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.
...So what did Dimon call for? Well, he basically said, we need to repair theWestern alliance. We need to bring the Western world, the advanced democracies, above all the United States and Europe, back together in part as a way to stand up against the threat of a rising China. And his proposal for how to do that was to negotiate a free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union.
That's quite something. That's a very un-MAGA position to take. You want to bear in mind that, first of all, we're currently under a government of people who do not at all believe in the virtues of free trade. In fact, are extremely hostile to globalism. Certainly don't believe in binding international agreements. Maybe they want agreements that bind other countries, but not them.
And they are also not of the mind that we have a lot of shared values with the democratic governments of Europe. The MAGA position, if anything, is that they like the anti-democratic forces in Europe. J.D. Vance essentially campaigned for Viktor Orban in Hungary. Trump officials have been quite clear that they have sympathy for the AfD in Germany. So if we have common values with some Europeans, the Europeans with whom they have common values are neo-Nazis. And Trump's de facto support for Putin in his invasion of Ukraine has been alarmingly clear over the past two years.
What we're seeing here is Jamie Dimon basically saying that I don't care about any of that. I don't believe that you people are going to be in charge. And I think that we can go back to trying to rebuild bridges to Western Europe.
...the whole brittleness debacle. Within a neural network, the parameter space is enormous and quasi-continuous; the prior is usually chosen for computational convenience rather than genuine belief; and the resulting "95% credible interval" carries no guarantee of actually covering the truth 95% of the time if either the prior or model is off (which in deep learning it usually is to some degree).
...Under normal conditions, the sun's heat and Earth's spin fuel east-to-west trade winds around the tropics, which blow water into a "warm pool" near Indonesia. As this warm pool grows, it builds up energy. "It could be a bit like a coiled spring waiting to emerge," says Richard Allan at the University of Reading, UK.
Every two to seven years, natural chaotic disturbances release that spring. Bursts of westerly winds can blow against and slow the easterly trade winds, allowing swells of warm water to roll across the Pacific Ocean, raising sea levels along the coasts of Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. These so-called Kelvin waves indicate that El Niño is coming.
A self-reinforcing cycle called the Bjerknes feedback kicks in. The blob of warm water suppresses the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich deep water that normally makes Peru's anchovy fishery so rich, further warming the surface water. The warm sea heats the air above it and causes it to expand. The resulting fall in atmospheric pressure slows the trade winds down even more, since winds flow from high to low pressure. This allows still more warm water to slosh back into the eastern Pacific.
The swathe of warm water stretching across the tropical Pacific releases trillions of joules of heat energy into the atmosphere, raising worldwide temperatures on top of global warming. This is why scientists expect 2027 to be the hottest year on record. But it also drastically alters weather patterns, bringing drought and wildfires to some areas and storms and flooding to others.
Normally, warm air rises over the warm pool, carrying moisture that falls out in thunderstorms, which is why rainforests flourish in places like Indonesia. Denuded of moisture, this warm, dry air then reaches the top of the troposphere and spreads out to the east and west. It descends over the eastern Pacific and the Horn of Africa, fuelling a belt of such air loops around the tropics called the Walker circulation.
During El Niño, however, the warming of the eastern Pacific moves this upward convection eastward, shifting the entire Walker circulation. Now dry, warm air that was sinking over the Horn of Africa and the eastern Pacific is sinking over Indonesia and the Amazon, encouraging drought and wildfires there. Over eastern Africa, warm air is rising, increasing rainfall and the risk of flooding.
Meanwhile, the warming waters also create a stronger temperature contrast between the tropical and northern Pacific, strengthening the jet stream and bringing more storms and wet weather to the southern US. It can bring storms and rain to the UK as well, in certain circumstances.
Data in Dialogue
An Interactive Atlas of Critical Data Visualization
...The featured work asks how interaction can encourage participation, how visualizations can support sensemaking, and how aesthetics can convey meaning. Some entries open up cultural collections and historical records to new readings. Others trace how conventions for representing data take shape, including tools and textbooks through which these conventions are taught and passed on. There are also entries that question the viability of data visualization altogether.
...Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.
In her new book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, Neiman argues that evil "isn't cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary."
...Trump crosses line after line. He declares wars on a whim. He enriches himself and his family in crypto schemes, from which he has made over a billion dollars. He orders assassinations and the kidnapping of heads of state. He uses billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain genocide in Palestine and since January 2025 has provided over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel. He guts government departments designed to lift up the vulnerable and bloats the war budget. He builds rogue paramilitary forces to terrorize citizens and immigrants. He attacks and attempts to censor the news industry.
In short, he does what all who commit evil do.
He fosters a world where nothing is sacred and where democracy and civic virtues do not exist.
...the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.
...Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.
...he has attracted millions of followers who tell us they admire his authenticity. This doesn't mean his followers are deplorable. They may not be evil at all, but in a world where implacable self-interest is usually camouflaged in soft colors, they find his candor refreshing. They have so often heard that people conceal the raw self-interest that really moves things, they're relieved to watch a man who never hides it.
...The moral rot in our society preceded Trump. He is its logical conclusion. He is the apotheosis of a culture where greed, exploitation and self-interest, the core tenets of neoliberalism, are held up as the defining forces of human existence.
...For decades, researchers studying the decision-making process favored models informed by economics, wherein people generally make choices that are grounded in a rational and objective assessment of risk and reward.
But in the late 20th century, this framework was challenged by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The two psychology researchers formulated an alternative concept known as ‘prospect theory', which describes a more complicated set of cognitive biases and other considerations that influence the way people weigh and act on probabilities.
...the concept of developing computational architectures that mirror key features of the brain had been around for decades. Several pioneering researchers had already begun to explore the potential of modeling the reasoning process with such systems, and Griffiths was intrigued by the possibility of tackling cognitive science with computational methods. "I was like, 'Wait a minute, you can use math to describe how minds work?'" he says, "And that was it—I was off on that track."
When Tessa Montague learned about CRISPR, the gene-editing system that was supposed to make it easy to modify any organism, she set her sights on the cuttlefish. The Columbia University neuroscientist dreamed of injecting its embryos with genes that would prompt its neurons to fluoresce as they fired. The flashes would let her track how this tentacled creature's brain controls one of its most striking behaviors: camouflaging itself by copying patterns it perceives in its surroundings onto its skin. Unlike most animals, she says, "cuttlefish can actually tell us what they see."
But modifying the animal was not easy at all. Injecting gene-editing tools into a fertilized egg required peeling away dozens of layers of jelly; developing pincers that squeeze the egg with a precise amount of force; designing a needle with the right angle to pierce its nearly invisible, lens-shaped embryo; and keeping the delicate baby cuttlefish alive once they hatch. "Sometimes I think we've experienced every type of failure possible," Montague says.
...The researchers had one shot to collect eggs from each animal because octopuses only spawn once during their lives. Using ultrasound, they gauged ovary size to predict when an octopus was about to start laying her 500,000 eggs, then analyzed the eggs' color so they could select only the freshest embryos for manipulation—ones that had not yet started to divide.
...The idea builds on fracking: pumping huge volumes of fluid into underground rock layers to fracture them and bring oil, gas, and wastewater back to the surface. It's long been known that those fluids can pick up trace amounts of metals such as lithium and uranium along the way. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the University of Oklahoma (OU) now want to make that process more selective, adding chemicals to the fluids to dissolve specific minerals from the rock. The team plans to escalate its efforts with 2 years of funding from the Department of Energy's Mine of the Future program, starting this month. This is "precision mining in the subsurface," says Todd Schaef, a chief scientist at PNNL. "We have to go after these low-grade ores."
The concentrations of critical minerals in individual oil and gas reservoirs are minute. But the sheer scale of the U.S. oil patch, with more than 900,000 active wellheads that tap a vast acreage, could compensate. Oil wells could produce up to 500 million tons of critical minerals, assuming mining of 5% of the reservoir volume and 1% recovery of the minerals, the group estimates in a paper published last month in Environmental Science & Technology.
...Now, thanks to technological advances such as automated species detection from audio recordings and analysis of DNA shed into the environment, conservation scientists think it's possible to assemble increasingly comprehensive and up-to-date views of biodiversity across huge landscapes. Last week, a coalition of research organizations, including Ramalho's institute, announced an initiative to test that promise by creating an Amazon-wide, regularly updated picture of what's happening to plant and animal populations as development threatens one of the most species-rich parts of the world.
The project, dubbed Amazon.ia, promises to marry streams of data from dozens of field sites with computer models capable of quickly detecting patterns and extending results across the river basin's 7 million square kilometers.
...A flood of data has helped train more powerful computer models, technical know-how has become more widespread, and more people are concerned about the loss of biodiversity.
Mamirau&a acute; and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia have already built a network of 65 stations in the Amazon that automatically collect audio and images; classify species including insects, mammals, and birds; and quickly upload the results via satellite. The program has been shown to effectively track the Amazonian manatee and endangered river dolphins.
...a concern given the Trump administration's overall approach to research, Clayton says.
"They're worried about [competition from] China, they're desperate to take research out of the research institutions and into the private sector, they may be allowing easier access by the private sector to data." But weakening the Common Rule could come at a price, she says. "Is the gain you're going to get from doing translational research without consent worth it for what it's going to cost in trust?"
... a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology
...ASML, the European manufacturer of semiconductor lithography machines, says that it doesn't actually sell any machines in Europe currently because no new fabs are being built there
via Tooze
...Robert Kanigel wrote about it in his massive (675 page) biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor (he of Taylorism), called The One Best Way. Taylor was considered the first efficiency expert and the creator of scientific management, a field that uses time and motion studies to increase productivity. Before that though, he was a leading cutting tool researcher at Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania. His Taylor curve and Taylor tool life equation are still in use today. Along with Maunsel White, Taylor invented High Speed Steel and introduced it to the world in Paris. In the relatively tiny Bethlehem booth they installed a massive lathe that chucked a 10-foot long solid steel cylinder. They would run their HSS tool for 20 minutes and then take a 10-minute break. French news reported that machine shops of Paris would see metal cut SIX TIMES faster than ever before. Crowds packed the small booth to watch the Taylor-White cutting tools in action and other exhibitors complained about them siphoning off attention. Source: David Barton
Memes are patterns that are imprinted, not into the molecules of the creature, their DNA, but into some more readily changeable part of the body, like connections between nerve cells. Memes are memories, learned skills and crafts, stories, ideas, taken-for-granted assumptions, languages. They are transferable patterns imprinted in a more abstract layer of bodily configurations (as compared to DNA). And they transfer through communication and imitation.
...And metamemes are the fundamental patterns of the memes themselves. The memes don't emerge independently, but in relation to each other. They emerge as functions of larger, more fundamental, overarching metamemes.
...memes are the most fundamental category of history.
...Cultural history must thereby, necessarily, be the history of how all memes emerge, how they struggle, combine, and evolve, and how they steer the world. Because culture consists of memes, whereas genes can only be transferred and experimented with through new generations, through new bodies (with some leeway for epigenetic factors, i.e. how genes are turned on and off during a lifetime), memes can evolve much more quickly and according to another logic entirely. And that logic is culture, and its development is "history". An event is "historical" because it's memetically significant. Events that don't change memes aren't really "historical"
...Memes are like ghosts-of-abstraction that, as it were, possess the biological bodies of their carriers. They emerge through ongoing interactions between human beings, and then take over those same human beings and control the movements of their bodies, shaping very specific patterns of movements of the body. Biologically, I can be a light-skinned homo sapiens with green irises and long legs. Culturally, I can be a Russian-speaking, socialist ballet dancer. Through the medium of my biological body, memes "remote-control" me and make me do pirouettes for the glory of Stalin. When I open my mouth to speak, my tongue will move in a specifically Russian manner. I'm a memetic creature as much as I'm a genetic one — just as much as I'm a physical object with a certain mass, speed, and position in space-time. I have emerged on all these levels: physical, biological, and cultural.
Cory Doctorow
...A post-American world is on the horizon. What that world will look like is undecided. The US was always a wildly defective trusted third party, but it retained its status as the world's platform for generations thanks to the absence of credible alternatives. Now — as Mark Carney told the Davos crowd last year — the old system has "ruptured": https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ What will replace the dollar? https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/11/post-dollar-world/#de-dollarization What will replace oil? https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/11/cyber-rights-now/#better-late-than-never What will replace the internet? https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition No one knows. No one can know, because this is all up for grabs. The future isn't something that happens to us. The future is something that we make. And despite the horrible death toll that's locked in by waves of climate shocks –—presided over by the dying, fumbling "drink bleach" guy — it's conceivable that the future we get will be a good one, if not an easy one.
...Today, we are submerged in an ocean of debt. I'm not talking about the (fictional) "national debt" that is just a measure of all the dollars the government has spent into existence without taxing out of existence: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/21/we-can-have-nice-things/#public-funds-not-taxpayer-dollars I'm talking about fiscal debt: the solar we didn't build, the carbon we emitted instead; the rail we didn't build, the wildly inefficient aviation we substituted; the walkable, livable, transit-oriented cities we didn't build, the car-choked disasters we built instead. Oligarchic opposition to universal health-care left us sick, with un- or undertreated illnesses and missed opportunities for prevention that left us with overlapping, population-scale health crises. All of this is debt that must be repaid: we can't walk away from it through bankruptcy. We must build the transit, cities, and systems of care — the infrastructure — our species needs to carry on human civilization. We can't keep hitting snooze on this, lest we are finally awoken by seawater lapping at our pillows. The world we're in today is awful and terrifying. It's awful because of the climate ruptures we're living through. It's terrifying because we didn't just fail to avert this crisis — we did nothing to prepare for it, either.
To millions he was ustad, or master. To others he was the Singing Buddha or the Pavarotti of the East. In London's clubs he might have been the trippiest sample they'd ever heard, and to Jeff Buckley (who sang covers of his songs in concert) Nusrat was Elvis. To Indians like the composer A. R. Rahman (who recorded a pop number with him called "Gurus of Peace") he was an emissary across history's most painful fissures.
...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—as is he fondly called by Anglophone audiences—rehearses certain phrases, mixing them with the names of God and his loyal 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.
...In qawwali audiences are invited to take part in sama, a Sufi practice that seeks a close connection with the divine through music and dance. To appreciate qawwali is not just to marvel at the vocal agility of its performers but to relinquish one's body and surrender to a place beyond language.
...In 1985 [Peter Gabriel] 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.
To our dear friends, family, patrons and foodies,
After 18 unforgettable years, we've made the difficult decision to close Home Kitchen Cafe & Bakery and begin a new chapter in retirement.
This place has always been about more than food. It's been about doing things the right way, every single day. From scratch cooking to genuine hospitality, we set a standard for ourselves and worked hard to live up to it. This is not a post we ever thought we would make, but in today's world, maintaining our level of quality has become increasingly challenging. Like many in our industry, we've faced a growing struggle to find and keep the skilled, dedicated team needed to consistently deliver the experience our customers expect and deserve. Rather than compromise what Home Kitchen Cafe stands for, we feel it's the right time to step away.
To our incredible employees, past and present, you are the heart of this story. Your commitment, resilience, and pride in your work carried us through every busy morning and every demanding season. Quite simply, we would not have made it this far without you.
And to our loyal customers and community, thank you for your unwavering support over the years. You filled our dining room, shared your lives with us, and made this journey deeply meaningful.
We leave with gratitude, pride, and a lifetime of memories, confident that what was built here, in Rockland's North End, will always be something unique and special.
Please stop by in the next 2 weeks as the Cafe and Bakery will remain open through October18.
With sincere thanks, gratitude and love James and Susan
If there were some way to confine pervert glasses to helping people remember names, I'd be all over them. But when it comes to actual, existing pervert-glasses, the main purpose is to covertly capture strangers and shame them. And when (not if) these pervert glasses get hooked up to facial recognition, they will become high-volume doxing factories that will reward the attention-hungry with viral fame. We've built a society that offers infinite rewards to anyone who can put a name — and thus an identity — to anyone caught in public having an argument, picking their nose, slipping on ice, or eating with their mouth open. We're on the verge of democratizing only the worst part of celebrity: the pervasive hovering cameras that are always there to preserve and distribute your failures.
...Today, Bentham's heir is the odious Larry Ellison, the famously secretive billionaire, Trump crony and Oracle founder who goes to enormous lengths to prevent the public from finding out about his personal life. Ellison is also one of the most vocal proponents of mass surveillance. Larry Ellison has repeatedly called for the installation of ubiquitous, AI-backstopped surveillance for every (non-billionaire) person in the world, calling this "supervision": Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
The great aspiration of the Human Race is to gain a knowledge of the Reality, the Noumenon behind the phenomenon; but the fact that from infancy we have been accustomed to confine our attention wholly to the objective, believing that to be the reality, has surrounded us with a concrete boundary wall through which we can only at times, with difficulty, get transient glimpses of that which is beyond. It is only in recent years that we have been able to realize that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow or its manifestation in the Physical Universe, and that Time and Space have no existence apart from our physical senses, in short, that they are only the modes or limits under which those senses act or receive their impressions and by which they are necessarily rendered finite.
The difficulty is that our physical senses only perceive the surface of our surroundings, and that we have hitherto been looking at the Woof of Nature as though it were the glass of a window covered with patterns, smudges, flies, &c., comprising all that we call physical phenomena and which, when analyzed in terms of Time and Space, produce the appearance of succession and motion. It requires a keener perception, unbounded by these limitations, to look through the glass at the Reality which is beyond.
...Although we have no words to express, nor indeed minds to grasp, the wonders and glories of that which is behind the Veil, it is possible for some of us to get a glimpse of it through our Window. [...] We have seen that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow; that the Invisible, as distinguished from the Visible, is not in a place apart from the Physical, but is the Reality of which the visible constitutes the boundary lines or planes in our consciousness.
Hugh Blackmer
Wed, Oct 7, 6:04 AM (1 day ago)
to me, Wende, John, Kate, John, Betsy
A Constellation of Amazements: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Joy of Collecting Things https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/06/these-are-my-rocks/
We are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing principle by which to contain the chaos of reality. We organize what we find into categories and hierarchies, hovering over which is one of the strangest things about being human: preference. How odd to have a strong feeling about a color or an object or a sequence of chords. And yet our preferences are how we sculpt the self from the monolith of the species.
Preference taken to its highest form touches amazement — the glad disbelief that something so personally relevant and rapturous could exist amid the impersonal allness of all there is. One of the most moving things about us, and one of the most felicitous things about being alive together, is that we get to share our amazements. A collection — be it of rocks or vinyl records or facts about the Moon — is a constellation of amazements in the sky of one mind that can light up another with its loveliness, its strangeness, its sheer delight.
...the Iran War is also setting into motion a number of other geopolitical transformations—in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, the Gulf states, and even further afield. Trump and his Israeli partner-in-crime Benjamin Netanyahu expected a quick war, a tidy regime change in Tehran, and the collapse of its "axis of resistance."
Instead they now face a Pandora's boxful of unintended consequences
Anne Carson
Carson writes that 'words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you're standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.'
The roots of Zoroastrianism date back well into the 2nd millennium BCE. Beginning in the Bronze age in Central Asia, Zoroastrianism went through several distinct phases of development. In antiquity, it was the dominant religion in several successive empires based on Iranian soil (Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian). With the advent of Islam, conditions changed as Zoroastrianism gradually became a minority religion in Iran and emigrant Zoroastrians began to establish settlements along the coast of Gujarat in Western India. Today, small Zoroastrian communities continue to exist in Iran, while a larger number of Zoroastrians are based in India (Mumbai and Gujarat) and Pakistan (Karachi). In India and Pakistan, Zoroastrians, especially those tracing their ancestry back to the medieval immigration, are commonly referred to as Parsis. In addition, the 20th century has seen a growing network of diaspora communities in Britain, Canada, the US, Australia and other parts of the world.
...Among the principal tenets of their religion as formulated by modern Zoroastrians are the virtue of righteousness, the freedom of choice between Good and Evil, individual responsibility, philanthropy and service to humanity. However, due to radically changing historical, geographical and socio-economic environments, Zoroastrian thinkers have time and again also been challenged to reformulate their positions with regard to the contemporary issues of their respective times and places.
...We will examine the rationale underlying the frequently expressed view that Zarathustra, the prophet of Zoroastrianism, was "the world's first proponent of ecology."
...The assumption that the Dēn in theory provides the required spiritual and practical guidance on any kind of matter is amply attested in the work of Zoroastrian theologians of the late Sasanian and early Islamic period (ca. 6th-11th century). As shown by Vevaina (2012), these exegetes regarded the Avesta and particularly its oldest part, the Gāthās, as an "omnisignificant" source, one that is open to various interpretive approaches including those concerned with contemporary issues. The tradition notably ascribes the Gāthās to Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism, himself.
...Football—besides being one of our more ubiquitous and unrestrained national entertainments—has also become one of the rare arenas in American life where highly specialized language can flourish without censure. Express an opinion about art in public? You're yucking somebody's yum, and, if you're not careful, you'll get yelled off your soapbox and into a lonely bin labelled "Pretentious," or worse. If a scientist stands behind a lectern and gets in the weeds about, say, food safety, she'd better watch out for a pelting of tomatoes from an impatient crowd.
...football fans have come to tolerate, and even crave, a surprisingly high level of nerdy, insidery talk. During the same game, after a false start called on the Commanders' offense, one of the commentators, the former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce (now, it must be acknowledged, the lucky brother-in-law to Taylor Swift), explained why the chemistry between a backup quarterback and the big guy snapping him the ball might be a bit off kilter. "Yeah, whenever a backup quarterback comes in, everybody's cadence is a little bit different," he said, leaning emphatically on that vividly musical noun. It was an art-critical observation, poetic but also obviously true.
...the human urge toward weird and disproportionately intense tunnelling toward understanding—the urge to gather and share knowledge, wherever it gleams—is hard to suppress. Play the tough guy if you want, but under your nose some fresh exercise in radical dorkery is stealthily blooming.
...We have a society that is superb at turning knowledge of how to do things into recipes that can be taught, into tekhne>, and, yes, on top of
tekhne there rides what Michael Polanyi calls "tacit knowledge", what James Scott calls metis, what Sean Illing calls phronesis—not just doing the thing, but doing the thing in the time, place, and way that makes it useful. And pretty much the only way to learn that is extensive apprenticeship, working and assisting at the elbow of someone who has it.
...OK. So, then, where are we now? What does this mean for me, as I try to make my fall push to figure out what to do with this SubStack thing? Especially in the onrushing world of "AI", which can combine and remix ideas both assisting me and replacing me in a way that was impossible two years ago, and in which a good deal of what I have done has been playing the glass-bead game in a way that machines are now learning to do, in some ways better than I can?
...And this brings me to the Hermann Hesse novel, The Glass-Bead Game. In Hesse's novel, the Castalians spend their lives creating ever-more-elegant syntheses. A theme from Bach is linked to a theorem of Euclid, which is linked to a passage from the I Ching. All of it is gorgeous, all of it is self-referential, strung together like glass beads on a string, and all of it is useful and interesting by virtue of the juxtaposition and the remix. And now there is a machine that has read everything, and that strings beads via juxtaposition and remixing faster than I can, and sometimes more prettily—although I think it has useful and relevant taste only by accident. Not to mention the deep question of whether the glass-bead game is a game worth playing in the first place.
The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided. But because possibility is the hardest thing to bear, we sedate ourselves with certainty — even though we know that liminality is the most generative place, that to believe is to doubt, that we are most creative when we attempt what is not certain. ("Whatever inspiration is," one of my favorite poets reflected in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'")
In a culture that bandaids its fissures with self-righteousness, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to remain undecided, to refuse to mistake for finished the works in progress we are, to remember that our task here is not to be certain but to be true — to our incompleteness, to the open-endedness of life itself, to the unhurried wisdom of the heart.
...having billions of dollars is in no way a reliable predictor that you also possess the wisdom to unilaterally dictate how thousands or millions of other people must live their lives, and that dictatorial power is most the tangible effect of being a billionaire.
Billionaireism is many things, but above all else, it is the power to do whatever *you* want to do, at the expense of whatever *other* people want to do. To be a billionaire is to live a life unthwarted, above the power of your workers, your neighbors, or your government and its laws. It is the right to get high on your own supply. It is the right to live a life in which no one ever calls you on your bullshit.
Billionaires aspire to live a one-sided libertarian fantasy in which they have the unlimited right to do whatever they want, and *you* have the right to do whatever they tell you to do.
There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than theirs. We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief. Billionaires, on the other hand, command resources that allow *them* to devote sizable effort to getting *us* to acknowledge that *they* should be able to tell *us* what to do.
This is why billionaires love neoclassical economics, with its doctrine of “revealed preferences,” which holds that the only true way to understand someone's preferences is to ignore what they *say* and only pay attention to what they *do*. It's a belief that can only be adopted by people who suffer the self-inflicted neurological injury you get from doing an economics degree, which renders the victim incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power.
...We let the most greedy, most ruthless people among us pursue their toddler's quest for an unthwarted life to the expense of any semblance of competent administration, and now we are *fucked*. That's why people are so angry about AI: there's nothing wrong with the idea of automating some tasks through advanced statistical techniques, but the reason so much of the world's scarce resources have been allocated to the AI buildout is that billionaires are infinitely horny for a technology that will let them sideline expertise in favor of money
...Krill meal is used as feed for aquaculture, pets and ornamental fish, among others. While some nations use krill meal as an additional food source for their people, human use of krill products is primarily through dietary supplements containing oils that are extracted from krill.
...Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, is a principal food source for penguins, seals, whales, seabirds and fish. But krill are not distributed evenly across the Southern Ocean: They gather in dense, patchy groups in particular locations. They are most numerous in the waters off the Antarctic Peninsula stretching into the Scotia Sea.
Breeding penguins and seals depend on high concentrations of krill found relatively close to their colonies because they must repeatedly return to those colonies to feed their young. If they don't find krill nearby, they can't go much farther into the ocean to seek alternative prey without risking their young starving on the shore. More than 30 years of observations from the Antarctic Peninsula show why this concentration of krill matters.
...Baleen whales are more mobile, but they depend on exceptionally dense krill patches to make feeding worthwhile and often congregate in the same productive hot spots. There is growing concern around the overlap between the krill fishery and important feeding grounds of the recovering fin whale population.
...The concentration of fishing comes as the overall ecosystem is becoming more vulnerable as a result of climate change. The Antarctic Peninsula and Scotia Sea are among the fastest-warming places on the planet.
Decreased sea ice cover, changing wind patterns and warming ocean temperatures are already altering krill habitat and the Southern Ocean food web.
'People forgot I existed: Audrey Niffenegger on taking 14 years to write a sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife in Guardian
Language change may be studied by tracking linguistic variant frequencies through space and time. Observed frequencies may be viewed as realisations of a statistical field. We first set out an efficient cross validated method for inferring the empirical field — the variant frequency distribution estimated directly from data --— in our case, high resolution surveys from 20th century USA. We then derive a model of the statistical field, assuming that individuals diffuse locally, periodically migrate, and copy one another based on a form of replicator dynamics involving both bias and linguistic accommodation. We infer model parameters by comparing changes in model and empirical fields. Our inferences demonstrate that spatial linguistic patterns can be rapidly destroyed by migration but that accommodation can create them, protect them, and in combination with diffusion, produce partially predictable pattern dynamics. The results provide the strongest evidence yet for surface tension driven phase ordering in human dialects. We quantify the model's forecasting ability up to a time horizon of twenty five years using the Kullback-Leibler divergence between forecasts and observations.
11x26
Warren Ellis:
What is the point of all this? For me, it's about getting off screens and selecting tools with intention: tactile ones that are a physical and aesthetic pleasure to use. I like using a good pen. I like working on paper. I like writing notes to the future that I will discover in the archive box in a few years. Will graphite pencil marks survive years of archiving? God knows. I generally use archival quality pens.
Everything I do starts in a notebook. For me, it's the only way to fly. And, honestly? With the internet gone dead and the digital space polluted by AI and people talking about AI all the fucking time? Paper is where I want to live now. It's where I started, and it's where I'll end.
...And the human enterprise is the center about which what matters spins as we modern techno-industrialized humans are front and center of the show, the meaning of it all, just a little lower than the gods and goddesses themselves. And nobody made us godlike. We Odysseans did it all ourselves with all due comfort and support of Penelopeans.
...If you think that the solution to our polycrises is to vote against the Odysseans (those who look/act like Odysseus or Sun Wukong and are proud of it) and vote for Odysseans (including Penelopeans as Odyssean wannabes) who dress themselves in the finest of sheep's clothing, then you are an a system serving political animal (and Anthropocene enthusiast even if you pretend not to be).
...The earliest semblance of the spice trade began in the Middle East as far back as 2000 BC, though it didn't fully take root until the Silk Road connected China to the Eastern Mediterranean around 130 BC. At the same time, black pepper from the southwestern edge of India reached Egypt and the Red Sea by ship. Spice slowly trickled into Europe, though it wasn't until around 1100 AD that Venetian merchants began heavily importing spice into the continent.
Because spice had to be transported either by camel along the Silk Road or by ship from India, the known spices of the time were incredibly expensive. A Roman "pound" (slightly over 11 ounces) of long seed black pepper cost the average Roman soldier two weeks of wages. Needless to say, most spices were for the rich and powerful. This meant average European citizens relied on cheap, easy-to-grow seasonings like garlic mustard. In many ways, garlic mustard was a commoner's seasoning.
President Donald Trump's second term has left the Declaration of Independence and Constitution on life support.
He openly and notoriously proclaims that the sole constraint on his power is his moral conscience — not the Constitution, not the law, not the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump's impeachable lawlessness has become a way of life at the White House.
Signs of a midterm blue wave are everywhere, and yet it would be journalistic malpractice not to attach some nervous caveats to any prediction. Polls are sketchy. Campaigns have never been more subject to the desires of the wealthy. What is more, the President of the United States has the impulse control of a toddler, though most toddlers have neither the authority nor the inclination to spark an insurrection, destabilize the Western alliance, live-stream an execution, or threaten to end "a whole civilization." We are subjected daily to the caprices of a mind both unregulated and amoral. As Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, the Commander-in-Chief is "fascist to the core." You may prefer milder terminology. Fine. But, after a decade defined by Donald Trump's unceasing presence, a growing percentage of the American electorate appears to recognize the uniqueness of this President and the mayhem that he has instigated from the Oval Office.
We are, collectively, on guard against undue optimism. Still, if the coming election does result in a blue wave, Trump will be faced with the fact of his diminishment. The rest of us will be faced with the wreckage.
Before August Sander and Diane Arbus and Olan Mills, before Facetune and duck face, there were two: a shoeshine boy and his client, captured by Louis Daguerre on the Boulevard du Temple in 1838, in what is thought to be the first photograph to depict human beings. The bootblack squats beside a chest containing the tools of his trade. The patron stands, hands clasped behind his back, with a foot perched on the box.
Green's Dictionary of Slang (GDoS) was launched online on 12 October 2016. I cannot say that this made much of a splash beyond a minuscule and immediate few. The print edition had been published six years earlier, and had I not called in every figurative debt I could find so as to obtain its reviews (and why not thank once more those who conjured up so many kind words in its favour), would have slipped on stage virtually unseen. As it was, amazon, as only they would be capable of doing, shrank its substantial price to something a least worth considering, and it momentarily topped the three niche charts for which it was eligible.
Now its digital incarnation is ten years old. I have no idea how many times it has been consulted, nor by how many individuals or institutions. What I do know is that never a day passes without me loading it up and, via screen or printed page, setting out to see what slang — new, chronologically necessary (I go for a citation per anglophone country per decade and when useful add alternative spellings and other tweaks) can be added to the mountain of the anglophone varieties of what I have long categorised as ‘the counter-language'.
As of this update, the dictionary now offers 57,993 entries; the full count of senses/definitions runs to 148,118 and includes derivatives, compounds and phrases, and the illustrative citations number 662,483. This specific update has added 3,529 such examples, and they have generated 264 new slang terms and given earlier 'predates' for the ‘'irst recorded use' of 300.
...the two related facts that a) our IT systems are poorly constructed and indifferently maintained; and b) the people who are supposed to be fixing this keep making it worse.
The worst culprits here are governments, though the private sector is also terrible (in truth, our cybersecurity nightmare is something of a private-public partnership from hell). Governments are deeply compromised when it comes to digital security because they have an irreconcilable conflict of interest: on the one hand, they want to defend their countries' administrative systems, firms and households from digital attacks. But on the other hand, they really want to be able to launch attacks on their adversaries, both foreign and domestic.
America's affluent top decile — the 10% of richest Americans — do the majority of America's shopping, a phenomenon that has only been accelerated by America's precipitous slide into oligarchy, which has exhausted the savings and the credit-card limits and the home equity of the majority of Americans, who increasingly can't afford to buy anything: https://dreamagainusa.org/
If you want to sell things in America, you must sell them in the place where the top decile shops, and that's Amazon. For merchants, that is an incredibly expensive proposition: 51-60% of every dollar you spend with an independent merchant on Amazon is claimed by Amazon through junk fees, listing fees, commissions, processing fees and other scams
...I puzzle it out to-day that my parents had simply said to themselves, in serious concern, that I read too many novels, or at least read them too attentively—that was the vice; as also that they had by the contagion of their good faith got me in a manner to agree with them; since I could almost always enter, to the gain of "horizon" but too often to the perversion of experience, into any view of my real interests, so-called, that was presented to me with a dazzling assurance. I didn't consider certainly that I was so forming my mind, and was doubtless curious to see whether it mightn't, by a process flourishing in other applications, get to some extent formed. It wasn't, I think, till I felt the rapture of that method's arrest that I knew how grotesquely little it had done for me. And yet I bore it afterwards no malice—resorting again to that early fatalistic philosophy of which the general sense was that almost anything, however disagreeable, had been worth while; so unable was I to claim that it hadn't involved impressions. I positively felt the impressional harvest rather rich, little as any item of it might have passed at the time for the sort of thing one exhibits as a trophy of learning. My small exhibition was all for myself and consisted on the whole but of a dusty, spotty, ugly picture—I took it for ugly well-nigh to the pitch of the sinister. Its being a picture at all—and I clung to that—came from the personal and material facts of the place, where I was the only scholar of English speech, since my companions, with a Genevese predominance, were variously polyglot. They wondered, I couldn't doubt, what I was doing among them, and what lost lamb, almost audibly bleating, I had been charged to figure. Yet I remember no crude chaff, no very free relation of any one with any one, no high pitch, still less any low descent, of young pleasantry or irony; our manners must have been remarkably formed, and our general tone was that of a man-of-the-world discretion, or at the worst of a certain small bourgeois circumspection. The dread in the Genevese of having definitely to "know" strangers and thereby be at costs for any sort of hospitality to them comes back to me as written clear; not less than their being of two sorts or societies, sons of the townspeople pure and simple and sons of the local aristocracy perched in certain of the fine old houses of the Cité and enjoying a background of sturdily-seated lakeside villas and deeply umbrageous campagnes. I remember thinking the difference of type, complexion and general allure between these groups more marked, to all the senses, than any "social distinction" I had yet encountered. But the great thing was that I could so simplify our enclosing scene itself, round it in and make it compose—the dark, the dreary Institution, squeezed into a tall, dim, stony-faced and stony-hearted house at the very top of the Cité and directly in the rear of the Cathedral, portions of the apse of which seem to me to have straggled above or protruded toward it, with other odd extraneous masses than itself pressing still nearer. This simplification, quite luxuriously for my young mind, was to mere mean blackness of an old-world sordid order. I recognised rich blackness in other connections, but this was somehow of a harsh tradition and a tragic economy; sordid and strong was what I had from the first felt the place, though urging myself always to rub off history from its stones, and suffering thus, after a fashion, by the fact that with history it ought to be interesting and that I ought to know just how and why it was. For that, I think, was ever both the burden and the joy—the complication, I mean, of interest, and the sense, in the midst of the ugly and the melancholy, that queer crooked silent corners behind cathedrals wrought in their way for one, did something, while one haunted them, to the imagination and the taste; and that so, once more, since the generalisation had become a habit with me, I couldn't, seeing and feeling these things, really believe I had picked up nothing.
...Overheated coral polyps often eject their algal companions, leading to "bleaching" that can starve and even kill the coral. The El Niño summer could provide a critical test for coral inoculated with experimental symbiotic algae bred for heat tolerance. "We expect this is going to be one of the first serious opportunities to assess the efficacy of that intervention," says Matthew Nitschke, a coral biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Because radiocarbon readings depend on how the atmosphere and oceans circulate the isotope around the planet, researchers must calibrate dates from the Northern and Southern hemispheres differently. Air from both hemispheres mixes over the Andes, however, so atmospheric scientists are helping archaeologists create bespoke calibration curves for major Inca sites.
...below ˜10 g of body mass, flapping flight is more energetically favorable than soaring flight. However, many species that rely exclusively on flapping flight have a much higher body mass. Obligate flappers may adjust their behavior to alleviate flight costs. For example, many small songbirds, but also relatively large woodpeckers, use bounding flight. This flight mode consists in alternate phases of wing beats and ballistic body glides that create an undulating trajectory, in which the optimal frequency of muscle contraction during the flapping phase and the reduction in drag caused by folding wings during the ballistic phase interact in complex ways. Waders, ducks, geese, and terns often fly in formations. Flock members position themselves sideways relative to each other, which enables them to soar within the wingtip vortex generated by the bird in front. Another energysaving behavior is to fly close to a water surface, making use of the so-called ground effect that increases lift and reduces drag.
...The promise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize science does not yet rest on a firm legal footing. Scientific AI applications rely on foundation models trained on books, images, and other material beyond scientific publications. In the United States, more than 100 active lawsuits are testing the legality of such training, which will shape the potential impact of AI on science
...To build foundation models, neural networks must feed on vast amounts of data, including many copyrighted works. If courts decide that training generative-AI models on copyright-protected, humanauthored works is illegal, liability risks for all developers and users of these models would increase dramatically, although noncommercial developers and users would be less vulnerable than commercial developers and users. AI developers, including many scientific laboratories, have been counting on the "fair use" doctrine of US copyright law to avoid liability for training on these works. Fair use is intended to promote freedom of expression and creativity by allowing unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain situations—including, in many cases, research, teaching, and commentary, but also more broadly where enforcing copyright protections would stifle rather than advance copyright’s goal of encouraging the production of new works. So far, AI developers’ reliance on fair use has been mostly vindicated. Two federal courts have ruled that using copyrighted works to train generative-AI models is fair use. But the fight is far from over.
...In the United States, more than 100 active lawsuits are testing the legality of such training, which will shape the potential impact of AI on science. The judge in one case suggested that copyright owners could prevail if they could show that outputs of generative-AI systems were likely to cause harm not to specific works owned by the plaintiffs—the usual harm at issue in copyright lawsuits—but to entire markets for human-authored works. This article explores conceptual difficulties raised by this "market dilution" theory and argues that whether market dilution exists is an empirical question. If it does exist in some contexts, legislatures, not courts, may be the better forum to address it.
...Throughout the book, Harper maintains his focus on humanity’s need to feed itself and our quest to do so with more efficiency and fairness, arguing that this impulse has been perhaps overly successful. We have gotten so good at procuring food that the human population doubled between 1750 and 1900. It kept going up, of course, reaching 4 billion by 1974 and 8 billion by 2022. "Humans and our domesticated animals now account for about 94 percent of all terrestrial mammal mass on Earth, leaving only about 6 percent for all wild species," he writes. How long can this go on?
...At least 79,000 tonnes of plastic accumulate in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch alone, with abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing gear accounting for up to 46% of that mass (2). Offshore oil and gas activities (3), which supply feedstocks for plastic production, also disturb deep-sea ecosystems. At the cellular level, plastic leachates and additives impair the photosynthetic efficiency and abundance of marine microbial primary producers (4), the base of the ocean food web, with direct implication for the biodiversity outcomes that the treaty seeks to protect.
a form of online advertising that uses a grid of thumbnails and captions to drive traffic to other sites and webpages. This form of advertising is often associated with low-quality clickbait links and articles.
...So Trump has an incentive to do something, anything, that might shake up this election. Attacking Iran would probably lead to an even bigger Republican defeat, but it might, just might, rally Trump’s base enough to change the outcome. True, a president who cared at all about what is good for America wouldn’t pursue disastrous policies for the slim chance of saving his own political skin. But this is, after all, Trump we’re talking about.
...So will Trump resume the bombing of Iran before the midterms? Obviously I don’t know, but Pape is surely right that normal political logic, under which a deeply unpopular president would avoid resuming a deeply unpopular war, no longer applies. And anyone who believes that Trump will become more cautious, more moderate in the aftermath of midterm defeat just doesn’t understand the new political reality. The truth is that political bankruptcy will free Trump to pursue his true desires. And those desires are horrifying.
Surveillance data about audiences is a kind of ambient vapor floating around websites and places and payments that has to be condensed through a heroic and expensive effort that gives power to whichever company can muster the capital and infrastructure to do so. Meanwhile, information about the content of publishers' offerings is already refined into ingots that are already in publishers' own possession.
