms must be integrated with innovations in materials and device engineering to create systems that emulate the brain's capabilities. This interdisciplinary approach will be essential for driving the development of scalable, energy-efficient ionic computing technologies. Advances in programmable self-assembly, bio-inspired thermal management, and hybrid bioelectronic platforms may provide the breakthroughs necessary to overcome these barriers. In the near term, applications that require extreme energy efficiency and biological compatibility such as brain-machine interfaces, biomedical sensing, and in situ environmental monitoring will serve as realistic proving grounds for ionic computing, rather than competing directly with CMOS-based high-performance systems.
Neuromorphic ionic computing offers a bold vision of energy-efficient information processing, promising radical gains in energy efficiency and new capabilities in dynamic adaptation and resilience. This Review has identified critical knowledge gaps across materials science, device architecture, system integration, and biocompatibility that researchers must address to unlock the full potential of this paradigm. Ultimately, this emerging field advances technological innovation that aligns with the growing demand for sustainable solutions in a data-driven world.
Ancient India was shaped by waves of migration and mixing Aeon
...when genetic studies knocked open the doors of ancient Indian history, the vast scholarly room inside was already bustling with numerous methodologies, hypotheses, interpretations, assertions and controversies.
Poetry: I Too, Dislike It Marginalian
Lee Lai's "Cannon" Cory Doctorow (ordered 9v26)
Kurds caught in the Middle of Israel-US War on Iran Informed Comment
9v26
from John, first thing: Causality itself is a very slippery idea….
Having digested and not yet feeling sleepy I think there are three overlapping mechanisms:
1. periodicities, regular cycles that are slowly over huge numbers of cycles inclined to nudge things into stable harmonies… I'm speaking mostly of planetary, axial, orbital, processional, solar scales, and of all the dynamic interactions that occur among them, and during cosmic shifts like when our solar system every 27.5 million years passes the ecliptic plane of the galaxy, where there is much more dust as a result of billions of years of stabilizing cycles, which means more meteors and more mineral deposition, which correlates to most of the mass extinctions. All of these are periodic and predictable including the influence of each planet and the lining up of many planets in constructive or destructive harmonies that influence one another in relation to the sun.
2. there are stable and unstable states in any system, these are patterns that upon perturbation either self correct (stable) or escalate or diminish but every system has a threshold of perturbation that it can absorb and stay the same, and a threshold over which it becomes unstable until it finds a new stable state.
3. Then there are dynamics which are aperiodic like continental drift, like weather, like earthquakes, which may be subtly influenced by some of the periodic cycles, and may themselves cause phase shifts in stable states of climate and ocean circulation and even cause CO2 increase from volcanoes or drawdown from mountain ranges being created which expose fresh rock to weathering that absorbs CO2 like the Himalayan orogeny that drew down enough CO2 over The course of 20 million years enough to lower temperatures enough that the milankovich cycles could cause periodic glaciation. But each of these slow changes was marked by periods of instability and others of stability or of steady oscillation.
And each of these three levels interact with one another in odd ways, like glaciers scrape huge amounts of minerals away and deposit them in oceans, where that causes huge blooms of life, like the two snowball earth mega glaciations were right before the advent of Cyanobacteria that then caused the great oxidation event and the second one before the multicellular explosion of Cambrian. And in turn if the blooms of life are large enough it affects O2 or CO2 levels or enough to cause more climate effects in turn.
I see the younger dryas as most likely an ocean current shift from one stable state to another, with instability in between,but the little ice age I think is more likely to do with the diseases ravaging the western hemisphere causing massive civilizations to die suddenly their cleared land to revert at once to forests that drew down enough c02to affect northern hemisphere but it wasn't enough to affect other hemisphere, or maybe just blame some series of volcanoes, as that cycle was able to absorb that perturbation enough to make Europe colder but not affect Africa much.
How the Iran War is Changing the Middle East Juan Cole (transcript of interview on the Kianistan podcast with Tafheem Kiani). Comprehensive
Have Billionaires Gone Too Far? The New Yorker podcast
Can China use its Huge Economy to break US Sanctions? Informed Comment
Adam Tooze:
The Greatest Financial Crisis Alarm Was Just Rung Shubhransh Rai at Medium
...The interest problem nobody talks about enough
The second largest expense for the US government right now isn't healthcare.
And unlike a 30-year fixed mortgage, most government debt is short term. One year. Two years. Five years. When it rolls over at higher interest rates, the interest bill goes up immediately.
$39 trillion in debt at rising interest rates is a compounding nightmare.
...The institutions caught in the private credit collapse — pension funds, insurance companies, investment firms — are also among the largest holders of US treasury bonds.
If they're losing money in private credit they may be forced to sell treasuries to cover losses.
More sellers of US government debt means the government has to offer higher interest rates to attract new buyers.
Higher interest rates on $39 trillion in debt means the interest bill explodes.
An Open Letter to Cory Doctorow: Ollama is part of the enshittification! Brennan Kenneth Brown
The three armies fighting for the post-American world Cory Doctorow
Trump is a master coalition builder. He wouldn't have been able to seize and wield so much power without a coalition that includes people who absolutely hate each other and want each other to die. Let's face it, Nick Fuentes wants to turn Ben Shapiro into a lampshade, but they both sent their followers to the ballot box for Trump. We've all seen those videos of Trump supporters railing against "elites”"nd robots.
This contradiction isn't a bug, it's a feature: the bigger a coalition gets, the more power it has — provided you've got a Trump figure at the top, using his cult of personality to coerce and flatter his coalition members into playing nice with each other.
But Trump's incontinent belligerence, his bullying, and his cognitive decline mean that he's conjuring a new anti-Trump coalition into existence: groups of people who don't agree on much, but do agree on fighting Trumpismo and its leader. This is very visible in US domestic politics, where "Never-Trumper" conservatives find themselves on the same side as Democratic Socialists, at least on this narrow issue. The anti-Trump mass mobilizations — the Women's March, the anti-ICE demonstrations, the No Kings rallies — are visibly, palpably coalitional, made up of people carrying signs and banners for groups that are often at odds with one another…except when it comes to Trump.
...when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump had Microsoft shut down the court's IT systems. The Chief Justice of the ICC lost his Office 365 account, which means he can't access his email archives, his working files, his calendar or his address books. He can't even log in to his non-Microsoft accounts because they're tied to his Outlook email address
10v26
Iran Threatens to Kidnap Data Cables as well as Oil; Trump warns of Nukes Juan Cole
How Climate Change Supercharges Hurricane Flooding, Deaths Informed Comment
via Tooze:
Critics describe the music as a fusion of blues and rock music with Tuareg, Malian or North African music.[2] Various other terms are used to describe it[1] including desert rock, Saharan rock,[3] Takamba,[2] Mali blues,[4] Tuareg rock[5] or simply "guitar music".[6] The style has been pioneered by Tuareg musicians in the Sahara region, particularly in Mali, Niger, Libya, Algeria, Burkina Faso and others; with it also being developed by Sahrawi artists in Western Sahara.[7] The musical style took shape as an expression of the culture of the traditionally nomadic Tuareg people, amid their difficult sociopolitical situation, including rebellions, widespread displacement and exile in post-colonial Africa.[7] The word Tishoumaren is derived from the French word chômeur, meaning "the unemployed".[1]
The genre was first pioneered by and popularized outside of Africa by Ali Farka Touré and later Tinariwen. In recent years, artists like Mdou Moctar and Bombino have continued to adapt Saharan rock music and have achieved international success. The Tuareg people live in a region of North and West Africa that covers large portions of the Sahara across the modern-day national boundaries of Mali, Algeria, Niger, Libya, and Chad, and to a lesser extent, reaching into Burkina Faso and Nigeria. They had been nomadic pastoralists involved in trans-Saharan trade for many hundreds of years. At the turn of the 20th century, the Tuareg were subjected to French colonial rule, after a lengthy resistance movement and defeated rebellion. With the departure of colonial powers in the 1950s and 1960s, the lands inhabited by the Tuareg population were split primarily between the six new countries of Mali, Algeria, Niger, Libya, Burkina Faso and Chad, making them ethnic minorities across the region.
For the next few decades, natural resources diminished due to increasing desertification and the Tuareg minorities have since been involved in a series of conflicts and rebellions, creating hardship for the survival of Tuareg people and their culture. In 1973, a major drought forced many of the Tamasheq-speaking people throughout the deserts to reconsider their traditional way of life as nomadic herders. Many took refuge in urban centers across the region, but with many lacking formal education, the Tamasheq were largely unemployed. The term ishumar began to be used describing young Tamasheq. A unique culture began to arise among many of the economically and politically marginalized youths, sometimes rebellious or revolutionary in nature, reasserting a cultural pride.[citation needed] Many young men, including future members of Tinariwen, took employment in a Tamasheq military unit being assembled by Libyan military leader Muammar al-Gaddafi.[10] Besides receiving military training and weapons in the Gaddafi-sponsored camps, many of the young Tamasheq men were also exposed to revolutionary ideas, pan-Africanism, and popular music.
In the decades to follow, the Tamasheq were involved in extended episodes of violence and rebellion against the various governments in the region, both as victim and perpetrator. The stories of socio-political unrest have been relayed through music, contributing to and partially shaping the Tamasheq people's culture and ideals. The music of the young, uprooted men who often wandered from town to town was guitar-driven, first acoustic and then electric. These were the men referred to as ishumar, a term derived from the French word chômeur, a term for an unemployed person.[11]
The originators of the musical genre were Tinariwen, a group of musicians within camps sponsored by Gaddafi who formed their group in 1979.[1] Tinariwen was the first Tamasheq group to feature electric guitars; they are considered the originator of the style. During rebellion against the government of Mali, Tinariwen's music was spread via audio cassette through the camps. ... Songs are generally sung in Tamasheq language.[10][16] Lyrics have been described as being rooted in traditional Tuareg poetry, with topics including rebellion, war and beauty, and often mention the Sahara desert itself.[1] Homesickness and longing for maintaining Tuareg traditions in the face of exile is also explored. Musically, the tende drum and three-stringed teherdent Malian lute are the roots of the style. Chaabi music of the Maghreb is another influence.[1] Many Saharan rock musicians have cited Jimi Hendrix as a key influence, including Mdou Moctar, who has been described as the 'Hendrix of the Sahara".[16][17]
Is Europe in Economic Decline? Paul Krugman
Are there real economic vulnerabilities underlying Europe's geopolitical cringe? European reliance on US and Chinese technology is clearly a concern, especially now that the US has become a rogue state — notwithstanding the fact that the world also relies on Europe for some key technologies, such as advanced chipmaking (illustrated by the photo at the top of this post).
More broadly, however, European geopolitical weakness is mainly about internal politics — largely a combination of disunion and learned helplessness after generations of relying for security on an America that no longer exists. Europe has also been made geopolitically weak by the self-centered, backward-looking attitudes of its two big powers — Germany, which turned a blind eye to foreign threats because it wanted cheap natural gas and markets for its aging auto industry, France with its struggle to reform a dysfunctional retirement system, and so on.
But European geopolitical weakness and the prospect for change is a large topic, which I'll turn to in future posts. For now, my message to Europeans is that you're much stronger than you seem to believe. Act accordingly.
China watches Russia's $5 million tanks die to $500 Toys Raj K at Medium
Today, the world has entered a period in which no crisis remains alone — all are connected. A fight in one place changes the situation in another place.
The Ukraine war, the standoff with Iran, the security of the Black Sea, oil and gas supplies, sea lanes, drone attacks, and inflation are no longer separate topics but rather form a new single system.
And when a problem occurs in one area, it will likely affect regions on different continents.
...In this entire change, one more thing is rising rapidly — the importance of maritime security. Now, security is not limited only to military power.
It depends on which country can keep its sea routes safe, can protect its ports, and can keep its supply chains stable. Oil, LNG, shipping, insurance, and logistics — all these have now come to the center of global stability.
For Europe, this means that its security is no longer limited only to NATO's eastern border. It will have to expand its strategy from the Black Sea to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.
Meanwhile, China is seeing this situation as an opportunity. In the context of Taiwan, it is not only creating military pressure but is also trying to strengthen its hold at the political level.
...America's power is not ending, but it is no longer as certain and cheap as before. And when allied countries start seeing even America's decisions as a risk, the world enters a new era.
...Today, the situation is such that many countries of the world want to learn from Ukraine's drone technology and want to adopt it — because the war of the future will now be decided not by expensive weapons, but by smart, fast, and cheap solutions.
Zadie Smith on the Courage to Be More Than Yourself Marginalian
11v26
ChatGPT defending cyberpunk Bruce Sterling, provocateur.
Black death Mysteries Small Things Considered
...this study exemplifies the interconnected nature of human societies and how we subsist thanks to so many, often overlooked, connections. But this same connectivity also becomes a vulnerability. This was made evident during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Not to mention the problems arising from unresolved conflict in the Persian Gulf.
...In sum, the very systems set in place to prevent starvation in major Italian cities also facilitated the entry of the bubonic plague into Europe.
Climate-driven changes in Mediterranean grain trade mitigated famine but introduced the Black Death to medieval Europe
Martin Bauch & Ulf Büntgen
...Additional information derives from administrative and epistolary records concerning the trans-Mediterranean grain trade from 1345–1348 CE (Supplementary Data S4). These documents are ordered by geographical origin to reflect conditions in individual Italian cities and their efforts to secure grain beyond their territories. A revised chronology of plague outbreaks across Italy is based on carefully evaluated entries in chronicles (Supplementary Data S5). Grain price data for different crops across Italy were collected from narrative sources on a seasonal basis (Supplementary Data S6). These data were converted into annual averages (Supplementary Data S7), together with published price series from the wider Mediterranean region. Although evidence is fragmentary and often biased toward periods of dearth or regulation, it suffices to reconstruct episodes of major transregional price spikes.
(extensive bibliography)
Hantavirus is a reminder we should prepare for the next pandemic Matthew Yglesias
But we're in a structural situation where, due to population growth, prosperity, and increased connectivity, the odds of new pandemic outbreaks are mechanically rising. Separately, technological improvements mean the odds of engineered pandemics are also rising. We ought to be taking aggressive countermeasures to get ahead of these risks, and we largely aren't.
via Tooze:
Opec was built for oil-dependent states. The UAE hasn't been one for a long time. As Abu Dhabi, we joined Opec before we were even a nation. Later as the UAE, we were a young country whose economy depended almost entirely on oil revenues. Opec's framework — collective production management, shared discipline, co-ordinated pricing — made sense for a state new to international energy markets and the global economy. It offered expertise, stability and leverage that a small, newly independent country could not generate on its own.
But that country no longer exists. Less than a quarter of our GDP is now tied to energy. Aviation, logistics, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, tourism and life sciences are our fastest-growing sectors. In the past four years we have signed 35 comprehensive economic partnership agreements (of which 15 are already operational) with India, South Korea, Indonesia, Ukraine, Israel, Kenya, Malaysia, Vietnam, Jordan and others — broadening access to markets covering billions of people.
We are advancing a bilateral trade agreement with the European Union. We have committed to a $1.4tn investment and technology partnership with the US. This is not the profile of a country whose primary interest is managing oil supply within a collective framework. The past year has reminded every government and every household what energy insecurity actually feels like. Regional instability has disrupted supplies, driven prices towards record levels, and imposed real costs on consumers, farmers and businesses from Des Moines to Delhi.
The lesson is not complicated: the world needs more reliable, affordable energy — and it needs producers who can deliver it. The UAE's interest is in a stable neighbourhood, not a volatile one — and our energy policy, like our foreign policy, is oriented towards that goal. We have significant spare capacity and the infrastructure to expand it. We plan to invest tens of billions of dollars in new pipelines, port upgrades and hardened logistics to ensure our energy reaches the markets that need it, regardless of what happens around us. Our production capacity target is 5mn barrels per day by 2027.
But within a collective production framework, that capacity sits idle. Leaving Opec is therefore not a commercial calculation alone; it is a responsibility. The UAE has the capacity to contribute to global energy security and international economic stability at a moment when that security and stability is genuinely at risk. We intend to do so.
Our revenues from expanded production will not simply accrue. They will be recycled into infrastructure investments across the developing world. Masdar, our renewable energy company, has spent twenty years building capacity across 40 countries, including the US. The Barakah nuclear plant — the Arab world's first — is operational and generating clean baseload power. ADNOC has allocated tens of billions of dollars to advance lower-carbon solutions through XRG, its new international investment arm. We are not choosing between oil and the energy transition. We are funding one with the other.
Source: FT
The Allegory of THE SEVENTH SEAL
Not Just Hanta: Over 100 People on Cruise Sickened by Norovirus gizmodo
The Emergent Self Loop Kevin Kelly
What Will It Take to Modernize the US Power Grid? gizmodo
K is for Ketchup Timothy Burke
...Malay etymologists, says Smith, feel that the word can't be of Malay origin, but is Chinese instead. That doesn't necessarily rule out the condiment coming from Indonesia, which most of the etymologies don't seem to discuss. E.g., there's been a merchant diaspora in Indonesia from southeastern China for six centuries, since before the Dutch and Portuguese came there.
...I think of it a bit as a culinary archipelago. There's Heinz as the big island, safe and everywhere. There are far islands only glimpsed at the horizon, where if you travel to them you find you've gone from the Ketchup Islands to the Nam Pla Islands, into the lands of Ferment. There are nearby small islands a lot like Heinz but you have them more to yourself, and a few weird and interesting places in the chain. It's all good. Whatever we lost in an era where mass production drove our palates into the monotony of efficiency, we've regained not just with expensive alternatives but with a better understanding of what something like ketchup is in our diets, and what might satisfy our desire for flavor besides that one affordable thing.
Walter Lippmann, writing in Public Opinion in 1922, described how a small class of editors and publicists had taken on the job of “manufacturing consent” by deciding which stories would be put in front of the public and to which framings they would be attached. He thought this was, on balance, fine. Most readers, he said, would never have the time or competence to form views from primary sources. Someone had to do the framing.
...The story of economic history begins with the evolution of minds, not markets. And not with the evolution of individual minds either. The story properly begins with the biocultural evolution of the time- and space-binding Mind that is humanity considered as an anthology intelligence. It is the peculiar, contingent evolution of that and its capacity for cumulative culture that sets off the possibility of the process. The "market" is merely a latecomer, a surface ripple atop the vast ocean of social learning, language, and trust that made Homo sapiens the protagonist of the coming of the Anthropocene
...Spoken language may be up to 1.7 million years old, and it has evolved into a complex and nuanced communication system. When writing began encoding speech, it instantly gained most of that complexity. “It piggybacked on the amazing functionality of language to communicate,” says Piers Kelly at the University of New England in Australia. Today, we take for granted that writing can be used to persuade, delight or anger a reader — but it can do so only because it encodes speech.
...And always, the farm was where the American dream was one drought, one sickness, one fire, one crushing debt, away from failure. Heart-breaking stories of the failure of a family farm are one of the deepest genres of American storytelling. The imagined failure of many farms at once lies at the heart of many political crises since the late 19th Century. The bipartisan commitment to massive financial subsidy of American agriculture since the 1970s flourished despite Reaganism and despite further waves of neoliberal austerity precisely because of the cultural power of stories about families losing their farms, even as most farms became outposts of large agribusinesses with farming families serving as little more than managers for conglomerate owners.
...the predators in the Dark Internet Forest are the mega-platforms themselves, at the core of which are machines for turning human action and feeling into saleable data objects.
Before he changed the way we understand lightning on Earth, Joseph Dwyer studied the weather in more cosmic settings. Using the sensors on NASA's Wind satellite (opens a new tab), orbiting a million miles away, he watched flares shoot out from the sun and analyzed the particles that stream from the sun's surface.
...the basic principle behind all analogue records, which is that the waveform of the sound is quite literally etched into the vinyl groove. In the simplest case—a mono record—the etched waveform pushes the needle in a direction perpendicular to the groove. This results in the needle tracing the waveform's geometry as the record spins, and the cartridge to which the needle is attached acts as a transducer, converting this physical movement into an electrical signal. Run the resultant signal through sufficient amplification, and bam, you've got sound.
...The theory of capitalism holds that markets are a kind of distributed computer that aggregates trillions of decisions from billions of market participants in order to optimize production and distribution of goods and services, creating a "Pareto-optimal" world where no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
...Facebook reached a billion users before any major democracy had a coherent policy position on what it was. By the time the policy machinery wound itself up, Facebook had already restructured politics in dozens of countries, undermined several elections, and pivoted into something else entirely. Whatever the regulators eventually produced was a response to a previous version of the company, but the current version had moved on
...The residue that is left behind by every bubble is subsidized, but that subsidy doesn't come from the deep-pocketed investors who are gripped by "irrational exuberance." It comes from mom-and-pop, normie, retail investors who have been tricked into giving their money to the insiders who inflated the bubble.
...American corporations own over 70% of the oil in the Tar Sands with an estimated $50 billion going to U.S. investors annually. Alberta's natural resources were recently valued at $860 billion, and such resources tend to provide enticements to American conservatives in the separatist movement. Similarly, in the Donbas region, resources are valued at $7.5 trillion making their development a major motive in the invasion of Ukraine.
...In the intellectual circles of Washington and its allies, a growing certainty is evident: a combination of military and economic pressure can bring Iran to its knees or drive it towards collapse. Analysts present detailed three-step plans to "crush Tehran" and postulate that the West holds strategic superiority. However, a deeper look at the array of global and regional developments illustrates this certainty to be a dangerous "strategic illusion". These roadmaps, by ignoring systemic consequences, geopolitical blind spots and their own internal vulnerabilities, chart a path towards an uncontrollable and attritional quagmire rather than a route to victory.
At this point it's almost routine: Almost every time Donald Trump makes a major announcement about the Iran War, that announcement is preceded — sometimes by only a few minutes — by huge and hugely profitable bets in the oil market.
The future of plant extinction
...Plants perform biological processes that are essential to the well-being of humans and ecosystems (1). Climate change is reshaping the environmental conditions that plants must face and accelerating their extinction. Estimating how endangered plants are is important to inform conservation decisions. However, only 18% of plants are included in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, which provides global assessments of the risk of extinction for 76,864 plant species
...The millions of Indigenous subjects of the Spanish crown—at least those who survived introduced European pestilence— were not all the cowering vassals or hybridizing peasants that previous scholars had assumed, the pair maintain. People of the Indies adapted quickly to new legal norms and practices and wielded them against their colonizers, their former Indigenous lords, and sometimes against each other in the form of countless petitions, lawsuits, notarial writs, and other appeals.
...Across the Persian Gulf region and Israel, desalination supplies a dominant share of municipal drinking water. Centralized desalination plants enable economic growth and urbanization in some of the world's most arid environments (2, 3) but make the region vulnerable to damage from geopolitical conflict (4). This risk highlights the need for Middle Eastern countries to strengthen the resilience of desalination infrastructure.
Desalination provides nearly all municipal water in Kuwait and Qatar, more than 90% of the municipal water supply in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, 60 to 70% of urban water in Saudi Arabia, 70 to 80% of municipal water in Israel, and substantial water for coastal communities in Iran (3, 5, 6). Most Gulf states maintain only limited strategic freshwater reserves—often measured in days to weeks—making sustained interruptions potentially catastrophic. Unlike electricity networks, water supply cannot easily be rerouted from distant regions.
The fragility of water infrastructure is most acute in regions already facing hydrological insolvency. In Iran, for instance, decades of anthropogenic groundwater depletion have pushed aquifers to the brink of exhaustion (6, 7). When conflict-induced infrastructure damage meets such preexisting scarcity, the resulting cascading disasters range from humanitarian crises to irreversible ecological collapses.
...Although complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS)–based neuromorphic technologies have made strides in scaling to billions of neurons and are increasingly applied in artificial intelligence and numerical computing, they remain orders of magnitude behind the human brain in terms of connectivity and energy efficiency. Neuromorphic ionic computing promises to overcome these limitations by leveraging the distinct architectural and operational principles of the brain. Our brains achieve this energy efficiency by combining several key features: using the same network elements to store and process information; using an incredibly complex and massively interconnected three-dimensional (3D) network of locally active elements that enables sparsity, robustness in the presence of noise, adaptation, and life-long learning; computing at comparatively low voltage and frequency; and last, taking advantage of a plethora of ions and small molecules as information carriers. We propose that ionic computing systems can take advantage of similar features to achieve substantial gains in energy efficiency.
...What is striking about the 19th-century accounts of the population history of South Asia is that they were largely based on just one category of evidence, namely linguistic and philological, with an overwhelming reliance on the Vedas, especially the Rgveda, as a primary source. However, from a historical methodological perspective, the language of the Rgveda is, in Trautmann's words, ‘archaic and its meanings are often hard to make out because of its poetic character and religious purpose
...an elderly fighter named Adib chimes in to urge caution, recalling his days battling the Western-allied shah as a teenage communist militant in the run-up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. "The U.S. and Israel won't give us anything we can't take for ourselves," he says. He recalls a notorious U.S.-brokered 1975 deal that exposed the Kurds to massacres, after Henry Kissinger, the U.S. secretary of state, abruptly terminated Washington's clandestine support. "This isn't our first experience with the West. They always try and use the Kurds as a card," he says.
1:42 AM
to me, Betsy, lexibee1, Kate, jcrootpi, Nick, Allen, lima, Annabel, Anne, meredith18@gmail.com, Paul, Noelle
Jamie Dimon just said there will be a bond crisis.
Not might be. Will be.
And when the CEO of the largest bank in the world says something like that, it's worth understanding what he actually means.
It isn't defense.
It's interest payments on the debt.
20 cents of every tax dollar you pay goes directly to servicing debt.
Which means more money printing to cover it.
Which means more inflation.
The whole cycle accelerates....In eastern Oregon, Amazon is using water already contaminated with agricultural fertilizer runoff to cool its data centres. When that contaminated water hits Amazon's sizzling equipment, it evaporates while nitrate pollution stays behind, concentrating to dangerous levels. Data centers consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, and the discharged wastewater contains biocides, corrosion inhibitors, heavy metals like zinc, copper, and chromium.
Political change is downstream of coalition building, and coalitions are fragile things, because by definition they are not fully aligned; they share some goals but often violently disagree about others. A coalition forms when groups set aside their differences to pursue the common elements of their agenda.
...One of the more confident predictions scientists can make for future tropical cyclones — the catch-all term for hurricanes, tropical storms, and tropical depressions — is that they will dump more rain. Global warming increases the amount of water vapor the atmosphere contains when fully saturated: Every one degree Celsius of ocean warming leads to about 7% more water vapor in saturated air.
Tishoumaren (ⵜⵉⵛⵓⵎⴰⵔⴻⵏ in Neo-Tifinagh script) or assouf, internationally known as desert blues, is a style of music from the Sahara region of northern and west Africa.
...The EU is an economic superpower almost on a par with the United States and China. Its economy is vastly larger than Russia's. Yet Europe often seems intimidated by the U.S. and until very recently has acted as if it is unable to cope with the Russian threat on its own.
The growing conflict between America and Iran is not a separate event. It is part of that big change whose beginning had already taken place with the Russia-Ukraine war.
...The tyranny of our time is that, because the hero of the modern myth is the victim, our catalogue of ways to be wounded has swelled to untenable proportions. The arsenal of possible offenses is so immense that we are left in a state of paralyzing hyper-vigilance, ever on the defensive, ever trying to preempt grievance and avoid indictment. Because it is hard to create from a defensive place, no region of life has suffered more by this than our arts — trembling before the whip of cultural appropriation, artists are left with narrower and narrower parameters of permission for whom and what they can imagine. We seem to have forgotten that the word empathy itself is just a little over a century old, invented by Rilke and Rodin to describe the imaginative act of projecting yourself into a work of art that represents something other than yourself. We seem to have forgotten that, at its best, art is not a mirror but a kaleidoscope, casting on the walls of our own lives a thousand hues of experience we never could have lived.
...The authors propose that the severity of this second pandemic plague was a consequence of a confluence of unfortunate events, likely catalyzed by environmental change. The cold and wet climate around 1345 and 1346, possibly due to a volcanic eruption, resulted in food shortages that required the import of grain that arrived in ships that also carried the plague pathogen. From here, the plague spread to nearby cities and regions in the Mediterranean. In sum, the very systems set in place to prevent starvation in major Italian cities also facilitated the entry of the bubonic plague into Europe.
Communications Earth & Environment volume 6, Article number: 986 (2025)
(pdf)f...We used climate proxy and written documentary archives to argue that a yet unidentified volcanic eruption, or a cluster of eruptions around 1345 CE contributed to cold and wet climate conditions between 1345 and 1347 CE across much of southern Europe. This climatic anomaly and subsequent transregional famine forced the Italian maritime republics of Venice, Genoa and Pisa to reconfigure their supply network and import grain from the Mongols of the Golden Horde around the Sea of Azov in 1347 CE. The unusual change in long-distance maritime grain trade prevented large parts of Italy from starvation and distributed the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis via infected fleas in grain cargo across much of the Mediterranean basin, from where the second plague pandemic emerged into the largest mortality crisis in pre-modern times.
see also Volcanism and global plague pandemics: Towards an interdisciplinary synthesis
Henry G. Fell et al. (2020) ScienceDirect Elsevier......For any given novel outbreak, the initial read is almost always going to be that the odds of it becoming a deadly pandemic are low. That's just the nature of things.
The UAE view on OPEC from the UAE's ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba
...The word itself appears in English for the first time in the late 17th Century, which in food history is something of a big hint that there's some association between European expansion and the new food word. In this case, there are rival theories about the etymology of "catsup" or "ketchup" that all feel kind of messy to me as I read them.