Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment -
computational ecology -
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence.
To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.
‘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
Content
Quotes:
The mathematical case against blaming people for their misfortune
Rudy Rucker - How to Be a Cult Underground Writer
Articles:
Loon’s bubble bursts—Alphabet shuts down Internet balloon company
New antifungal compound from ant farms
Identical Twins Accumulate Genetic Differences in the Womb
The water allies hydrating Greek islands
Clever cocoons transform the drylands
New eco-friendly way to make ammonia could be boon for agriculture, hydrogen economy
World-first home hydrogen battery stores 3x the energy of a Powerwall 2
MICROSOFT PATENT SHOWS PLANS TO REVIVE DEAD LOVED ONES AS CHATBOTS
a 2014 Pew Research report found that 39 per cent of Americans believed that poverty was due to a lack of effort on poor people’s part. When ‘effort’ includes an inability to properly weigh up the risks inherent in a decision, this suggests that, in the end, many of us think that people are responsible for their own bad luck.
… insights from complexity science – specifically, computational complexity theory – show mathematically that there are hard limits on our capacity to make accurate and precise calculations of risk. Since it’s often impossible to get a reasonable sense of what will happen in the future, it’s unfair to blame people with good intentions who end up worse off as a result of unforeseen circumstances. This leads to the conclusion that compassion, not blame, is the appropriate attitude towards those who act in good faith but whose bets in life don’t pay off.
The starting point is to note that, for people to be held responsible for their actions, they have to know about certain features of the world. In many cases, even this minimal condition for blameworthiness isn’t satisfied.
The bar for blameworthiness can be made more precise by saying that, in order to be blamed for a gamble, people must possess an accurate causal model of the system in which they act. That is, they must know how different variables in the system do or don’t affect one another.
trying to infer the most likely causal structure of a system – no matter how much data we have about it – is what theorists call an NP-hard problem: given a general dataset, it can be fiendishly hard for an algorithm to learn the causal structure that produced it. In many cases, as more variables are added to the dataset, the minimum time that it takes any algorithm to learn the structure of the system under study grows exponentially.
The mathematical case against blaming people for their misfortune
There’s a worry that the golden promise of cyberspace, that is, the happy Tomorrow of internet and AI—there’s a worry that it’s been coopted by the Pig, the Man, spyware, big biz, the data miners, and the spammers. One fears the frontier has been tamed and made ordinary. But that might not be true.
As a writer, your one power over the world is to depict realties that are in line with the way things should be. Or realities that reflect the way things really are. Even though these truer realties may not be widely recognized. I like to depict smart, empathetic characters doing wild and crazy things. There are plenty of people like this—I meet them all the time in my variously intersecting circles of mathematicians, writers, hackers, hipsters, computer people, and artists. But you don’t necessarily see these people in many of the books and movies and videos out there.
If you write about the world as you feel it should be, or like it secretly is, you encourage disaffected readers to hang in there, to stay strong, to be themselves, and keep on the path to the hoped-for Tomorrow.
For decades I read Scientific American to keep an eye on what’s new. But sadly they’ve turned to shit—small fonts and articles about—gak—sociology and political policy and economics? As if. Nowadays it’s enough to keep a loose eye on Twitter, and see the wonders trundling past—like a holiday parade that never ends. Grab hold of anything you see—and tweak it a little bit, and make it your own. Connect it in some way to your actual personal life—that’s the move I call transrealism. And go a little meta—that’s a trickier tactic I’m always trying to master—flip your idea up a level, and into something having to do with states of consciousness, or with the nature of language, or with the meaning of dreams. Go further out. There’s still so much. We’re just getting started.
Rudy Rucker - How to Be a Cult Underground Writer
The relation between appearance and reality is paramount to understanding Western art. When the mind had been separated from the world, art was then targeted to produce a world of images for private consumption by individual subjects. Science, art, and the layman live in the conceptual playground defined by the contrast between the mind and the world
The mind represents the world. We experience our surroundings. We see the sky, smell flowers. We hear beautiful melodies. Nonetheless, as it has been observed countless times, if you peer inside the brain of someone who is watching a green field of grass, you are not going to find anything green. The brain is just a brain: gray, bloody, and in the dark.
So, to make a long story short, a scientific explanation of consciousness is still missing. It is still largely a mystery that, although the brain lurks in the dark of our cranium, when we open our eyes, we see the bright light of the sun.
Is the Mind Like a Rainbow?
Another vital contribution of Peirce’s is his fallibilism, the idea that we cannot guarantee truth for any beliefs (though there is some dispute as to whether to extend this idea to mathematics and logic). Fallibilism is important because it means that no matter how much evidence we have collected, induction doesn’t guarantee that the next bit of data won’t show us to be mistaken. However, Peirce did not take this to mean that truth is never possible. For Peirce, enquiry is a community activity, and it is unbounded by time, in principle. Thus, truth is whatever the community of enquirers would agree to be the case by the end of enquiry – ie, by the end of time. This is not the same as denying the existence of Truth, but Peirce’s views require a certain humility and acceptance of the idea that all knowledge is subject to revision.
Nor must any synechist say: ‘I am altogether myself, and not at all you.’ If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbours are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.
The American Aristotle
This is a sort of sad signal - about the challenge of not connecting the next billion people but the difficulty of connecting the last billion people to the Internet.
We talk a lot about connecting the next billion users, but the reality is Loon has been chasing the hardest problem of all in connectivity—the last billion users: The communities in areas too difficult or remote to reach, or the areas where delivering service with existing technologies is just too expensive for everyday people. While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business. Developing radical new technology is inherently risky, but that doesn’t make breaking this news any easier. Today, I’m sad to share that Loon will be winding down.
Loon’s bubble bursts—Alphabet shuts down Internet balloon company
After eight years, Loon couldn't find a "long-term, sustainable business."
When Google announced "Project Loon" in 2013, a running joke behind the project was that no one thought a network of flying Internet balloons was a feasible idea. Eight years later, Google has decided that a network of flying Internet balloons is indeed not a feasible idea. Loon announced it is shutting down, citing the lack of a "long-term, sustainable business."
Google also cited economic problems when it shut down Titan Aerospace in 2017, a plan to deliver the Internet via drone.
The name "Loon" came partly from the fact that the project uses flying balloons as a kind of ultra-low-orbit satellite, but also from how "loony" the idea sounded to everyone outside the project. Google's introductory blog post explained the idea of a flying network of Internet balloons and followed up by saying, "The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it."
The science mostly seemed to work out. Loon's sales pitch was that about half of the world was not on the Internet. The offline areas are too remote, without enough backhaul to build a traditional Internet infrastructure. So let's build everything here and fly it over there, and then everyone can use our flying Internet infrastructure in the sky. The Loon balloons were flying cell phone towers—they could deliver an LTE signal down to regular smartphones (the cheapest computers we have) with no special equipment for the end user. There was also a home version of Loon with a cute red balloon antenna. Google wanted to integrate Loon balloons into the traditional cell phone network and had partnerships with AT&T, Telkom Kenya, and Telefonica in Peru.
Stuart Kauffman is one of my intellectual heroes bring biological principles to challenge a predominant ‘physics worldview’ of change. This is a 8 page paper well worth the read.
mathematical systems shine as pure crystals and one might expect them to be consistent and complete, as indeed Hilbert did. These hopes have been destroyed by G¨odel, who has set the limits of deductive systems. Despite these limits, we currently rely on mathematical models for understanding systems of any sort, conscious of the possible incompleteness of the deductions we make. But there is a kind of incompleteness we have probably overlooked: what can be entailed by a formal system is already contained in it, and we cannot expect to be able to deduce novelty, to entail the becoming of the biosphere.
The world is not a theorem
Abstract
The evolution of the biosphere unfolds as a luxuriant generative process of new living forms and functions. Organisms adapt to their environment, and exploit novel opportunities that are created in this continuous blooming dynamics. Affordances play a fundamental role in the evolution of the biosphere, as they represent the opportunities organisms may choose for achieving their goals, thus actualizing what is in potentia. In this paper we maintain that affordances elude a formalization in mathematical terms: we argue that it is not possible to apply set theory to affordances, therefore we cannot devise a mathematical theory of affordances and the evolution of the biosphere.
A good article signaling the enrichment of our understanding of evolution.
Does the way in which animals improve environments in relation to their needs demand new ways of thinking about evolution’s adaptive landscape? From the most radical niche-construction standpoint, the answer is ‘yes’: organisms don’t just adapt, they co-direct evolution.
as they move through evolutionary time, organisms don’t just suppress their fitness, but they can also improve their environment, and hence their fitness relative to it. This engineering is sufficiently powerful to help determine evolutionary outcomes.
niche construction modifies natural selection in an orderly, directed and sustained manner. It doesn’t just change, but directs adaptive evolution, by imposing a statistical bias on the direction and strength of selection.
Evolving populations are less like zombie mountaineers, and more like industrious landscape designers
Evolution’s engineers
Organisms do not evolve blindly under forces beyond their control, but shape and influence the evolutionary environment itself
the theory of niche construction is controversial among evolutionary biologists, partly because natural selection is traditionally believed to work ‘blindly’: it is thought to sculpt organisms over millennia to become adapted to their ecological niches, with no steer from the goals or purposes of organisms. Humans undergo the same sculpting, but rather than evolving to fit a pre-existing niche, it’s widely accepted that we’re active agents who shape the environments to which we adapt. Our brains have evolved to process linguistically encoded information and learned knowledge because we built a rich cultural realm and then adapted to it. We domesticated plants and animals and, by incorporating them into our diets, triggered selection for genes that metabolise these foods. We invented agriculture, which fuelled population growth, inadvertently selecting for genetic resistance to diseases of the crowd such as typhoid or cholera. Our parents don’t just transmit their genes to us; we also inherit the changed world they leave in their wake. This ecological inheritance means that humans don’t evolve in response to a static adaptive landscape, but instead mould that landscape to alleviate or intensify the particular selective pressures it places upon us. ‘[T]he organism influences its own evolution, by being both the object of natural selection and the creator of the conditions of that selection,’ as the evolutionary biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin put it.
Just like humans, earthworms have constructed their own niche. Their environments aren’t fixed as rich or poor, but remain dynamic and changeable according to the activity of their inhabitants. Worms aren’t just altering soils – they’re cultivating crops, releasing greenhouse gasses, building homes and aggregating into cities that sprawl out into the countryside, just as we do.
Nor are earthworms the only species that improve their environment through niche construction: marine algae secrete sticky chemicals that bind the sand and stabilise the environment; chaparral and pine trees promote forest fires, which burn off the competition, through dispersing flammable needles, cones and oils; and ant species eliminate trees unsuitable for their colonies by spraying them with acid herbicides or cultivating fungus crops.
Here’s an interesting signal of both niche construction and harnessing natural compounds for human uses.
This discovery marked the first report of a specialized metabolite with broad geographic distribution produced by ant-associated bacteria. While this metabolite was safe for the fungal crop, it inhibited growth of fungal parasites, though—unlike many antibiotics—only in the absence of iron. It was also effective in fighting a Candida albicans infection in mice, comparable to azole-containing antifungal treatments that are used clinically, making it a potential drug candidate.
New antifungal compound from ant farms
Attine ants are farmers, and they grow fungus as food. Pseudonocardia and Streptomyces bacteria are their farmhands, producing metabolites that protect the crop from pathogens. Surprisingly, these metabolites lack common structural features across bacteria from different geographic locations, even though the ants share a common ancestor. Now, researchers report in ACS Central Science they have identified the first shared antifungal compound among many of these bacteria across Brazil. The compound could someday have medical applications.
Attine ants originated as one species at a single location in the Amazon 50 million years ago. They have evolved to 200 species that have spread their farming practices throughout South and Central America. In exchange for food, bacteria at these farms produce small molecules that hold pathogenic fungi such as Escovopsis in check. However, these molecules differ from region to region, suggesting a highly fragmented and geographically limited evolutionary history for the bacteria. Monica T. Pupo, Jon Clardy and colleagues wanted to find out if any antifungal bacterial metabolites with broader distribution had been overlooked in prior investigations.
The debate between nature and nurture has never been completely resolved - but now we also have nature and nature to account for difference in how DNA creates life.
Drawing on deCODE’s genetic databases to analyze variation in multiple cells sampled from 381 monozygotic twin pairs and their immediate family members, the researchers pinpointed a number of mutations that arose during this stage of development in just one member of each pair, meaning that at birth, so-called identical twins may already differ genetically from each other.
Identical Twins Accumulate Genetic Differences in the Womb
DNA replication errors during cell division cause monozygotic twins to diverge from each other even during the earliest stages of development, a new study finds.
Identical twins are not as identical as previously assumed, according to a study published in Nature Genetics. Rather than having exactly the same DNA sequences, twins start accumulating genetic variation from the earliest stages of development, researchers at Iceland-based company deCODE genetics found, meaning that one twin harbors variants that aren’t present in the other.
Also known as monozygotic twins because they develop from a single fertilized egg, identical twins have long been central to research on the relative effects of genes and environment—aka “nature versus nurture.” Although everyone accumulates some genetic mutations during their lifetime, the differences in identical twins were assumed to be minimal, particularly when twins are young, allowing researchers to study how different environments influence the development of people with the same genotype.
The new study focuses specifically on mutations that occur as or before embryos form from the mass of cells inside the blastocyst, a structure that implants in the uterine wall. During this stage of development, this inner cell mass can split to form two separately developing embryos.
And understanding evolution Darwinian selection has been challenged by horizontal gene transfer - of course as with many thing - the answer is not either-or - but AND.
Plant Cells Swap Organelles
Their relocation explains horizontal genome transfer first described more than a decade ago.
Past genetic experiments have shown that, when plants are grafted together, entire genomes can move between the host and the graft, but it was not clear how the genetic material was traveling. In a study published in Science Advances, researchers demonstrated that entire organelles can move between plant cells, bringing their genomes along for the ride.
In the studies before this one, “there was no way to rationally explain how a whole genome got over, other than it went into an organelle. Otherwise, you would have seen genetic recombination between an incoming genome and the resident genome,” says Pal Maliga, a plant biologist at Rutgers University who did not participate in the work. The nucleus, mitochondria, and plastids—the group of small organelles that includes chloroplasts—all contain genetic material. Researchers therefore made the inference that the genomes were moving via organelles, he explains, “but this paper is beautifully showing what the details are. I was very happy to see that the assumptions that were there to explain the biology are actually real.”
A team led by Ralph Bock of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology showed in a study published in 2009 that grafted tobacco plants could share entire genomes. Horizontal gene transfer—when genetic material passes between individuals via some method other than fertilization—has been shown to influence plant evolution at various levels, including sharing of beneficial genes, but the movement of entire genomes is much less common and understood. While the initial and subsequent studies hinted that the transferred DNA was likely coming from the genomes contained in moving organelles, researchers couldn’t be sure that naked DNA wasn’t being shared in large chunks
This is a hopeful signal of one way to mitigate climate change and food shortages and reclaim our deserts. I remember talking about a possibility of something like this 10 years ago.
This is how you grow vegetables in the Sahara – by piping seawater from the Red Sea across the sands to produce biofuels and electricity.
The ambition of the Sahara Forest Project is to make the world’s deserts productive again, ultimately restoring vegetation. A team of engineers, architects, biologists, environmentalists and business people have come together to create a concept based on a simple, yet big, idea: Why not make use of proven environmental technologies and take what we have enough of – saltwater, sunlight and desert land – to produce what we need more of? That would be sustainable food, water and energy.
All they require is a low-lying area of desert that is close to the ocean of which, like people, the earth has in abundance.
Founded on the premise that we must find a more holistic approach to successfully tackle challenges related to energy, food and water security, the new Sahara Forest Project saltwater pipeline, scheduled to be finished late summer 2021, will carry water from the Red Sea – piping seawater to innovative bioplants where clusters of solar and salt water evaporation technologies will combine to produce biofuels and electricity, as well as food crops and purified water.
A few other projects are enacting other forms of greening.
The water allies hydrating Greek islands
In the Greek islands, a community of ‘water allies’ is working to solve the problems of water supply, wastewater and biodiversity loss – by extracting water from unconventional sources.
Clever cocoons transform the drylands
No irrigation? No problem. These clever tree-planting cocoons can bring soil back to life and restore dry, dusty land back to its former, greener glory.
And a similar signal in a different domain.
New eco-friendly way to make ammonia could be boon for agriculture, hydrogen economy
Ammonia has sustained humanity since the early 20th century, but its production leaves a huge carbon footprint. Now researchers have found a way to make it 100 percent renewable.
Chemical engineers at UNSW Sydney and University of Sydney have found a way to make 'green' ammonia from air, water and renewable electricity that does not require the high temperatures, high pressure and huge infrastructure currently needed to produce this essential compound.
And the new production method—demonstrated in a laboratory-based proof of concept—also has the potential to play a role in the global transition towards a hydrogen economy, where ammonia is increasingly seen as a solution to the problem of storing and transporting hydrogen energy.
In a paper published today in Energy and Environmental Science, the authors from UNSW and University of Sydney say that ammonia synthesis was one of the critical achievements of the 20th century. When used in fertilizers that quadrupled the output of food crops, it enabled agriculture to sustain an ever-expanding global population.
Hydrogen has been a signal for a renewable energy source for decades now - perhaps we will see it sooner then the horizon of skepticism predicts - but then there are still ‘details’ to deal with.
World-first home hydrogen battery stores 3x the energy of a Powerwall 2
To get off the grid with home solar, you need to be able to generate energy when the Sun's out, and store it for when it's not. Normally, people do this with lithium battery systems – Tesla's Powerwall 2 is an example. But Australian company Lavo has built a rather spunky (if chunky) cabinet that can sit on the side of your house and store your excess energy as hydrogen.
The Lavo Green Energy Storage System measures 1,680 x 1,240 x 400 mm (66 x 49 x 15.7 inches) and weighs a meaty 324 kg (714 lb), making it very unlikely to be pocketed by a thief. You connect it to your solar inverter (it has to be a hybrid one) and the mains water (through a purification unit), and sit back as it uses excess energy to electrolyze the water, releasing oxygen and storing the hydrogen in a patented metal hydride "sponge" at a pressure of 30 bar, or 435 psi.
It stores some 40 kilowatt-hours worth of energy, three times as much as Tesla's current Powerwall 2 and enough to run an average home for two days. And when that energy is needed, it uses a fuel cell to deliver energy into the home, adding a small 5-kWh lithium buffer battery for instantaneous response. There's Wi-Fi connectivity, and a phone app for monitoring and control, and businesses with higher power needs can run several in parallel to form an "intelligent virtual power plant."
Shades of science fiction - anyone who enjoyed the 2004-9 version of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ may have also loved the spin-off prequel of 20910 called Caprica - if anyone watched this series - then this may send some shivers up your spine. Also more recently:
It is famously the plot of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”, where a young woman uses a service to scrape data from her deceased partner to create a chatbot – and eventually a robot.
MICROSOFT PATENT SHOWS PLANS TO REVIVE DEAD LOVED ONES AS CHATBOTS
Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people.
The patent describes creating a bot based on the “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages”, and more personal information.
“The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc”, it goes on to say.
“The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot,” Microsoft also describes – implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.
Microsoft has even included the notion of 2D or 3D models of specific people being generated via images and depth information, or video data.
#micropoem
gota new lectric shaver -
bit of a razor burn -
nota big thing -
i should have read the instructions -
sort of like asking for directions -
or just listening -
hormones can make men -
so irrational
mhm -
an affordance is -
an unknown unknown -
till it becomes a -
known enabler of a -
known wantable -
or -
a step-o-faith -
to find enablemeants -
and -
so on
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