Saturday, July 8, 2023

Friday Thinking - 7-7-2023

Friday Thinking, is a playful reflection of the week's pondering moments. 

It is dedicated to illuminating that the next tomorrow won't be like today's yesterday. 




I've been reading a couple of science-fiction novels lately. 'The Doors of Eden' (2020) by Adrian Tchaikovsky and 'Star Maker' (1937) by Olaf Stapleton - almost a century separates their publication and it's hard to say which is a better account of the 'living possibilities' of vast time-spaces. 

This quote from Olaf Stapleton:
Star-Maker - p.224
We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true. It is awareness only of the colours that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being. 

The sense of the fated incompleteness of all creatures and of all their achievements gave to the Galactic society of Worlds a charm, a sanctity, as of some short-lived and delicate flower. 

And it was with an increasing sense of precarious beauty that we ourselves were now learning to regard the far-flung utopia.

And if we could apprehend our uncertainties. In a way that comprehends our actual context of infinite possibilities, even if we limit our imagination to a concept of a linear-plane of an unfolding. We may come to perceive how indeterminant any existence is. 

and finally -
the comprehension -
of the sanctity -
of life -
that arises -
with the apprehension -
of its precarity -
[#micropoem](https://twitter.com/hashtag/micropoem?src=hashtag_click) 

And it is this indeterminacy, this precarity to change - transformation - that is 'the sacred' of life. No matter the scale with which we measure. Any moment of glimpsing - life's fractals of fragility and our wistful ifs of memory - reveal the form of the sacred. 

This re-calls to my mind Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower' - and her visioning of 'God is Change and we can Shape Change'. Change is irrevocable, implacable, inevitable, unpredictable - and we have agency enough to nudge affordances - to shape experiences. And it is this 'choice-making will' that affords us - the nudging.  Of a god - that is not a god - and without a god - the force of a sanctity that is a secular illumination for re-linking a-part to what is beyond parting. 

To end this moment of pondering, I want to contextualize it with another recent science fiction - 'The Ministry For The Future' by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is a magnificent work. Everyone should read it.

Everyone should read all the books I've mentioned.

Ministry For The Future illuminates the essence of the challenge of climate change for humans. For us it is a crisis of consciousness - to grasp and embody the reality that we humans - are one species, on one planet (or ultimately in one solar system, one galaxy - turtles all the way). 

A paradox of a secular raising of consciousness of the sanctity of our fragile life. 











































































mhm

Friday, March 17, 2023

Friday Thinking - 3-17-2023

Friday Thinking, is a playful reflection of the week's pondering moments. 

It is dedicated to illuminating that the next tomorrow won't be like today's yesterday. 



It seems the attractor of my minding this week is the prompt about values as they are embodied in moral-cultural contexts. The way a culture can enable values to constelate in a variety of coherent strange attractors. 

I enjoy being able to have some sort of accounting of my own processes - the quantitative-self thing (including the cloud of unknowns it lives in). And maybe this is related to the reality that I've never had so much control over how i am able to structure my time as i choose. 

Pondering what "taking measures" means?
I continue to feel, that the analytical metrics of my fitbit dashboard suffers large standard deviations, in the 'sensing-analysis' accuracy of the measures the fitbit, can take to sense my self-enaction.

And then i thought about how, there might be an emotional tone in my day. One that i may not be aware of. And this embodimeants of emotional  tone, could be key to measurements it algorithm-I-zes of to determine a rating of stress-level. 

The floating-fluctuations of anxieties - like currents generating resistances to the mediums-of-flows - frictions and heat -like imflamation. 

And then i remembered my moment - of a glimpse into eternity of - almost one second, of enlightment. Later i could only describe this moment as "resistanceless presense". And now i re-cognize that the moment was a blink of the liberty within "awareness of awareness". 


I was preparing to participate in a conversation of honest accounts about values. This is a somewhat regular-ish effort amongst a group of elder-ish minds - mostly retired intellectuals and professionals. So I've been pondering moral frameworks and how they frame our relations-in-the-world. 

I think current marketing - whatever the product - shoes or news - seems to work best by tailoring the 'choice architectures' of any market in ways the enable tuning a repertoire of 'nudges' for shaping narratives. 

Watching the news and it's a-mazing to me.  Grasping that every compelling narrative has to  exude a coherent-rightness, to anyone for whom the moral-framing is used to navigate viable-enough social existence. 

And then trying the question: "Is it possible to determine which moral frameworks lead to which types of results - short-term and long-term."  That immediately asks another question: "Whether and/or how - other coherent-rightness moral-framing can exist?"  

It could well be that a socially-embodied moral-frame-space operates a core self-reproducing MEME - a bio-cultural attractor.  



One night this week my 30 neuro-diverse daughter raised an interesting question related to a narrative she uses and develops as a core to her creative career that help her life flourish. The central character - her alter-ego-hero, must save a comrade trapped in a "Dark crystal" - like world (dcw). The question is whether entering the 'other world' would their bodies have to transform to look familiar to the world's inhabitants. 

Immediately i understood a concern that if the rescuers did not transform their bodies into local forms, they would horrify the inhabitants of dcw as 'Alien Invaders'.  She loves H.P. Lovecraft and this concern seems so normal in that context of a 'Lovecraftian liminal encounter between dimensions'.  

So i let my imagination flow. A sensory-embodied world, with sensory-stimulation protocols enabling response-able, information ecology, as a base condition of re-productive success. The survival of fit ecologies-in-conditions of living. The emergence of cultural learning co-creates a sort-of sensory-shaping field. A meta-protective protocol. 

And so what are the choices of an invador's - species-re-productive survival. The challenge should be felt-as-stress by the challenging-invader. When is that stress 'redeemed'? And what protective mimetic-field is needed to structure the social-protocols of agencies for collective response-abilities for evolving survive-ability. 

Sensoriums of living systems would be shaped to evolve that can organize viable enough mapping protocols, that in turn enable viable interactions-en-vironments. So the question of how aliens become re-cognized and re-cognize first contact encounters and how they evolve further environments. How do cultural memetic environments perceive evolution enaction? 

drifting -
through the cloud -
of un-knowing -
moral frameworks - 
socially-constructed -
sensorial-stimulations - 
organ-eyezed -
entangled-empirical -
sense-making-worlds -

proto-calls -
fore -
 aliens-in-a-strange-land -
[#micropoem](https://twitter.com/hashtag/micropoem?src=hashtag_click)

Of course an elemental attractor to pondering moral-frameworks is the progressive-conservative, left-right, social-private, collective-individual polarities of moral-political-belief spectrums. And alwasy and everywhere is righteousness. 
The challenge of an open mind is finding a foundation for confindence in the right-righteousnees of our observation-and-judgements. 

Political Moral Framing
I wondered about the vigilant and eternal quest of - re-searching for the arc of evolving democracy.  Shouldn't the very conception of a democracy inevitably shapes a flourishing of a wealth of diversity. Perhaps increasing growth in the wealth of diversities - each-and-all response-able to evolving and entangled conditions - can provide some useful measures of social-cultural civilizational health. 

Pondering Moral Attractors
I was looking the different constelations of 5 moral values deemed universal (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity) that arise when people are asked to rate then. The easiest constelations to imagine are the very liberal vs the very conservative. 

These two constilations also correlate with Democracy vs Patriarchy and Nuturant Parent vs Strict Father Family Models. 

According to research  
![[Pasted image 20230318001014.png]]


 

Liberal Democracy weighs - fairness-care as co-equals - with a vital importance. This makes sense, as democracies consider all equal (at least before the law) and thus invites ever developing diversities - welcome. 

Conservative governance weighs loyalty-purity-authority - as co-equals - with vital importance within a tight 'center-mass' of reduced importance of care/harm and fairness. 

I can't seem to help myself from always drifting into complexity. Thinking of the bio-cultural processes of a metabolic-allostasis  or memetic value constelations. The social process of enact-meants of ideological re-production. How the value-relation algorithms have to have a tune-able capacity (like turning knobs to increase-decrease relational statuses) for each value spectrum. And that's exactly what the chart seems to identify - like different cultural value-strange-attractors. Like chords-with-feedback-afford-dancing - melodies.  

This episode of Friday Thinking ends with a wonderful ereka-moment i experienced watching Poker Face with/by Natasha Lyonne - Season 1, Episode 8. In the first episode I thought that Natasha was channeling Peter Falk in his television role as "Columbo" - a low-key rumpled classic 'gumshoe' dectective. 

In episode 8 with a brilliant performance of Nick Nolte (being an old Nick Nolte with a fidelity to honesty that only he can convey) illuminated an archetypal - god-like role - of the unplacable, unremiting - confessor. Damming those who don't take the opportunity she offers to embrace the honest accounting of their deeds. 

literally -
holy-shit - 
poker-face - 
s1e8 - 
'columbo-the-confessor -
of accounts' - 
brilliance -
even at its most -
obvious -
interio-or-ogations -


end of transmission

each night -
i play - 
my small wind -
chamber - 
of one note -  
another song - 
of multi-dimensional -
diverse-ariety - 

Last pondering thought.  
Pondering my twitter stream. My customized stream - but for who, is it customized? 
And the ghost of my feeling - once ago - of how I felt connected with real people. There was an easy to use stream that actually let me sample and shape enough to stay current with network-communities.  Now - it just seems random without easy ways to shape the view of the stream. 

i remember feeling like it was my own sort of personal newspaper. And now Twitter is the future of news. Will it continue to shape us into marketing incanted rational-zombies - dreaming of life-blood. 

Then again - there is too much to know - and moore over - there is a moore-to-different phase-transition liminal space - what is on the other side of this phase transition. 

Whatever happens we are all anticipating better personal instrument panels for sampling and shaping streams for our entanglemeants and our own stream of experiencing and scheduling of attentions.








































mhm

Friday, March 3, 2023

Friday Thinking - 3-3-2023

Friday Thinking, is a playful reflection of the week's pondering moments. 

It is dedicated to illuminating that the next tomorrow won't be like today's yesterday. 



Was watching a Grand Boxing in the WWE-MMA spectacle tradition taking place Saudi Arabia. A big-oil spectacle. And yet i think i smelled or caught a whiff of a sort-of  'Fin de Siècle' atmosphere. Fin de Oil-Siècle - just a few pixels of.  And there was something grotesque about this spectacle - past-peak slavishness.  


During another time I pondered - about a point-of-view perspective that is enacted by every part of a living system.  Everything alive, every living system - Eats and Shits - something. 

That is how the energy to 'run the system' is harnessed. The self-running system is the measure of the system to be alive. Despite that, being alive, changes the conditions of being alive next - moment. Life is an energy harnessing system. 

The question is: Does this produce more or less energy?  Because while energy may balance within some unknowable ultimate boundary that is the whole. But that doesn't work as a construct because it enacts a distraction from a desperate fear that must avoid the possibility of infinity. 

A calculate-able logic starts at the place where there has to be some boundary-bounded space. Whether in the direction of that goes all the way up-down. But I think such enactmeants are unknow-able, because of eternal sensitivity to initial conditions - butterfly-turbulence. 

but that doesn't work -
because it avoids -
the possibility of infinity - 
compelling some boundary -
at spectrum scales -

future enact-meants -
are unknow-able -
because of afford-dances -
in eternal sensitivity to -
butterfly-turbulence - 
initial conditions -



And I wanted to get back to the economics of metabolism. That every living thing eats and shits. It metabolizes what it eats to harness the energy released by its own livingness. Does the living system simply rent? Or does it create? The energy released and dissipated throughout what is an entangled living-in-environment-system. 

So what can it mean when  energy reservoirs are empty ? 
And a prime Axiom is that energy is neither created or destroyed. And another prime Axiom that matter is energy - M=E 
So the only trick is how to rent-surf-shape the dissipation of the energy through living matter.  



Re-minded that my thinking of eating and shitting actually paraphrased one of my favorite thoughts:

The key idea in evolution is survival; yet living organisms, by definition, are dying all the time; they live by dying, which is metabolism.
  
Biological "survival" is a grand, breathtaking, and accurate metaphor, but only a metaphor. Nothing of a gene is surviving in material reality when it reproduces; what "survives" is a piece of abstract information, the sequence {pattern] of nucleotides on the DNA chain [none of the same atoms or molecules]. My liver dies and resurrects itself every few days. It is no more "surviving" than a flame.

A billion-year-old chunk of granite would, if it could, laugh at the lunatic claims of an organism to be "surviving" by hatching eggs, or by eating and excreting. …Yet... there is as much limestone, built from the corpses of living organisms, as there is granite.

A mere phantom – a pattern of information – can move mountains.

And if so abstract, so spiritual a thing as that pattern can masterfully determine the structure of large chunks of matter and the whole surface of our planet, why should not the even more abstract and metaphysical entities of goodness, freedom, spirit, soul, divinity and beauty? And has not the success of the epic-composing societies borne out this strange fact in the realm of human history?
Frederick Turner - Epic: Form, Content, and History

Every living system eats and shits- metabolizing what enables the shaping constraints that dissipate a flow of energy for its self-reproductive survival of its own living. 

This of course changes the environment the living system is entangles within and by. This asks for a spectrum of membrains rather hard boundaries of private property. 
When energy reservoirs are empty? Living systems are search engines to seek out new 'know how' about niches that can be energy farmed. And if we believe that energy is neither created or destroyed, that matter is energy - does that mean matter too will evaporate? 
Can the only trick be to re-cognize that matter and energy will all-ways be abundant and to be alive is a 'grey'-matter (puns afforded) of Know-How - for metabolizing more ways to metabolize a wider diversities of afford-able matter-energy transformations. Or simply new forms of eating and shitting.



I check my spam folder regularly. I like to keep it empty. This evening I deleted two tweets about 'defense gutters'. And I re-cognize two things: 
  • I've been getting this type of spam regularly and
  • the information mil-bloggers use to identify events-places
Linking those two things and re-calling how, this winter, as a home owner I've noticed-worried about the ice-dams over some of my roof eaves. I've been comparing other homes to see if this is normal. 

The re-cognition? That advertisers are linking real-time satellite data on local conditions of identifiable internet user home addresses. Has anyone with an address Not had something shipped to them. 

Of course - how can I possibly be surprised. What I think the real question is why aren't we able to know how to use this data for our collective well being. How can we ensure this Common Wealth of ours enables a more robust and useful public infrastructure. 




I made a #micropoem about what I literally heard a mainstream news broadcaster say: "Things went left the went wrong". And immediately my George Lakoff alarm went off. 

things went left -
they went wrong -
the news got it -
right -

this is what -
i think i -
herd -


Maybe it was only me - but i sense a micro-muscle twitch of cognitive dissonance has the broadcaster heard his own words. 

On Jimmy Kimmel the other night, he had a person-in-the-street interview bit. Asking what the last book a person had read. The bit ended in a brilliant comic-jazz. 
When asked, the person said that the last book he read was: "The History". Probed again he described it about "the community, the world" and when as who wrote it the person said, "America". 
Amazing and I wrote this #micropoem

wow -
the history - 
the community - 
the world -
by America

sort-of -
brutal honest -
reflex-admission of -
America's -
orientation -
framework -



I am going to end this drift of Friday Thinking with a channeling of one of my many beautiful intellectual heroes.  The inspiration are the new horizons being revealed through the play with generative afford-dancing of 'stochastic parots and automated statistics' (Bruce Sterling phrase for AI).

if McLuhan -
were writing today - 
he would call -
his mcluhanisms - 
prompts -
fore -
collective-intelligence -























































mhm

Friday, February 24, 2023

Friday Thinking - 2-24-2023

Friday Thinking, is a playful reflection of the week's pondering moments. 
It is dedicated to illuminating that the next tomorrow won't be like today's yesterday. 




Of course, there is no 'neutral politics' or economics or even science. Religion has been how we enculture a faith in values. Politics is how we align our power among ourselves with our cultural values. Economics is how we rationalize the credit-and-debt of our interdependencies in relations to our valuing of values. Science is how we search for and develop the reliability of what we value.  

The question of the - __re-conciling the accounts__.  I find fascination in looking at the moral and religious palettes embodied in basics of the accounting tems in economics. The invisible hand of moral religiousness of economics. The sacredness of  dedemption of our obligations in our socie-ties. 


I am reading 'The Ministry of the Future', just past when Frank dies. In hospice. A slow fading, slide out. Podering this membrane moment of evaporation.   I feel there can be joy in the simple - of presencing. Awaring and awaring awareness - without judgment. 

And then there is Adience. Audience-share. A shadow of the atomistic - isolated -self-ish - individual. The mutualism of performer-audience measures. 

The foundation of a democracy is more than the vote. And the vote is not for leaders, maybe that's even a contradiction - do followers vote for leaders? 
Rather, the vote is to appoint representatives, with a duty to formulate the laws we want. And the stewarding of the public institutions that provide for our public flourishing. It is far beyond regulating the 'private-sector-market'. It is the formulation of the rules  for enacting our collective will - the general will. Our representatives at all levels are the scribes for encoding laws of self-governance  - for public good. Not to be high-priests of the invisible hand of private goods. 

Institutions are the organs of the demos - the polis - the political-economy - the social-moral-economy. The core of a political-economy lives through the systems of accounting for the value of our values. The time-space-matter constraints of valueing. The systems of accounting - assets and liability - credit and debts.  

Currency isn't a free floating commodity. It is an institution of accounting credit-ability - credit-worthyness - credit-redemption from obligations. And a sense of liberty. And for what? From what? The shadow of liberty, is it enslavement? Or is it the absent of relationship and connectedness.   

For a credit to have value, social relationships have to be trust-worthy. Social-relations have to be able to enact credit-able means of redemption. 


Could one read Adam Smith as imagining a most plausible enactment of democracy, in the context of monarch-empires. Shifting toward a self-organizing commons, enacted by moral beings, for moral beings. 

Capitalism is a game of compound network-effects - the more x you have, the easier it is to get more x, till you own the house - in a ponzi-way. 

And a subjectivity-based agency, whether in the context of a 'natural' nature or in the context of a technology optisms, have the same shadow. It is the looming - liminal-finality of a dissolution of self. This imbues the dark ecology of mind.

and subjectivity-based - 
agency - 
framed-in -
polarity of -
nature-vs-technology - 
have the same shadow - 
the looming - 
liminal-finality of a - 
dissolution of self - 
the dark ecology of mind - 
[#micropoem](https://twitter.com/hashtag/micropoem?src=hashtag_click)


but capitalism -
is a game -
of compound -
network-effects - 
the more x you have -
the easier it is to get more x - 
till you own the house - 
in a ponzi-way -
[#micropoem](https://twitter.com/hashtag/micropoem?src=hashtag_click)


From pondering a Smithian strategy aiming to shift a value-attractor for enacting an evolving of collective intelligence. The emergent constraint, that enables the regulation of ongoing living - is an anticipatory response-able shaping of allostasis. A quorum-sensing-stimulation, into being. 

A focus on a self-organizing market was one, plausibe enactmeant, toward a more democratic govern-mentality. A pre-Hegelian evolution of history. 



I don't really know, what i'll need - in order to find the pattern that connects. Which means that i don't know what belief constellations, will change what i know, that ain't so. 
Believing' is entangled with 'knowing' - a sort of credit-debt mutualism. This is a philosophical afford-dancing -with allostatic - for-see-ables - the sensing-stimulating ouburus. 



Thursday, August 26, 2021

Friday Thinking 27 Aug 2021 - The Last Apprehension of the Future of the Digital Environment

Hello all – Here’s today’s Friday Thinking - dedicated to illuminating tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.


This will be my last Friday Thinking - I can’t remember exactly when I first began this little curation of curiosities of possibility. I believe it was at least around 2012. So it’s been almost a decade. I think it has served its purpose. There was too much to know when I started and the ‘too much to know’ keeps growing exponentially. 


The uncertainty of our future has also grown in the same way. But we must all remember that - “To be lucky, it’s essential to be open and alert to the unexpected.”


I want to thank everyone who enjoyed Friday Thinking even if only sporadically - or in fondness of the weird guy that bothered to keep sending it out week after month after year. :) 


john



In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .

‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’

“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon




“Once we can study a situation where quantum theory would suggest that space-time itself should be in a superposition of two measurably different states,” said Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum physicist at the University of Toronto, “all bets are off, and we have nothing but experiment to guide us. It’s reasonable to keep an open mind to the possibility that we will discover something new.”

In other words, expanding the quantum scale up to sizes where gravity matters might teach us new things about quantum mechanics, gravity and hidden aspects of the universe. 

How Big Can the Quantum World Be? Physicists Probe the Limits.





Fichte understands human embodiment and finitude as a call to action. So long as we can feel and exist in a community with others, then we can learn and continue becoming better versions of ourselves. To think that we could find the truth that would cease our strivings and settle our worries is to deny the necessary limitations of human existence. Though we cannot know whether what we feel is ‘really’ true (because all we know must come from feelings), we contribute to the collective progression of humanity towards perfection through following where our feelings lead us.

A pragmatist ethics …  aims to cause feelings that lead others to reconsider what they take to be true, or authoritative, rather than convincing them to accept some pre-established truth on our say-so. Authority is not ‘out there’ baked into the world in virtue of it being non-perspectival or objective, just as it is not transparent what God’s commands permit (hence all the disagreement). Pragmatism excises God, Truth and even appeals to the universal authority of science, and begins again with a commitment to unforced social cooperation, an attitude towards others that emulates what Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘the seriousness of a child at play’.

Democracy is sentimental




a brain map with neat borders is not just oversimplified — it’s misleading. “Scientists for over 100 years have searched fruitlessly for brain boundaries between thinking, feeling, deciding, remembering, moving and other everyday experiences,” Barrett said. A host of recent neurological studies further confirm that these mental categories “are poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.”

Neuroscientists generally agree about how the physical tissue of the brain is organized: into particular regions, networks, cell types. But when it comes to relating those to the task the brain might be performing — perception, memory, attention, emotion or action — “things get a lot more dodgy,”

Recent work has found, for instance, that two-thirds of the brain is involved in simple eye movements; meanwhile, half of the brain gets activated during respiration. In 2019, several teams of scientists found that most of the neural activity in “perception” areas such as the visual cortex was encoding information about the animals’ movements rather than sensory inputs.

The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does




A common theme of this scholarship is that groupings depend more on dominant culture than on ancestry. In Singapore, the government mandates that individuals are identified explicitly as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other, which affects where they can live and study. In the United States, people with ancestry from the world’s two most populous countries, India and China, along with every other country on the continent, are collapsed into a single racial category called ‘Asian’. Similarly, the term ‘Hispanic’ erases a multitude of cultural and ancestral identities, especially among Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Erroneous ideas about genetic ‘races’ live on in the broad, ambiguous ‘continental ancestry’ groups such as ‘Black, African’ or ‘African American’, that are used in the US Census and are ubiquitous in biomedical research. These collapse incredible amounts of diversity and erase cultural and ancestral identities. Study participants deemed not to fit within such crude buckets are often excluded from analyses, despite the fact that fewer and fewer individuals identify with a single population of origin.

One practical way forwards is to move away from having people identify themselves using only checkboxes. I am not calling for an end to the study of genetic ancestry or socio-cultural categories such as self-identified race and ethnicity. These are useful for tracking and studying equity in justice, health care, education and more. The goal is to stop conflating the two, which leads scientists and clinicians to attribute differences in health to innate biology rather than to poverty and social inequality.

Too many scientists still say Caucasian





Human beings find comfort in certainty. We form governments, make calendars, and create organisations; and we structure our activities, strategies and plans around these constructs. These routines give us the satisfaction of knowing that, by having a plan, there’s a means of it coming to fruition.

But there’s another force, constantly at play in life, that often makes the greatest difference to our futures: the ‘unexpected’ or the ‘unforeseen’. If you think about it, you already look out for the unexpected every day, but perhaps only as a defence mechanism. For example, whenever you use a pedestrian crossing on a busy road, you look out for the unexpected driver who might race through the red light. That ‘alertness’ to, or awareness of, the unexpected is at the centre of understanding the science of (smart) luck and exploiting it to your benefit.

In my research into what makes individuals and organisations fit for the future, one insight has come up again and again: many of the world’s leading minds have developed a capacity, often unconscious, to turn the unexpected into positive outcomes. Developing this ‘serendipity mindset’, is both a philosophy of life and a capability that you can shape and nurture in yourself. 

You might think of serendipity as passive luck that just happens to you, when actually it’s an active process of spotting and connecting the dots. It is about seeing bridges where others see gaps, and then taking initiative and action(s) to create smart luck. Serendipity is a guiding force in great scientific discoveries but it’s also present in our everyday lives, in the smallest of moments as well as the greatest life-changing events. It’s how we often ‘unexpectedly’ find love, a co-founder, a new job, or a business partner – and it’s how inventions such as Post-it Notes, X-rays, penicillin, microwaves and many other innovations came about.

How to be lucky





A signal from the 80’s about the future that’s still coming.

Neuromancer --- Radio Drama

A radio play of William Gibson’s breakout novel.
Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price..


If the quest of the ‘Grail’ of knowledge is the journey that all scientists undertake - the natural question they must ask is “Who does the Grail serve?” This is a signal for the choice humanity must face to share knowledge or to let privateers enclose a knowledge commons.
researchers have taken to Twitter in outrage, calling the blanket ruling “short sighted”, “plain ludicrous”, “cruel”, “astonishing”, “outdated” and “gut-wrenching”.

Preprint ban in grant applications deemed ‘plain ludicrous’

Australia’s major research funder has ruled more than 20 fellowship applications ineligible because they mentioned preprints and other non-peer reviewed materials, sparking an outcry from scientists who say the move is a blow to open science and will stymie careers.

At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the use of preprints to the fore, researchers say the stance by the Australian Research Council (ARC) — which limits applicants’ ability to refer to the latest research — is out of step with modern publishing practices and at odds with overseas funding agencies that allow or encourage the use of preprints.


This is an important signal for the future of self-driven transportation. It’s not just the technology that is important - it is the human-centric design and enables easy use and trust. On a personal note I’ve seen the detrimental impact on people when their driving license had to be revoked due to disability or aging. The loss of autonomy can have serious impact on well-being. The question is how do we enable that sense of autonomy and agency - while enabling automation. This is also another signal of the extended mind.
Interestingly, results showed that most people prefer a self-driving car that drives like a less aggressive version of their own driving behaviors. Participants who reported that they trust or somewhat trust artificial intelligence, autonomous technologies, and self-driving cars expected a car with behaviors similar to their personal driving behaviors.

Do passengers want self-driving cars to behave more or less human?

Recent studies have shown that people have negative attitudes about using autonomous systems because they don't trust them. Moreover, research shows a human-centered approach in autonomy is perceived as more trustworthy by users. This begs the question: "Do passengers want self-driving cars to mimic their personal driving behaviors or do they hold these autonomous vehicles to a different standard?"

To explore this quandary, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science conducted a study asking 352 participants about their personal driving behaviors such as speed, changing lanes, distance from a car in front of them, accelerating and decelerating and passing other vehicles. They also asked them the same questions about their expectations of a self-driving car performing these very same tasks. The objective of the study was to examine trust and distrust to see if there is a relationship between an individual's driving behaviors and how they expect a self-driving car to behave.

For the study, published in the proceedings HCI in Mobility, Transport and Automotive Systems, researchers asked the participants 46 questions to gain a better understanding of driving behavior and driver's expectations of self-driving cars in a variety of driving scenarios. Ultimately, information from this study can be used to construct driving models for self-driving cars.


The development of the extended mind can also include a new sort of ‘sensorium’ - and in a world filled with all manner of new material this may be important.

Detecting an unprecedented range of potentially harmful airborne compounds

Many of the products we encounter daily—from deodorant to pesticides to paint—release molecules that drift through the air. Breathing in enough of the wrong ones can cause serious and potentially long-term health problems. However, it can be hard to estimate exposure because current devices are limited in what they can detect. Today, researchers report development of a new personal air-sampling system that can detect an unprecedented range of these compounds from a special badge or pen attached to someone's shirt or placed in a pocket.

The researchers will present their results today at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

"In every situation there's a unique set of compounds that could be present in the air, including potential hazards that we do not know about," says Allen Apblett, Ph.D., the project's senior researcher, who is presenting the research. "Using a single material, we can capture many classes of these compounds, called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and potentially offer a much more comprehensive picture of exposures."


When I was a child my step-grandfather would feed squirrels peanuts in the shell - they became so friendly they would actually go into his pant pockets to pull out peanuts. Who wouldn’t just find them to be sooo cute.
Then as an adult I started growing things like grapes. That’s when I really learned the meaning of varmints - the squirrels would season after season - simply trash the grapes just as they were ripening. I understood the old movie images of an old man on his porch with a shotgun shooting salt - waiting for those varmints to show up.

Protecting gardens and crops from insects using the 'smell of fear'

For home gardeners and farmers, herbivorous insects present a major threat to their hard work and crop yields. The predator insects that feed on these bugs emit odors that pests can sense, which changes the pests' behavior and even their physiology to avoid being eaten. With bugs becoming more resistant to traditional pesticides, researchers now report they have developed a way to bottle the "smell of fear" produced by predators to repel and disrupt destructive insects naturally without the need for harsh substances.

The researchers will present their results today at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

"It is not uncommon to use our senses to avoid risky situations. If a building was on fire, we as humans could use our senses of sight or smell to detect the threat," says Sara Hermann, Ph.D., the project's principal investigator. "There is evidence for such behavioral responses to risk across taxa that suggest prey organisms can detect predation threats, but the mechanisms for detection aren't very well understood, especially with insects."


This is definitely a signal to watch in the transformation of global energy geo-politics.

World's biggest wind turbine shows the disproportionate power of scale

China's MingYang Smart Energy has announced an offshore wind turbine even bigger than GE's monstrous Haliade-X. The MySE 16.0-242 is a 16-megawatt, 242-meter-tall (794-ft) behemoth capable of powering 20,000 homes per unit over a 25-year service life.

The stats on these renewable-energy colossi are getting pretty crazy. When MingYang's new turbine first spins up in prototype form next year, its three 118-m (387-ft) blades will sweep a 46,000-sq-m (495,140-sq-ft) area bigger than six soccer fields.

Every year, each one expected to generate 80 GWh of electricity. That's 45 percent more than the company's MySE 11.0-203, from just a 19 percent increase in diameter. No wonder these things keep getting bigger; the bigger they get, the better they seem to work, and the fewer expensive installation projects need to be undertaken to develop the same capacity.

these mammoth turbines is the key reason why industry experts are predicting that the cost of offshore wind will drop by between 37 and 49 percent by 2050. 

 the MySE 16.0-242 is just the start of its "new 15MW+ offshore product platform," and that it's capable of operating installed to the sea floor or on a floating base. The full prototype will be built in 2022, installed and into operation by 2023. Commercial production is slated to begin in the first half of 2024.


Another signal on the future of global energy geopolitics.
"It was really exciting when we observed the sodium-ion intercalation with such high capacity. The research is still at an early stage, but the results are very promising. This shows that it's possible to design graphene layers in an ordered structure that suits sodium ions, making it comparable to graphite,"

Janus graphene opens doors to sustainable sodium-ion batteries

In the search for sustainable energy storage, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, present a new concept to fabricate high-performance electrode materials for sodium batteries. It is based on a novel type of graphene to store one of the world's most common and cheap metal ions—sodium. The results show that the capacity can match today's lithium-ion batteries.

Even though lithium ions work well for energy storage, lithium is an expensive metal with concerns regarding its long-term supply and environmental issues.

Sodium, on the other hand, is an abundant low-cost metal, and a main ingredient in seawater (and in kitchen salt). This makes sodium-ion batteries an interesting and sustainable alternative for reducing our need for critical raw materials. However, one major challenge is to increase the capacity.

Typically, the capacity of sodium intercalation in standard graphite is about 35 milliampere hours per gram (mA h g-1). This is less than one tenth of the capacity for lithium-ion intercalation in graphite. With the novel graphene the specific capacity for sodium ions is 332 milliampere hours per gram—approaching the value for lithium in graphite. The results also showed full reversibility and high cycling stability.



Shameless self-promotion

Re-imagining the Local

Response-Able action to the challenges of the 21st Century
Three paradigms enabling response-able action to the challenges of the 21st Century — where everything that can be automated will be.
And
There will never be a shortage of Work and Activity to Do and to Value — When we are Engaged in the enterprise of a Flourishing Life, Community and Ecology.

Paradigm One — Power of a nation with its own currency — Modern Monetary Theory 

Paradigm Two — Enabling a person to flourish as a citizen — Universal Basic Assets (UBA) and Guaranteed Job rather than unemployment insurance.

Paradigm Three — Enabling community to be response-able in a changing world — Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD).   


And a signal of our epistemological times.

A Eulogy to Truth

The Truth is Dead - Long Live Honesty
Intro - Motif 
The truth is dead - long live honesty
Entailing honest accounts and holding accounts honest

Science teaches us skepticism - 
Entailing multiple lines of evidence
For reliable knowledge

Complexity teaches us relative perspectives - 
Entailing multiple ways of reasoning
For relevant wisdom

Collective wisdom emerges in our institutions of conversation
Entailing good faith speaker-hearers - 
with honest accounting - 
Entangling complex reasonings - 
For adaptive evolving 
We barely know what we know – but we don’t even know what we don’t know



#micropoem



yeah - 
the complexity -
of our challenges -
drives our evolution -
even when -
we are part of -
our challenges -


commons governance -
social hormones entangle community of I's -
like organs with an -
allostasis metric -
like the price mechanism -
becoming displaced -
perhaps -
by distributed ledgers -
 self-care is other-care -
other-care is self-care -
mimesis of entanglement -



mhm -
with distributed ledgers -
price mechanisms level up -
in complexity -
enabling -
 allostatic self-governance -
and diversity of commons  -
and exchange accounting -
architectures -
enabling collective -
exploration of afford-dancing -
the valuing of values -



mhm - 
yes  - 
the perfect beauty of cubs at play - 
a perfecting of moments -
entangled -
over the time of memories -
of one summer - 
a time of paying -
without roles - 
but with each other - 
the beauty enacted - 
as we played - 
outside the roles - 


we have no ‘self’ -
we are allostatic -attractor-processes -
in-environments -
enabled to maintain -
narrationing -
sustaining viable coping -

crisis-growth emerge -
narrationing-about-narrationing -
learning to learn about learning -
en-act-play -
is wicked hard -